She finished typing, read over what was on the screen, smiled at the thing as if it had been a good boy, and turned to give me a once-over. “Yo,” she said. Then, “You look tired and kind of beat up.”
“Thanks so much. Aren’t you going to tell me I’m late, too?”
“You’re late. Twenty-nine minutes.”
“Should we dock my pay?”
I said that jokingly, but she didn’t smile. She said, “Pretty rough, huh? The weekend?”
“Not one of the best.”
“That man Eberhardt’s funeral?”
“Yeah. I hate funerals.”
“Me, too. I had to go to my grandmother’s a couple of years ago. Tore me down for days afterward. You know that book by Jessica Mitford? The American Way of Death?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“She was right on, man. Dying sucks.”
“Amen to that.” Tamara had made the coffee; I went over to the hot plate to pour myself a cup. “You had a good weekend, at least. Romantic one with Horace.”
“...How’d you know that?”
“Deduced it.”
“My boss man, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.”
“You’re glowing, for one thing. You always have that look after a romantic weekend with Horace. A sort of self-satisfied glow.”
“Hell I do,” she said, and then laughed. “Okay, maybe so. What else?”
“That jade heart you’re wearing. It’s new. Horace gave it to you, right?”
“Could be a present from my family. Or could be I bought it for myself.”
“It isn’t the kind of jewelry you usually wear. And if somebody in your family’d given it to you, chances are you wouldn’t be wearing an all-green outfit — also not your usual color — to show it off. Nothing’s quite so special as a present from a lover.”
“Lawsy, Mistuh Holmes, you sho’ is a caution. Yes you is!”
“Whenever you do Butterfly McQueen, it means I’m right.”
“Mr. Smug. Okay, you’re right.”
“Special occasion? The jade heart.”
“Uh-uh. Man just loves me, that’s all.”
“You going to marry him one of these days?”
“Sure thing. Day he joins the New York Philharmonic and plays his first gig in Carnegie Hall.” Horace was studying to be a concert cellist, so she was only half kidding. “You want to know what I gave him this weekend?”
“No.” I took the coffee to my desk. The mail had already arrived, a meager little pile for a Monday. I shuffled through it.
“No checks,” Tamara said. “I looked.”
“No calls either, I suppose.”
“None on the machine. One about fifteen minutes ago.”
“Client?”
“Man wants to be. Your kind of job, but you won’t like it.”
“Why won’t I like it?”
“He’s looking for his ex-wife. She disappeared three years back in Santa Fe, not too long after they split up. That’s where the man lives, in Santa Fe.”
“So why does he want a detective in San Francisco?”
“He thinks maybe she’s living in this area now. Patterson agency in Santa Fe gave him a list of six investigators here. We were number two.”
“Which probably means number one turned him down.”
“Uh-huh. But we’re hungrier and we try harder.”
“Why does the man want to find his ex-wife after three years.”
“That’s the part you won’t like. Also the part that’ll make you take the job.”
“It’s too early for riddles—”
“Paradoxes.”
“Whatever. Talk to me in plain English.”
“Better hear the details from the man himself. His name’s Erskine, he’s coming in at ten-thirty. I figured that’d be okay since there’s nothing else on the calendar.”
“And when he tells me his troubles, I won’t like them but I’ll take the job anyway.”
“Right.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Not the kind of case you can turn down. Bet you five bucks.”
“No bet. Why is it women all think they know me so well?”
“Could be you’re easier to read than most guys.”
“Like a trashy paperback?”
Tamara laughed. “Easy to read doesn’t mean there’s no substance. Walter Mosley’s easy to read. So’s Mr. Hemingway.”
And James Joyce is hard to read. And so’s Mr. Eberhardt. “Hemingway blew his head off with a shotgun,” I said, and then wondered what had prompted me to say it. Because Eberhardt blew his heart apart with a .357 Magnum? No connection, no point.
“What’s your point?” Tamara the Mindreader asked.
I sighed. “None. No point at all.”
She said, “Too early for paradoxes, huh?” and gave her attention to her trusty PowerBook.
3
Ira Erskine was not what I’d expected. He was younger, for one thing — no more than thirty-five. And well turned out and prosperous-looking in an expensive silvery gray Brioni suit and a hand-painted silk tie. Short dark hair and a neatly groomed mustache were both frost-edged with premature gray. He had the look and confident carriage of a successful businessman, which is what he admitted to being: he owned what he termed “a small but forceful financial consultancy firm” in Santa Fe. You might have taken him for a satisfied, complacent man, the kind people refer to admiringly as pillars of the community and who are often approached to run for political office, if it weren’t for his eyes.
The eyes were gray, direct; he locked them onto mine and maintained the contact the entire time we talked. But the thing about them was that they were almost scintillant with strong emotion, the dominant one being pain. I could feel his hurt as well as see it, as though he were emitting little pulsing waves of radiant energy. It made me both sympathetic and uncomfortable. Emotion that naked is never easy to face, particularly when you have empathic tendencies as overly developed as mine.
He was packing a load of woe, all right. The root cause of it was his ex-wife, Janice, but she was no longer the main ingredient. It took him a while to get around to what was currently ripping him up inside, and when he did I felt twice as sympathetic and twice as uncomfortable. Most private investigators attract clients whose problems require little or no emotional involvement; they do the job, get paid, and move on unaffected to the next. Not me. All too often I get the bleeders, men and women with such intense personal predicaments that I can’t seem to avoid being sucked in to the point of bleeding right along with them. And maybe carrying around a scab or two myself afterward.
Erskine had accepted a cup of coffee when he arrived; he’d also asked if he could smoke, and when I said I’d prefer he didn’t, he’d accepted that without argument or smoker’s belligerence, even though it was obvious he needed the nicotine. Instead he’d swallowed two cups of black coffee, the caffeine acting as a partial substitute, and asked for a third. That one he nursed, sitting with both hands wrapped tightly around the mug as if he were taking in the bitter warmth by osmosis.
His posture was both relaxed and tense, the way a man who is normally at ease in any social or business situation sits when dark things are warring inside him. He didn’t shift position once during our conversation. Or glance once at the voice-activated tape recorder whirring away on my desk. I’d taken to taping all interviews and telephone exchanges, one of the many good suggestions Tamara had made, and while most clients didn’t object, they were aware of the recorder and would look at it nervously or suspiciously now and then, as if it might somehow be altering their words or taking them out of context. A few inadvertently altered the pitch of their voices or phrased things in more self-conscious ways once the machine started running, but Erskine didn’t seem to be affected that way either.