“Yes, the ultimate selfish act. Bobbie Jean knows that as well as we do, but knowing it and coming to terms with it are two different things.”
“She’s strong. She’ll be all right.”
“Not as strong as she once was. He wore her right down to the nub. She won’t cave in, I’m pretty sure of that, and eventually she’ll work through it. But it’ll take time. And the quicker the closure the better. Her life with him, I mean — severing all the material ties so she can start cutting the emotional ones.”
“I’ll get the task done as soon as I can, Cliff.”
“I don’t mean to pressure you—”
“No, no, I understand. I’ll try to sort through everything by the first of next week.”
“Thanks. For Bobbie Jean’s sake,” he said. Then he said, “You know, she really does feel bad about shutting you and Kerry out the past four years. Going along with Eberhardt, not challenging or defying him.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“Pam and I talked to her about it more than once. The harm cutting off old friends can do. But he had such a psychological hold on her. And he grew more and more bitter, more and more screwed up.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“No hard feelings then?”
“Not toward Bobbie Jean. Never.”
“I didn’t think so, but I wanted to make sure. I’ll tell her again; it might help. Might help, too, if you and Kerry came over to visit at some point. As friends.”
“Count on it, Cliff.”
He shook my hand. “Let’s keep in touch.”
“Count on that, too.”
Alone, I sat looking at the keys before I put them in my wallet. Two keys that would not only open house and office doors but doors into the past. I had no desire to pass through any of them; to touch any part of Eberhardt now that he was dead and buried. Yet at a visceral level I needed to walk through those doors, for as long as I could stand to be on the other side of them. If any of the missing pieces to his suicide existed, that was where I would find them.
Bobbie Jean needed closure, and like it or not, so did I.
Tamara said, “This phone stuff isn’t getting us anywhere. You know what I think?”
“What do you think?”
“There’s a better way to find out if there’s anything in the art angle. Faster, anyhow. We’re just jerking around here, you know what I’m saying? Get it over with and move on.
“Fish or cut bait,” I said.
“Huh?”
“An old expression. Means quit jerking around, do what needs doing, move on.”
“Sort of like shit or get off the pot.”
“You have such a delicate way of phrasing things, Ms. Corbin.”
“Hey,” she said, “we’re private eyes, right? Private eyes have to talk like private eyes, keep up the tradition. You think Bogart said fish or cut bait in The Maltese Falcon?”
“No, but he didn’t say shit or get off the pot, either.”
“Would have if they hadn’t had the Hays Office.”
“What do you know about the Hays Office?”
“More than you, I’ll bet. Like, real name was the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Man hired to run it in 1922 was Will Hays, former U.S. Postmaster General. Production Code was adopted in 1936. Only about four thousand words long, bunch of generalities in outline form. Paragraph in Subdivision Two, sexual taboos, that says scenes of passion such as excessive and lustful kissing have to be treated so they don’t stimulate the lower and baser elements. Code never did define who the lower and baser elements were—”
“Okay, okay. Enough, college girl.”
“College woman,” she said.
Verbal sparring with Tamara can sometimes be wearying, particularly when it involves trying to build a rickety bridge across the generation gap. And we’d already wasted enough time this Wednesday morning. Almost noon now, and we’d both been on the phones since nine-thirty, turning up one blank after another on Janice Durian Erskine. Diligence often pays off, but on some cases you get certain feelings, and the feeling I had on this one was that we weren’t going to find the subject working at any art gallery, organization, school, or other affiliated business in San Francisco or anywhere else in the Bay Area. Any reasonable new tack was fine with me.
I said, “What’s your suggestion on the art angle?”
“Well, let’s say the woman did clean up her act. Could be she got married again, right? Could be she doesn’t need to work. Client told you the only thing she ever cared much about is art, her own painting. So if she did learn to just say no to drugs, got her shit together, what’s one of the first things she’d start doing?”
“Painting again. Maybe.”
“Maybe’s all we got. Say she did. If she’s as good as the man says, good enough to have a showing at a fancy Santa Fe gallery, her work’s probably still good enough to be hanging in some Salishan clone out here. And from what I know about artists, it’d be the same sort of stuff she used to do — same style, subject matter. You know where I’m coming from?”
“And where you’re heading. The thing to do is visit galleries in person, flash the photos of her and her paintings.”
“That’s it. You’re the man.”
“Might work. If she’s off drugs, if she started painting again, if her work is still good enough to interest a gallery, and if she cares enough and is confident enough to make it available to one.”
“No worse odds than playing telephone roulette. Kind of obvious by now she’s got herself another name.”
“Pretty obvious,” I agreed. “So you think I should take those photos and climb on the old shanks’ mare—”
“The which?”
“Go out and start making the rounds. Me. Alone.”
“Like I said, you’re the man.”
“Uh-huh. And the man has a better idea. Two people can canvass twice as many galleries in the same amount of time.”
“Me? Hey, I’m just a hacker and glorified secretary—”
“If that’s what you think, then it’s time you got out and did some fieldwork. Didn’t you tell me you’re considering a full-time career in this business?”
“High-tech, high-concept,” she said. “Where I’m the boss and my people do the scut-work.”
“In this low-tech, low-concept agency you’re the people and I’m the boss. Besides, the idea was yours. Tell you what. We’ll close up now and take those two snapshots of Janice Erskine’s paintings down to the fast-photo place on the corner and have them duplicated while you and I eat lunch and decide which of us scut-works where. And then we’ll each spend an instructive afternoon in the world of showcase art.”
Tamara groaned. Then, slyly, “You buying lunch or do we put it on the expense account?”
“You’re learning fast, all right. Too fast. I’ll buy.”
“Okay. But if I’m the one gets a line on her, how about a reward? Say another twenty bucks a week?”
“So fast, in fact, you’ll probably end up owning your own agency before you’re thirty.”
“I’ll settle for ten more a week. Deal?”
“Deal. But only if you get a line on her.”
She hopped to her feet, grinning. “Fish or cut bait,” she said.
5
It wasn’t Tamara who got the line on Janice Durian Erskine; it was me. And it wasn’t because the missing woman had begun painting on canvas again, or taken to exhibiting any of her work old or new in a San Francisco gallery. Rather, it was a case of luck and coincidence combined in equal parts — the sort of thing a detective runs into more often than you might think, even on a cold trail, and that can make all the difference between a successful trace and a dead-end one.
The place where I picked up the lead was The Artful Vision, a small but high-class gallery on Pine on the downtown side of Nob Hill. The last one on my list for the day. My watch said a quarter of five when I walked in, and Tamara and I had agreed to meet back at the office at five-thirty to compare notes. I was tired, my feet hurt from all the pavement-pounding and hill-climbing, and I felt put upon and grumpy. In addition to headshakes and verbal negatives, I’d been subjected to down-the-nose sneers and a genteel form of the bum’s rush from more than one overdressed, haughty gallery owner or hired help. One glance was enough to tell these snooty types that I probably couldn’t afford one of the frames in which their paintings hung, let alone the art itself, and therefore I was not there to buy or even to browse discerningly. When I told them my profession, it pushed their noses further out of joint. A private investigator, to that sort of mind, is a cut above a homeless panhandler, and not a prime cut at that.