Epitaphs

by Bill Pronzini

  This man Ferry was not the only one who had testa di caeca—shit for brains ...

  Chapter Two

  THE BUILDING AT 250 Chestnut Street was an old three-storied, brown-shingled job, set high in the shadow of Coit Tower and across from the retaining wall where Telegraph Hill falls off steeply toward the Embarcadero. From each of the apartments, especially the ones on the third floor, you’d have quite a view of the bay, the East Bay cities, both bridges, and most of the waterfront from below the Ferry Building to Fisherman’s Wharf. Prime North Beach address, this. The rent would be well in excess of two thousand a month.

  Pietro and Dominick had a good point: If Gianna Fornessi could afford to live here, why would she steal a sum of money that was not even enough to pay a single month’s rent?

  There were plenty of parking places along the retaining wall. I drove down to where Chestnut jogged right into a dead-end, made a U-turn, came back and claimed a space behind a white Nissan directly opposite 250.

  A man in a tan safari jacket was coming out of the building as I crossed to the front stoop. I called out to him to hold the door for me—it’s easier to get apartment dwellers to talk to you once you’re inside their building—but either he didn’t hear me or he chose to ignore me. He came hurrying down without a glance my way as he passed. City-bred paranoia, I thought. It was everywhere these days, rich and poor neighborhoods both, like a nasty strain of social disease.

  Bumper sticker for the nineties: FEAR LIVES.

  In the vestibule was a bank of six mailboxes, each with Dymo-Label stickers identifying the tenants. Gianna Fornessi’s name was under box number four, along with a second name: Ashley Hansen. It figured that she’d have a roommate; salespersons working in the interior design trade are well but not extravagantly paid. Box number one bore the name George Ferry and that was the bell I pushed. He was the one I wanted to talk to first.

  A minute died away while I listened to the wind—sharper up here than it had been down at Aquatic Park—savaging the trees on the hillside below. Out on the bay hundreds of sailboats formed a shifting mosaic of white on blue. Sailboating ... something I’d always intended to try but had never gotten around to. Too busy working on weekends like this one. Well, what the hell. It was probably a good thing I hadn’t tried the athletic art of sailing. As clumsy as I was, I would no doubt have been clobbered by a jib or boom or whatever the first time out and been knocked overboard and drowned.

  Get a life? Hell no. Just hang on to the one I had.

  The intercom crackled finally and a male voice said “Who is it?” in wary tones.

  “George Ferry?”

  “Yes?”

  I gave him my name. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about your complaint against Gianna Fornessi.”

  “Oh, Christ.” There was a pause, and then he said, “I called you people on Friday, I told Inspector Cullen I was dropping the charges. Isn’t that enough?”

  He thought I was a cop. I could have told him I wasn’t; I could have let the whole thing drop right there, since what he’d just said was a perfect escape clause from my commitment to Pietro Lombardi. But I have too much professional curiosity to let go of something, once I’ve got a piece of it, without knowing the particulars. So I said, “I won’t keep you long, Mr. Ferry. Just a few questions.”

  Another pause. “Is it really necessary?”

  “I think it is, yes.”

  An even longer pause. But then he didn’t argue, didn’t say anything else—just buzzed me in.

  His apartment was on the left, beyond a carpeted staircase. He opened the door as I approached it. Mid-forties, short, rotund, with a nose like a blob of putty and a Friar Tuck fringe of carrot-colored hair. And a bruise on his left cheekbone, a cut along the right corner of his mouth. The marks weren’t fresh, but then they weren’t very old either. Less than forty-eight hours.

  He didn’t ask to see a police ID; if he had I would have told him immediately that I was a private detective, because nothing can lose you a California investigator’s license faster than willfully impersonating a police officer. On the other hand, you can’t be held accountable for somebody’s false assumption. Ferry gave me a nervous once-over, holding his head tilted downward as if that would keep me from seeing his bruise and cut, then stood aside to let me come in.

  The front room was neat, furnished in a self-consciously masculine fashion: dark polished woods, leather, expensive sporting prints of the British steeplechase variety. It reeked of leather, dust, and his lime-scented cologne.

  As soon as he shut the door Ferry went straight to a liquor cabinet and poured himself three fingers of Jack Daniel’s, no water or mix, no ice. Just holding the drink seemed to give him courage. He said, “So. What is it you want to know?”

  “Why you dropped your complaint against Ms. Fornessi.”

  “I explained to Inspector Cullen ...”

  “Explain to me, if you don’t mind.”

  He had some of the sour mash. “Well, it was all a mistake ... just a silly mistake. She didn’t take the money after all.”

  “You know who did take it, then?”

  “Nobody took it. I ... misplaced it.”

  “Misplaced it. Uh-huh.”

  “I thought it was in my desk,” Ferry said. “That’s where I usually keep the cash I bring home. But I’d put it in my safe-deposit box along with some other papers, without realizing it. It was in an envelope, you see, and the envelope got mixed up with the other papers.”

  “Two thousand dollars is a lot of cash to keep at home. You make a habit of that sort of thing?”

  “In my business ...” The rest of the sentence seemed to hang up in his throat; he oiled the route with what was left of his drink. “In my business I need to keep a certain amount of cash on hand, both here and at my office. The amount I keep here isn’t normally as large as two thousand, but I—”

  “What business is that, Mr. Ferry?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What business are you in?”

  “I run a temp employment agency for domestics.”

  “Temp?”

  “Short for temporary,” he said. “I supply domestics for part-time work in offices and private homes. A lot of them are poor, don’t have checking accounts, so they prefer to be paid in cash. Most come to the office, but a few—”

  “Why did you think Gianna Fornessi had stolen the two thousand dollars?”

  “... What?”

  “Why Ms. Fornessi? Why not somebody else?”

  “She’s the only one who was here. Before I thought the money was missing, I mean. I’d had no other visitors for two days and there wasn’t any evidence of a break-in.”

  “You and she are good friends, then?” “Well ... no, not really. She’s quite a bit younger....”

  “Then why was she here?”

  “The rent,” Ferry said. “She was paying her rent for the month. I’m the building manager, I collect for the owner. Before I could write out a receipt I had a call, I was on the phone for several minutes and she ... I didn’t pay any attention to her and I thought she must have ... you see how I could have made the mistake?”

  I was silent.

  He met my gaze for maybe three seconds, looked down at his empty glass, licked his lips, and went to commune with Jack Daniel’s again.

  While he was pouring I asked him, “What happened to your face, Mr. Ferry?”

  His hand twitched enough to clink bottle against glass. He had himself another taste before he turned back to me. “Clumsy,” he said, “I’m clumsy as hell. I fell down the stairs, the front stairs, yesterday morning.” He tried a laugh that didn’t come off. “Fog makes the steps slippery. I just wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  “Looks to me like somebody hit you.”

  “Hit me? No, I told you.... I fell down the stairs.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Why would I lie about it?”

  That was a
good question. Why would he lie about that, and about all the rest of it too? There was as much truth in what he’d told me as there is value in a chunk of fool’s gold.

  THE YOUNG WOMAN who opened the door of apartment four was not Gianna Fornessi. She was platinum blond, with the kind of fresh-faced Nordic features you see on models for Norwegian skiwear. Tall and slender in a pair of green silk lounging pajamas designed to show off the lines of her body; arms decorated with hammered gold bracelets, ears with dangly gold triangles. Judging from the expression in her pale eyes, there wasn’t much going on behind them. But then, with her physical attributes, not many men would care if her entire brain had been surgically removed. I wasn’t one of them, but I’m an old fart with a one-woman fixation and the antiquated idea that intellect is just as stimulating as bare flesh. Silly me.

  “Well ... hello,” the blonde said, and favored me with a radiant smile.

  “Ashley Hansen?”

  “That’s me. Who’re you?”

  When I told her my name she bobbed her head up and down in a delighted way, as if I’d said something amusing or clever. Or maybe she just liked the sound of all those vowels.

  “I knew right away you were Italian,” she said. “You’re a friend of Jack’s, right?”

  “Jack?”

  “Jack Bisconte.” The smile dulled a little. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “No,” I said, “I’m a friend of Pietro Lombardi’s.”

  “Who?”

  “Your roommate’s grandfather.”

  “Gianna? Oh,” she said.

  “I’d like to talk to her, if she’s home.”

  Ashley Hansen’s smile was gone now; her whole demeanor had changed, become less spritely and self-assured. She nibbled at a corner of her lower lip, ran a hand through her hair, fiddled with one of her bracelets. Finally she said, “Gianna isn’t here.”

  “When will she be back?”

  “She went away for the weekend.”

  “Uh-huh. Due back when? Tonight?”

  “... I guess so.”

  “Where did she go?”

  “I’m not sure. What’d you want to talk to her about?”

  “The complaint George Ferry filed against her.”

  “Oh, that, ” she said. “That’s been taken care of.”

  “I know. I just talked to Ferry.”

  “He’s a creepy little prick, isn’t he?”

  “That’s one way of putting it.”

  “Gianna didn’t take his money. He was just trying to hassle her, that’s all.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Well, why do you think?”

  I shrugged. “Suppose you tell me.”

  “He wanted her to do ... well, stuff.”

  “You mean go to bed with him?”

  “Stuff,” she said. “Kinky stuff, real kinky.”

  “And she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.”

  “No way, José. What a creep.”

  “So he made up the story about the stolen money to get back at her, is that it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What made him change his mind, drop the charges?”

  “He didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  “Who knows?” She laughed. “Maybe he got religion.”

  “Or a couple of smacks in the face.”

  “Huh?”

  “Somebody worked him over yesterday,” I said. “Bruised his cheek and cut his mouth. You have any idea who?”

  “Not me, mister. How come you’re so interested, anyway?”

  “I told you, I’m a friend of Gianna’s grandfather’s.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “Gianna have a boyfriend, does she?”

  “... How come you want to know that?”

  “Does she?”

  “Uh, no. Not right now.”

  “So Jack Bisconte is yours.”

  “My what? My boyfriend? No, he’s just somebody I know.” She nibbled at her lip again, did some more fiddling with her bracelets. “Look, I’ve got to go. You want me to tell Gianna you were here?”

  “Yes.” I handed over one of my business cards. “Give her this and ask her to call me. At home tonight, if it’s not too late when she gets in.”

  Ashley Hansen looked at the card; blinked at it and then blinked at me. “You ... you’re a detective?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My God,” she said, and backed off, and shut the door in my face.

  I stood there for a few seconds, remembering her eyes—the sudden fear in them when she’d realized she had been talking to a detective.

  What the hell?

  NORTH BEACH is not a beach. Nor is there a beach within miles of its boundaries, hasn’t been one in well over a hundred years. Back in the 1860s and 1870s, before the city began filling in the land along this part of the bay, there had been a popular bayside resort here that went by the name of North Beach. Even before the resort and beach vanished, the narrow district tucked between and along the slopes of Telegraph and Russian hills inherited the name.

  Italians were the first to settle North Beach—fishermen, mostly, who immigrated alone, worked hard, saved their money, bought their own boats or small businesses, and then paid for their families to join them from the old country. They picked the Beach because rents were cheap, it was close to the waterfront, and for the nostalgic reason that San Francisco Bay resembles the Bay of Naples. When the burgeoning Italian community began to outnumber all the other nationalities in the area, the name “Little Italy” was applied to it and still adheres to this day, even though it really isn’t a Little Italy anymore.

  When I was a kid—hell, when I was a not-so-young adult —North Beach was the place you went when you wanted pasta fina, the best espresso and biscotti, conversation about la patria d’Italia. That, too, is no longer the case. There are still plenty of Italians in the Beach, and you can still get the good food and some of the good conversation; still get a sense, here and there, of what it was like in the old days. But most of the landmarks are gone—vanessi’s, the original Enrico’s, the Boccie Ball, where you could hear mustachioed waiters in gondolier costumes singing arias from Verdi and Puccini—and so is most of the old-world flavor.

  The Italian community and the Italian influence shrinks a little more with each passing year. There are more Chinese in North Beach now than Sons of Italy, by a good margin. Plus a proliferation of motorcycle toughs, aging hippies, homeless people, coke and crack dealers, and pimps and small-time hustlers who work the flesh palaces along Columbus and lower Broadway. On the upscale side, there are fancy new cosmopolitan restaurants and cafés, and the snobbish influence of the city’s literati, who live and congregate in the area around Washington Square Park. A scattershot melting pot, that’s North Beach these days. Me, I preferred it when it really was Little Italy.

  Parking in the Beach is the worst in the city. On weekends you can drive around its hilly streets for hours without finding a legal space. So today, in the perverse way of things, I found a spot waiting for me when I came down Stockton.

  In a public telephone booth near Washington Square I encountered a second minor miracle: a city directory that had yet to be either stolen or mutilated. The only Bisconte listed was Bisconte Florist Shop, with an address on upper Grant a few blocks away. I took myself off in that direction, through the usual good-weather Sunday crowds of locals and gawking sightseers and drifting homeless.

  Upper Grant, like the rest of the Beach, has changed drastically over the past few decades. Once the center of Little Italy, it is now an odd ethnic mixed bag: Italian markets, trattorias, pizza parlors, bakeries cheek by jowl with Chinese sewing-machine sweatshops, food and herb vendors, and fortune-cookie companies. The Bisconte Florist Shop was a narrow storefront near Filbert, sandwiched between an Italian saloon and the Sip Hing Herb Company. It was open for business, not surprisingly on a Sunday in this neighborhood. Tourists buy flowers, too, given the opportuni
ty.

  The front part of the shop was cramped and jungly with cut flowers, ferns, plants in pots and hanging baskets. A small glass-fronted cooler contained a variety of roses and orchids. There was nobody in sight, but a bell had gone off when I entered and a male voice from beyond a rear doorway called, “Be right with you.” I shut the door, went up near the counter. Some people like florist shops; I don’t. All of them have the same damp, cloyingly sweet smell that reminds me of funeral parlors; of my mother in her casket at the Figlia Brothers Mortuary in Daly City nearly forty years ago. That day, with all its smells, all its painful images, is as clear to me now as if it were yesterday.

  I had been waiting about a minute when the voice’s owner came out of the back room. He wasn’t anybody’s preconceived notion of a florist, but then how many of us actually look like what we are? Late thirties, dark-complected, on the beefy side; hair so thick on his arms and curling up out of his shirt collar that it was like a matting of fur. Wearing a floral-pattern shirt, a pair of beige doeskin slacks, and a professional smile.

  We had a good look at each other before he said, “Sorry to keep you waiting—I was putting up an arrangement. What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Bisconte? Jack Bisconte?”

  “That’s me. Something for the wife, maybe?”

  “I’m not here for flowers. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  The smile didn’t waver. “Oh? What about?”

  “Gianna Fornessi.”

  “Who?”

  “Gianna Fornessi. You don’t know her?”

  “Name’s not familiar, no.”

  “She lives up on Chestnut with Ashley Hansen.”

  “Hansen, Ashley Hansen ... I don’t know that name either.”

  “She knows you. Young, blond, looks Norwegian.”

  “Well, I know a lot of young blondes,” Bisconte said. He winked at me. “I’m a bachelor and I get around pretty good, you know?”