Epitaphs

by Bill Pronzini

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Lot of bars and clubs in North Beach, lot of women to pick and choose from.” He shrugged, took a package of Kools from his shirt pocket and fired one with a gold lighter. “So how come you’re asking about these two?”

  “Not both of them. Just Gianna Fornessi.”

  “That so? You a friend of hers?”

  “Of her grandfather’s. She’s had a little trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “Manager of her building accused her of stealing some money. But somebody convinced him to drop the charges.”

  “That so?” Bisconte said again, but not as if he cared.

  “Leaned on him to do it. Scared hell out of him.”

  “You don’t think it was me?”

  “Was it?”

  “Nope. Like I said, I don’t know anybody named Gianna.”

  “That’s right, like you said.”

  “What’s the big deal anyway? I mean, if the guy dropped the charges, then this Gianna is off the hook. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then why all the questions?”

  “Curiosity,” I said.

  Another shrug. “I’d like to help you, pal, but I can’t do it if I don’t know the lady. Sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  “Come back anytime you need flowers,” Bisconte said. He gave me a little salute with his cigarette, waited for me to turn and then did the same himself. He was hidden away again in the back room when I let myself out.

  Today was my day for liars. Liars and puzzles.

  He hadn’t asked me who I was or what I did for a living; that was because he already knew. And the way he knew, I thought, was that Ashley Hansen had gotten on the horn after I left and told him about me. He knew Gianna Fornessi pretty well, too, and exactly where the two women lived.

  He was the man in the tan safari jacket I’d seen earlier, the one who’d been leaving 250 Chestnut.

  Chapter Three

  I TREATED MYSELF to a plate of linguine and fresh clams at a ristorante off Washington Square and then drove back over to Aquatic Park. Now, in mid-afternoon, fog was seeping in through the Gate and the temperature had dropped sharply. So much for the warm-and-clear aspect of this June Sunday. Those loyal, fog-loving San Franciscans would already be quitting the good-weather attractions in droves, grumbling and muttering, the heat turned up in their cars.

  Even the number of bocce players and kibitzers had thinned by a third. Pietro Lombardi was still there, though; so was Dominick Marra. Bocce may be dying slow in the city, but not in men like them. They cling to it and to the other old ways as tenaciously as they cling to life itself.

  I told Pietro—and Dominick, who wasn’t about to let us talk in private—what I’d learned so far. He was relieved that Ferry had dropped his complaint, but was just as puzzled and curious as I was about the Jack Bisconte connection.

  “Do you know Bisconte?” I asked him.

  “No. I see his shop but I never been inside.”

  “Know anything about him?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How about you, Dominick?”

  He shook his head. “He’s too old for Gianna, hah? Almost forty, you say—that’s too old for girl twenty-three.”

  “If that’s their relationship,” I said.

  “Men almost forty, they go after young woman,” Dominick said, “they only got one reason. Fatto ’na bella chiavata. You remember, eh, Pietro?”

  “Pazzo! You think I forget ’na bella chiavata?”

  I asked Pietro, “What do you know about Gianna’s roommate, Ashley Hansen?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “I never meet her.”

  “How long have they been sharing the apartment?”

  “Long time. Eight months, maybe.”

  “They know each other long before they moved in together?”

  He shrugged. “Gianna and me, we don’t talk much no more. Young people now, they got no time for la famiglia. ” Another shrug, a sigh. “Ognuno pensa per sè, ” he said. Everybody thinks only of himself.

  Dominick gripped his shoulder. Then he said to me, “You find out what’s happen with Bisconte and Ferry and those girls. Then you see they don’t bother them no more. Hah?”

  “If I can, Dominick. If I can.”

  The fog was coming in thick now and the other players were making noises about ending the day’s tournament. Dominick got into an argument with one of them; he wanted to play another game or two. He was outvoted, but still pleading his case when I left. Their Sunday was almost over. And so was mine.

  I drove to Pacific Heights and my cold, cold flat. I hadn’t put the heat on this morning because of the nice weather; and with the fog had come the wind, and when the wind blows across the Heights there isn’t a building up there, no matter how well constructed and well insulated, that can retain warmth for more than an hour. I worked the thermostat up to sixty-five, checked my answering machine—no calls—and went straight to the bathroom, where I ran the tub full of hot water. My tub, or rather the landlord’s, is one of those big old-fashioned claw-foot jobs, deep and wide and long enough for a man six feet tall to stretch out full length. Bathtubs nowadays are built for midgets and contortionists.

  A good long soak not only warmed me up, it made me sleepy. I drowsed for a time, finally went under all the way ...

  ... and again I am lying belly down across the lip of that bare brown hill, the wind howling around me, the steep slope below and the pit yawning like an open wound below that ... and I feel the strain on my arms from the two-handed grip on his arm and shoulder, the weight of his spread-eagled body ... I see his face just inches from mine, that evil stranger’s face, and in it there is an arrogance born of the certainty that I will pull him up to safety because I am not like him, I am not coldblooded casual death ... and I think of the victims, Kerry and how close she came to being one of them, Kerry with his hands on her, hurting her ... and then I see the arrogance fade, slowly transform into raw terror as he stares into my face, sees the truth in my face ... and I let go of him, I just open my fingers and let go ... and he falls away, that evil face grows smaller and smaller and I hear the voice of his terror as he slides and tumbles into the pit, hear it rising until it is louder than the wind, hear him screaming all the way down ...

  ... but then the screaming changed, modulated into something else, and I came jarringly awake with my heart banging and a metallic taste in my mouth. Telephone—damn telephone. In automatic reflex I hauled myself out of the tub: big white hairy walrus heaving himself out of a puddle. I was still disoriented from the dream and I slipped on the floor tile, barked my knee on the tub; lurched, bruised my other knee on the toilet seat before I could regain my balance. The pain woke me up all the way. Cussing, I hobbled into the bedroom, all too aware of my nakedness, thankful that most times there was nobody around to see me when I was at my most ridiculous, and yanked up the receiver and growled a hello.

  “You don’t have to bite my head off,” Kerry said.

  “Sorry, babe. I, uh, I was doing something.”

  “Anything important?”

  “No. Glad you called.”

  “Want some company tonight?”

  “Sure. But I thought you had work to do.”

  “It’s finished. I had an inspired day.”

  “I wish I could say the same.”

  “It’s not over yet,” she said. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” We rang off and I sat on the bed and massaged my knees. The left one had a welt and a little cut that trickled blood. Fine, let it bleed, the hell with it.

  Vestiges of the dream still drifted like toxic smoke in the corners of my mind. Too soon since it happened, the images of that April afternoon still too sharp in my mental storehouse. You can blank hateful memories out of your conscious mind with enough effort of will, but the subconscious retains them, devils you with them when you let your defenses down in sleep. Not endlessly, though—I could take a measure of com
fort in that. In six months to a year, if my psychological patterns held true to form, I wouldn’t be having this particular ugly dream much at all anymore. I hadn’t had the shackled-in-the-cabin nightmare in almost a year now, had I?

  Back in the bathroom, I gave myself a fast rubdown and then took a look at my face in the mirror. Some face. Full of hollows and crags and little fissures, like a bas-relief map of a gray wasteland. What did Kerry see in a face like that? The eyes weren’t too bad, if a little on the hound-dog side; maybe it was the eyes. Or maybe she was just nuts. Batty as an Arizona cave under that rational exterior of hers.

  I hope she never gets sane, I thought.

  I ran a knuckle over my cheek, decided I could use another shave. Mistake: I cut myself twice and couldn’t find my styptic pencil and couldn’t seem to make one of the cuts stop bleeding. When the doorbell rang I went to answer it wearing slacks and a sport shirt and two pieces of bloody toilet paper stuck on the gray wasteland. Kerry didn’t seem to notice. She gave me a tender smile and a tender kiss to go with it.

  I held her for a while, tighter than I would have normally, because enough of the dream was still with me to dredge up other nightmare images of that bad time in April: the night I’d found Kerry unconscious on the floor of my closet, blood on her face ... almost a victim because of me. The images made me ache all over again. Losing her would be intolerable. Just the thought of losing her ...

  “Enough with the bear hug,” she said against my chest. “You’re squeezing the breath out of me.”

  I let go of her, reluctantly. “Sorry about that. I like the way you feel.”

  “It’s mutual. Just don’t get carried away.”

  I like the way she looks, too, in and out of clothing, any day, anytime. Tonight she was wearing tan suede pants and a white sweater, both of which hugged her body more tightly than I’d just been doing, and her auburn hair was tied up with a green scarf. I let her walk ahead of me into the kitchen so I could watch the play of her hips. Fifty-eight years old and horny as a teenager every time I’m near her. Like the old joke about the octogenarian who married the beauty queen sixty years his junior and dropped dead of a heart attack on their wedding night: it took the morticians three days to close his coffin. Take them a week to close mine if I dropped dead on a wedding night with Kerry.

  We got drinks and sat on the couch, Kerry with her shoes off and her legs tucked under her. Tall and slender, my lady, with nice legs and beautiful feet. Most people’s feet leave a great deal to be desired; mine are as ugly as sin. But hers are small, perfectly formed, with a high-arched instep—beautiful. Sometimes, like tonight, just contemplating them gives me erotic ideas. I reached over and fondled the nearest one. Definite erotic ideas.

  “Hey, that tickles!”

  “It does, huh?”

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Playing.”

  “Well, don’t. I want to relax for a while.”

  “A foot massage is relaxing.”

  “Not the way you do it.”

  “Your toes inflame me,” I said. “I want to nibble them.”

  “My God, you’re a closet foot fetishist!” She smacked my hand and yanked her foot away. “Sit over there and behave yourself.”

  “For how long?”

  “Go on, move.”

  I scooted back from her, not too far.

  “Now,” she said. “Cybil.”

  “What about Cybil?”

  “We had a talk this afternoon, an old-fashioned mother-daughter talk.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  “Good. Very good.”

  “She’s still going to Marin?”

  “Sooner than expected. Saturday morning, nine o’clock.”

  “That’s a nice surprise. It’s definite, huh?”

  “Definite. She notified the seniors complex yesterday, and called the storage company in L.A. and arranged for her furniture and other things to be shipped.” Kerry drank some of her wine. “There is one thing she’s asking for before she goes.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “Don’t worry, I think it’s positive.”

  “You think? What is it?”

  “Well, my guess is some fence-mending.”

  “Fence-mending?”

  “With you. She wants to see you.”

  Another surprise. Cybil and I hadn’t laid eyes on each other in six months. Hadn’t exchanged more than a dozen words in all that time. On the few occasions I’d called and Cybil had answered the phone, she’d hung up as soon as she knew who she was talking to.

  “This was her idea?” I asked.

  “All hers.”

  “But she wouldn’t tell you exactly why she wanted to see me?”

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “So maybe she doesn’t want to mend fences. Maybe she wants to tell me to my face what a bum she thinks I am. Hell, maybe she wants to spit in my eye.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Then again, you don’t know for sure.”

  “No, but I know my mother well enough. She’s coming out of her shell. The Cybil I talked to today is the old Cybil, the one I grew up with.”

  “Mm. So when does she want to meet?”

  “Whenever you’re free. Tomorrow night?”

  “Better make it Tuesday night. Tomorrow’s pretty full.”

  “Seven o’clock okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “... You don’t mind, do you? Talking to her?”

  “Mind? Good God, no. If it’ll make things better between the three of us, I’ll talk to her all night. I’ll do anything she wants, short of leaving you and doing away with myself. I’ll even let her spit in my eye.”

  Kerry reached over and patted my cheek. “I love you, you know that?” she said. “Sometimes I think too much.”

  “Makes two of us. Can I move back over there?”

  “Come ahead.”

  I came ahead. Cybil was no longer uppermost in my mind; what was perched there now, leering suggestively, was ’na bella chiavata. “I am about to stop behaving myself,” I said. “I am about to start playing again.”

  “With my feet?”

  “For openers.”

  “In that case ...” She leaned back, extended one leg, and wiggled her toes at me. “The game’s afoot, Watson,” she said.

  Chapter Four

  I SPENT ALL DAY Monday in the East Bay, testifying at a felony extortion trial in Oakland in the morning and then chasing down information on a possibly fraudulent insurance claim that took me out to Orinda and Lafayette. I didn’t get out of Lafayette until after five, and the commute traffic on the Bay Bridge was so snarled that it was almost seven before I got home. I was in bed and asleep by ten. Two good nights’ sleep in a row, for a change, though I much preferred the postcoital variety I’d had on Sunday.

  On Tuesday morning I opened the office at a quarter to nine. All I had on the docket for this day, aside from my promised follow-up on the Gianna Fornessi matter, was a routine skip-trace and a routine personal-injury investigation, neither of which I could begin working on until various city, state, and private business offices opened. So I got on the horn to the Hall of Justice and asked for Inspector Cullen on the Robbery Detail. He was in, and willing enough to talk about George Ferry’s complaint, but he didn’t have much to tell me.

  Ferry had filed the complaint last Thursday morning. Cullen had gone to Chestnut Street to investigate, talked to the two principals, and determined that there was not enough evidence to take Ms. Fornessi into custody. Thirty-two hours later Ferry had called in and withdrawn the charges, giving the same flimsy reason he’d handed me. As far as Cullen and the department were concerned, it was all very minor and ordinary.

  I asked him if he’d run Gianna Fornessi’s name through R&I to find out if she had a previous arrest record in the city. He had and she hadn’t. He had not run Ferry’s name, he said, because he hadn’t seen any need for it. I didn’t know Cullen well enough to ask him for a
favor; but I did know a couple of Eberhardt’s department cronies well enough. So I had Cullen switch me over to General Works, got Jack Logan on the line, and asked him to run a check on Ferry, and on Jack Bisconte and Ashley Hansen. Might as well touch all the bases.

  Gianna Fornessi’s name wasn’t listed in the telephone directory, but the Hansen girl’s was. No address, just the number. I tapped it out, waited through eight rings, and was about to hang up when a sleepy female voice answered.

  “Ms. Hansen?”

  “Yum. Who’s this? You woke me up.”

  I identified myself, thinking that whatever she did for a living, it was not a job that required her to be up early and out battling the morning commute traffic. This time my name got a different reaction out of her: It woke her all the way up, seemed to put her on her guard.

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Talk to your roommate. Is she there?”

  “... No.”

  “Left for work already?”

  “Uh, no.”

  Something in her voice made me ask, “She did come home from her weekend, didn’t she? Sunday night?”

  “No, she didn’t. She’s still not back.”

  “How come?”

  “I don’t know. How should I know?”

  “Didn’t she call you?”

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t it worry you? Her not coming home when she’s supposed to, not calling?”

  “Why should it? Gianna’s a big girl.”

  “She do that sort of thing often?”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Go away for extra-long weekends.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “With her boyfriend, I guess. Or did you tell me she doesn’t have a boyfriend right now?”

  “You’re sure nosy,” Ashley Hansen said. “Ask Gianna, why don’t you.”

  “I’ll do that. Where does she work?”

  No response.

  “Maybe she’ll go straight to work this morning,” I said. “I need to talk to her, Ms. Hansen.”

  More of the same.

  “Ms. Hansen? I’d appreciate—”

  “Bye, now,” she said, and hung up on me.