Epitaphs

by Bill Pronzini

  I considered calling Pietro Lombardi for the name of Gianna’s employer, but there were other ways to get it, a little later on, and I didn’t want to get into a dialogue with him until I had something to report. I drank coffee and did paperwork until ten o’clock, then called TRW and requested credit checks and background information on Gianna, Ashley Hansen, Bisconte, and Ferry. The rep said she’d have them for me by noon.

  I was putting in telephone time on the skip-trace when Eberhardt clumped in at ten-thirty-the first I’d seen of him since Friday. He wore a blue suit that wouldn’t have looked good on a corpse, a tie that deserved a citation for visual pollution, and had one of his smelly briars clenched at a Popeye angle between his teeth. Mr. Elegant. I resisted an impulse to needle him about his appearance; that kind of banter was no longer acceptable between us. Instead I settled for a simple good morning. He grunted something, shrugged out of his overcoat, went to the hot plate, poured himself a cup of coffee, took the cup to his desk, banged the briar into an ashtray, and made slurping noises as he drank. Then he pulled a face and muttered, “Lousy goddamn coffee.”

  “You could always come in early and make it yourself,” I said. Mildly.

  “Yeah.”

  “So how was your weekend?”

  “Fair.”

  “Spend it with Bobbie Jean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do anything interesting?”

  “No.”

  “You know,” I said, not so mildly, “trying to talk to you is like trying to talk to a teenager. ‘Where did you go?’ ‘Out.’ ‘What did you do?’ ‘Nothing.’ Monosyllables, that’s all I get.”

  “So?”

  “So. See what I mean?”

  He looked at me for the first time since he’d come in. “Bull—” he said, and paused, and then said, “—shit.”

  “Uh-huh, I get it.” A bristling annoyance was building in me. Hold your temper, I warned myself. Not holding it is how the rift got opened up in the first place. “How much longer is this going to go on, Eb?”

  “What?”

  “The silent treatment, the big grudge. It’s been more than two months now and I don’t think I can take much more of it.”

  “So don’t,” he said.

  “Now what does that mean?”

  Some heavy silence. Then, abruptly, “All right, maybe it’s time. Call it quits, get it over with.”

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “Us, the business—that’s what I’m talking about.”

  “... Bust up our partnership?”

  “You got it.”

  I stared at him. “You’re not serious.”

  “Dead serious. I been thinking about it for weeks.”

  “Eb, we’ve been together a long time—”

  “Five years. That’s not a long time.”

  “We been friends a hell of a lot longer than that.”

  “You think we’re still friends? I don’t.”

  “Come on, you don’t mean that.”

  Flat, cold stare. He meant it.

  Shaken, I said, “I apologized for what happened in April. How many times you want me to say I’m sorry?”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it. I needed a friend when Bobbie Jean called off the wedding and what’d I get? I got a self-righteous know-it-all who tells me I’m at fault, calls me seven different kinds of schmuck, and then punches me in the gut.”

  “I lost my head....”

  “Yeah. And I could’ve lost my spleen.”

  “Oh for Christ’s sake, I didn’t hit you that hard.”

  “No? I puked up blood afterward.”

  “The hell you did.”

  “The hell I didn’t. You calling me a liar?”

  “No, I’m just ... goddamn it, Eb, it’s history. What’s the sense in all this scratching at scabs? Why can’t you just let it heal, let us get on with our lives?”

  “Right. I get on with mine, you get on with yours.”

  “I meant—”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “Okay. Okay, then. What’ve you got in your head? Quit me and get a job with some other agency?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or what, hang out your own shingle?”

  “Maybe that too. None of your business what I do if I decide to walk.”

  His telephone rang; he picked up before I could say anything else, mostly listened for the thirty-second duration of the call. I sat watching him, thinking: It’s the grudge talking. He won’t walk. After thirty-five years of friendship? He’s giving me a hard time, that’s all. Jerking my chain.

  Eberhardt put the receiver down. Went and shrugged back into his overcoat and then headed for the door, all without looking my way.

  I said, “Where you going?”

  He said, “Out,” and banged the door behind him.

  THE TRW REP called back at eleven-fifteen. I was still brooding at my desk; I hadn’t done much of anything else since Eberhardt’s departure. I took down the credit and background information I’d requested, stared at it for a couple of minutes until the phone rang again. Jack Logan this time, with the R&I report. More notes, more half-blank staring. I couldn’t seem to get my head into the work. It was as if I were trying to make sense out of words written in a foreign language.

  I got up, paced around, stood at the back-wall window and stared down toward Civic Center. No sun today; gray again, high foggy overcast that only added to my bleak mood. I went back to the desk, willed myself to concentrate on my notes.

  Jack Bisconte. Good credit rating. Owner and sole operator, Bisconte Florist Shop, since 1978. Home address: a rented apartment on upper Greenwich Street, last three years. No listing of previous jobs held or previous local addresses. No felony or misdemeanor convictions or arrests.

  George Ferry. Excellent credit rating. Owner and principal operator, Ferry Temporary Employment Agency, 510 Fremont Street, since 1972. Resident of 250 Chestnut since 1980. No felony convictions or arrests; one DUI arrest and conviction following a minor traffic accident in May of 1981, sentenced to ninety days in jail (suspended), driver’s license revoked for six months.

  Gianna Fornessi. Fair to good credit rating, established less than a year ago. Applied in March, three months ago, for dealer financing on a new Nissan Sentra; application approved thanks to a cash down payment of five thousand dollars. Employed by Home Draperies, Showplace Square, as a sales representative since 1989. Resident of 250 Chestnut for eight months. Addresses prior to that: two in Daly City, the most recent for a period of one year, the other her parents’ home.

  Ashley Hansen. No credit rating. No felony or misdemeanor convictions or arrests.

  There wasn’t much in any of it, except for the fact that TRW had no listing on Ashley Hansen. Almost everybody uses credit cards these days, establishes some kind of credit—especially a young woman whose income is substantial enough for her to afford an apartment in one of the city’s best neighborhoods. Why not Ashley Hansen?

  She was one person who could tell me; another was Gianna Fornessi. Maybe Gianna had gone straight to work this morning.... Call or drive over to Showplace Square? Drive. It wasn’t far, and I’d had enough of the office. Oppressive in here now, with the gray day pressing against the window and skylight. With Eberhardt’s anger and bitterness lingering in the air like smoke ghosts.

  SHOWPLACE SQUARE is south of Market and west of 7th Street, in the shadow of the Highway 101 Skyway interchange, in a once-shabby industrial area that underwent urban redevelopment several years ago and now contains a number of new office buildings, upscale businesses, and the S.F. Concourse exhibition hall. The Square is just that, a block-square complex of manufacturers’ showrooms for the interior decorating trade—carpets, draperies, lighting fixtures, and other types of home furnishings. Most of it isn’t open to the general public, but I showed the photostat of my license to one of the security men on the door and talked him into calling the Home Draperies showroom and asking that Gianna Fornessi c
ome out to talk to me.

  Somebody came out but it wasn’t Gianna Fornessi. It was a fluffy-looking little man in his forties named Lundquist, who said in a voice that matched his appearance, “I’m sorry, sir, Ms. Fornessi is no longer employed by us.”

  “Oh? When did she leave?”

  “Eight months ago.”

  “Eight ... months?”

  “At the end of October, last year.”

  “Quit or terminated?”

  “Quit. Rather abruptly too.”

  “To take another job?”

  “I don’t know. She gave no adequate reason.”

  “No one called for a reference?”

  “No one,” Lundquist said.

  “She worked for you two years?”

  “About two years, yes.”

  “As a sales representative.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Mind telling me her salary?”

  “I’m afraid that’s confidential.”

  “Just this, then: Was hers a high-salaried position? In excess of thirty thousand a year, say?”

  Lundquist smiled a faint, fluffy smile. “Hardly,” he said.

  “Was her work satisfactory?”

  “Well, not really. She seemed ... uninterested.”

  “With her job or the interior design trade?”

  “Both.”

  “So it’s not likely she’d have taken another, better-paying job in the industry.”

  Another fluffy smile. And another “Hardly.”

  So why had Gianna quit Home Draperies so suddenly eight months ago, at just about the same time she moved in with Ashley Hansen? And why hadn’t she told her family about it? And what had she been doing since to afford a $5000 down payment on a new car and half the rent on a $2000-a-month North Beach apartment?

  Chapter Five

  THE SAME WHITE Nissan was parked along the retaining wall across from 250 Chestnut, in the same place as on Sunday. I parked behind it again. It looked new and it was a Sentra—Gianna’s? If so, all it meant was that she’d left it here and gone off for her long weekend in somebody else’s car. Boyfriend’s, maybe. I had my doubts about Ashley Hansen’s disclaimer on that issue.

  The wind off the bay was cold and blustery up here; it blew me on a tack across the street and up the stoop of her building. In the vestibule I punched the doorbell for apartment four. No answer. Either Ashley Hansen had gone out or she didn’t want to deal with callers; and apparently Gianna still hadn’t come home. I leaned on George Ferry’s bell. No answer there, either. Well, it was a weekday. It figured that he’d be at work.

  I tacked back across the street to the Nissan, bent at the driver’s window. There wasn’t anything to see inside except empty upholstery. That door was locked; but it turned out that the passenger door wasn’t. Careless, Gianna, I thought. Don’t you know new cars are targets in the city, even cheaper models like the Sentra?

  Street and sidewalks both were deserted. Some Nosy Parker might be peering out a window, but for all anybody knew I had every right to poke around inside the Nissan. I opened the door all the way and folded myself into the passenger seat. Cars like this aren’t made for big men; my knees were up around my chin and there was barely enough room for me to work the glove compartment open. At that, I had to haul out the contents and then hold each item up past my legs so I could see it clearly.

  Owner’s manual. Registration card and insurance receipt, both made out in Gianna Fornessi’s name. An open roll of lime Life Savers. A packet of Tampax. Seven pennies, one nickel. And three Shell Oil credit card slips. The card owner’s name was the same on each slip, but it wasn’t the Fornessi girl’s; it was male, and if I was any judge of handwriting, so was the back-scrawled signature underneath. Brent DeKuiper. Nice name, very distinctive—very easy to trace. Gianna’s boyfriend?

  I wrote it down in my notebook, along with the credit card number, the date on each slip, and the fact that Brent DeKuiper had been a customer of Shell Oil since 1971. The dates were widely spaced: one in early April, one in mid-May, one nine days ago. The 1971 date made DeKuiper a good deal older than Gianna—unless one of his relatives had believed in long-range planning and presented him with a Shell card instead of a teething ring on his first or second birthday.

  Everything back into the glove box. Then I poked around a little—as much as my cramped position would allow—on the floorboards and under the seats. All that got me was dirty fingers. I hauled myself out of there, grunting as my muscles uncricked again. Before I shut the door I pushed the locking doodad over into the lock position. You’re welcome, Ms. Fornessi. Crime prevention, after all, is every good citizen’s duty.

  FIVE-TEN FREMONT STREET was just off Mission, within shouting distance of the Transbay bus terminal. Busy downtown area, this, so street parking was a virtual impossibility during business hours. The third parking garage I tried had short-term space for my car, at an exorbitant hourly rate—and it was four cold blocks from there to Fremont and Mission.

  The building that bore the numerals 510 was a three-story stone pile that had been born not long after the 1906 quake and looked as if it was pretty damned weary of standing around in the same spot after eighty-plus years. Its score or so tenants were all small businesses of the more esoteric variety, from a small jewelry manufacturer to an outfit that sold micrographic equipment. The Ferry Temporary Employment Agency was on the second floor, just down the hall from where a cranky old elevator deposited me.

  Ferry had a modest layout, mostly anteroom with one or maybe two small private offices at the rear. Newish if inexpensive furnishings, restful colors, a designer map of the city on one wall and a big sign on another that said SE HABLA ESPAÑOL. At right angles to the sign was a counter, and behind the counter was a desk and a fat woman with lemon-colored hair. The anteroom’s other two occupants were middle-aged, tired-looking women, one Latina and one Anglo, perched like mismatched bookends on either end of a row of hard wooden chairs.

  The fat woman looked me over and seemed to decide that I was neither a male domestic nor a potential employer of domestics. Maybe she mistook me for a bill collector or one of the less shabbily dressed street people who had wandered in looking for a handout; in any event she fixed me with a hard eye and said, “May I help you?” in a voice that might have been packed in dry ice.

  I said, “George Ferry.”

  “Mr. Ferry is in conference.”

  “Sure he is. But he’ll see me.”

  I gave her my name. She didn’t want it, so when she repeated it on the interoffice phone she mispronounced it—deliberately, I thought. She listened, nodded in satisfaction, and said to me, “He doesn’t know you.”

  I had no patience for this. “He knows me,” I said. “Tell him I’m the detective who came to see him on Sunday. And damn it, lady, pronounce my name correctly this time.”

  She was like a tub of cheap margarine: hard-looking on the surface, all soft on the inside, so when you cut into her a little she melted and ran. She quit looking at me; repeated my message to Ferry in a different voice, and with my name correctly pronounced. As soon as she put the phone down she got very busy with a sheaf of papers stacked in front of her. Some receptionist. Some outfit. I felt sorry for the two job-seekers, who were trying to pretend that they hadn’t heard a thing. For all the poor women who needed the Ferry Temporary Employment Agency to make ends meet.

  Another Latina, sad-eyed and slump-shouldered, came out through the inner door and lowered herself into a middle chair in the waiting area: bedraggled paperback between the two bookends. Ferry appeared in the doorway, looking nervous and worried, and gestured for me to join him. His office was about a third as large as the anteroom, just as bare and functional. The only visitor’s chair was a hardwood job that matched the ones out front. Ferry’s desk chair, on the other hand, was an executive model with thick arms and six inches of leather-covered foam rubber in the seat.

  “What is it now?” he said when the door was shut. Hi
s voice had a whiny tone; it didn’t go any better with his chocolate-brown Armani suit than the healing marks on his face. “I explained everything to you on Sunday.”

  “Did you, Mr. Ferry?”

  “Of course I did. I don’t see what—”

  “Sit down, why don’t you? Let’s talk a little more.”

  He sat down, reluctantly. I stayed on my feet, went around on the side of the desk so that I was standing close above him. Some men you can intimidate with that kind of looming posture. Ferry was one of them.

  He licked his lips, as if his mouth was dry and he was wishing his old buddy Jack Daniel’s was close at hand. Tried to find something to do with his hands and finally folded them together at his chest with his thumbs twitching the material of his paisley tie. Nor could he keep his eyes still; they kept shifting this way and that under blinking lids, never quite meeting mine.

  I let him stew awhile before I said, “Gianna Fornessi.”

  “... What about her?”

  “What does she do for a living?”

  Blink. Lick. Twitch. “Do?”

  “Her job, Mr. Ferry. Where does she work?”

  “I ... don’t know,” he said.

  “No idea at all? Didn’t she fill out a renter’s application before she moved into your building?”

  “I never saw it. It’s not my building.... I mean, I don’t own it....”

  “Who does own it?”

  “A man named Chandler, Adam Chandler.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Back East. Pennsylvania.”

  “And she sent the application directly to him?”

  “Well, no, she ... I took it. But I didn’t read it.”

  “Just sent it on to this Adam Chandler in Pennsylvania.”

  “Yes.”

  “And he checked her out and approved her from back there.”

  “That’s right. Yes.”

  “What about Ashley Hansen?”

  “... I don’t know what you mean.”

  “What does she do for a living?”

  Twitch. Lick. “I have no idea,” he said.

  “Come on, Ferry.” I leaned down so that I was right in his face. “What’re you trying to hide?”