Epitaphs

by Bill Pronzini

  Surprisingly, he was at his desk when I got to the office Wednesday morning. The big converted loft was already blue with carcinogens from his lousy pipe tobacco. He was thumping on his computer terminal with two hard, blunt fingers; he didn’t say hello, didn’t even look up. I thought that if he bit down any harder on the stem of his stubby briar, he would wind up picking hard plastic slivers out of his molars.

  He hadn’t made any coffee, which was just as well; he made worse coffee than I did. I went and put up a pot. When I was done I said, “Early bird this morning,” taking care to keep my tone light and cheerful.

  Nothing at first. Then, “Lot of work to do.” His tone was about as light and cheerful as a morgue attendant’s.

  “You free for lunch?”

  Another pause. “Why?”

  “I thought maybe we could have a burger and a beer.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we haven’t done that in a while.”

  No response.

  “All right,” I said. “So we can talk.”

  “We got nothing to talk about.”

  “Does that mean you’ve made up your mind?”

  “About what?”

  “Not to bust us up,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Or is it the other way around?”

  Silence.

  I said evenly, “I’ll ask once more. How about lunch?”

  “I got a lunch,” he said.

  “Drinks after we close up, then.”

  “I’m meeting Bobbie Jean.”

  “Lunch tomorrow.”

  “Busy then too.”

  “Okay. Okay. You name it, whenever you’re free.”

  “Quit bugging me, will you? I told you I got work to do—didn’t I just tell you that?” He began to bang the computer keyboard again, violently this time.

  I started some work of my own, but I couldn’t concentrate. The atmosphere in there was oppressive again: Eberhardt’s attitude was as foul as his frigging tobacco. After ten minutes I got up, got ready to leave.

  At the door I said, “I’ll be back sometime this afternoon, if anybody wants me.”

  He didn’t look up, didn’t speak.

  “Put my answering machine on when you go. Or you want me to do it now, so you don’t have to deal with my calls?”

  “It’s your machine,” he said. “I’m busy.”

  Weeds. High, getting higher, and full of thorns.

  PIETRO LOMBARDI? Or another try at an audience with his granddaughter?

  I debated the issue with myself as I got my car out of the parking garage down the block. The first thing I decided was that I could not face Pietro cold on this cold morning, even to tell him a benign lie of omission. The mood I was in, I would probably make a slip of some kind, or just blurt out my suspicions about Gianna; there was about as much tact in me right now as there was in an elephant. Talking to him would have to wait until later in the day. Or until tomorrow.

  As for Gianna, I didn’t have to talk to her at all. I was pretty sure she was selling her body, and to confirm it I could try Bisconte again, or get in touch with a couple of street people I knew who could find out anything about anybody on the shady side, given enough time and the right amount of grease.

  The sticking point was that neither of those approaches would quite satisfy my professional curiosity about Gianna Fornessi. What kind of person was she? What kind of young woman, with a goombah like Pietro and a rock-ribbed, traditional Italian family upbringing, turns to hooking to make her living? I wanted to know that before I talked to Pietro; it might make lying to him a little easier. And to know it I had to know her at least a little—I had to meet her face-to-face, ask her some hard questions.

  GIANNA’S WHITE NISSAN was still sitting in the same spot along the retaining wall opposite her building. The wind had been working hard up here; bits and pieces of litter were shaped around its tires, as if the elements were using it to build some kind of nest. Not that the unmoved Nissan had to mean she was still missing. If she’d returned from her long weekend sometime yesterday or last night, she could have been dropped off here and elected not to go out again.

  Double-parked directly in front of 250 was an appliance store delivery truck, its rear doors open and its tailgate lowered to the pavement. The entrance door to the building also stood wide open. I parked a couple of spaces ahead of the Nissan this time, let the wind blow me over past the truck.

  Nobody was in the vestibule or lobby, but the murmur of voices filtered down from the third floor. One of them, I thought, belonged to George Ferry. Not working today? Well, maybe he just hadn’t left yet; it was not quite ten, still early, and he was his own boss.

  If I’d been a burglar I would have rubbed my hands together in glee at the wide open entrance and empty lobby: Welcome, prowlers, one and all. As it was, I walked in as if I belonged there and climbed the inside staircase.

  When I swung into the second floor hallway I came face-to-face with Jack Bisconte.

  He was hurrying toward me from the direction of apartment four, something small and red and rectangular clutched in the fingers of his left hand. He broke stride when he saw me; and then recognition made him do a jerky double take and he came to a halt. I stopped, too, with maybe fifteen feet separating us. That was close enough, and the hallway was well-lighted enough, for me to get a good look at his face. It was pinched, sweat-slicked, the eyes wide and shiny—the face of a man on the cutting edge of panic.

  Frozen time, maybe five seconds of it, while we stood confronting each other. There was nobody else in the hall; no audible sounds on this floor except for the quick rasp of Bisconte’s breathing. We both moved at the same time—Bis—conte in the same jerky fashion of his double take, shoving the red object into the pocket of his safari jacket as he came forward. Then, when we had closed the gap between us by half, we both stopped again as if on cue. It might have been a mildly amusing little pantomime, if you’d been a disinterested observer. It wasn’t amusing to me. Or to Bisconte, from the look of him.

  I said, “Fancy meeting you here. I thought you didn’t know Gianna Fornessi or Ashley Hansen.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “Get out of my way. I mean it.” The edge of panic had cut into his voice; it was thick, liquidy, as if his vocal chords were bleeding.

  “What did you put in your pocket, the red thing?”

  He said, “Christ!” and tried to lunge past me.

  I blocked his way, getting my hands up between us to push him back. His eyes went wild; he made a noise in his throat and swung at me. It was a clumsy shot and I ducked away from it without much effort, his knuckles just grazing my neck. But then he got his shoulder down, into my chest before I could sidestep, and his pumping legs drove me hard into the wall.

  The force of the collision hammered the breath out of me, made me see double; I might have gone down if his body hadn’t been pinning mine. He hit me in the rib cage, weakly, then tried to throw me aside, but I had hold of the rough material of his jacket and he couldn’t yank loose. He was almost sobbing now, more with fear than exertion, the panic raking him.

  We hung there against the wall, him sobbing, me trying to get my breath back—bodies jammed together, legs and feet twined and scrabbling like a couple of drunks performing a lunatic jitterbug. Somewhere people were yelling; I could hear that over the blood-pound in my ears. Bisconte got one arm loose, short-punched me on the ear without doing any damage. I hit him in the belly with the same result. We clinched again, danced some more. But not for long.

  The son of a bitch got a leg back far enough to kick me, hard, on the left shinbone. I yelled and relaxed my grip enough for him to tear loose, and this time I did go down. He kicked out again, at my head; didn’t connect because I was already rolling away. I fetched up tight against the curve of the stair banister and by the time I got myself twisted back around, Bisconte was on the stairs, running.

  I use
d the banister to get on my feet, almost collapsed again when I put weight on the leg he’d kicked. Hobbling, wiping pain-wet out of my eyes, I chased after him.

  People were on the staircase above me, coming down from the third floor; the one in the lead was Ferry. He called something that I didn’t listen to as I started to descend. Bisconte, damn him, had already crossed the lobby and was charging out through the open front doors.

  Hop, hop, hop down the stairs like a contestant in a one-legged race, clinging to the railing for support. When I reached the lobby, some of the sting had gone out of my shinbone and I could put more weight on the leg. But I still couldn’t move very fast, because my breathing wasn’t right.

  Out into the vestibule, with a hobble-stagger gait, looking for him. He was across the street and down a ways, fumbling with a set of keys at the driver’s door of a new silver Mercedes. But he was too wrought up to get the right key into the lock, and when he saw me pounding across the street in his direction, the panic goosed him and he ran again. Around behind the Mercedes, onto the sidewalk. And up and over the concrete retaining wall. And gone.

  I heard him go sliding or tumbling through the undergrowth below. I lurched up to the wall, leaned over it. The slope down there was steep, covered with trees and brush, strewn with the leavings of semihumans who had used it for a dumping ground. Bisconte was on his buttocks, digging hands and heels into the ground to slow his momentum. For a few seconds I thought he was going to turn into a one-man avalanche and plummet over the edge, where the slope ended in a sheer bluff face. But he managed to catch hold of one of the tree trunks and swing himself away from the precipice, then crawled in among a tangle of bushes where I couldn’t see him anymore. I could hear him—and then I couldn’t. He’d found purchase, I thought, and was easing himself down to where the back side of another apartment building leaned in against the cliff.

  There was no way I was going down there after him. I turned from the wall, bent to massage my shin; most of the sharp hurt was gone now, in its place a thin, pulsing sting. I was able to walk more or less normally to where the Mercedes was parked. And to breathe more or less normally, too, thanks to the cold wind.

  The Mercedes had a vanity plate, the kind that makes you wonder why somebody would pay $25 extra to the DMV to put it on his car: BISFLWR. If the car had had an external hood release I would have popped it and disabled the engine; but it didn’t, and all four doors were locked. All right. Chances were, Bisconte wouldn’t risk coming back here soon —and even if he did run the risk, it would take him a good long while to work his way up the hill from below.

  I recrossed the street to 250. Four people were clustered in the vestibule, staring at me—Ferry and a couple of uniformed deliverymen and a fat woman in her forties with her hair up in curlers. Ferry said as I came up the steps, “What happened, what’s going on?” I didn’t answer him. There was a bad feeling in me now; or maybe it had been there from the moment I’d first seen the look on Bisconte’s face upstairs. I pushed past the four people—none of them tried to stop me —and went on up to the second floor.

  Nobody answered the bell at apartment four. I tried the door, and the knob turned freely, and I walked in and shut it again and locked it behind me.

  She was lying on the floor in the living room, sprawled and bent on her back near a heavy wood-and-glass coffee table, peach-colored dressing gown hiked up over her thighs. Her head was twisted at an off angle, blood and a deep triangular puncture wound on the left temple. The blood was still wet and clotting. She hadn’t been dead very long at all.

  In the sunlight that spilled in through the undraped front windows, the blood had a kind of shimmery radiance. So did her hair—her long platinum-blond hair.

  Good-bye, Ashley Hansen.

  Chapter Nine

  I CALLED THE Hall of Justice and talked to a Homicide inspector I knew slightly named Harry Craddock. I told him what I’d found, and about my little skirmish with Bisconte, and said that yes, I would wait right here and no, I wouldn’t touch anything. He didn’t tell me not to prowl through the apartment and I didn’t say that I wouldn’t.

  While I was talking I took a good look at the living room. Expensively furnished in a modern southwestern style—white-wood tables, chairs and a sofa with muted blue and salmon-colored fabrics, set against a white background. But it hadn’t been done by a decorator, or by anyone with much taste. None of the four wall decorations—two darkish paintings, an Indian-style rug thing, some kind of ceremonial mask —complemented one another; the big rococo mirror over the fireplace was both ugly and out of place; there were too many overstuffed pillows strewn around. Stains and scuff marks marred the hardwood floor and two of the walls. The place was none too clean, either. And the dead woman in the middle of it all gave it a tawdry, pathetic aspect.

  Poor Ashley Hansen. All that quick cash for selling her body, and what had it bought her? Death at twenty-two or twenty-three in a room that wasn’t much larger or fancier, when you got right down it, than a Tenderloin crib.

  Somebody had started banging on the door. Ferry, probably. I went the other way, into one of the bedrooms.

  Ashley Hansen’s: There was a photograph of her prominently displayed on the dresser, and several more rococo mirrors to give her a live image of herself. A narcissist, among other things. The room smelled of expensive perfume and shower damp, but it wasn’t any cleaner than the living room. Clothing and lingerie littered it; there was a dustball peeking out from under a corner of the bed. The fact that it had been searched, with what apparently had been frantic haste, added to its unkempt appearance.

  Drawers in the dresser were pulled out, one lay upended on the floor in front of it; the nightstand drawers were open too. Things had been tumbled out of the closet. And on the unmade bed, tipped on its side with most of its contents spilled out, was a fancy beaded leather purse.

  I used the backs of my two index fingers to stir around among the spilled items and the stuff still inside. Everything you’d expect to find in a woman’s purse. And one thing that should have been there but wasn’t—a personal address book. The kind, say, that was small and red and rectangular, like the object Bisconte had shoved into his pocket.

  On one nightstand was a powder-blue combination telephone and answering machine. With a knuckle I switched the machine on, pushed the PLAY button. The last recorded message was still on the tape, which meant that Bisconte had overlooked this angle in his panicked hunt through the apartment. If he’d thought of the answering machine, he’d sure as hell have taken the time to erase the tape.

  Man’s voice, friendly, cheerful, but with a smarmy edge to it: “Hi, babycakes. Dave here, Big Dave from Colma. Like to see you again Thursday night. Give you a ride in one of my new demos, then give you a real ride, ha ha. Just come on down to the lot if you’re available, usual time. I’m feeling spry, maybe we’ll party all night. See you then.”

  Not this Thursday, babycakes, I thought. Not any Thursday with Ashley ever again.

  I reset the machine, went across the hall into Gianna Fornessi’s bedroom. The decor in there was different from the rest of the apartment: frilly, done mostly in pink brocade and pink satin and white lace, like a little girl’s room. Full of cute little porcelain knickknacks, even a big stuffed koala bear propped against the bed’s headboard. Gianna was tidier than Ashley had been; the bed was made, all her soiled clothing picked up, all the cosmetics in order on her vanity table. Even so, there was disorder in the room now: it had been searched in the same rough, hurried fashion.

  A telephone and a Panasonic answering machine sat on one of her nightstands; the number on the phone dial was not the same as her roommate’s. The message light on the machine was lit; Bisconte had missed that too. I worked the REWIND button—three messages, judging from the amount of tape that reversed—and then hit the PLAY button.

  First message. Soft, older voice: “This is Everett, from Fresno. Remember me? I’ll be in the city again Friday, checking into t
he usual place around six. If you’re free, pencil me in. I’ll call again later to confirm.”

  Second message. Younger, angry voice: “Gianna ... Bud. What the hell’s the idea standing me up this afternoon? Don’t I pay you enough? Don’t I always treat you right? You want any more of my business, you better have a good excuse.”

  Third message. This voice was so shrilly nervous it cracked like sheet ice on a couple of syllables: “Gianna, my name is Tom ... Tom from Fairfax. Dick from San Rafael gave me your name and number. He said ... well, he said you wouldn’t mind meeting somebody new. You can give him a call, he’ll tell you I’m okay. I run my own business and I’ve got plenty of money and I ... I can be generous. Maybe you’d be willing to come here some night next week, to my home? Paul’s told me a lot about you and I ... well, I’d really like to get together. Okay? Best night for me would be Friday ... next Friday, if you can make it. My number is 555-2897, I’m home most evenings after six, it’s okay to call anytime because I live alone. Thanks. I look forward to hearing from you and meeting you, Gianna.”

  Jesus.

  My teeth were set so tightly now I could feel ridges of pain along my jawline. I reset the machine, moved around to where a spindly writing desk stood against one wall. All the drawers had been yanked open; papers littered the top, the floor underneath. But Bisconte in his frenzy had overlooked something here, too, something that caught my eye almost immediately: one of those loose-leaf calendars in a little molded plastic tray, with each date on an individual sheet that you can pluck out and throw away. The top sheet had nothing written on it, evidently the reason Bisconte had passed over it; but the date was last Thursday’s, and when I lifted that sheet to reveal Friday’s date, I found inked words in a childish, feminine hand.