Bones (The Nameless Detecive)

by Bill Pronzini

  Outside, there was no sign of Mrs. Kiskadon. I wondered if she'd slipped into the house while I was there; I hadn't heard her, if so. Or maybe she was still over on that bench in the park, looking for answers to her problems in the branches of the big cedar tree.

  NINE

  D

  inner that evening was more of a disaster than the previous night's earthquake. And I don't mean that metaphorically.

  To begin with, I should have known from its location what Il Roccaforte would be like. San Bruno Avenue is not exactly one of the city's ritzier neighborhoods, adjoining as it does the Southern Freeway interchange and the Hunters Point ghetto. I know a guy who lives in that area and he says it's not bad—blue-collar residential, mostly. But it's one of the last places you'd go looking for haute cuisine and an elegant, atmospheric dining experience.

  The owners of Il Roccaforte had never heard of either haute cuisine or elegance. But the place was definitely atmospheric—in the same way a condemned waterfront pier is atmospheric. And without a doubt eating there was one hell of an experience.

  It was in a building all its own, so old and creaky-looking it might have been a survivor of the 1906 earthquake, sandwiched between a laundromat and a country-and-western bar called the Bull's Buns. Kerry said, “My God!” in a horrified voice as we drove up, and I couldn't tell if she meant Il Roccaforte or the Bull's Buns or both. She didn't have anything else to say. She had been conspicuously silent since I'd picked her up, which was always a storm warning with her: it was plain she'd had a very bad day in the advertising business, running ideas up flagpoles and seeing if they saluted, or whatever the current Madison Avenue slang expression was, and that she was in no mood for what awaited us inside Il Roccaforte.

  Please, Lord, I thought, let it be an uneventful evening. Not a good one, not even a companionable one—just uneventful.

  But He wasn't listening.

  We got out of the car and went inside. The motif, if you could call it that, was early Depression: some dusty Chianti bottles on shelves here and there, the corpses of three house-plants of dubious origin, a cracked and discolored painting of a peasant woman stomping grapes, tables with linen cloths on them that had not been white since the Truman Administration, and the smells of grease, garlic, and sour wine. Some people might have called the place funky, but none of that type had discovered it yet. The people like myself who called it a relic and a probable health hazard were the ones who, having taken one good look at it, no doubt stayed away in droves. The only customers at the moment, aside from a waiter who looked as if he might have been stuffed and left there for decoration, were Eberhardt and Wanda, tucked up together at a table in one corner.

  “Hi, people,” Wanda said when we got over there. She beamed at us from under a pair of false eyelashes as big as daddy longlegs and fluffed her gaudy yellow hair and stuck out her chest the way she does, as if anybody but a blind person could miss seeing it. “Say, that's a real cute dress, Kerry. You didn't get that dress at Macy's, did you?”

  “No, I didn't.”

  “Gee, it looks just like one we had on sale last week in the bargain basement.”

  Kerry smiled with her teeth, like a wolf smiling at a piece of meat, and sat down. There was a carafe of red wine on the table; she picked it up immediately and poured herself a full glass, which she proceeded to sip in a determined way.

  I said something to Eberhardt by way of greeting, but he didn't answer. As usual, all his attention was focused on Wanda's chest. Tonight the chest was encased in a white silk blouse with the top three buttons undone, so that most of it, very white and bulging, was visible to the naked eye. Eberhardt's naked eye was full of gleams and glints; I felt like leaning over and telling him to wipe the drool off his chin.

  As soon as we were settled, Wanda set the tone for the evening by telling a pair of jokes. Wanda liked to tell jokes, most of which were dumb and a few of which were in bad taste. Sort of like a female Bob Hope.

  Wanda: “What's the definition of foreplay in a Jewish marriage?”

  Eberhardt: “I dunno, what?”

  Wanda: “Thirty minutes of begging.”

  Eberhardt broke up. I managed a polite chuckle. Kerry just sat there sipping her wine.

  Wanda (giggling): “So what's foreplay in an Italian marriage?”

  Eberhardt: “I dunno, what?”

  Wanda: “Guy nudges his wife and says, ‘Hey, you ready?’”

  Eberhardt broke up again. I managed a polite smile this time, without the chuckle. Kerry just sat there sipping her wine.

  “I hear lots of jokes like that down at Macy's,” Wanda said. “I could tell jokes like that all night long.”

  Kerry rolled her eyes and gnashed her teeth a little. Neither Wanda nor Eberhardt noticed. Wanda was still giggling and he was watching her chest and grinning fatuously.

  The waiter finally showed up with some menus. He was an older Italian guy dressed up in a shiny, rumpled tuxedo that looked as if it belonged on a corpse. He had a long, sad, creased face, ears that had big tufts of hair growing out of them, and a toupee so false and loose-fitting that it invited my attention the way Wanda's chest invited Eberhardt's. Every time the waiter leaned over the table, the hairpiece moved a little like something alive that was clinging evilly to the top of his head. If he had heard Wanda's dumb Jewish and Italian jokes, he gave no indication of it. Nor did he bother to adjust his hair. Either he didn't notice it was so loose or he had a lot more faith in its ability to stay put than I did.

  He went away and Wanda told us about her day at Macy's. Then she told us another dumb joke. Then she lit up a Tareyton and blew smoke that made Kerry cough and glare and pour more wine. Eberhardt stared at Wanda's chest, still looking both fatuous and horny. I didn't say much. Kerry didn't say anything at all.

  The waiter brought us a loaf of bread. I would have eaten some of it, because I was hungry, but if I'd tried I would have broken every tooth in my mouth. It was so old and so hard you couldn't have cut it with a hatchet, much less a knife. It had gone beyond bread and become a whole new and powerful substance. It ought to have been donated to the Giants for use as a fungo bat.

  Wanda told us about one of her ex-husbands, the one who had driven a garbage truck; she had two or three, I'm not sure which. One of the things she told us was a long and involved anecdote about his underwear that had no point and wasn't funny but that she concluded with a shriek of laughter so shrill I thought it might shatter the water glasses.

  Nobody else came into the place—fortunately for them.

  The waiter again, this time to take our orders. I decided his hairpiece looked even more like a spider than Wanda's false eyelashes—a deformed and wicked spider. I almost said, “I'll have the spider, please.” Instead I said, “I'll have the scallopini, please.” Eberhardt and Wanda both ordered the veal piccata because Wanda said, “They really know how to do it here, Ebbie, you never tasted veal like this before, believe me.”

  I believed her.

  Kerry said, “I'm not very hungry. I guess I'll just have a small salad.”

  “What's the matter, honey?” Wanda asked her. “Don't you like Italian food?”

  “Yes,” Kerry said, “but we ate Italian last night. And I'm just not very hungry.”

  “You sick or something? Getting your period? Sometimes I don't feel like eating much when I'm getting mine.”

  Kerry buried her nose in her wineglass and sat there looking at the Chianti bottle on the shelf above Wanda's head, as if she wished there would suddenly be another earthquake.

  The waiter brought a tureen of soup. When he leaned over to set it on the table I thought for sure his hair was going to fall into the tureen. It didn't, which was something of a disappointment. I wanted that damned thing to fall off. We all have our perverse moments, and under the circumstances I felt I was justified in having one of mine.

  Wanda told us about the time she went to Tijuana and saw a bullfight. She told us about the highest game she'd eve
r bowled, “a two-ten, I had five strikes in a row, my God I thought I was going to wet my pants.” She told us about the time she got drunk at a party and threw up into the heating register. “The place stank for weeks after that,” she said. “I mean, you just can't get all that stuff out of there.”

  I tried to eat my soup. Minestrone, the waiter had said, lying through his teeth. Maybe it was just the power of suggestion, but what it tasted like was what Wanda had once upchucked into the heating register.

  Still no other damn fools came into the place.

  Wanda told us about the time she'd had a varicose vein removed from her leg and how painful it was. Then she told us about the time she'd broken her arm roller-skating and how painful that was. Then she told us about the first time she'd had sex and how painful that was. “I didn't start to enjoy it until my fifth or sixth time. How about you, honey?” she asked Kerry. “You like it the first time you got poked?”

  Kerry said something that sounded like “Nrrr.” After which she said between her teeth, “I don't remember.”

  “Oh, sure you do. Everybody remembers their first time. How old were you?”

  Silence.

  “I was fourteen,” Wanda said. “The guy lived across the street, he was fifteen, we did it under the laundry sink in his basement—I mean, it had to be down there because his parents were home, you know? Boy, was I scared. Fourteen's pretty young, I guess, but I was a curious kid. How about you, Ebbie? How old were you?”

  “Eighteen,” Eberhardt said, staring at her chest.

  She looked at me, but I got spared having to answer by the reappearance of the waiter and his wicked hair. The thing had slid down over his left ear and seemed to be hanging onto the edge of it. Fall, you furry bastard, I thought. Fall! But it didn't.

  What the waiter brought this time was a bowl of spaghetti in marinara sauce. Or what he said was spaghetti in marinara sauce. The minestrone, which had been made out of three carrots, half a potato, some stringy celery, and a gallon of peppered water, had had more consistency and more flavor. But Wanda ate the spaghetti with gusto and half a pound of parmesan cheese. So did Eberhardt. I ate one strand and a tiny bit of the marinara sauce, or whatever the hell the red stuff was, and decided that was enough of a risk for a man my age. Kerry finished what was left in the wine carafe and ordered a refill.

  Wanda talked about her youth in Watsonville, where her father had been a grower of artichokes. “We never had much money,” she said, “but we had all the artichokes we could eat. I ate artichokes until they were coming out my ears. I can't eat them anymore. Just the smell of one cooking makes me puke.”

  The main course arrived just then—perfect timing, I thought, considering Wanda's last comment—and the bowl of spaghetti in marinara sauce got transferred to a sideboard. I was not sorry to see it go. My scallopini had not been made with veal; it had not been made with any sort of animal that had been either young or alive in years. It was so tough you could have used it to make a baseball glove, also for donation to the Giants, a team that needs all the help it can get.

  Wanda thought her veal dish was “scrumptious.” Eberhardt thought her chest was scrumptious. Kerry took one look at her salad, pushed it away, and poured another glass of wine from the refilled carafe.

  Between bites, Wanda talked about another of her ex-husbands, this one a dock worker who used to knock her around when he got drunk. Eberhardt said gallantly that he'd kill any son of a bitch who ever touched her. She rubbed her chest against his arm and batted her eyelashes at him and said, “Oh, Ebbie, you're such a man!” If he'd been on the floor at the time he would have rolled over on his back with his tongue lolling out so she could scratch his belly.

  The waiter and his pet spider showed up again to ask if we wanted any dessert. Wanda asked him what they had, and he said, “Apple cobbler and zabaglione. But I wouldn't recommend the zabaglione.”

  “No? Why not?”

  “I just wouldn't recommend it,” he said ominously.

  “Oh. Well, I'll have the apple cobbler then.”

  None of the rest of us wanted any apple cobbler and definitely not any zabaglione. The waiter went away. Wanda talked. Eberhardt lusted. I fidgeted. Kerry drank. The waiter came back and put a dish of something in front of Wanda and went away again. Eberhardt took his eyes off Wanda's chest long enough to look at the dish.

  “Say,” he said, “isn't cobbler supposed to have crust?”

  “It's got crust,” Wanda said.

  “Where?”

  “There. See? Right there.”

  Eberhardt looked. I looked too. What she was pointing at was a little piece of something floating upside down in a brownish goop, like the corpse of some small creature floating on its back in a bog. Then Wanda, the ghoul, proceeded to eat it.

  When she was finished she fired up another Tareyton, covered us all with a haze of smoke, and told us about her sister in Minneapolis who was a hairdresser and who worked with “a bunch of faggots, they even got 'em back there.” Then she gave us her opinion of homosexuality, which was not very high. “You ask me,” she said, “that Anita Bryant had the right idea. There oughta be laws against fruits. I mean, the whole idea of them sticking their things into each other—”

  “Wanda,” Kerry said.

  Wanda looked at her. So did I. It was the first word she'd spoken in twenty minutes.

  “Why don't you shut up, Wanda,” Kerry said.

  Wanda said incredulously, “What?”

  “Shut up. You know, put your fat lips together so no sound comes out.”

  Eberhardt said incredulously, “What?”

  “You've got diarrhea of the mouth, Wanda.”

  I said incredulously, “What?”

  Everything stopped for a few seconds, like a freeze frame in a movie. We all sat there staring at Kerry. She was sitting stiff and straight, very calm and self-possessed, but her eyes said she was crocked. I also knew her well enough to understand that she was seething inside. Her kettle, as the saying goes, had finally boiled over.

  Wanda made a wounded noise, shuffled around in her chair to break the tableau, and said like a siren going off, “You can't talk to me like that! Ebbie, tell her she can't talk to me like that!”

  Eberhardt glowered at Kerry. “What's the idea? What's the matter with you?”

  “Nothing's the matter with me. The matter is with your fiancée and her big mouth.”

  “Listen, I don't like that kind of talk—”

  “Oh, why don't you shut up too, Ebbie.”

  I tried kicking her under the table, but she squirmed her legs out of the way. “Come on, folks,” I said like a cheerful idiot, “why don't we all just relax? Kerry didn't mean what she said. She's just—”

  “Fed up,” Kerry said, “That's what I'm just. And the hell I didn't mean it. I meant every word of it.”

  Wanda pointed a trembly finger at her. “You never liked me. I knew you never liked me right from the first.”

  “Bingo,” Kerry said.

  “Well, I never liked you either. You're nothing but a … a … cold fish. A scrawny cold fish.”

  Kerry's face took on a mottled hue. “Cold fish?” she said. “Scrawny?” she said.

  “That's right—scrawny!”

  “I'd rather be scrawny than a top-heavy blimp like you.”

  “Oh, so I'm a blimp, am I? Well, men like big boobs on a woman, not a couple of fried eggs like you got.”

  Kerry sat absolutely still for maybe three seconds. Then she scraped back her chair and stood up. The rest of us popped up too, like a bunch of jack-in-the-boxes, but Kerry was already moving by then, out away from the table. My first thought was that she was about to stalk off in a huff, but I should have known better; Kerry isn't the type of woman who stalks off in a huff. When I realized what she was really going to do I yelled her name and lunged at her. Too late.

  She caught up the bowl of soggy spaghetti from the sideboard and dumped it over Wanda's head.

  Wanda le
t out a screech that rattled the windows. Then she scrunched up her face and segued into wailing hysterics. A strand of spaghetti slid off her nose like a fat red and white worm, dropped onto one enormous breast, and wriggled down its ski-run length, gathering momentum as it went. Some more strands dangled off her ears and around her neck like so much art-deco jewelry. All that spaghetti and all that dripping sauce and all those tears gave her the look of a comic foil in an old Marx Brothers movie. I managed, just barely, to repress an insane urge to giggle.

  Eberhardt was pawing at her with a napkin and his hands, trying to clean her off; all he succeeded in doing was pushing some of the spaghetti down inside her blouse, which only made her yowl the louder. He murdered Kerry with his eyes. Then he murdered me with his eyes. Then he smeared some more marinara sauce into Wanda's chest.

  Kerry seemed sobered and a little awed by what she'd done. She said to me in subdued tones, “I think we'd better go. I'll be out in the car.” She caught up her purse and off she went, leaving me there to deal with the wreckage alone.

  I dealt with it by fumbling my wallet out, throwing a couple of twenties on the table, and saying stupidly, “I'm sorry, Eb. I'll pay for dinner …”

  “Take your money,” he said, snarling the words, “and shove it up your fat ass.”

  The waiter had come over and was trying to help clean up the mess. His hair had shifted to the right side of his head and was hanging there at a wickedly jaunty angle. I swear he winked at me just before I fled.

  TEN

  E

  berhardt didn't show up at the office next morning. I hung around waiting for him, fidgeting a little. I had an apology speech all worked out, all about how much I regretted what had happened at Il Roccaforte and how contrite Kerry was. Which was the truth: once she'd sobered up last night, and had absorbed the full impact of what she'd done, she had been pretty hangdog about the whole thing. She had tried to call Eberhardt and Wanda, first at his house and then at her apartment, but nobody answered at either number. So she was planning to go over to Macy's today on her lunch break and apologize to Wanda personally, and then come here to the office and apologize to Eberhardt personally. She had already apologized to me personally. I let her do it, but I wasn't really mad at her. I pretended to be, a little, and I pretended to be shocked by such a public loss of control, but secretly I was kind of pleased about it. I kept having mental images of Wanda standing there bawling, with the marinara sauce dripping onto her chest and the spaghetti crawling over her head, and they weren't unpleasant at all. A product of the same sort of perversity that had made me yearn for the waiter's hair to fall off into the soup, with maybe a pinch of malice added.