Bones (The Nameless Detecive)

by Bill Pronzini

  Yankowski still didn't have anything to say. He looked away from me again, out to where a freighter, like a two-dimensional silhouette, seemed about to be engulfed by the shimmery fire on the horizon. The wind was even colder now. Distantly a foghorn sounded, spreading the news that fogbanks were lying out there somewhere and might soon be blowing in.

  I said, “For thirty-five years you got away with it, you and Bertolucci. Ancient history, half-forgotten, and the two of you probably long out of touch. But then Kiskadon showed up. And I showed up. You weren't worried at first; you didn't figure I could dig deep enough after all that time to get at the truth. But my bet is you hunted up Bertolucci just the same, first to determine if he was still alive and then to warn him about me.

  “My visit to Bertolucci on Wednesday didn't seem to unnerve him much; but when I found his wife's bones that same day—he read about it in the papers or heard about it somehow on Thursday—he got nervous and called you. You went up there to see him. With the intention of killing him to keep him quiet? No, probably not. But something happened when you got to his house, an argument of some kind: he was a crazy old coot and you're a mean bugger when you lose your temper. He probably waved that shotgun at you, and you took it away from him and let fly with both barrels.

  “You didn't find out until later that it was my car you ran into when you were tearing out of there. If you needed any more reason to have the damage to your car fixed, that was it. Nice repair work, too; nice new paint job. But the authorities will find out who did the work for you.”

  “I doubt that,” Yankowski said.

  “Even if they don't, there'll be something else to tie you to Bertolucci and the murder.”

  “I also doubt that,” he said, “since everything you've said is an outrageous tall tale.” He seemed to have relaxed completely, to have regained his arrogant manner. The hate was still in his eyes, but it was shaded now by a thin veil of amusement. He took out one of his fat green cigars, turned his back to the wind, and managed to get the cigar fired with a gold butane lighter. When he faced me again he said, “You don't have a shred of proof to back up any of your allegations and you know it. You can't prove that I conspired with Angelo Bertolucci to cover up a murder in 1949. A letter addressed to me that happens to resemble Harmon Crane's suicide note is hardly evidence of any wrongdoing on my part. The police were satisfied that Crane's death was suicide; you have no legal grounds for reopening the case after all these years. You have no proof that I ever even met this man Bertolucci. You have no eyewitnesses who can identify me as being in or near his home on the night of his death. You have no physical evidence of any kind against me. You have nothing, in short, except a great deal of fanciful speculation. Fiction, not fact.”

  “That isn't going to stop me from taking it to the authorities,” I said.

  “Do as you like. But I warn you, detective. I'd like nothing better than to instigate a lawsuit against you for harassment and defamation of character.”

  “And I warn you, Yankowski, you won't get away with it this time. Not this time.”

  He smiled at me mirthlessly around his cigar. “Won't I?” he said, and turned his back—a gesture of contempt and dismissal—and walked a short distance away. Stood there smoking and looking out to sea, with his back still turned.

  Frustration was sharp in me; he was right and I knew it, and I hated him, too, in that moment, as much as I have ever hated any man for his corruption. The hatred brought on an irrational impulse to go over and give him a push, one little push that would send him hurtling to his death. Immediately I swung around and went the other way, back through the sand and iceplant to Sunset Trail and along it to the parking lot.

  I could never have done it, of course—pushed him off that cliff, killed him in cold blood. It would have made me just like him, it would have turned my soul to slime. No, I could never have done it.

  But on the long drive home, thinking about him standing up there so smug and sure, so goddamn safe, I almost wished I had.

  TWENTY-TWO

  I

  did not call Sergeant DeKalb that night, although I considered it. What I had to say to him, the full story of Yankowski's guilt, was better dealt with in person. It could wait until the morning.

  On Monday, before I drove up to San Rafael to see him, I stopped by the office to find out if there had been any weekend calls. And damned if Eberhardt wasn't already there, even though it was only ten past nine—making coffee and cussing the hot plate because it was taking too long to get hot.

  “Surprise,” I said as I shut the door. “The prodigal has returned.”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “You haven't been around the past few days.”

  “Yeah, well, I took a long weekend. So what?”

  “So nothing. But a lot of things have been happening.”

  “So I read in the papers. You can't keep your ass out of homicide cases, can you? One of these days somebody's going to shoot it off for you.”

  “Or part of it. Then I can be as half-assed as you.”

  “Is that supposed to be funny?”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “I don't feel very comical today,” he said.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Then don't try to be funny.” He smacked the hot plate with the heel of his hand. “Frigging thing takes forever to get hot,” he said.

  “Any calls on the machine? Or didn't you check it?”

  “I checked it. No calls.”

  “Figures.” Leaving my coat on, I went over and cocked a hip against my desk. “Where'd you go for the weekend?” I asked him.

  “Up to the Delta.”

  “Fishing?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wanda go with you?”

  Pause. Then he said, “No.”

  “I kind of figured she didn't.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “She called me up Saturday night.”

  “What for?”

  “To tell me she hated my guts. Kerry's too.”

  “Drunk?”

  “Sounded that way. Eb, listen …”

  “Shut up,” he said. He put his back to me and went to his desk and sat down. Out came one of his pipes and his tobacco pouch; he began loading up, getting flakes of the smelly black shag he used all over his blotter.

  Neither of us said anything for a while; we just sat there, Eberhardt thumbing tobacco into his pipe as if he were crushing ants, me listening to the coffee water start to boil on the hot plate.

  He said finally, “What else she say on the phone?”

  “She told me to go fuck myself.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “No. I hung up on her.”

  “Nothing about us, then. Her and me.”

  “No. What about the two of you?”

  “We broke it off,” he said.

  “Broke it off? You mean your engagement?”

  “The whole thing. It's finished between us. Kaput.”

  That threw me a little; it was the kind of surprise that usually comes only on birthdays and Christmas. I said, “When did this happen?”

  “Tuesday night. Big goddamn battle. I haven't seen her since and I won't either.”

  “What was the battle about?”

  “What do you think?” he said. “She kept bad-mouthing you and Kerry. Drinking vodka like it was water and ranting like a crazy woman. Kept saying she was gonna get back at the two of you. Do something drastic, she said. Talk to one of her ex-husbands, get him to throw a scare into Kerry some night—shit like that.”

  “She'd better not go through with it.”

  “She won't. It was just crazy talk.”

  I said diplomatically, “Well, I guess she had a right to be upset.”

  “Upset, sure, but not out for blood. Not crazy. No damn right to act that way at all.”

  He defended us, I thought, Kerry and me. That's what the big blowup was all about.

  “M
ade me look at her different,” he said, “made me think maybe she wasn't the woman I figured she was. Made me compare her to Kerry, you want to know the truth.” He looked away from me abruptly, out into the airshaft behind his desk. “Ahh,” he said, “the hell with it. She's a bitch, that's all. I always did have a knack for picking bitches.”

  “Eb …”

  “Look at Dana. First-class bitch.”

  Dana was his ex-wife and not nearly as bad as he tried to paint her. Maybe Wanda wasn't either—but I wouldn't have wanted to bet on it.

  “Eb, why didn't you tell me this on Wednesday or Thursday?”

  “Didn't feel like talking about it,” he said. “I needed to get away for a few days, get her out of my system.”

  “And? She out of it now?”

  “Not completely. But she will be. All I got to do is keep thinking about what she called me.”

  “What did she call you?”

  “Never mind.” He lit his pipe and puffed up enough smoke to make the office look and smell like a grass fire.

  “Come on, Eb, what did she call you?”

  “I said never mind. I don't want to talk about her anymore, all right?”

  I let it drop. But a while later, as I was getting ready to leave for San Rafael, Eberhardt said out of the gray of his pipe smoke, “Tits aren't everything, for Christ's sake.”

  “What?”

  “Tits. They're not everything.”

  “Uh, no, they're not.”

  “Man is attracted by more than that in a woman. Man looks for somebody he can be comfortable with, somebody he can talk to. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “She said I was a piss-poor excuse for a man because all I cared about were her tits. Said I was a baby—a tit wallower. How the hell do you like that?”

  “The nerve of the woman,” I said, straightfaced.

  I managed to make it out of the door and over to the stairs before I burst out laughing.

  Kerry laughed, too, when I told her about it that night. In fact, she thought “tit wallower” was the funniest expression she'd heard in months. She kept repeating it and then sailing off into whoops and snorts.

  When she calmed down I said, “So now you're vindicated, lady.”

  “Vindicated?”

  “The Great Spaghetti Assault. It was a damned stupid thing to do, but it got all the right results.”

  “Mmm,” she said. Her eyes were bright with reminiscence; she really did hate Wanda a lot. “And I'd do it again, too, if I got drunk enough.”

  “I'll bet you would.”

  “For Eberhardt's sake.”

  “Right.”

  “God, what a relief she's out of his life. The idea of having to attend their wedding gave me nightmares. She probably would have worn white, too.”

  “Probably.”

  “And Eberhardt would have been in a tuxedo. He'd have looked like a big bird, I'll bet. A black-winged, white-breasted tit wallower,” she said and off she went into more whoops and snorts.

  I sighed and picked up her empty wineglass and went into the kitchen to refill it. We were in her apartment tonight, because the weather was still good and the view from her living room window is slightly spectacular on clear nights. When I came back she had herself under control again. “I'll be good,” she said when I handed her the wine.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “No, I will. I'll be serious. You're in a serious mood tonight, aren't you?”

  “More or less.”

  “Michael Kiskadon?”

  “Yeah. He's been on my mind all day.”

  “Have you heard anything more about his wife?”

  “Some. I talked to Jack Logan at the Hall; she's still in custody, still holding up all right.”

  “Is the D.A. going to prosecute her?”

  “Probably not. She didn't murder her husband; all she did was try to cover up her part in the accident. Any competent lawyer could get her off without half trying.”

  “Lawyers,” Kerry said, and made a face.

  “Yeah.”

  “Yankowski—what about him? He's not going to get off, is he?”

  “That's the way it looks,” I said. “DeKalb went to see him today, after we talked, and he didn't get any further than I did. The law can't touch him for what he did in 1949. And there's just no proof that he killed Bertolucci. Unless DeKalb can find out who did the repair work and paint job on his Cadillac, there's nothing at all to tie him and Bertolucci together.”

  Kerry seemed to have grown as sobersided as I felt. She scowled into her wineglass. “It's not right,” she said. “He's a cold-blooded murderer. He can't get away with it.”

  “Can't he? A lot of things aren't right in the world these days, babe. Who says there has to be justice?”

  “I'd like to believe there is.”

  “So would I,” I said. “But I'm afraid there isn't.”

  EPILOGUE

  W

  ell, maybe there is. Sometimes.

  Eight days later, at 6:20 in the evening, Thomas J. Yankowski suffered a fatal heart attack while watching the news on TV. He didn't die immediately; he died forty minutes later, in an ambulance on the way to Mission Emergency Hospital. He had a history of heart trouble—he'd had a mild attack a few years ago, as Eberhardt had mentioned to me—but I like to think the seizure was the direct result of the stress and strain of having committed one crime too many. I also like to think he was coherent during the last forty minutes of his life, that he believed the attack was punishment for his sins and perhaps he faced an even greater punishment to come.

  Not that any of that matters, of course. What matters is the simple fact that he was dead, just as Kate Bertolucci and Harmon Crane and Angelo Bertolucci and Michael Kiskadon were dead; and now the pathetic little drama they had enacted was over. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. A few insignificant bones scattered and lost in the graveyard of time.

  It makes you wonder. Sometimes there is justice, yes. But does that matter, either, in the larger scheme of things—whatever that scheme may be?

  Maybe it does.

  Like love, like compassion and caring and friendship—maybe it does.