Epitaphs Read online

  Other Books by Bill Pronzini

  The Hangings

  Firewind

  With an Extreme Burning

  Snowbound

  The Stalker

  Lighthouse (with Marcia Muller)

  Games

  “Nameless Detective” Novels by Bill Pronzini

  The Snatch

  The Vanished

  Undercurrent

  Blowback

  Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)

  Labyrinth

  Hoodwink

  Scattershot

  Dragonfire

  Bindlestiff

  Quicksilver

  Nightshades

  Double (with Marcia Muller)

  Bones

  Deadfall

  Shackles

  Jackpot

  Breakdown

  Quarry

  Epitaphs

  Demons

  Hardcase

  Sentinels

  Illusions

  Boobytrap

  Crazybone

  Bleeders

  Spook

  EPITAPHS

  Bill Pronzini

  SPEAKING VOLUMES, LLC

  NAPLES, FLORIDA

  2015

  Epitaphs

  Copyright © 1992 by Bill Pronzini

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission of the author.

  9781628152500

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  For

  Kit, Tiffany, and Arthur Knight

  In honor of the Petaluma connection, the happy rhino, and “standing alone, famous, next to the cheap wine ”

  Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs;

  Make dust our paper, and with rainy eyes

  Write sorrow on the bosom of the earth.

  —SHAKESPEARE Richard II

  Poorly lived

  And poorly died

  Poorly buried

  And no one cried

  —EPITAPH IN AN

  ENGLISH CEMETERY

  Chapter One

  I LIKE SUNDAYS. Most Sundays, anyway.

  Day of rest, day of relaxation. Stay-in-bed-and-read-or-watch-old-movies day. Putter day. Go-out-and-play day. Do-nothing-at-all day. Good old Sunday.

  This one, in late June, had clear skies and warm breezes off the ocean and the bay—a pair of surprises, since too many June days in San Francisco are fog-shrouded and cold. Nature’s air-conditioning, the locals like to say with pride; keeps the city nice and cool while surrounding communities swelter under the hot summer sun. Wouldn’t have it any other way, they tell outsiders, lying through their teeth. If they really meant it, they would not take part, as plenty of them do, in the mass weekend exodus to those sweltering neighborhood communities. It is only on rare June days like this one that these none-too-true-blue San Franciscans stay put and take advantage of what they refer to as the city’s “good-weather attractions.”

  So what was I going to do on this fine June Sunday? If Kerry were available, there were lots of possibilities, beginning with a couple of hours of lovemaking and proceeding to a picnic somewhere or maybe to the Giants-Cubs game at Candlestick. But Kerry wasn’t available. One reason was that she had her mother to contend with, though maybe not for much longer. Cybil had been sharing Kerry’s Diamond Heights apartment for nearly seven months now, the result of her inability to cope with the death of her husband, Ivan, and what remained of her life without him. Difficult and painful situation, made even worse by the fact that Cybil had taken an irrational dislike to me: I couldn’t visit without provoking a crisis and could call only when I was certain Kerry was home. This had severely curtailed our love life, added an edge of tension to what had formerly been a pretty stress-free relationship. Recently, though, with the aid of a counseling group called Children of Grieving Parents, Kerry had succeeded in convincing her mother to move into a Marin County seniors complex. Cybil had agreed to make the move by the end of the month. But would she change her mind at the last minute? The whole thing was a tale well-calculated to keep you in suspense, right up to the last act.

  The other reason Kerry wasn’t available today was that she had work to do on one of her ad agency’s major accounts. Kerry Wade, Bates and Carpenter’s new Creative Director. The title had been bestowed on her just last week; and along with it and a $5000 annual increase in salary went “greater responsibility,” which translated to longer hours and an increased workload. Not such an ideal promotion, if you asked me. But nobody had, and I was not about to volunteer anything that might dampen her euphoria. The one time we’d made love since had been terrific.

  So. My options for the day were limited. Under normal circumstances I could have called Eberhardt and suggested that we go watch the Giants get it on with the Cubs. But things were not normal between Eb and me, hadn’t been for the past two months—since Bobbie Jean had called off their planned wedding, for good reason thanks to him, and the fight he and I had had as a result. That damned fight. Schoolboy stuff: I’d lost my head, stupidly, and punched him. He still hadn’t forgiven me; it worried me that maybe he never would. We barely spoke in the office, and then only when business made it necessary. The few times I’d tried to talk him into having a beer together after work, he’d flatly refused.

  No Kerry, no Eberhardt. Going to the ballgame by myself didn’t appeal to me; neither did taking a drive or visiting one of those “good-weather attractions” alone. Barney Rivera? On impulse I called his number, and got his answering machine. Out getting his ashes hauled somewhere, probably. Barney Rivera, God’s gift to women who liked little fat guys with soulful eyes and a line of sugar-coated BS. Mentally I ran down the list of my other friends ... and a pretty short list it was. Devote your life to your profession, turn yourself into a workaholic, and this is what happens to you: shortlisted as you approach sixty. The few others were married, had families. Had lives. Get a life, why didn’t I?

  Too old. Besides, I liked the one I had—most of the time.

  Staying home was out. Too nice a day for that, and already I felt restless. Open air was what I needed, sunshine on my shoulder, people around me, maybe some familiar faces. No blue Sunday for me....

  Aquatic Park, I thought.

  Sure, that was the ticket. I hadn’t been down there in a while, and I always enjoyed myself when I went. What better way to spend a quiet Sunday than getting back in touch with your ethnic heritage?

  I went and picked up the car and drove to Aquatic Park, to watch the old men play bocce.

  IN SAN FRANCISCO, in the last decade of the twentieth century, bocce is a dying sport.

  Most of the city’s older Italians, to whom bocce was more a religion than a sport, have died off. The once large and close-knit North Beach Italian community has been steadily losing its identity since the fifties—families moving to the suburbs, the expansion of Chinatown and the gobbling up of North Be
ach real estate by wealthy Chinese—and even though there has been a small, new wave of immigrants from Italy in recent years, they’re mostly young and upscale. Young, upscale Italians don’t play bocce much, if at all; their interests lie in soccer, in the American sports where money and fame and power have replaced a love of the game itself. The Di Massimo bocce courts at the North Beach Playground are mostly closed these days; so are the handful of other public courts left in the city, including the one in the Outer Mission, where I’d been raised. The Potrero district’s Monte Cristo Club is still open on a regular basis, but it’s private. About the only public courts where you can find a game every Saturday and Sunday are the ones at Aquatic Park.

  Time was, all six of the Aquatic Park courts were packed from early morning to dusk and there were spectators and waiting players lined two and three deep at courtside and up along the fence on Van Ness. No more. Seldom, now, is more than one of the courts used. And the players get older, and sadder, and fewer each year.

  There were maybe fifteen players and watchers on this Sunday, almost all of them older than my fifty-eight, loosely grouped around the two courts nearest the street. Those two are covered by a high pillar-supported roof so that contests can be held even in wet weather. Up until a year ago, the roof was so badly weather-worn that it was in danger of collapse. Just when it looked as though the courts would have to be shut down, the Italian Consul General stepped in and hosted a benefit soccer match that raised enough money for the necessary repairs. Viva il console.

  Under the roof are wooden benches; I parked myself on one of these, midway along. The only other seated spectator was Pietro Lombardi, in a patch of sunlight at the far end, and this surprised me. Even though Pietro was in his seventies, he was one of the best and spriest of the regulars, and also one of the most social. To see him sitting alone, shoulders slumped and head bowed, was puzzling.

  Pining away for the old days, maybe, I thought—as I had just been doing. And a phrase popped into my head, a line from Dante that one of my uncles had been fond of quoting when I was a kid: Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice nella miseria. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days.

  Pietro and his woes didn’t occupy my attention for long. The game in progress was animated and voluble, as only a game of bocce played by elderly ’paesanos can be, and I was soon caught up in the spirit of it.

  Bocce is simple—deceptively simple. You play it on a long, narrow packed-earth pit with low wooden sides. A wooden marker ball the size of a walnut is rolled to one end; the players stand at the opposite end and in turn roll eight larger, heavier balls, grapefruit-size, in the direction of the marker, the object being to see who can put his bocce ball closest to it. One of the required skills is slow-rolling the ball, usually in a curving trajectory, so that it kisses the marker and then lies up against it—the perfect shot—or else stops an inch or two away. The other required skill is knocking an opponent’s ball away from any such close lie without disturbing the marker. The best players, like Pietro Lombardi, can do this two out of three times on the fly—no mean feat from a distance of fifty feet. They can also do it by caroming the ball off the pit walls with topspin or reverse spin, after the fashion of pool shooters.

  Nobody paid much attention to me until after the game in progress had been decided. Then I was acknowledged with hand gestures and a few words—the tolerant acceptance accorded to known spectators and occasional players. Unknowns got no greeting at all. These men still clung to the old ways, and one of the old ways was clannishness.

  Only one of the group, Dominick Marra, came over to where I was sitting. And that was because he had something on his mind. He was in his mid-seventies, white-haired, white-mustached; a bantamweight in baggy trousers held up by galluses. He and Pietro Lombardi had been close friends for most of their lives. Born in the same town—Agropoli, a village on the Gulf of Salerno not far from Naples; moved to San Francisco with their families a year apart, in the late twenties; married cousins, raised large families, were widowed at almost the same time a few years ago. The kind of friendship that is virtually a blood tie. Dominick had been a baker; Pietro had owned a North Beach trattoria that now belonged to one of his daughters.

  What Dominick had on his mind was Pietro. “You see how he’s sit over there, hah? He’s got trouble—la miseria.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “His granddaughter, Gianna Fornessi.”

  “Something happen to her?”

  “She’s maybe go to jail,” Dominick said.

  “What for?”

  “Stealing money.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. How much money?”

  “Two thousand dollars.”

  “Who did she steal it from?”

  “Che?”

  “Whose money did she steal?”

  Dominick gave me a disgusted look. “She don’t steal it. Why you think Pietro, he’s got la miseria, hah?”

  I knew what was coming, now; I should have known it the instant Dominick started confiding in me about Pietro’s problem. I said, “You want me to help him and his granddaughter.”

  “Sure. You’re a detective.”

  “A busy detective.”

  “You got no time for old man and young girl? Compaesani?”

  I sighed, but not so he could hear me do it. “All right, I’ll talk to Pietro. See if he wants my help, if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Sure he wants your help,” Dominick said. “He just don’t know it yet.”

  We went to where Pietro sat alone in the sun. He was taller than Dominick, heavier, balder. And he had a fondness for Toscanas, those little twisted black Italian cigars; one protruded now from a corner of his mouth. He didn’t want to talk at first, but Dominick launched into a monologue in Italian that changed his mind and put a glimmer of hope in his sad eyes. Even though I’ve lost a lot of the language over the years, I can understand enough to follow most conversations. The gist of Dominick’s monologue was that I was not just a detective but a miracle worker, a cross between Sherlock Holmes and the messiah. Italians are given to hyperbole in times of excitement or stress, and there isn’t much you can do to counteract it—especially when you’re a ’paesano yourself.

  “My Gianna, she’s good girl,” Pietro said. “Never give trouble, even when she’s little girl. La bellezza delle bellezze, you understand?”

  The beauty of beauties. His favorite grandchild, no doubt. I said, “I understand.”

  “She’s grown up now, not so close to her goombah—I don’t know her so good like before. But una ladra? My Gianna? No, no.”

  “Tell me what happened, Pietro.”

  “I don’t hear from her for a while,” he said, “four, five weeks, so I call her up Thursday night. Right away she’s start to cry. She don’t want to tell me what’s the trouble, but I get it out of her.”

  “She said she didn’t steal the money?”

  “Sure that’s what she say. It’s all big lie.”

  “Did the police arrest her?”

  “They got no proof to arrest her.”

  “But somebody filed charges?”

  “Charges,” Pietro said. “Bah,” he said, and spat.

  “Who made the complaint?”

  Dominick said, “Ferry,” as if the name were an obscenity.

  “Who’s Ferry?”

  He tapped his skull. “Testa di cacca, this man.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “He live where she live. Same building.”

  “And he says Gianna stole two thousand dollars from him.”

  “Liar,” Pietro said. “He lies.”

  “Stole it how? Broke in or what?”

  “She don’t break in nowhere, not my Gianna. This Ferry, he says she take the money when she’s come to pay her rent and he’s talk on the telephone. But how she knows where he keeps his money? Hah? How she knows he have two thousand dollars in his desk?”

  “Maybe he t
old her.”

  “That’s what he says to police,” Dominick said. “Maybe he told her, he says. He don’t tell her nothing.”

  Pietro threw down what was left of his Toscana, ground it into the dirt with his shoe—a gesture of anger and frustration. “She don’t steal that money,” he said. “What she need to steal money for? She’s got good job, she live good, she don’t have to steal.”

  “What kind of job does she have?”

  “She sells drapes, curtains. In ... what you call that business, Dominick?”

  “Interior decorating business,” Dominick said.

  “Sì. In interior decorating business.”

  “Where does she live?” I asked.

  “Chestnut Street.”

  “Where on Chestnut Street? What number?”

  “I never been there,” he said sadly. “Gianna, she don’t invite me. But I got address in my wallet.” He dredged up a piece of paper and gave me the number: 250.

  “You make that Ferry tell the truth, hah?” Dominick said to me. “You fix it up for Gianna and her goombah?”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Va bene. ”

  “Pietro, I’ll need your address and telephone number—”

  There was a sharp whacking sound as one of the bocce balls caromed off the side wall near us, then a softer clicking of ball meeting ball, and a shout went up from the players at the far end: another game won and lost. When I looked back at Dominick and Pietro, they were both on their feet. Dominick said, “You find Pietro okay, good detective like you,” and Pietro said, “Grazie, mi amico,” and before I could say anything else the two of them were off arm in arm to join the others.

  Now I was the one sitting alone in the sun, holding up a burden. Primed and ready to do a job I didn’t want to do, probably couldn’t do to anybody’s satisfaction, and would not be paid adequately for, if I was paid at all. Some quiet Sunday outing. No bocce after all; no loafing in the warm breezes, listening to the sounds of kids along the beachfront, of old men at play. What was I going to do on this fine June Sabbath? Why, just what I did most other days of the week, good weather and bad. I was going to work.