Epitaphs Read online

  “Number belongs to a Thomas Duchaine,” he said. “D-u-c-h-a-i-n-e. Seventy-nine Raven Hollow Road, Fairfax.”

  “Got it. Thanks, Marty.”

  “Sure. You talk to Frank Plutarski yet?”

  “Not yet. I called him but he wasn’t in.”

  “Let me know how it goes, will you? With Eb, I mean.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  “I’d hate to see you two bust it up after all these years. You know? I hope like hell it works out.”

  “It will if I’ve got anything to say about it.”

  But I was beginning to think that I didn’t.

  THE MARINA is AN affluent neighborhood along the northern lip of the bay, where the Small Craft Harbor and some of the city’s older and finer homes are located. But it was all landfill, and the area had been hit hard during the October ’89 earthquake. Half a dozen apartment buildings had been shaken loose of their foundations; a lot of other multiunit structures and private homes were badly damaged, some beyond repair. Gas mains had burst and fires had raged through the Marina, with the result that much of the national and international news coverage had been focused on the district. Even now, scars from that devastating night are still visible. And here and there repair work is still going on.

  The Cervantes Boulevard address for M. Harris was a four-story wood-and-stucco apartment building not unlike a couple of those that had collapsed in the quake. This one showed no outward signs of damage, but it might have undergone structural restoration and/or cosmetic surgery. You can’t judge how stable a building is by its outward appearance, particularly not in the Marina. Which is why a large number of the neighborhood’s residents, some of whom had lived there for decades, had fled to safer locales since October 17, 1989. FOR SALE and APARTMENT FOR RENT signs are still common sights; there was one of the latter on the front of M. Harris’s building.

  According to the mailboxes in the foyer, M. Harris occupied 3C. I rang the bell. Nobody responded.

  I gave it another try, finally went back out to the sidewalk. A car had pulled up behind mine; a fat woman about my age, hennaed hair flaming in the sun, was getting out of it with a cake box balanced in one hand. I waited to see if she was coming here. She was, with a mildly curious glance at me in passing. I let her get all the way into the foyer before I turned back in after her.

  “Excuse me, ma’am.”

  She turned, a little startled. “Yes?”

  “Maybe you can help me. I’m looking for Melanie Harris.”

  “Who?”

  “Young woman, slender, dark hair. Lives in Three C, I think.”

  “Oh,” the fat woman said, “her.”

  “You know her, then?”

  “As well as I want to, which is hardly at all.”

  “Don’t like her much?”

  “What’s to like? Snotty, foul mouth, morals of a rabbit.” She paused. “Uh, you’re not related to her, are you?”

  “No.”

  “One of her ‘friends,’ I suppose.”

  “Not that either. I’m here on business.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Truly,” I said. “She’s not home and I need to talk to her. You wouldn’t happen to know where I can find her?”

  “How should I know? You think I keep track of my neighbors’ comings and goings?”

  “No, ma’am. I thought you might know what she does for a living, where she works.”

  “You don’t know where she works and you got business with her?”

  “I’ve only spoken to her once, briefly.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “Insurance.”

  She studied me, frowning. Pretty soon she said, “Well, she doesn’t work days. Little Miss Harris works nights.”

  “Oh?”

  “In North Beach.” She made the words sound like Sodom and Gomorrah.

  “Whereabouts in North Beach?”

  “One of those sleazy clubs on Broadway. High Hat or Top Hat or something like that. One of those topless places.”

  “Dancer? Singer? Waitress?”

  “Bartender,” the fat woman said. “Can you believe it? A bartender in a sleazy topless club. What kind of job is that for a young woman?”

  “A job is a job,” I said. “It probably pays pretty well.”

  She sniffed. “My daughter took a job like that,” she said, “I’d disown her. You’d better believe I would.”

  I believed it.

  Back in the car, I used the mobile phone to call directory assistance. No High Hat or Top Hat listed, but there was a Top Cat Club on Broadway. I called that number and got a male voice that had to shout to make itself heard above a blare of heavy-metal music. Yeah, the voice said, Melanie Harris worked there. No, she wasn’t there now—why the hell would she be there now? Her shift didn’t start until six.

  Six o‘clock. The same time I could expect to find Thomas Duchaine at 79 Raven Hollow Road, Fairfax. Nearly three hours to kill. If I stayed in the city and went to see Melanie Harris first, I couldn’t figure any productive way to dispose of the interim time. But if I drove over to Marin County, there was a worthwhile stop I could make between now and six o’clock, somebody in San Rafael I needed to talk to.

  Bobbie Jean Addison worked over there. And if anybody knew what was going on inside Eberhardt’s head these days, it was Bobbie Jean.

  Chapter Twelve

  COMMUTER EXODUS FROM the city starts early; the northbound lanes on the Golden Gate Bridge were already beginning to clog as I drove across. Traffic moved at more or less normal speeds until I got to Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, south of San Rafael. Then it commenced to snarl again, as it sometimes does along there, because of the arteries leading to and from the Richmond Bridge. So it was after four by the time I pulled into San Rafael and found a place to park on Mission Avenue downtown.

  San Rafael is an old town, built in the early 1800s around one of the original California missions. Mission San Rafael Arcángel has been well preserved, and the area surrounding it still retains some of the town’s once-strong Spanish flavor. The realtor Bobbie Jean worked for had her offices here, in a building on A Street whose front windows offered a partial view of the mission’s tile roofs and buff-colored bell tower.

  Bobbie Jean was alone at her desk when I walked in. It was a much warmer day over here, summery, and her brown, angular body was encased in a sleeveless yellow dress. She looked cool, fresh, as some people manage to do at the tag end of even the hottest day. Not all men would find her attractive at first inspection, but the perceptive ones did when she smiled; she has an exceptional smile, incandescent and infectious. She favored me with it as soon as she spotted me. We’ve gotten along well, Bobbie Jean and I, during the two-plus years she and Eb have been together. She’d even come to do a little crying on my shoulder after his too-elaborate wedding plans had pushed her into calling the whole thing off in April. We hadn’t seen much of each other since, thanks to Eberhardt’s tight-held grudge.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said. “What brings you over here?”

  “Some business in Fairfax. I thought I’d stop by for a few minutes.”

  “I’m glad you did.”

  “Can we talk, Bobbie Jean? It can wait until after five, if you’re busy ...”

  “I haven’t been busy for half an hour. This is slack time around here.” Bobbie Jean is from South Carolina and when she says things like “slack time” you can hear the Deep South in her voice. Mostly, though, after twenty-some years in California, her accent is barely noticeable. “Some coffee? There’s a pot on in back.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a cup.”

  She went away and I rolled a padded chair from the waiting area over next to her desk and put myself down in it. I was trying to find the most tactful frame for my questions when she came back and made it easy for me. She said as she handed me one of the cups she carried, “It’s Eb you want to talk about.” It wasn’t a question.

  I nodded. “Do you mind?�
��

  “No. He’s one of my favorite subjects.” But her smile wasn’t quite as bright now; there was a pensive quality to it. Even after all that he’d put her through, her love for Eberhardt hadn’t diminished any. If anything, it was stronger than ever.

  “Has he said anything about me, about his plans?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Dissolving our partnership. Opening his own agency.”

  “Oh, Lord,” she said, and now the smile was gone completely. “You mean he’s serious about that?”

  “Seems to be.”

  “I didn’t think so, or I’d have called you.”

  “How long has he been talking about it?”

  “Not long. And just one time.”

  “When?”

  “Last Sunday night.”

  “What did he say?”

  “His exact words?”

  “They won’t hurt my feelings.”

  Bobbie Jean drank some of her coffee, spoke with her eyes on the cup. “ ‘I’m tired of taking orders from him. He thinks he knows everything—he’s a goddamn little tin god. It’s time I was my own boss again.’ ”

  “Uh-huh. That’s about what he said to me on Tuesday.”

  “Was he angry? You know, fulminating the way he does?”

  “No. He was calm enough.”

  “Damn,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “But he wasn’t definite? About quitting?”

  “Well, he didn’t quit on the spot. But he’s been talking to people, I think maybe trying to line up clients for himself.”

  “You don’t mean trying to steal them away from you?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “I hope not.”

  “He wouldn’t do a thing like that—”

  “As angry at me as he is? He might.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “Too soon to decide that. Before I do anything I wanted to talk to you. And to the people he’s been seeing, find out exactly what he’s said to them.”

  “What if he is trying to steal clients?”

  “I won’t lie to you, Bobbie Jean. If that’s the case, then I’m through with him. In every way.”

  She sighed. “He’s so damn stubborn ... he makes me crazy sometimes, and I’ve only known him a short while. I can imagine what it must be like for you.”

  Bobbie Jean’s telephone rang. She picked up, spoke briefly, made a note. I was working on my coffee when she disconnected. It was good coffee, much better than what I made.

  “If Eb did open his own agency,” she said, “what do you think would happen?”

  “You mean could he make a go of it?”

  “Yes.”

  I hadn’t let myself think much about that; I thought about it now, weighing the probabilities. “He might,” I said at length, “if he applies himself. He has sloppy work habits. He’s chronically late getting to the office, he sloughs off paperwork and routine phone calls.... Hell, I don’t have to tell you. You know how he is.”

  “All too well.”

  “He’d have to get out and hustle work too. Regularly. Even if he swipes clients, the ones he can get won’t be enough to support him. Neither will favors from old friends. There are a lot of private investigators in the Bay Area and only so much work to go around. It’s a damn grind. I’ve been in the business more than twenty years and I still have to scratch part of the time.”

  A couple of beats, and Bobbie Jean said, “He’d fail.” It wasn’t worried reflection; it was a flat statement of fact.

  “Yeah,” I said. “In the long run he probably would.”

  “Then what would he do? He’s almost sixty.”

  “Get a job with one of the bigger agencies, maybe. If he was lucky.”

  “Doing what, at his age? He wouldn’t let himself be tied down to a desk job—what else is there?”

  “Electronic surveillance, but he’s never had any training in electronics and it’s not his kind of thing anyway. No experience in high-powered corporate shenanigans either. Besides, that sort of specialized investigating is a young man’s game.”

  “What’s left?”

  “Security work. Guard duty, private patrol.”

  “Wearing a uniform? Like those old men in banks?”

  “Like that.”

  “It would drive him crazy,” Bobbie Jean said. “A proud, stubborn, active man like Eb ... he couldn’t stand it.”

  I didn’t say anything. But she was right: It would drive Eberhardt crazy, maybe even put him into an early grave. Just as it would me.

  RAVEN HOLLOW DRIVE, according to my Marin County map, was in the well-to-do residential section of Fairfax called Sleepy Hollow. Wooded countryside out there—a narrow valley bounded by low, craggy foothills. Lots of oak and madrone and eucalyptus, and in the summer months, sweeps of dry brown grass that made fire an ever-present danger. Lots of short, twisty, dead-end streets with names like Van Winkle Drive, Legend Road, and Catskill Lane to complete the Washington Irving, New York Dutch theme.

  The higher up on the hillsides the streets went, the more expensive the homes. Raven Hollow Drive was not one that climbed to ridge heights; it was a valley street, angling a short ways upward off Butterfield Road, the main drag. Even so, it didn’t lack much in either affluence or bucolic appeal. Dark-red plum trees lined it thickly, as did a little creek on one side, and the homes and lots were large—probably in the $300,000 to $400,000 range. Whatever Thomas Duchaine did for a living, he was pretty successful at it.

  Well, maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t. Number seventy-nine turned out to be a sprawling ranch-style house, partially hidden behind plum trees and pyracantha hedges; it also turned out to be for sale, with a big realtor’s sign on the front lawn. Along one side was an unoccupied carport. Nobody home yet: chimes echoed emptily inside when I rang the bell.

  I waited in the car, trying not to brood about Eberhardt. After fifteen minutes a teal-blue BMW came up the street, turned into Duchaine’s drive, and stopped under the carport. A medium-size man in a business suit got out, let himself into the house through a side door. I gave him three minutes before I went back to the front porch and worked the bell.

  He opened up right away, with the door on a chain. The head and face framed in the gap was early forties, balding, sad-eyed, and nondescript.

  “Mr. Duchaine? Thomas Duchaine?”

  “That’s right, yes. May I help you?”

  I had my wallet out, and as I identified myself I showed him the photostat of my license. The look he gave it and then me was bewildered.

  “A private detective?” he said. “What do you want with me?”

  “We can talk better inside, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not until I know why you’re here.”

  “Gianna Fornessi,” I said.

  He blinked at me. Then he said, “Oh my God.”

  “A few minutes of your time, that’s all I’m after.”

  “How did you know I ... how did you find me?”

  “The message you left on her answering machine.”

  “But I didn’t ... just my first name ...”

  “And your telephone number.”

  “You heard ... everything I said?”

  “I heard it.”

  His face screwed up: embarrassment, something that might have been self-hatred. Without looking at me he said, “I still don’t know what you want.”

  “I’m trying to find Ms. Fornessi.”

  “Find her? Is she missing?”

  “It looks that way. Since last Friday.”

  Headshake.

  “Her roommate was killed yesterday,” I said. “Murdered in the flat they shared. That fact may not be related to Ms. Fornessi’s disappearance; then again, it might be.”

  “My God,” Duchaine said.

  He shut the door, not fast, not hard. To take the chain off, I thought, but it stayed shut. Only he didn’t lock it or move away from it. I could hear him on the other side, the
faint, irregular sibilance of his breathing—trying to make up his mind what to do, or maybe just trying to get himself under control.

  “Mr. Duchaine? You have a choice—talk to me or talk to the police.”

  Nothing for ten seconds. Then I heard the chain rattle and he pulled the door all the way open. Most of the color had gone from his face, leaving it paper-white and splotchy; he looked stricken. “I don’t know where Gianna Fornessi is,” he said dully. “I don’t know anything about her or her roommate. I didn’t even know she had a roommate.”

  “All right,” I said. “May I come in?”

  “I just told ... yes. Yes, all right, come in.”

  The living room he led me into was well-furnished, comfortable enough, but as nondescript as he was—like a furniture store’s bland showroom display. He sat slump-shouldered on the arm of a couch and looked at his hands, turning them over and back in front of him, as if examining them for marks or stains. I stood off from him, giving him space, waiting.

  Pretty soon he said, “I shouldn’t have done it. I knew that from the start.”

  “Done what, Mr. Duchaine?”

  “Called her. I almost didn’t. But I ... it’s been such a long time. Almost a year now since my wife left me. There’s been no one else and a man ... a man gets lonely. You can understand that, can’t you? How a man can get lonely for a woman?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This house ... all the memories. It wouldn’t be so bad if I were somewhere else, if I could sell it, but the real estate market these days ...” He squeezed his eyes shut, popped them open again. “My son moved out right after my wife. He blames me for the divorce. Katherine lives in Milwaukee now, her hometown—she doesn’t have to deal with this place or the memories, she has her family....” Another headshake, sharper this time, angry, but with all the anger directed at himself. “I’m talking too much,” he said.

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself. There’s nothing terrible in trying to buy a little companionship.”