Epitaphs

by Bill Pronzini

  The Old Cocksman!

  Saturday’s sheet had the same words on it. With two exclamation points and curlicue underlining, as if the phrase—or maybe the individual it referred to—was some kind of private joke. Sunday’s sheet was blank. Monday’s bore the notation: Bud, Skygate Motel, 4:00.

  The Old Cocksman. Her weekend date, probably; reference to his sexual prowess, or lack of it. Fine, dandy, and wouldn’t her goombah be delighted by such charming wit? But she’d written the phrase just twice, which indicated that it was a two-day shack job and she’d expected to be home by Monday. Only she hadn’t come home on Monday; and she’d missed her afternoon date with Bud at the Skygate Motel. Nor had she shown up yesterday or yet today, so far as I knew. Why not?

  The little-girl room, with its taint of big-girl corruption, was wearing badly on me. I took myself out of there, back into the living room. Faint acrid odor in the air ... or was there? I thought I smelled it, but when I stopped and stood sniffing, all I could smell was the drifting scent of Ashley Hansen’s perfume. Imagination. Phantom whiff of brimstone ...

  The door-knocking had started up again. Bang, bang, bang. And now I heard Ferry’s voice, rising querulously. “Hey! Hey in there! What’s going on?”

  I walked over there, threw the bolt lock, yanked the door open. “Quit making so much noise.”

  Ferry blinked and backed off a step; he didn’t know whether to be afraid of me or not. Behind and to one side of him, the two deliverymen and the fat woman looked on with hungry eyes. They would have liked seeing what lay inside. Blood attracts some people, the gawkers, the insensitive ones, the same way it attracts flies.

  “What’s happened?” Ferry asked me.

  “Come in and see for yourself. Just you.”

  I opened up a little wider and he came in past me, showing reluctance. I shut and locked the door again behind him. Before I turned he said, “Oh, my God,” in a sickened voice. He was staring at the body on the floor, one hand pressed up under his breastbone.

  I moved around in front of him. “Not pretty anymore, is she.”

  “... Dead?”

  “Very.”

  “Gianna ... is she all right?”

  “You tell me.”

  “She’s not here?”

  “Not since Friday, the way it looks.”

  Headshake. “What happened to Ashley?”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Accident ... an accident?”

  “I wouldn’t want to bet on it.”

  “Somebody ... did that to her? Who?”

  “You know who, Ferry. You saw me chase him out of here.”

  “I ... don’t know that man. I never saw him before.”

  “The hell you never saw him. He’s the one put those cuts and bruises on your face.”

  “No,” Ferry said, “that’s not true.” He looked and sounded even sicker now. “I told you how that happened—”

  “You told me lies. Bisconte roughed you up so that you’d drop your complaint against Gianna. He did it because she and Ashley are call girls and he’s their pimp and he didn’t want the cops digging into her background and finding out the truth.”

  Ferry leaned unsteadily against the wall, facing away from what was left of the Hansen woman. The lick-blink-twitch reaction had set in again. He didn’t speak.

  “Nice quiet little operation they had,” I said, “until you got wind of it. That’s how it was, wasn’t it? You found out and you wanted some of what Gianna’s been selling.”

  More twitchy silence. Then, “It wasn’t like that, not at first. I loved her ... thought I loved her.”

  “Sure you did.”

  “I did. ” Lick. Blink. “But she wouldn’t have anything to do with me.”

  “So then you offered to pay her.”

  “... Yes. Whatever she charged.”

  “Only you wanted kinky sex and she wouldn’t play.”

  “No! I never asked for anything except a night with her ... one night. She pretended to be insulted; she denied that she’d been selling herself to men. She ... she said she’d never go to bed with a man as ... ugly ...” He moved against the wall—a writhing movement, as if he were in pain.

  I said, “And that was when you decided to get even with her.”

  “I wanted to hurt her, the way she’d hurt me. It was stupid, I know that, but I wasn’t thinking clearly. I just wanted to hurt her ...”

  “Well, you succeeded. But the one you really hurt is Ashley over there. If it hadn’t been for you, she’d still be alive.”

  He started to say something to that, but the words were lost in the sudden summons of the doorbell.

  “That’ll be the police,” I said.

  “The police?” Twitch. Blink. “But ... I thought you were—”

  “I know you did. I never told you I was, did I?”

  I left him holding up the wall and went to buzz them in.

  I SPENT TWO HOURS in the company of the law, alternately answering questions and waiting around. I told Inspector Craddock—a heavyset, intense black man who went about his job with a kind of missionary zeal—who I was working for and how I happened to be there. I told him how I’d come to realize that Gianna Fornessi and Ashley Hansen were call girls, and how George Ferry and Jack Bisconte figured into it. I told him about my encounter with Bisconte in the hallway, about the small red rectangular object Bisconte had shoved into his pocket—the probable address book with the names and numbers of some of Hansen’s johns. There was nothing that I didn’t tell him; Harry Craddock was not a cop you withheld information from, not if you wanted to maintain an amicable relationship with him.

  He said, “So Bisconte and the Hansen woman had some kind of hassle, he shoved her or smacked her one, she fell and hit her head on that table over there. Second-degree homicide. That how it looks to you?”

  “That’s how it looks.”

  “Complications?”

  “Gianna Fornessi, maybe.”

  “You think Bisconte did something to her too?”

  “I don’t know. But she does seem to be missing.”

  “Seem. She could be off with a john.”

  “I know it. But five days is a long time.”

  “Some guys got big sexual appetites,” Craddock said. He grinned around one of the plastic-mouthpiece cigarillos he favored. “I used to have one myself. Wore my wife out when I was a young stud.”

  “I’ll bet you did.”

  “Fact is,” he said, “nobody’s filed a missing persons report on the Fornessi girl. I had one of the men call in to check.”

  “She’s not close to her family anymore; she couldn’t afford to be, in her profession. They don’t know she’s been away so long.”

  “Not close to her grandfather?”

  “Especially not him.”

  “She told him about Ferry’s robbery complaint.”

  “He called her up to see how she was doing,” I said, “because he hadn’t heard from her in a while. That was right after Inspector Cullen talked to her. She was upset and she let it slip; she wouldn’t have told him otherwise.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And Hansen wouldn’t file a missing persons report, even if she had any personal feelings for Gianna. Bisconte would see to that.”

  “Could also be,” Craddock said, “Hansen knew all along where Gianna went last Friday and with whom and wasn’t worried. Maybe the only one who’s worried is you.”

  “Ask Bisconte when you find him. Ask him who ‘the Old Cocksman’ is.”

  “Oh, I will. I’m curious, too, being an old cocksman myself. Anything else? Theories, suggestions?”

  “Just a favor. A small one.”

  “Department owes you a favor, does it? I know I don’t.”

  “It’s not like that, Inspector.”

  “Your client, right? The Fornessi girl’s family?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep the prostitution angle out of the media. That it?”

&nbs
p; “That’s it,” I said. “The Lombardis and the Fornessis are good people, respectable-old-fashioned Italian families. They don’t have any idea what she’s into and it’ll hurt like hell if they find out.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Besides, it’s minor-league stuff. A second-degree homicide, probably—you said that yourself.”

  “Yeah. Pimps and whores, one killing the other. Happens all the time in the city.”

  “That won’t stop the media from making a thing out of it. Sex sells papers and attracts viewers, especially when the victim is a pretty young blonde. Might even make it harder for you to find Bisconte.”

  “Might,” he conceded.

  “So what do you say?”

  Craddock thought it over, chewing on the mouthpiece of his cigarillo. “Nobody else in the building knows about the hooking?”

  “I doubt it, but you can ask Ferry. He knows. And he won’t want it to get out any more than I do.”

  “All right. I don’t see why it can’t be handled that way, at least until we find Bisconte. But if he makes more trouble, resists arrest, say, there might not be any way to keep it under wraps.”

  “As long as possible, that’s all I’m asking.”

  Now that the coroner’s assistant had finished his preliminary examination, a pair of white-coated morgue attendants had come into the flat and were loading the dead woman’s remains into a body bag. Craddock glanced over there, shook his head. “Pimps and whores,” he said again.

  Sure. Pimps and whores. One killing the other, happens all the time in the city. Old, old story, as old as sin. Simple. Cut and dried.

  Maybe it was. It looked like it was. So why wasn’t I satisfied too?

  Chapter Ten

  SPIAGGIA’S WAS A VENERABLE, hole-in-the-wall North Beach saloon on Vallejo off Broadway. Not just another saloon, though; not even one strictly for the compaesani. A saloon in the old tradition, the kind of private club for working-class men that was once referred to as a drinking parlor or a public resort. It had even been a speakeasy during Prohibition, or so legend had it.

  Narrow, dark, comfortingly womblike. Battered hardwood tables and chairs, a few settees and armchairs with puffy, dust-laden upholstery, which looked as though they had come out of somebody’s grandfather’s attic. Thick musty smell composed of tap drippings and tobacco and dust and dry rot and body odor and all manner of old things, built up over three quarters of a century until it was as tangible a part of the place as the walls and fixtures. Placard on the back bar: DON’T ASK FOR CREDIT. Another, crusty with age: MIND YOUR MANNERS OR THEY’LL BE MINDED FOR YOU. Rack of communal clay and corncob pipes, left over from the days when the purchase of a pint of draft entitled you to a free smoke.

  There weren’t many customers in attendance when I walked in a few minutes past two. Too early for all but the dedicated drinkers and the lonely ones. It was so dark in there that I had to wait several seconds for my eyes to adjust before I could make out the faces at the bar and tables. Not more than half looked Italian; there were two Nordic types, a WASP, an African-American, and an elderly Chinese. Spiaggia’s was nothing if not democratic. Most of the patrons were past fifty and all were male.

  Three weekend bocce players were having a game of pedro at a rear table, one of them Dominick Marra. There was no sign of Pietro Lombardi. As soon as I was sure that Pietro was absent I felt relief, a subtle easing of tension. I wasn’t here to face him if it could be avoided; I was here to talk to Dominick. Hell, I was here to take the coward’s way out.

  When Dominick saw me he said something to his companions, got to his feet, hitched up his baggy trousers, and reached out to grasp my arm. “Hey,” he said, “detective. Where you been, hah? We don’t hear from you.”

  “Working,” I said.

  “You want Pietro? He’s not here.”

  “No. It’s you I want to talk to. One of your neighbors said I’d find you here.”

  “Sure, I’m here, where else I got to go at my age?” He said this with a certain irony, but without bitterness. “What you want to talk about?”

  “In private, Dominick, okay?”

  Before we went to an empty table farther back, Dominick insisted on buying drinks—beer for me, a glass of Lambrusco for him. The beer tasted good, a lot better than the words I had to say. And it went down much easier than the words came out.

  Dominick listened without interruption, without expression. When I was done he stared at me silently, hard-eyed, intense. Then he said, “No.” Just the one word, half disbelief and half denial.

  “It’s true, Dominick.”

  “Pietro’s Gianna—a puttana? Gianna?”

  “For at least eight months. Probably longer.”

  The long stare. Then, “You got proof, hah?”

  “I saw proof, I listened to proof.”

  “You tell me what.”

  I told him. Gianna’s lie about her employment, my talk with Brent DeKuiper, Vortex, the things I’d heard on Gianna’s answering machine, the truth behind Ferry’s theft charges. Not glossing over any of it—giving it to him straight.

  “Ah, Dio, ” he said, “ah, Dio. ”

  “I’m sorry, Dominick.”

  “This Bisconte ... he’s do this to Gianna?”

  “She works for him, yes.”

  “Gianna, her roommate, how many others?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe just the two of them.”

  “Somebody, he should kill Bisconte. Man like that ... pah!”

  “He’ll go to prison. The law will see to that.”

  “Prison.” Dominick made a spitting mouth; an angry gesture with an upraised fist. “Dead he should be.”

  I didn’t agree with that. But I didn’t say so.

  In the new silence I was aware of the bar sounds: men shifting on cracked leather and dusty brocade, ice clicking in glasses, bottles thumping against wood, the low murmur of voices. No TV noise; there was a set in one corner of the back bar, but it would mostly remain dark. No jukebox or video games or pinball machines—not even a pool table. If you craved distractions you went somewhere other than Spiaggia’s.

  Dominick had been brooding into his wine. Now his shoulders jerked and he sat up straight, as if a sudden thought had struck him. “Pietro,” he said. “You don’t tell Pietro?”

  “No.”

  “You gonna tell him?”

  “No.”

  “It’s hurt him bad,” Dominick said mournfully. “He’s love Gianna like nobody else.”

  “So you won’t tell him either?”

  “Me?” The long stare again. “That’s why you come to me? You want I should tell this terrible thing to Pietro?”

  “No. That’s your decision. But somebody close to him has to know the whole truth, and you’re his best friend, blood of his blood. If he ever has to find out, better from you than a stranger.”

  “I don’t hurt Pietro that way. Never.”

  I nodded. “Let’s hope nobody ever hurts him that way.”

  Pretty soon he said darkly, “Ah, cacchio! I got to tell him. Before he’s hear it on TV, read it in the newspapers. Pietro, Gianna’s mama ... everybody, he’s gonna know.”

  “It won’t be on TV or in the papers, not about Gianna. The police are keeping quiet about the prostitution. Ferry won’t say anything either.”

  “Why they do that? Keep quiet?”

  “I talked to the policeman in charge. Gianna’s shame has nothing to do with her roommate’s death.”

  “This policeman, he’s promise you?”

  “He promised me.”

  Dominick sat focused inward; then abruptly he picked up his glass, drained it. The heavy red wine made his lips and the edges of his white mustache look bloody in the dim light. “Maybe Gianna, she change now,” he said. “You say Bisconte, he’s go to prison and the other one, the roommate, she’s dead. Maybe Gianna, she’s stop being puttana.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But what you think? Yes or no?”

&n
bsp; What I thought about a woman I knew little enough about and had never set eyes on was irrelevent. But I said, “Yes. If this whole thing, Ashley Hansen’s murder, scares her enough.”

  “I got to talk to her myself,” Dominick said, “scare her little bit myself. Where she is now?”

  “I don’t know. The only one who does is Bisconte.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Nobody’s seen her since last Friday.”

  “Friday? She’s go away last Friday?”

  “That night, evidently.”

  “With somebody, hah? Some man?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t about to mention the Old Cocksman to him.

  “And she don’t come back since then?”

  “No. Her car hasn’t been moved.”

  “Cristo bello, ” he said. “You think something’s happen to Gianna? That stronzo Bisconte, he’s hurt her too?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “He’s hurt her, I kill him. For Pietro, I kill him dead!”

  His voice had risen; a few of the other drinkers turned their heads to look at us. I said, “Easy now. We don’t know that anything’s happened to Gianna.”

  “Then where she is since Friday?”

  I shook my head.

  “You got to find her,” Dominick said.

  “Not me. That’s a job for the police now.”

  “No. You, paesan. He caught hold of my arm, tight-fingered. “The police, they come around, they ask questions, they talk to Pietro and Gianna’s mama; Gianna’s shame, it’s all come out.”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way. The police—”

  “You find her,” he said adamantly. “For Pietro. For Gianna’s mama. For me too.”

  “Dominick, I—”

  “You find her,” he said again.

  His eyes bored into mine, full of fire. I tried to look away from them; couldn’t seem to manage it. Compaesani—Dominick and Pietro, and me. Blood of the blood.

  “I’ll find her,” I said.

  THE REST OF THE DAY was a bust.

  I went back to the office—no Eberhardt, big surprise—and did fifteen minutes of work on the personal-injury case before I ran out of interest. On impulse I opened the San Francisco Yellow Pages, which includes Colma, to the section marked Automobile Dealers—New Cars. Big Dave from Colma ... 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. No listing under Dave or Big Dave. Easy enough to identify him, though, if he did in fact run or work for a car dealership in Colma; three or four phone calls would do it. But was it worth the effort? His message had been on Ashley Hansen’s machine, not Gianna’s.