Epitaphs

by Bill Pronzini

  Chet Valconazzi, John Valconazzi, Bisconte, Morris, an unknown party ... too many possibilities. I still did not have enough information, no way to narrow down the field. Unless I confronted Chet. He had some of the answers—Bisconte’s present whereabouts, for one—and what I had was just enough leverage to pry them loose. Maybe I couldn’t prove he’d been harboring a fugitive at his Bolinas cottage, but I was a good enough poker player to convince him that I could....

  The crowd noise beat at me in waves; the strawberry blonde was shrieking again, and some of the words penetrated: “Rip his throat out, baby, kill the goddamn shuffler!” My attention shifted involuntarily to the pit, and what was happening in there had such a cruel fascination that I could not tear my eyes away for the thirty seconds it took to reach a climax.

  Valconazzi’s Shawl had the Arkansas Traveler down near the center, moving atop him in a series of quick strikes with beak and spurs. The Traveler was near dead, torn and bloody, but somehow it kept managing to avoid a killing thrust. It reached up, got a beakful of the other bird’s hackles, pulled itself up enough to make one last shuffle. It raked the Shawl with one heel, hurt it enough to drive it back. But then the Shawl came in again, viciously, and did just what the blonde had exhorted its enemy to do: ripped a spur through the exposed throat, nearly slicing the Traveler’s head off. Blood gushed; I heard the cock’s death rattle even above the cries of the watchers. The blonde screamed, “Shit, shit, shit!” And the Shawl jumped on the dead rooster’s chest, slashed at the corpse half a dozen more times, then let loose with a long, triumphant crow.

  Part of the crowd applauded; from the rest, catcalls and curses. Chet Valconazzi stood yelling, hands clasped high above his head in the victory salute. I clambered off my seat and went outside, for clean air and to steal a march on the others to the picnic area.

  I had a glass of beer I didn’t really want and a place under one of the oaks, away from the tables, when they came streaming out of the barn. Laughing, joking, moving in little packs. Chet was still toting his entourage, and they stayed with him as he heaped food onto a plate and carried it to one of the tables. Somebody brought him a beer; he drank it in one long draught, macho style, and called for another. Then he began to eat with piggish gusto. Watching him and his friends was like watching a Roman food-and-drink orgy played out in modern dress.

  There was no way I could get to him yet. And I didn’t see his old man: still in the cocking annex, probably. I circulated at the periphery, keeping to Chet’s blind side, and managed to strike up three conversations with men eating and drinking alone—two farmers and a guy who said he was a professional gambler from Phoenix. Neither of the farmers knew or would talk about Gianna Fornessi. The gambler admitted to being at the main last Saturday, said he remembered seeing Gianna, but hadn’t spoken to her. Nice piece, he said; really got turned on by the cocking. Bloodthirsty. Ed Levinsky’s wife was like that too—big blonde over there, must have heard her screaming inside. Yeah, I said, I heard her. The gambler wondered what it would be like to be married to a woman like that. I didn’t answer him, because I did not want to speculate on what it would be like.

  Chet had finished eating by then and his pack had thinned out for one reason or another. Not much time left before the cocking would resume; if I was going to brace him, it would have to be within the next five minutes.

  Four of the five minutes had passed when he finally moved away from his last two friends, started alone toward one of the kegs of beer. I went that way, too, and I would have gotten there at about the same time if a plump, middle-aged woman hadn’t hurried up and stopped him halfway. She said something and I saw him frown. They exchanged a few more words and then he walked away—reluctantly, I thought —in the direction of the house.

  People were beginning to file back toward the barn. I hung around next to the outdoor toilets, watching the house. Another five minutes slipped away; the picnic area was empty now of everyone except me and the women cleaning up. Valconazzi still hadn’t reappeared. Fine, I thought; when he does I’ll brace him alone on the way to the barn.

  Some more time evaporated, and still he didn’t show. What the hell was keeping him? He was going to miss the start of the next hack and that was out of character. Maybe I ought to bite the bullet, go to him instead of waiting for him to come to me....

  Sudden rumbling noise from that direction: car engine rewing up. And a few seconds later, a pickup truck came barreling into view beyond the house. Dusty blue Ford Ranger, with Chet Valconazzi at the wheel. He swung over onto the ranch road, traveling at a good clip, raising plumes of dust.

  My first impulse was to run for my car, try to catch up and then follow him. But it was a hundred and fifty yards to where I was parked, and he could drive that truck over the rutted road a lot faster than I could drive my rattletrap car. He’d be off the property before I got near the gate; and it was doubtful that I could catch him even if I were able to convince one of the guards to tell me which way he’d gone.

  I stayed put, working through my surprise. What would send him away from here in such a hurry? Urgent telephone call? Have to be damned urgent to make him miss the rest of his bloodsport.

  The plump, middle-aged woman wasn’t in the picnic area; I went hunting and found her just coming out of the kitchen at the rear of the house. Housekeeper or cook, probably. She didn’t know me and she didn’t want to answer my questions; I gave her a wheedling story about needing to see Chet right away on an urgent business matter, and finally she bought it.

  “Well, I don’t know where he went,” she said. “Must say I was surprised to see him drive off, with the main still going on. He’d rather fight those cocks of his than just about anything—”

  “He had a telephone call, did he?”

  She nodded. “Real important, the man said.”

  “What man?”

  “Well, I don’t know. He sounded funny.”

  “Funny? How do you mean?”

  “Didn’t talk right.”

  “Speech impediment?”

  “No, I don’t mean that. Like he was sick or hurt.”

  “What name did he give?”

  “Just his first name. Chet knew who he was.”

  “Jack? Was it Jack?”

  “It was,” the woman said. “‘Tell Chet it’s Jack and it’s real important.’ That’s what he said.”

  Bisconte, all right. It was the “sick or hurt” I couldn’t figure.

  SEVEN-FIFTEEN BY MY WATCH when I rolled into Bolinas. The good weather had brought the weekend visitors out in droves, and most of them were still hanging around, clogging the village center, trooping in and out of the art galleries. No parking there. I crawled through onto Wharf Road. No parking there either. But I did make one discovery down toward the beach: the dusty blue Ford Ranger, empty, wedged tight against the hillside. I’d guessed right that Chet had come here from the ranch.

  I got my car turned around, drove back through town and onto one of the side streets. It was a block along there before I found a place to park. Before leaving the car, and as I had last night, I unclipped the .38 from under the dash and pocketed it. I was not about to take any chances with the two of them together in the cottage.

  On Wharf Road I waited at the closed gate until a van loaded with surfers clattered past. Then I eased the gate open, stepped through quickly, shut it again behind me.

  The first thing I saw was that the door to the cottage stood wide open.

  My scalp prickled; a bad feeling began to build in me. I took the .38 out, held it down low along my right leg, and slow-walked across to the door. The decayed mudflat smell seemed stronger today, started me breathing through my mouth. Light showed dully inside, somewhere in the big front room. Noise spilled out of there too: a radio tuned loud to a soft-rock station. I didn’t like that either.

  At the door I stood for a time with sweat running on my body, listening. The rhythmic beat of the radio was all I could hear. When I stepped over the thresh
hold I did it in a shooter’s crouch. One, two, three paces—and a floorboard creaked under my weight. But that wasn’t the reason I stiffened and came to a standstill.

  Now I could smell cordite, faint but unmistakable.

  My stomach jumped; lousy day for my insides. I eased ahead, still crouching, until I could see most of the front room. Battleground: furniture disarranged, lamp overturned, bottle of whiskey spilled on the floor, glass door on the stereo star-cracked, CD discs scattered helter-skelter. And on the cushions of one of the chairs, streaks and spatters of still-wet blood.

  Somebody dead in here, I thought.

  Right. I found him just inside the kitchen, lying on his back with one leg drawn up, blood around his head like a bent and twisted halo.

  Jack Bisconte was no longer a fugitive. Someone had made him another victim.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I MADE A QUICK PASS through the other rooms; parted the drapes and looked out over the deck and pier beyond. Except for the dead man, the place was deserted.

  So where was Chet Valconazzi? If he’d done this to Bisconte, why was his truck still parked on Wharf Road? Same question if he hadn’t done it.

  I squatted beside what was left of Bisconte. Shot once just under the right ear with a small-caliber automatic, judging from the size of the exit wound and the shell casing on the floor nearby. And at point-blank range: the right side of his face was scorch-marked. Execution style, I thought. Get down on your knees, close your eyes, say your prayers ... bang, you’re dead. I put the .38 back into my jacket pocket; I didn’t like the feel of it in my hand. Guns. This was what they could do. This was what they did do hundreds of times each day, nationwide; what one had almost done to me that afternoon at Eberhardt’s house five years ago. Up close and personal.

  Ash-taste in my mouth. I worked up some saliva, tongued it through the dryness, swallowed it. Wet ashes then, just as bitter.

  Bisconte hadn’t been dead long—half an hour, forty-five minutes, by the look of the coagulating blood. A little too long for Valconazzi to have been the shooter. He hadn’t had much more than a fifteen-minute jump on me; he’d have had to drive at dangerously excessive speeds to beat me here by as much as thirty minutes, and that wasn’t possible with the Saturday evening traffic. Another thing: Bisconte had been badly used before he was killed. His nose looked broken, there were cuts and abrasions on his face and neck. Knocked around in the front room; that explained all the damage, why the radio was on loud. He’d been a fairly big man, and yet by all indications he’d gotten the worst of the fight. And when it was over and he was groggy, maybe unconscious, he’d been walked or carried or dragged in here and blown away.

  If not by Valconazzi, then by who? And why?

  I went through the other rooms again. None of them showed signs of violence, or of having been searched. Evidently the shooter hadn’t been after anything other than Bisconte. Had Bisconte known him, let him in? Or had he forced his way in? I went to look at the front door. No damage to the lock. I checked the sliding glass door to the deck, the windows in the two bedrooms and the bathroom. No damage to any of those either.

  The sink in the bathroom caught my attention. Used recently, by someone washing up. One of the towels had been used too. Faint stains on both the porcelain and the towel fabric. Two different stains, one reddish and the other blue-black. The reddish stain was blood. The other one ...

  Ink?

  I got down on one knee so I could eyeball the small blue-black smear up close. Yeah—ink. But not pen ink; a darker, heavier variety.

  Printer’s ink, I thought.

  Brent DeKuiper.

  NONE OF THE CARS parked along Wharf Road was a dark-colored Cadillac. I stopped at Valconazzi’s Ford Ranger as if I owned it and tried the driver’s door. Locked. The passenger door, when I went around to that side, was also locked. I peered through the window glass. Nothing on the floorboards, nothing on the seat except issues of a couple of cocking magazines, Grit and Steel and The American Gamefowl Quarterly.

  I walked back through the village, up the side street to my car. No dark-colored Caddy anywhere in the area.

  Valconazzi’s pickup but no Valconazzi. And no DeKuiper. Add those two facts together and you got the two of them traveling together in DeKuiper’s car, headed ... where? One guess, but no way of knowing for sure unless I went to check it out.

  The probable scenario was easier to figure. DeKuiper manages to trace Bisconte to Bolinas, through Valconazzi or by some other means. Braces him, beats the crap out of him, puts the gun to his head and forces him to call the ranch; that was why Bisconte had sounded “hurt or sick” to the housekeeper. After the call, DeKuiper shoots Bisconte. And when Valconazzi shows up he throws down on him, then hustles him out of there.

  Fine as far as it went. But what was DeKuiper’s motive for all of this? Why shoot one man here and run the risk of taking another away alive?

  What did he know that I didn’t?

  DARKNESS HAD SETTLED by the time I drove back into San Francisco. A velvety darkness, as much purple as black, the sky free of fog and clouds, so the bridge and city lights had a bright, diamond-hard shine. One of those rare summer nights when you could see all the way to the Farallons. The lighted outline of a ship was visible out that way, too, moving slowly southward at least twenty miles offshore.

  Through the Presidio, out past the Cliff House and Ocean Beach to Balboa. Vortex Publications was the only place I could think to go. Long drive for DeKuiper and Valconazzi, just as it had been for me, but maybe DeKuiper hadn’t minded it. Maybe what he was planning for Chet could best be accomplished on his home turf.

  Hard choice for me, coming here. I could have stayed in Bolinas; I could have taken myself right out of it by calling the Marin sheriffs department. But I didn’t want to be out of it, not yet. I had no hard evidence implicating DeKuiper in Bisconte’s death, nothing but a smear of ink and a hunch; and if I reported the homicide, it would mean hours of questions and explanations—sitting around, waiting, while the authorities made up their minds to act and finally got the wheels in motion. Valconazzi could be dead by then. The truth about Gianna Fornessi could be buried by then.

  The block of neighborhood businesses was mostly deserted; the only one open at this hour was a Chinese take-out place. The storefront housing Vortex Publications appeared dark. I drove past and through the next block, looking for DeKuiper’s Caddy; made a couple of circuits to check the cross streets on either side. Just one Cadillac street-parked in the vicinity, and it was white and an older model.

  On Balboa again, I parked several doors below the print shop, on the opposite side of the street, and went over there on foot. Peering through the dirty front window was wasted effort. He didn’t have a night-light on, so all I could make out were vague shapes. I tested the lock on the door. Dead bolt, maybe more than one. The only way to get in through here was to kick the door down.

  I walked to the corner, around it onto 44th Avenue. A short ways along, a narrow dead-end alleyway cut three-quarters of the way into the block—a service road for the business establishments fronting Balboa. The alley was void of streetlamps, but starshine and lighted windows in the adjacent apartment building provided enough illumination that I could see to navigate. I counted business back sides until I came to number five from the corner; that was Vortex Publications. It had two thick-curtained windows with iron grilles fastened over them, the near one small, the far one twice its size, both showing nothing but dark. The door set next to the smaller window had been reinforced with metal as a safeguard against break-ins.

  I went on past, walking slow. In mid-block behind the apartment building I could make out a recessed area and a row of four garages. One garage was empty; the doors to the other three were shut and locked. No way of telling, without making a lot of noise, if one of those encased DeKuiper’s Cadillac.

  Back to the rear door to his print shop. Test the knob: locked as securely as the door in front. Turn away, with f
rustration building inside—

  —and there was a sudden scraping noise and the door popped outward, throwing light at me. I came around, half crouching. DeKuiper was standing in the doorway, huge and deadly with a flat black automatic in one hand.

  “Figured might be you,” he said. “Want in? Well, come on.”

  I didn’t move; I was still trying to regroup.

  “Pop you right there, man. Tell cops you’re prowler.”

  Heard me out here, I thought, even though I’d been quiet. Stood inside in the dark, waiting, and made his move when I tested the door knob. Christ!

  “Five seconds,” DeKuiper said.

  I moved, jerkily, with my hands at chest level. He backed up to let me come in; stopped and gestured for me to shut the door. Small storeroom, cluttered with cartons of paper and ink and other printing supplies. A doorway off it led to a lighted hallway, and across that, a second doorway through which I could see part of another lighted room. Lights on all the time, then. I hadn’t seen even a glimmer because of the thick curtains—goddamn blackout curtains.

  “Turn around, lean on wall there.”

  I obeyed. He found the .38 on the first pass; made a little mirthless chuckling sound and yanked it out of my pocket. Two weapons to zero now. Emotions swirled inside me, an ugly mix of fear and failure and self-disgust. Screwed up again, for fair this time. Caught and wriggling on my own smart hook.

  DeKuiper prodded me with one of the guns. I pushed away from the wall, went into the hallway and across it into the room opposite. Much larger, this one—his living quarters. Rumpled daybed, four mismatched chairs, Formica-topped table, expensive TV set and stereo equipment. At the far wall, an improvised kitchenette. All of it messy, the air stale with the odors of fried food and dirty laundry and the printer’s trade.

  Chet Valconazzi lay on the bare floor next to the daybed, curled up on his side facing us. His hands were bound behind his back with a gaudily hand-painted necktie. He was conscious, but his eyes had gone into soft focus: the glaze on them was pain. DeKuiper had worked him over even more mercilessly than he had Bisconte. The dark, narrow face was swollen, bloody, disfigured by dozens of cuts, bruises, abrasions. Blood in his throat: his breath rattled liquidly. Internal injuries, too, possibly.