Dragonfire

by Bill Pronzini

  “They’ll happen.”

  “But what if they don’t?”

  “They’ll happen,” I said again. “Let’s drop the subject, okay? I’m not in any mood for it.”

  We were quiet for a time. Then she said, “Do you want me to stay here with you?”

  “For a while, yes.”

  “I meant tonight. For a few days.”

  “I wouldn’t be much good to you with this arm.”

  “I wasn’t talking about sex. Is that what you thought?”

  “I didn’t think anything.”

  “What kind of person would I be if that’s all I had to offer you?”

  “All right. Let it go.”

  “I don’t think you should be alone,” she said.

  “No? Why not?”

  “Because you’ll brood. I know you that well; when you’re alone and upset, you brood.”

  “I won’t brood.”

  “Then you don’t want me to stay?”

  “No. I need to be alone.”

  “Just tonight? Or don’t you want to see me at all?”

  “I didn’t say that. You said that six weeks ago, remember?”

  “Yes,” she said in a small voice, “I remember.”

  I felt bad for her again. “Kerry, look, I’m not shutting you out. I’m glad you care for me, I’m glad you want to be with me; maybe there’s still something for us after ail. But too much has happened to me, too fast. I’ve got to come to terms with it and I’ve got to do it my own way. You’ve already given me what I need from you—being there, caring. Keep on being there, okay?”

  “I will,” she said, and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But it didn’t happen. Her face smoothed and she put on a smile. Then she took my good hand, held it in both of hers; her fingers were very strong and very cold.

  We did not say much to each other after that, but it was a good kind of silence. She left at four, saying she would call tomorrow, come by if I wanted her to. When she was gone I felt relieved and sorry at the same time, the way I had each time she’d left my room at the hospital.

  I sat and stared at the walls. Made myself some more coffee. Stared at the walls again until the room itself began to bother me. It was just too neat, too clean; I hated it this way, it wasn’t mine any longer. I got up and went into the bedroom and took some clothes out of the dresser and scattered them around in there and in the living room. I took a handful of pulps off the shelves that flanked the bay window, scattered those around. I found some mildewed cheese in the refrigerator, put it on a plate and put the plate on the coffee table next to the dirty cups. I was breathing heavily when I was finished. The place looked better then, it looked all right. Familiar. Mine again.

  The phone rang at seven o’clock. Newspaper reporter, wanting an interview; I banged the receiver down in the middle of his pitch, so hard I almost knocked the thing off the nightstand.

  The anger was still there an hour later, when I struggled out of my clothes and got into bed. It was always there now; it had not left me for a minute since Monday. Living and growing in my body, sometimes burning hot and sometimes banked, clinging to me and making me cling to it— a symbiotic thing that was both friend and enemy.

  Sunday.

  I was awake before dawn, with pain pulsing in my shoulder because I had shifted somehow in my sleep and wrenched the arm. I got up and took one of the pills Abrams had given me. In the bathroom I looked at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Beard stubble, but not enough to make me want to shave again; I had shaved yesterday before leaving the hospital. My eyes looked dark, sunken. But the anger was not visible in them, at least not to me. Windows with the blinds drawn tight behind them.

  When the pain diminished I took my left arm out of the sling and spent several minutes trying to flex it. I could not quite get it straightened out all the way; the pain came back, sharp stabs of it, whenever I tried to lock the elbow. The fingers moved all right, unbent into horizontal planes, but when I went to pick up a glass I couldn’t close them around it.

  The whole time I kept thinking about Eberhardt. He had been in a coma one week, seven days, 160 hours. How long could he hang on that way, balanced on the thin edge between life and death? Weeks, months? Years? I had heard of cases where people lay in a coma for two, three, four years, little more than vegetables kept breathing by life-support equipment. If that happened to Eberhardt

  Restlessly, I went back into the bedroom and called the Hall of Justice. Neither Marcus nor Klein was in, and nobody else would tell me anything, even when I explained who I was. I ended the call by jamming down the handset. Damn the cops; I was beginning to hate the Department. A few individuals like Klein and Marcus were all right, but it was not being run the way it had been in the old days. The damn brass all seemed to have political ties and ambitions; they went around yelling about public relations, the police image, the war on crime. And yet they were also close-mouthed, secretive, unyielding, like a bunch of neo-fascists. The chief had yanked my license because I was too good a cop myself, because I made waves and showed them up and undercut their authority. A victim of a goddamn fascist purge, that was what I was when you boiled it down.

  Out in the kitchen I banged some pots and pans around, making coffee and frying a couple of eggs for breakfast. It was awkward trying to cook with one hand; I spilled coffee on the counter, broke both egg yolks, spattered hot butter on myself. By the time I scooped the eggs out onto a plate, I was growling again and spewing blasphemy all over the kitchen.

  The telephone rang. I went and hauled up the receiver and barked a hello. A whiny male voice said my name questioningly, and as soon as I heard it my hand went tight around the receiver.

  It was an Oriental voice—Chinese.

  I said, “Yes. What is it?”

  “I having something to tell you. About shooting, you and Lieutenant Eb-hardt.”

  I eased down on the bed. “Who is this?”

  “No. Not giving my name.”

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  “Man who do shooting—Mau Yee.”

  “Mau Yee? That’s his name?”

  “No. Mau Yee. V

  “I don’t understand… .”

  “You finding out. Mau Yee. That’s all.”

  I thought he was going to hang up. “Wait a minute! Why call me about this? Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “No police,” he said.

  “Why not? If you have information …”

  “No police. You lieutenant’s friend, you getting shot too. Maybe you understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Reason for shooting.”

  “No. Why did this Mau Yee shoot Eberhardt?”

  “You not knowing?”

  “I’m asking you, man. Why?”

  Hesitation. And then he said, “Bribe. Big bribe.”

  “What!”

  “Yes. Big bribe. You understand now?”

  “Hell, no, I don’t understand. Are you trying to tell me Eberhardt was taking bribes from somebody in Chinatown?”

  “Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.”

  “That’s a frigging lie!”

  “No lie. You see why I not calling police? You lieutenant’s friend, you find out.”

  “Goddamn it, who are you? What do you know? Talk to me!”

  The line clicked and went dead.

  I sat holding the receiver, shaking a little. Then I cradled it, carefully, to keep the impulse for violence bottled up, and went out into the living room and took a couple of hard turns around it.

  No, I thought, not Eberhardt. Dirty? Him? No. He was an honest cop; I’d known him for thirty years, I’d worked with him, I’d listened to the hatred in his voice when he talked about police officers on the take. He wasn’t dirty, he couldn’t be.

  Crank call, I thought. But it hadn’t sounded like a crank call. And Chinese weren’t prone to that kind of thing; of all the cranks who annoyed police and other people, almost none of them
were Orientals.

  Mau Yee, I thought. Who the hell is Mau Yee?

  And who the hell is the man on the phone?

  Big bribe. Not in Chinatown. Somebody else.

  It just wasn’t possible that Eberhardt was taking. And yet he’d been shot by a Chinese gunman, and the caller had been Chinese, and Mau Yee was a Chinese name or phrase. All of that fit together; why would the man have lied about the other thing?

  You see why I not calling police? You lieutenant’s friend, you find out.

  I stopped pacing. Without even thinking about it, I crossed to the closet and got my overcoat out and shrugged it over my shoulders. When I had it buttoned I hunted around until I found where Kerry had put my car keys, on top of the mantelpiece.

  Yeah, I thought then, grimly. I’ll find out, all right.

  I’ll find out.

  Five

  Outside it was cold and foggy again, the kind of heavy dripping fog that tends to linger for days during the summer months. I was shivering when I got to where my car was parked a block from the flat. Doctor Abrams had told me to stay inside, get plenty of rest, don’t exert myself. The hell with him. The hell with everybody. It was my life and I could do what I damned well pleased with it. I didn’t have a license anymore, I only had one good arm, but I still had the freedom of choice; they hadn’t taken that away from me yet.

  I started the car, put the heater on high, and sat there until some of the chill went away. Driving with one hand was no real problem because the car had an automatic transmission; I wheeled it around and took it to Van Ness. Twenty minutes later I rolled down the steep Castro Street hill into Noe Valley.

  There was not much activity on Eberhardt’s block of Elizabeth Street. No kids playing; nobody out puttering in his garden or mowing his lawn or washing his car; nobody drinking beer and cooking steaks on the backyard barbecue. The absence of sunshine kept everyone indoors or off on day trips somewhere. The weather made a big difference in people’s lives in this city. So could a few weeks, and one week in particular. Seven days could make all the difference in the world—turn you upside down and inside out, reshape your thinking, restructure the patterns of your life.

  And maybe force you to accept things you never would have believed and never wanted to know.

  The curb in front of Eberhardt’s house was empty; I parked there, went up the path, and climbed the stairs onto the porch. The house was locked tight, but there was no problem in that. Eb had given me a key years ago, the way friends do. I found it on my key ring, slid it into the latch, and let myself in.

  The living room was dark, full of shadows again. The blood was there too, dried into the carpet where Eberhardt had lain, where I had crawled across it from the sofa. His blood, my blood. I imagined I could smell the burnt gunpowder on the cold musty air. Little shivers crawled up my back; a ghost pain slid along the length of my stiffened left arm. The whole thing from last Sunday replayed itself in my mind in ragged blips, like scenes in a badly cut film noir.

  Dry-mouthed, I crossed to the staircase and clumped up to the second floor. It was better up there; the images faded, the phantom smell was gone. I bypassed Eb’s bedroom and the adjacent guest room and opened the last door on the left. Originally it had been a third bedroom, but he had converted it into an office for himself when he and Dana bought the house.

  More shadows; I went over to the window, opened the curtains to let some light in. Desk, sideboard, Naugahyde couch, over-stuffed chair, a small bookcase with some police manuals and a few other books jammed into it in haphazard fashion, a long table supporting a partially finished model railroad layout that he had been fiddling with for years; an electric Olympia beer sign on one wall, on another a framed photograph of our Police Academy graduating class. It was Eberhardt’s room in every way, a perfect reflection of the man I had known for three decades. His sanctuary, he’d called it. Nobody touched anything in there but him.

  Except that somebody had touched things—Marcus or Klein, probably, looking for a lead to explain the sudden attack. A couple of the desk drawers were half open, papers were spread around on the desktop in a non-Eberhardt way; an accordian file stood open on the sideboard. If there was anything incriminating among his papers, had they found it? Either Marcus or Klein might have told me if they had, but then again they might not have. Cops did not go around spreading the word when one of their number turned up dirty; they would keep it under wraps as long as they could, until a full investigation had been conducted.

  Still, they would have made the search early in the week, not later than Monday when no other leads opened up and it became clear that Eberhardt wasn’t going to regain consciousness right away, and I had talked to both Klein and Marcus later on. If they had discovered something incriminating, I should have been able to tell it from what they said and the way they acted. Klein especially, because he was almost as close to Eb as I was; he wore his feelings as openly as he’d worn his patrolman’s badge.

  So the odds were that they had come up empty. But did Klein know about Eb’s hideaway safe? I knew about it because he had told me, shown it to me once. He had also given me the combination, for the same reason he had given me the key to the house. In case of an emergency, he’d said. In case anything happened to him.

  The safe was built into the bottom of the sideboard, concealed by a horizontal sliding panel. A small thing, just large enough to hold documents and a few valuables. I squatted in front of the sideboard, opened the doors. On top of the panel were some glasses and a bottle of brandy; I took them out, slid the panel aside to expose the combination dial, and opened my address book to the set of numbers I had written down in back. Half a minute later I hauled the safe door up and peered inside.

  There was not much to see. A small jewelry case that contained his wedding ring; I remembered that he had stopped wearing it after Dana moved out. An envelope with five twenty-dollar bills in it—but that didn’t mean anything. Mad money, probably, or a small cache for emergencies. His marriage license. A packet of U.S. savings bonds that amounted to fifteen hundred dollars. An insurance policy. A savings account passbook that showed a balance of $532.57. And a stock-transfer form, made out in Eberhardt’s name, turning over to him one thousand shares of Mid-Pacific Electronics.

  I knelt there for a time, staring at the stock-transfer thing. I did not like the look of it; it made my stomach feel hollow and made me afraid. Eberhardt had never dabbled in the stock market, never owned any stocks so far as I knew. He wasn’t a gambler and he didn’t trust that sort of investment. So what was he doing with a piece of paper like this? It was not a regular transaction, the kind where you go to a broker and buy shares of a common stock. Somebody owned those thousand shares—somebody whose name did not appear on the form, who had neither filled it out completely nor signed it to make the transfer binding. Eb had no close relatives; it couldn’t be anything like that. Then who? And why?

  Mid-Pacific Electronics. I had never heard of it. There were plenty of electronics firms in Northern California, with the boom in the computer and related industries; it could be a large or a small company, and the value of those thousand shares could also be large or small. If they weren’t worth much, maybe Eb was taking a flyer—maybe somebody had given him a tip and the owner of the stock was unloading it piecemeal to friends and other investors. He might have changed his mind about gambling in the market. Dana’s defection had changed him in a lot of ways; this could be one of them.

  Big bribe. Sot in Chinatown. Somebody else.

  But he could have changed that way, too, I thought bitterly. Honest people do turn crooked; honest cops do start taking bribes. And the bribes they take don’t have to be in cash, either, not in this day and age.

  I put the form in my coat pocket, returned the rest of the stuff to the safe, closed the lid and spun the dial to lock it, and then slid the panel back into place and rearranged the glasses and the bottle of brandy. When I straightened up I took another look around the room. But
there did not seem to be much point in doing any more searching; Eb had no other safes or hiding places that I knew about, and the police would have been through everything else.

  Downstairs again, I tried not to look at the bloodstained carpet. No good; it drew my eyes magnetically. They could have cleaned it up, I thought. Or Dana could have come and done that—aired the place out, made it decent for Eb when he came home. It didn’t surprise me that she hadn’t been here. She wanted no part of this house anymore, no part of Eberhardt’s life; she was back in Palo Alto, waiting in her law professor’s bed to find out if Eb lived or died.

  I hope she’s still suffering a little, I thought. I hope she has long nights and bad dreams.

  I made a promise to myself that I would come back in a few days and call a cleaning service and have them pick up the carpet. Maybe nobody else cared about those stains, but I did. At least I could see to it that they were erased from the carpet, even if I could never erase them from my memory, or Eberhardt from his.

  On the way back to Pacific Heights I made two stops. The first was at a liquor store on 24th Street, where I bought a copy of the Sunday Examiner-Chronicle. There was nothing on the front page about Eb or the police investigation. Other news, national and local, had kicked it onto one of the inside pages, or maybe too much time had passed and they had quit writing about it altogether; I didn’t bother to look. Instead I turned to the financial section and checked for a stock listing on Mid-Pacific Electronics.

  No listing. Which meant what? Either the company was too small or too insolvent to warrant one, I thought, or else they had not gone public with their stock. In any case, it would take some checking to find out how much a share of Mid-Pacific was worth, and just what kind of outfit it was.

  My second stop was at a service station on Market, to get a tankful of gas and to have a look at the directory in their public telephone booth. There was a local listing for Mid-Pacific Electronics, it turned out: an address on Pine Street in the Financial District. I thought about dialing the number, but I didn’t do it. Even if anyone was around on Sunday, which was unlikely, I wanted more information before I started asking questions of the company personnel.