Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

by Daniel Hecht

  Cree breathed slowly and shut her eyes. When she opened them again, Bert was leaning across the table, red face close to hers, cords in his neck making the loose flesh jump and shiver.

  "There was a long time when I didn't think I could keep going. The department gave me personal leave, all I did was look for her. I drove my wife away. I badgered every cop in fifty miles, I threatened cops, my friends, said I'd kill them if they didn't help me. What kept me going was, I'd go home and I'd suck on my gun. Yeah, I'd put it in my mouth and remind myself there was that, it was a split second away if I needed it. And the only thing that kept me from doing it was that every time I got close I'd think maybe there was one detail I hadn't looked at hard enough, maybe I had a lead or a clue or a contact that would pay off, if I pulled the trigger I wouldn't be able to follow up on it."

  Bert's throat was gulping air. Quietly, almost to himself, he finished, "In my whole life there was one perfect thing, one delicate thing ever put in my hands, and I lost it. I let it get broken."

  He was whispering, but he was far too intense, on the verge of causing a scene. The people at the next table were glancing over. Cree covered for him by taking his big fists in her hands and nodding understandingly, as if the intensity was about their relationship, something remotely normal, acceptable.

  Suddenly the waiter was there. Bert reared back in his chair, wide eyed, taken by surprise. The waiter was a short, dark-haired, middle-aged guy, a perfect Italian penguin in his tux, and though his nostrils flared wide at Bert's reaction, he managed a tight smile.

  "Have you decided on your antipasto," he asked expressionlessly, "or would you like a few more minutes?"

  Which is why you don't talk about it, Cree realized. Because there's no end, no bottom, no top. No stopping it once it gets going, but no place for it to go. A condition she was personally all too familiar with.

  They ordered prosciutto with cantaloupe for the antipasto, a primo of conchiglie con il sugo per gramigna and a secondo of steak alia fiorentinaand for right away another bottle of wine, a Barolo the waiter recommended. Then they sat in silence for a few minutes, letting it subside.

  After the second bottle had been opened and poured, she tasted the Barolo and rolled it around the globe, sneaking a look at Bert through the red-washed glass.

  "When I was talking to Horace," she said, "I asked him if the handsome guy in that graduation picture was his son."

  Bert's little smile ticked one cheek.

  "Point is, I put my foot in my mouth a lot, Uncle Bert. All in the interest of being Miss Honesty USA, but it still adds up to the hoof in the yap, as Pop said. You'd think with a Ph.D. in psychology I'd have some finesse. But it's a genetic disorder. Probably inherited it from Mom."

  He dismissed the apology with a wave.

  "No, don't let me off the hook, because I'll probably keep doing it. Especially since I have just drunk a couple glasses of wine and my judgment is even worse than usual. But I'm sorry in advance."

  She'd conjured the smile again, longer, a nice reward.

  "So, since I've already apologized, can I ask you something?"

  "Oh Christ."

  "Were you and Mom—were you ever, you know . . . sweet on her?"

  "Why would you—"

  "I remember you dancing with her. You'd be in the kitchen, you'd put the radio on. Mom pretended she hated it, but I could tell she didn't. Seeing you two, I thought it looked very romantic."

  The memory seemed to please Bert. "We were kids. I used to goof like that, thought I was a real Romeo. Your father deserves a lot of credit for putting up with me. Far as your mother goes, sure, I was sweet on anything in a skirt and she was a great gal, a lot of fun. I didn't mind taking her for a turn on the linoleum." He checked Cree's eyes to make sure she wasn't misinterpreting. "But that's it. All three of us were old-fashioned when it came to marriage."

  Their antipasto arrived, and as soon as they finished it two waiters were there with steaming plates of pasta. Bert tucked the corner of his napkin into his collar, spread it to protect his shirt. Cree noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were scraped, thought to ask about it, then decided she'd already asked too many questions; every time she ventured into Bert's personal life she hit another taboo area. She expected they'd have another long silence, but Bert surprised her.

  "Your first paranormal thing," he said to his plate. "Something to do with Mike?"

  Cree was taken aback. "What—Mom told you? I asked her never to—"

  "No. Just put two and two together."

  "I don't usually—"

  " 'Otherwise it's hanging over us, we gotta talk around it.' "

  Fair enough, Cree had to admit. There was a time when she wouldn't have been able to tell it, but in the last year she had managed to get some distance on it, package it as a narrative she could recite without stumbling too much or crying.

  "We were living in New Hampshire. I was working for the county social services system, Mike had a hot job at a Manchester high-tech firm. One time he flew out to L.A. on a four-day business trip, so I went down to visit Mom and Dee in Philadelphia. The next day I was downtown, doing some shopping, and I saw him. I was totally astonished, he was supposed to be in L.A. He was right there, dressed in his good suit, the one I had helped him pick out. He met my eyes. But then he . . . disappeared. Vanished. It didn't make sense. It scared me terribly. Later that day I got a call from the L.A. police, saying that he'd been killed in a car accident. About three minutes before I saw him."

  A rim of tears gathered on one eyelid and she swiped at it before it could spill. "Under the circumstances, I kind of came . . . unglued for a while."

  Bert was rearranging the food on his plate, face expressionless, not looking her way. "And that's why you haven't remarried."

  "Everyone goes through denial. In my case, it was very hard to accept that he was really, completely . . . dead. In an absolute sense. Yes. That has complicated my relationships with men, yes."

  "A shame. Good-looking woman like you." He hazarded a glance at her. "What, you didn't know that? Any guy with half a brain would kill for a shot at a woman like you."

  Cree smiled, surprised at how good it felt to hear that from him.

  They ate in silence for a time, and then Bert sighed ponderously. "Yeah, the ambiguity. It's the ambiguity that gets you."

  He walked her to her car. A short, somber stroll through North Beach. Traffic was heavy on Columbus Avenue, the sidewalk was bustling, every restaurant was packed, thousands of little bright lights, candles on the tables, flush-faced couples laughing, food smells, music from doorways. Everybody else seemed so happy and light.

  Bert's insightfulness had surprised her, and as they walked she sneaked glances at him, trying to gauge what else might be hidden inside. So hard to tell. They had exhumed each other's sorrows, and there was no remedy for either. And yet it wasn't too bad. The wine made her warm and a little floppy, and she felt surprisingly close to Bert, holding his big arm against her side and liking the mass of him, the gravity he gave off. He smoked continuously, catching up after an hour and a half without nicotine.

  When they got to the Honda, she beeped the doors open but didn't get in right away, reluctant to leave him.

  "We didn't talk about business," Bert pointed out. "What's next on your agenda?"

  "Well, I still can't do much, not without a closer age estimate. I thought I'd spend the morning in the old newspapers—mainly just to orient myself, but you never know, I could get lucky. I'm hoping to get over to the Parson Collection in the next couple of days. I'm sorry I don't have much to offer yet. But I'm enjoying working with Horace, and I had a very pleasant morning, reading some general history." She was rambling, being chatty, trying to leave things on a more upbeat note. "Funny, I was sitting in the City Hall plaza, and who should come along but the radiologist who's doing the imaging work for Horace. This guy Ray?"

  Bert shrugged, pursed his lips. The name apparently didn't ring a bell.
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  "Talk about your foot in your mouth. Ray has very bad scarring on one side of his face—his whole left cheek was ripped open? And he obviously has a lot of issues about the way people react. Don't worry, I didn't tell him what I do for a living, but I went on about feeling like a stranger, an oddball—to a guy with a face like that! What was I thinking? Like I say, I'm sorry in advance, world."

  Bert stared down the street, looking distant and preoccupied. "Okay, Cree. You say hello to Horace for me. Give me a buzz when you want to get together next, yeah?"

  She had thought to give him a kiss on the cheek, but he was already gone, bulky shoulders and silver hair moving down the sidewalk and disappearing into the throng.

  17

  HORACE? DR. SKOBOLD?"

  The door to the bone zone was unlocked, so Cree went in and called again. The lights were all on, but she got no answer. She looked into the office and the back room, found both empty. Five after eight, Horace was running late again.

  She had brought her tote bag with a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt and her jogging shoes, and decided that she could use some extra time anyway, to change out of her dinner clothes. She considered doing it in Horace's office, but then figured that Murphy's Law would require him to show up precisely when she was maximally undressed. Instead, she went back out of the lab and down the echoing corridor to the ladies' room. The basement had an abandoned feel tonight, no sound or movement, no lights under the doors, not even under the big gray door to the meat suite. She went into the bathroom, changed, and folded her good clothes carefully away.

  Horace was still not in the lab when she returned. To kill time, she greeted each of the reconstructions in progress, looking over the slabs and mounds of clay that had been applied since she'd last seen them. The one Karen Chang had been working on looked nearly done, but except for the fact that it was vaguely female it had almost no personality. She wondered if it had to do with levels of skill, whether maybe Karen was not as good a sculptor as Dr. Skobold. Or maybe she just wasn't done yet.

  She perched on a stool and started looking through the anatomy book again. After a few minutes she heard that rumble and clunk through the wall, a deep dull sound that slightly vibrated the workbench: lumberlumber-lumberbunk. That was the common wall with the meat suite. Now that she knew what was through that wall, she could better visualize where the sound was coming from. If you came into the meat suite and went past the offices near the corridor, took a right so you'd face this wall from the other side, there'd be the bank of drawers. The morgue drawers.

  She went to the workbench along that wall, leaned over, and put her hands flat against the plaster. When the sound came again, feeling it also through her palms, she knew exactly what it was. The rumble was the sound of an eight-foot refrigerated steel drawer sliding out on its carriage. The blump at the end was the drawer stopping as it reached full extension. The more forceful clunk was a drawer chunking against the wall when it had been slid shut. Somebody was opening and closing the drawers that contained the customers of the meat suite, the crispy critters and the mudman and who knew what else.

  She pulled her hands quickly away.

  After listening to another repetition of the noise, she got impatient with it and went out into the corridor and down to the meat suite entrance. But there was no light visible under the door. She leaned the side of her head against the steel and waited until she heard the sound again. Rumble-bumblerumblechump. From here she couldn't feel the deep vibration of it.

  She rattled the lock and knocked loudly. "Horace? Dr. Skobold? It's Cree!" Everything she did sounded frightfully loud in the cocooning silence. "Are you in there?"

  No answer. She waited, her ear against the door, and heard nothing.

  She thumped the door with the heel of her hand, waited, then gave it a kick of frustration and went back to the reconstruction lab feeling twitchy and hyperalert, irrationally glad she had put on her running shoes. The sound didn't come again.

  A few minutes later Skobold bumbled through the door with his armload of books, so effusively apologetic that she couldn't stay irritated.

  Their goal tonight was to measure every bone. As Cree had pointed out, the standards would probably not apply to the wolfman, but they still had to be systematic about the metrics. Once he had all the numbers, Skobold would attempt to pin down the wolfman's age and stature by comparing his measurements to statistical averages derived from thousands of skeletons in the Hamaan-Todd collection in Cleveland, the Terry collection at the Smithsonian, and others. When they'd finished measuring, they'd label each bone with its own control number and then varnish it. The skull would require a number of additional processes to prepare it for casting.

  Horace unlocked the back room. Cree helped him carry a variety of tools out to the counters, and then they wheeled out the wolfman's pallet. Reserving the skull for himself, Horace put her to work measuring the long bones, showing her how to position them on an osteometric table. He started her with a femur, positioning the two knobs at the knee end, the medial and lateral condyles, flat against the stop board so that the bone angled out across the middle of the grid-marked table. Once it was in place, they slid a metal form over the top and placed its wire crosshairs parallel to the major lines of the bone. Cree wrote down the measurements and then used a protractor to determine the angles of the knobs and protrusions relative to the shaft.

  Skobold had placed the jaw into a boxy contraption that he called a mandibulometer. With the open end of the horseshoe of the jaw positioned against a vertical board, he slid a bar across until it touched the chin area, then lowered another bar from above so that it touched the top of the jaw hinges. He didn't say anything as he jotted the measurements, but Cree could tell he was perturbed by the results.

  They settled into a rhythm, Skobold leaning over to check her work, nodding when he approved, making small adjustments when necessary.

  "So," Cree began, "I thought you were over in the . . . over on the other side." She tipped her head toward the meat suite wall. "Thought I heard someone working over there, but when I went over there wasn't any light under the door."

  "No, not tonight. I was bringing some slides to a colleague in another building. I'm very sorry, Ms. Black, he's a talkative fellow and I couldn't break free without offending him."

  "Who else might be working there?"

  "This time of night, no one."

  "But I heard it last night, too. It sounded like the . . . drawers being opened and closed." She tried not to show how much it had upset her.

  He frowned as he made an adjustment to the mandibulometer. "Hm. The elevators, perhaps? Sound travels queerly in some of these buildings. I can't speak to it myself because, frankly, my ears are not what they once were. I should probably get hearing aids, but I am too vain."

  Cree nodded, letting it go. She finished with the left femur and marked it with the case control number Skobold's papers specified, then set it back on the pallet and started in on the right femur. Skobold bent back to the mandibulometer and explained in some detail the process of using multiple indicators to determine age.

  She waited until it seemed they had a pretty good rapport going. "Horace, I have a problem I was hoping I could talk to you about."

  "Oh?"

  "It's about Bert. What you told me last night showed me how little I really know him. We just had dinner tonight, and I still can't say I know much. I mean, it was good, we talked about the old days, my mom and pop, his daughter . . ."

  "But," Skobold prompted. He was using a caliper to measure the thickness of the mandible at various points, tipping his head to get his bifocals onto the tiny numbers.

  "But he's working on a . . . project. And I'm having a hard time with it. I mean, trying to figure out whether it's a reasonable concern or suggests Bert is . . . not coping effectively with his impending retirement."

  He looked at her sternly. "Ms. Black. I have no idea what you're talking about. You'll have to be more specific."
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  Cree had been trying to position the crosshairs over the femur and couldn't seem to get it right. She gave it up, folded her arms, and faced Skobold.

  "He showed me a bunch of case files. Some are closed cases, some are open, some are unsolved homicides, some are accidental deaths, and Bert thinks there's something wrong with every one of them. A lot have to do with dog attacks. He's got a theory that there's a murderer on the loose from years ago. He sort of suggested he could use my help, because his bosses aren't buying it. The problem is, I'm not either. I keep thinking it's because he's retiring, he wants to go out with a flourish. He's created a . . . a crusade, he's invested it with all the emotional urgency associated with his failure to protect or find his daughter. He's on a quest to rid the world of bad guys and he's only got three more months to do it."

  Skobold went back to work on the jawbone, shaking his head with vast sadness. "Oh, Bertie. Oh, Bertram."

  "But then, what do I know? He's certainly more perceptive than I gave him credit for being. So maybe he's right. Especially given those e-mails he's been getting, I—"

  "E-mails?" Skobold repeated, deeply perplexed now.

  Cree stamped her foot in frustration. She was just not telling this coherently.

  "I'm sorry, Horace. Bert started getting some unusual e-mails not long after they found the wolfman. He thinks the bones might have provided some kind of a trigger for the killer. About ten years ago, he and a detective from Oakland worked on a pair of unsolved dog-attack deaths. They thought maybe it was someone sending their dogs after people, basically homicides with dogs as the weapon. Now he's thinking some more recent dog attacks might tie in, too. And the e-mails could be this guy taunting him, because Bert never got him and maybe this guy knows Bert's retiring soon. They're highly skilled, altered photos of dogs, morphing into humans. Or humans who've almost turned into dogs."