Sleuths

by Bill Pronzini

  Back into the living room. The knocking was still going on. I started over there; stopped after a few feet and stood sniffing the air. I thought I smelled something—a faint lingering acrid odor. Or maybe I was just imagining it.

  Bang, bang, bang. And Ferry's voice: "What's going on in there?"

  I moved ahead to the door, threw the bolt lock, yanked the door open. "Quit making so damned 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 nervously.

  "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. And when 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. "Is she—?"

  "Very."

  "Gianna . . . is she here?"

  "Somebody did that to Ashley? It wasn't an accident?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Who? Who did it?"

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

  "I . . . don't know who he is. 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 you'd drop your complaint against Gianna. He did it because Gianna and Ashley Hansen have been working as 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. 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."

  Nothing for ten seconds. Then, softly, "It wasn't like that, not at first. I . . . loved her."

  "Sure you did."

  "I did. 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's 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.

  "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," I said. "But the one you really hurt is Ashley Hansen. If it hadn't been for you, she'd still be alive."

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

  "That'll be the police," I said.

  "The police? 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.

  9.

  I spent more than two hours in the company of the law, alternately answering questions and waiting around. I told Inspector Craddock 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 the small red rectangular object I'd seen Bisconte shove into his pocket—an address book, no doubt, with the names of some of Hansen's johns. That was the common item that was missing from her purse.

  Craddock seemed satisfied. I wished I was.

  When he finally let me go I drove back to the office. But I didn't stay long; it was late afternoon, Eberhardt had already gone for the day, and I felt too restless to tackle the stack of routine paperwork on my desk. I went out to Ocean Beach and walked on the sand, as I sometimes do when an edginess is on me. It helped a little—not much.

  I ate an early dinner out, and when I got home I put in a call to the Hall of Justice to ask if Jack Bisconte had been picked up yet. But Craddock was off duty and the inspector I spoke to wouldn't tell me anything.

  The edginess stayed with me all evening, and kept me awake past midnight. I knew what was causing it, all right; and I knew what to do to get rid of it. Only I wasn't ready to do it yet.

  In the morning, after eight, I called the Hall again. Craddock came on duty at eight, I'd been told. He was there and willing to talk, but what he had to tell me was not what I wanted to hear. Bisconte was in custody but not because he'd been apprehended. At eight-thirty Monday night he'd walked into the North Beach precinct station with his lawyer in tow and given himself up. He'd confessed to being a pimp for the two women; he'd confessed to working over George Ferry; he'd confessed to being in the women's apartment just prior to his tussle with me. But he swore up and down that he hadn't killed Ashley Hansen. He'd never had any trouble with her, he said; in fact he'd been half in love with her. The cops had Gianna Fornessi in custody too by this time, and she'd confirmed that there had never been any rough stuff or bad feelings between her roommate and Bisconte.

  Hansen had been dead when he got to the apartment, Bisconte said. Fear that he'd be blamed had pushed him into a panic. He'd taken the address book out of her purse—he hadn't thought about the answering machine tapes or he'd have erased the messages left by eager johns—and when he'd encountered me in the hallway he'd lost his head completely. Later, after he'd had time to calm down, he'd gone to the lawyer, who had advised him to turn himself in. Craddock wasn't so sure Bisconte was telling the truth, but I was. I knew who had been responsible for Ashley Hansen's death; I'd known it a few minutes after I found her body. I just hadn't wanted it to be that way.

  I didn't tell Craddock any of this. When he heard the truth it would not be over the phone. And it would not be from me.

  10.

  It did not take me long to track him down. He wasn't home but a woman in his building said that in nice weather he liked to sit in Washington Square Park with his cronies. That was where I found him, in the park. Not in the company of anyone; just sitting alone on a bench across from the Saints Peter and Paul Catholic church, in the same slump-shouldered, bowed-head posture as when I'd first seen him on Sunday—the posture of la miseria.

  I sat down beside him. He didn't look at me, not even when I said, "Buorz giorno, Pietro."

  He took out one of his twisted black cigars and lit it carefully with a kitchen match. Its odor was acrid on the warm morning air—the same odor that had been in his granddaughter's apartment, that I'd pretended to myself I was imagining. Nothing smells like a Toscana; nothing. And only old men like Pietro smoke Toscanas these days. They don't even have to smoke one in a closed room for the smell to linger after them; it gets into and comes off the heavy user's clothing.

  "It's time for us to talk," I said.

  "Che sopra?"

  "Ashley Hansen. How she died."

  A little silence. Then he sighed and said, "You already know, hah, good detective like you? How you find out?"

  "Does it matter?"

  "It don't matter. You tell police yet?"

  "It'll be better if you tell them."

  More silence, while he smoked his little cigar.

  I said, "But first tell me. Exactly what happened."

  He shut his eyes; he didn't want to relive what had happened.

  "It was me telling you about Bisconte that started it," I said to prod him. "After you got home Sunday night you called Gianna and asked her about him. Or she called you."

  ". . .
I call her," he said. "She's angry, she tell me mind my own business. Never before she talks to her goombah this way."

  "Because of me. Because she was afraid of what I'd find out about her and Ashley Hansen and Bisconte."

  "Bisconte." He spat the name, as if ridding his mouth of something foul.

  "So this morning you asked around the neighborhood about him. And somebody told you he wasn't just a florist, about his little sideline. Then you got on a bus and went to see your granddaughter."

  "I don't believe it, not about Gianna. I want her tell me it's not true. But she's not there. Only the other one, the bionda."

  "And then?"

  "She don't want to let me in, that one. I go in anyway. I ask if she and Gianna are . . . if they sell themselves for money. She laugh. In my face she laugh, this girl what have no respect. She says what difference it make? She says I am old man—dinosaur, she says. But she pat my cheek like I am little boy or big joke. Then she . . . ah, Cristo, she come up close to me and she say you want some, old man, I give you some. To me she says this. Me." Pietro shook his head; there were tears in his eyes now. "I push her away. I feel feroce, like when I am young man and somebody he make trouble with me. I push her too hard and she fall, her head hit the table and I see blood and she don't move . . . ah, mio Dio! She was wicked, that one, but I don't mean to hurt her . . ."

  "I know you didn't, Pietro."

  "I think, call doctor quick. But she is dead. And I hurt here, inside"—he tapped his chest—"and I think, what if Gianna she come home? I don't want to see Gianna. You understand? Never again I want to see her."

  "I understand," I said. And I thought: Funny—I've never laid eyes on her, not even a photograph of her. I don't know what she looks like; now I don't want to know. I never want to see her either.

  Pietro finished his cigar. Then he straightened on the bench, seemed to compose himself. His eyes had dried; they were clear and sad.. He looked past me, across at the looming Romanesque pile of the church. "I make confession to priest," he said, "little while before you come. Now we go to police and I make confession to them."

  "Yes."

  "You think they put me in gas chamber?"

  "I doubt they'll put you in prison at all. It was an accident. Just a bad accident."

  Another silence. On Pietro's face was an expression of the deepest pain. "This thing, this accident, she shouldn't have happen. Once . . . ah, once . . ." Pause. "Morto," he said.

  He didn't mean the death of Ashley Hansen. He meant the death of the old days, the days when families were tightly knit and there was respect for elders, the days when bocce was king of his world and that world was a far simpler and better place. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days.

  We sat there in the pale sun. And pretty soon he said, in a voice so low I barely heard the words, "La bellezza delle bellezze." Twice before he had used that phrase in my presence and both times he had been referring to his granddaughter. This time I knew he was not.

  "Si, 'paesano," I said. "La bellezza delle bellezze."