8407 by Bill Pronzini

Author:Bill Pronzini [Pronzini, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-08-08T00:00:00+00:00

THIRTEEN

It was one o’clock when I got out of that hot smoky office and out of the Hall of Justice into the cold afternoon wind. I picked up my car and took it over to Sixth and turned uptown toward the Hotel Continental. The heat and the pipe smoke had combined to give me a headache, and what Eberhardt had told me only made me feel worse. A kind of grayness moved through me, thick and heavy like the fog roiling overhead. It had been some while since I had felt this low down.

Eb and Dana. Christ, I had been best man at their wedding. I had spent hundreds of hours with them over the years. I had suffered through Dana’s good-natured attempts to fix me up with various women and get me married off. I had watched them banter with each other and share the cooking duties at Sunday afternoon barbecues and walk hand in hand at Ocean Beach, Kezar Stadium, Golden Gate Park. Twenty-eight years. Half a lifetime, almost. They had been my friends all that time, and I had thought I knew them; I had thought that if ever there was a perfect marriage, two people made for each other, this was it. Yet all the while they’d been having problems, they’d strayed from each other in more ways than one.

Standing up there in Eberhardt’s office, listening to him talk about it, I had felt shocked and sad and painfully awkward. And aware of a bitter irony: I had heard it all before, from dozens of clients and prospective clients, men and women both. The same old story — the age-old story. They approach a private detective the way they approach a priest; they make you into a kind of father-confessor, and they tell you everything. And then they ask you to help them do this or do that to repair their shattered lives. Or they say, as Eberhardt had said, “What am I going to do? What the hell am I going to do?”

I never knew what to say to all those others, and I had not known what to say to Eberhardt. I had no answers for him; I couldn’t do anything for him except to be around if he needed somebody to talk to or somebody to get drunk with. You had to get through it by yourself. It was a little like dying: ultimately you had to face it alone.

But the trouble with me was, I empathized too much with Eberhardt and all the rest of them: I knew too much about that quality of aloneness. They hurt, so I hurt. The feeling private eye, the tough guy riddled with Weltschmerz — the fictional stereotype. And the hell with those who thought in terms of stereotype rather than in terms of humanity. I cared, that was all. I was me, not any other detective, pulp or otherwise. I was me, and Eb and Dana had split up, and I hurt for both of them.

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