Bones(10)

I left the library, picked up my car and the overtime parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper, said a few words out loud about the way the city of San Francisco treats its citizens, and drove back up Van Ness to O'Farrell Street. The office I share with Eberhardt is on O'Farrell, not far from Van Ness, and in the next block is a parking garage that by comparison with the garages farther downtown offers a dirt-cheap monthly rate. I put the car in my alloted space on the ground floor and walked back to my building.

The place doesn't look like much from the outside: bland and respectable in a shabby sort of way. It doesn't look like much on the inside either. The ground floor belongs to a real estate company, the second floor belongs to an outfit that makes custom shirts (“The Slim-Taper Look is the Right Look”), and the third and top floor belongs to Eberhardt and me. That floor is a converted loft that once housed an art school, which is why it has a skylight in the ceiling. Very classy, an office with a skylight—except when it rains. Then the noise the rain makes beating down on the glass is so loud you have to yell when you're talking on the telephone.

Eberhardt was talking on the telephone when I came in—settled back in his chair with his feet up on his desk—but he wasn't yelling; he was crooning and cooing into the receiver like a constipated dove. Which meant that he was talking to Wanda. He always crooned and cooed when he talked to Wanda—a man fifty-five years old, divorced, a tough ex-cop. It was pretty disgusting to see and hear.

But he was in love, or thought he was. Wanda Jaworski, an employee of the downtown branch of Macy's—the footwear department. They had met in a supermarket a couple of months ago, when he dropped a package of chicken parts on her foot. This highly romantic beginning had evolved into a whirlwind courtship and a (probably drunken) proposal of marriage. They hadn't set a definite date yet; Wanda was still assembling her trousseau. Or “truss-o,” as she put it, which sounded like some kind of device for people with hernias. Wanda was not long on brains. Nor was Wanda long on sophistication; Wanda, in fact, was coarse, silly, and an incessant babbler. Nor was she long on looks, unless you happen to covet overweight forty-five-year-old women with double chins and big behinds and the kind of bright yellow hair that looks as if it belongs on a Raggedy Ann doll. What Wanda was long on was chest. She had the biggest chest I have ever seen, a chest that would have dwarfed Mamie Van Doren's, a chest that would have shamed Dolly Parton's, a chest among chests.

It was Kerry's considered opinion that Eberhardt was not in love with Wanda so much as he was in love with Wanda's chest. He was fascinated by it—or them. Whenever he and Wanda were together he seemed unable to take his eyes off it—or them. It was also Kerry's considered opinion that if he married her, he would be making a monumental mistake.

“What he's doing,” she'd said to me in her typically caustic way on the occasion of our first meeting Wanda, “is making a molehill out of a couple of mountains.”

I tended to agree, but there wasn't much I could do about it. You don't tell your business partner, your best friend for more than thirty years, that he is contemplating marriage to a pea-brained twit. You don't tell him that he can't see the forest for the chest. You don't tell him anything; you just keep your mouth shut and hope that he comes to his senses before it's too late.

He waggled a hand at me as I crossed to my desk. I didn't feel like doing any waggling in return, so I nodded at him and then made a slight detour when I saw that he had a pot of coffee on the hot plate. I poured myself a cup and sat down with it and tried calling Stephen Porter's number again. Still no answer. So then I just sat there, sipping coffee and waiting for Eberhardt to come back to the real world.

The office was big, about twenty feet square; otherwise it wasn't anything to get excited about. The walls and the carpet we'd put down ourselves were a funny beige color that clashed with some hideous mustard yellow fiberboard file cabinets Eberhardt had bought on a whim and refused to repaint. The furnishings consisted of our two desks, some chairs, my file cabinets and his, and an old-fashioned water cooler with a bottle of Alhambra on it that we used to make the coffee. And suspended from the middle of the ceiling was a light fixture that resembled nothing so much as a bunch of brass testicles soldered onto a grappling hook, which someday I was going to tear down and hurl out a window. Not the window behind Eberhardt's desk, which looked out on the blank brick wall of the building next door; the one behind my desk, which had a splendid view of the backside of the Federal Building down on Golden Gate Avenue, not to metion the green copper dome of City Hall further downhill at Civic Center.