Kerry seemed sobered and a little awed by what she'd done. She said to me in subdued tones, “I think we'd better go. I'll be out in the car.” She caught up her purse and off she went, leaving me there to deal with the wreckage alone.
I dealt with it by fumbling my wallet out, throwing a couple of twenties on the table, and saying stupidly, “I'm sorry, Eb. I'll pay for dinner …”
“Take your money,” he said, snarling the words, “and shove it up your fat ass.”
The waiter had come over and was trying to help clean up the mess. His hair had shifted to the right side of his head and was hanging there at a wickedly jaunty angle. I swear he winked at me just before I fled.
TEN
E
berhardt didn't show up at the office next morning. I hung around waiting for him, fidgeting a little. I had an apology speech all worked out, all about how much I regretted what had happened at Il Roccaforte and how contrite Kerry was. Which was the truth: once she'd sobered up last night, and had absorbed the full impact of what she'd done, she had been pretty hangdog about the whole thing. She had tried to call Eberhardt and Wanda, first at his house and then at her apartment, but nobody answered at either number. So she was planning to go over to Macy's today on her lunch break and apologize to Wanda personally, and then come here to the office and apologize to Eberhardt personally. She had already apologized to me personally. I let her do it, but I wasn't really mad at her. I pretended to be, a little, and I pretended to be shocked by such a public loss of control, but secretly I was kind of pleased about it. I kept having mental images of Wanda standing there bawling, with the marinara sauce dripping onto her chest and the spaghetti crawling over her head, and they weren't unpleasant at all. A product of the same sort of perversity that had made me yearn for the waiter's hair to fall off into the soup, with maybe a pinch of malice added.
Wanda was a twit and she'd deserved it, by God.
The only thing I was worried about was Eberhardt's reaction. What he'd said to me before I left might have been just words, flung out in the heat of anger; but on the other hand, he was something of a grudge-holder. The last thing I wanted was an episode like last night's putting a damper on our friendship and a strain on our working relationship. Fat-mouth Wanda's feelings weren't worth that. And neither was what I found myself thinking of as the Great Spaghetti Assault.
So I stayed there in the office, waiting for him, instead of getting an early start for Tomales to follow up on the Angelo Bertolucci lead. Keeping busy wasn't much of a problem at first. I called Stephen Porter's number again, found him in, and had a ten-minute talk with him that didn't enlighten me much. In the first place, he hadn't found the box of Harmon Crane's papers yet, even though he was sure they were around “somewhere.” And in the second place, while he knew Crane's first wife had been Ellen Corneal, and that they had been married in Reno—an elopement, he said—in 1932, he didn't know what had happened to her after their divorce; nor had he had any idea she'd been pestering Crane for money not long before his suicide.
“Harmon never mentioned her to me,” he said. “It was Adam who told me about her.”
“Did your brother know if their divorce was amicable or not?”
“He seemed to think it wasn't. One of those brief, youthful marriages that end unhappily when all the passion is spent. I gathered they didn't get on well at all.”
“Do you know if she had a profession?”
He paused to think, or maybe just to catch his breath; his coughing and wheezing sounded severe this morning. “No, I can't recall Adam mentioning it, if she did.”
“Would you have any idea what she studied at UC?”
“No. You might be able to find that out through the registrar's office, though.”
“Might be worth a try. Did you know Russell Dancer?”
“I don't believe I ever met him. The name isn't familiar. You say he knew Harmon fairly well?”
“They were drinking companions for a while.”
“Yes, well, people tell each other things when they've been drinking that they wouldn't discuss sober. Or so I'm told. I wish I was a drinking man; I might have got to know Harmon much better than I did. But I haven't much tolerance for alcohol. Two glasses of wine make me light-headed.”
“You're probably lucky,” I said, thinking of Kerry last night.
When I hung up I dragged the San Francisco telephone directory out of the desk and just for the hell of it looked up Ellen Corneal's name. No listing. I checked my copy of the directory of city addresses, just in case she had an unlisted number. Nothing. So then I called information for the various Bay Area counties; but if Ellen Corneal was still alive and still living in this area, she didn't have a listed phone under that name. Which left me with the Department of Motor Vehicles, a TRW credit check, and the obit file at the Chronicle. I put in calls to Harry Fletcher at the DMV, Tom Winters, who was part owner of a leasing company and who had pulled TRWs for me before, and Joe DeFalco at the newspaper office—all of whom promised to get back to me before the day was out. I decided to forgo a check with the registrar's office at UC until I saw what turned up on the other fronts. Likewise a research trip to the Bureau of Vital Statistics, on the possibility that Ellen Corneal might have remarried here in the city.