Bones(68)

T

here was nobody home at Yankowski's house except for the snarling brute that guarded the place. It came flying at the sound of the bell, just as it had the first time I'd been here, and slammed into the door and then stood there growling its fool head off. I went back up the stairs and over to the street-level garage door and peered through the mail slot. Dark-shadowed emptiness looked back at me from within.



But if I could help it I wasn't going to go away from here empty-handed. I set out to canvass the neighbors, and I would have tried every house in this section of St. Francis Wood if it had been necessary. But it wasn't. The second one I went to, diagonally across the street from Yankowski's, produced just the kind of occupant I was looking for: a fat woman in her fifties, with hennaed hair and rouged cheeks, who reminded other people's business along with her own and who didn't mind talking about it.

“Well, no, I don't know where Mr. Yankowski went today. Not exactly, that is.” She was also the type who speaks in italics; emphasis was very important to her, so you'd be sure to take her meaning. “But he might be out at Fort Funston.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I happen to know he goes there on weekends. He likes to watch those young people with their gliders. Hang gliders, they call them. That's a very dangerous sport, don't you think? Hang gliding?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“He likes to walk along the cliffs too, Mr. Yankowski does. He's quite spry for a man of his years. I wish my husband were half so energetic—”

“Excuse me, ma'am. Can you tell me what kind of car Mr. Yankowski drives?”

“Car? Why, it's a Cadillac. Yes, definitely a Cadillac.”

“Black, isn't it?”

“Oh yes. Black as a nigger's bottom,” she said, and gave me a perfectly guileless smile.

I went away from her without another word.

Fort Funston is at the far southwestern edge of the city, off Skyline Boulevard above and beyond Lake Merced—a fifteen-minute drive from St. Francis Wood. There isn't much there except for the launching and landing area for hang-glider enthusiasts and close to a mile of footpaths along the cliffs overlooking the sea. One of the more scenic but under-visited sections of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

It was after five when I rolled in there, less than an hour before sunset, and only a scattering of cars was still parked in the big lot. The only people I saw were a trio of muscular young guys furling a glider and tying it to a rack across the top of an old Mustang. I spotted the black Cadillac immediately, parked over by the restrooms—the only one in the lot. I pulled in alongside it and got out and looked at the license plate. One of the personalized ones: MR TJY. Yankowski's, all right. I went around to examine the driver's side.

Unscratched, undented. And gleaming with what had to be new paint. The whole damn car had been repainted.

He was a shrewd bastard, Mr. TJY. He'd had bodywork done on the Caddy right away, followed by the brand-new paint job, and I should have known that was what he'd do. Hide anything that might be incriminating and hide it quick. And no ordinary body shop—the type that keeps records and cooperates with the police—to do the work, either. He'd been a shyster for too many years not to pick up the name of somebody who would do repair work, sanding, and painting on the QT, for the right price.

And there, goddamn it, went the only solid piece of evidence linking Yankowski to the murder of Angelo Bertolucci.

I moved away from the Caddy, over to the main asphalt path that led out onto the cliffs. Sunset Trail, they called it, and it was an apt name: the sunset starting on the horizon now, in deep golds streaked with red, was quite a sight from up here. Just as impressive, from farther along, was the view you had of Ocean Beach all the way to the Cliff House in the hazy distance. Not so impressive, lying closer in, were the offshore dredgers and the long finger of the pipeline pier that were part of an endless city sewage project.

Irregular sandy paths branched off the main path, meandering through dark red and brown and green iceplant to the rim of the cliffs. A few people were out there, one of them with an easel set up, painting the sunset; none of them was old enough to be Yankowski. I stayed on Sunset Trail. I have a thing about heights, and the dropoff over there was sheer and at least two hundred feet to the strip of beach below.

Benches were strung out at intervals along the trail, and on one of them a fifth of a mile from the parking lot I found Yankowski. He was sitting there alone, nobody else within a hundred yards, watching the quicksilver shimmer of the dying sun on the water. The wind was strong and turning cold and I wasn't dressed warmly enough; goosebumps had spread up my arms and across my shoulders. But old Yank-'Em-Out was bundled up in a heavy mackinaw and gloves and a Scottish cap, and he looked as relaxed and comfortable as he had the day I'd talked to him in his own back yard.