Except for the Bones (9 page)

“Sure.” Bernhardt nodded. “The real estate tycoon.”

“Yeah.” It was a sarcastic acknowledgment. “Right.”

“You don’t think much of Preston Daniels, I gather.”

“That’s right, I don’t.”

“Have you ever met him?”

“Yes. They have a place on Cape Cod. A wonderful beach house. I spent a week there, last summer.”

“Does Diane live in New York?”

“She’s going to college. Or, at least, she was going to college. She just finished her freshman year at Swarthmore. But her father lives here, in San Francisco. He’s remarried, just like my dad. He’s a lawyer—Diane’s dad, I mean. His name is Cutler. Paul Cutler. So, a week or two ago, Diane came out here—drove out here, in her car. See—” Earnestly, she leaned toward Bernhardt. Carley Hanks had come to the crux of it, the reason she desperately sought help. “See, she had a terrible fight with her mother. And with her stepfather, too. Daniels. So—” She spread her hands, evoking the eternal plight of the powerless teenager. “So she came out here, to San Francisco. Except that she doesn’t get along with her stepmother, either. So—” As if she were admitting to a defeat, she grimly shook her head. “So she’s staying with me.”

“It sounds like Diane has problems with both her stepparents.” Watching her, Bernhardt spoke quietly, evenly.

“Yeah, well—” She broke off, considered, then decided to say, “Well, the truth is, the past couple of years, Diane’s been pretty hard to get along with herself.”

“What about her and her father?” He glanced at his notes. “Paul Cutler. Do they get along?”

“Yes, they do. But she can’t live with him and his wife.”

“Do you think she’s talked to her father since she arrived in San Francisco, told him what was bothering her?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” But, even as he asked the question, he knew it was meaningless. The answer was lost in the mystery of the parent-child relationship.

“What about you?” he asked. “Will she talk to you?”

“She tells me a little. But not enough. That’s why I called you. Sometimes strangers can help more than friends or family. You know—like psychiatrists.”

“On my machine, you said Diane’s in trouble. What kind of trouble?”

She looked away, shifted in her chair. The body language was definitive: she was deciding how much to tell him—and how much not to tell. Finally she admitted: “The fact is—the truth is—that the past year or two, Diane’s done more—” She looked away, bit her lip.

“She’s done more drugs than she should have,” Bernhardt offered. “Is that what you were going to say?”

Sadly, she nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.”

“What kinds of drugs does she do?” There was an edge to Bernhardt’s voice, a sharpness in his eyes. If Diane Cutler was a junkie, he would stay clear. It was the second lesson he’d learned. The first lesson was to always get a retainer.

“She drinks a lot, and she smokes a lot of dope.”

“That’s it?”

“She also takes pills. Lots of pills. And if she does the pills with the booze, she gets really spaced out.”

“How about cocaine?”

“I’m sure she’s tried it. But she’s not really hooked. I’d know if she was doing a lot of it.”

“Heroin?”

“No, not heroin.”

“So she does booze and grass and pills.”

Gravely, she nodded.

“You say she gets spaced out. What’s that mean?”

“She just kind of—kind of floats off.”

“Would you say she’s self-destructive? Does she get in car accidents, things like that?”

“No, nothing like that. She loves her car. If she drinks too much, pops too many pills, she’s extra careful.”

Judiciously, he nodded. “That’s a good sign.”

Carley nodded in return. “I thought so too. Except that she’s so—so sad. So terribly sad. It’s like she’s got nowhere to go. Nowhere at all.”

“Is she suicidal, would you say?”

Hopelessly—helplessly—she shook her head. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

“This trouble she’s in, has it got anything to do with drugs? A supplier that wants his money?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

Thinking now about the time he’d already put in, Bernhardt spoke crisply now, all business: “So what’s the problem you called about, Carley?”

“I called you because she’s scared. So scared, and so—so lost. That’s the only way I can say it.”

“Scared of what? Scared of who?”

“I don’t know. The only way I get any information is when she’s high, lets things slip out, and I piece them together. Otherwise, when she isn’t high, she won’t talk about it. But it’s got something to do with—” She swallowed. “It’s got something to do with murder. Maybe with two murders.” Her voice was hushed. Her eyes were very blue, very round.

“Do you mean that she was a witness to murder? Is that what you’re saying?”

“I—I don’t know, Mr. Bernhardt. I honest to God don’t know. All I know is that she’s afraid. Deathly afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“Afraid that she’ll be killed.”

He studied her for a long, thoughtful moment. Yes, she believed it, believed Diane Cutler was in mortal danger.

“So how do you think I can help?”

“Well, I—I was thinking that if you talked to her, maybe you could find out what happened. You know, the way people talk to their psychiatrists, like I said. And if you could get some information from the police, maybe, then you could advise her.”

“You say she’s living with you.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you live?” He drew the notepad closer.

“At forty-one-seventy-four Noe. That’s in Noe Valley, between Clipper and Twenty-sixth Street.”

“What’s your schedule? Do you work?”

“Yes. Nine to five. Not today, though. The owner of the business died.”

“What about Diane? What’s she do during the day?”

She shrugged. “Hangs around. Reads. Drives her car.”

“What kind of building do you live in?”

“It’s a lot like this place—a big old Victorian that’s been cut up into four apartments. They’re small apartments, though. One bedroom.” As she spoke, she looked wistfully around Bernhardt’s office, originally the flat’s master bedroom. “I wish I had a place like this—a flat with a garden and everything. This is great.”

“Thanks.” Bernhardt rose from behind the desk, went to the window that looked out across a small front garden to the street. He stood for a long moment with his back to Carley Hanks, a Holmesian pantomime of deep, reflective thought. It was, Bernhardt admitted to himself, a deliberate actor’s turn, calculated to impress. But, after all, the best investigators were the best actors; fiction was the investigator’s best tool.

Finally he turned to face his visitor as he said, “There’s my fee—forty dollars an hour for most things, sometimes a little less for surveillance. And there’s a two-hundred-dollar minimum, for something like this. That’s—ah—in advance. I don’t charge for what we’re doing now, for the first consultation. But after that, I charge.”

While he’d been talking, she’d looked at him steadily, undismayed. Carley Hanks could pay the freight, then. And, confirming it, she opened her big saddle-leather shoulder bag, rummaged, and came up with a checkbook, all in one single, self-assured movement of the hands. “I’ve decided to go up to five hundred dollars,” she said. “After that, maybe we’ll have to hit up Mr. Cutler.” She opened the checkbook, then looked at him directly, all business now. “Is that one ‘l’ in Alan?”

Amused, Bernhardt smiled. “Right. And there’s a ‘d’ in Bernhardt.”

“W
HAT I CAN’T DECIDE,”
Bernhardt said, “is how to approach her. I can’t just ring her doorbell and say ‘Hi, I’m Alan Bernhardt, and I’ve been hired to find out what’s bugging you.’”

Across the table, Paula Brett smiled. She was a small, trim woman with serious eyes and a quick laugh. Ten years younger than Bernhardt, she’d majored in drama at Pomona and then managed a firm foothold on the bottommost rung of the Hollywood acting ladder. But she’d married a sadistic second-rate screenwriter with two ex-wives and a diabolically concealed drinking problem. The marriage had lasted eight years, long enough to inflict psychic wounds that were just beginning to heal. Even though both Paula’s parents were tenured professors at UCLA, she’d had to get out of Los Angeles after the divorce. San Francisco was the obvious choice—and acting in little theater was the obvious therapy. She’d met Bernhardt while he was directing her in
The Buried Child.
They’d gone out for pastrami-on-rye sandwiches and beer after the first rehearsal. A week later, he’d taken her to his favorite Italian restaurant. The next week she’d cooked dinner for him at her place. Four days later, at his place, they’d made love.

“Maybe Carley Hanks could introduce you, and then leave,” Paula suggested.

Bernhardt gestured to the salad bowl. “More?”

“Is there dessert?”

“Just mangoes. And ice cream, if you want it.”

Promptly, Paula reached for the salad bowl, announcing that she would skip the ice cream. They were eating in Bernhardt’s small dining room that adjoined the kitchen at the rear of the long, narrow, ground-floor flat. The dining room was the flat’s rearmost room, with a window overlooking the small garden. The garden was carefully tended by the building’s owner, who lived on the second floor. She—Mrs. Bonfigli—was a spry, quick-witted, sharp-tongued, tight-fisted woman whose husband had earned a precarious living making harpsichords in the building’s full-length basement workshop, where his carefully oiled tools still hung on wooden pegs. When one of Bernhardt’s clients had left Crusher the Airedale with Bernhardt for a weekend, and the client had then jumped bail, Mrs. Bonfigli had ordered Bernhardt to get rid of Crusher. But when Bernhardt had dolefully described the details of Crusher’s certain fate at the animal shelter, Mrs. Bonfigli had relented. Now, when Bernhardt left town, Crusher stayed with Mrs. Bonfigli.

“What you should do,” Paula was saying between small, precise bits of French bread and salad, “is let me talk to her.”

It was, Bernhardt knew, yet another variation on a theme that Paula had lately been pursuing with increasing determination. Paula, he was beginning to realize, was stubborn. Quiet and ladylike, but stubborn.

“Listen, Paula …” He refilled his wineglass, refilled her glass. “We’ve been all through this. And I just don’t think—”

“The problem, it seems to me—the first step—is to get Diane Cutler’s confidence. And it’s only natural that she’d confide in a woman.”

“What’s bothering her,” Bernhardt said, “is murder, at least according to Carley Hanks. Suppose Diane saw a murder committed. Suppose she saw who did it. Suppose the murderer’s after her. Then let’s suppose you win her confidence. Let’s suppose she tells you everything—because you’re a woman. So then—”

“You’re being facetious. I’m being serious. You’ve said yourself that women make great investigators.”

“Paula. Please.” He reached across the table, took her hand, squeezed. “I’m not saying you wouldn’t make a great investigator. But that’s not the point. The point is that I’m in love with you. We make wonderful, exciting, imaginative love. We have breakfast together the next morning. While we eat, we pass sections of the newspaper to each other across the table. All this is very important to me. And I think we’d be very silly to mix all that with business.”

“Then you shouldn’t talk shop at breakfast,” she said promptly.

“You’re right. Absolutely right.”

Both of them sipping the wine, they shared a long, silent moment. Then, gravely, she said, “That part about the paper, at breakfast. I like that.”

“I know.”

“S
O?” IN THE BEDROOM
darkness, Paula’s voice was soft and low. On Bernhardt’s bare chest, her fingers traced a slow, sinuous design, lazily erotic.

“Okay.
Jeez.”
It was Bernhardt’s burlesque of a grifter’s heartfelt protest upon being conned at his own game. “We’ll see how it goes. But I’m going to talk to her first. Fledgling private investigators don’t start off doing interrogations. They start at the bottom. Which means surveillance. Which means long, cold hours parked in some car. Long, cold,
miserable
hours. So buy yourself a good thermos bottle. You’ll want a transistor radio, too, with spare batteries. And an empty coffee can.”

“An empty coffee can?”

“Think about it.”

“I
THINK,” PAULA SAID,
“that you should talk to her father. I think that’s the way to go.”

Bernhardt looked at her empty cup. “More coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

“Want half of my croissant?”

She smiled: her slow, knowing smile. “You’re ducking the question. Stalling.”

“I’m buttering my croissant. And I don’t believe in discussing business at breakfast.”

“I’ve been in San Francisco for six months, at least. I’m bored. All I’ve done is act in one Alan Bernhardt production.”

“You have no idea what boredom is. Not until you’ve done a stakeout or two.”

“Maybe so. But I want to try.”

He sighed, spread orange marmalade on the croissant, took a bite. “Let’s think about it. Let’s both think about it.”

“I
have
thought about it.”

“There’s an art fair in Sausalito. Want to go over there, hang around for a while, then drive out to Point Reyes, have a picnic on the beach?”

“I don’t see how you can think about picnicking while Diane Cutler is suffering.”

He sighed again, took another bite of the croissant. “It’s Saturday, after all. I figure, this week, I’ve put in maybe seventy hours being a private detective. I figure I’m entitled to hang around with the one person in the world that I—”

“You see? You see what I mean? You’re overworked. Overextended. You need someone.”

He groaned, finished the croissant, drained his coffee cup, returned the empty cup to its saucer. He sat silently for a moment, staring thoughtfully at Paula. When he’d first known her, it was the intensely feminine piquancy of her face that had first attracted him. Then he’d discovered the understated perfection of her body. When she entrusted her body to him, she also entrusted the vulnerabilities and self-doubts that were the bitter ashes of her divorce. Only later had he discovered how persistent she could be, how stubborn.