Bones of the Barbary Coast (3 page)

Cree smiled. "What's your name for this one?"

Skobold started to answer, then checked himself; the big eyes behind their lenses grew concerned. "Bertram did talk to you about our concerns? You're not going to . . . publicize this in any way, are you?"

Uncle Bert shifted, an unspoken signal of discomfort. He turned and came toward them, meeting Cree's eyes briefly. Clearly, he'd rather she didn't go into the details of her profession.

"I'm just here as a friend of Uncle Bert's," she said. That sounded stupid, so she clarified: "I call him Uncle Bert because I've known him since I was a kid. He was a good friend of my father's."

"I grew up in the same neighborhood as her pop," Bert explained. "Ben and I were in the Navy together, back in the old days. Cree was coming down to visit and it occurred to me that she'd be interested in our guy here. In fact, Horace, I thought she could help me look into him—she's a . . . private investigator, historical research is her specialty, so I thought I could kind of kill two birds with one stone. We'd get in a visit, she could do some legwork for me. I can't give him too much time, I could use the help. I figured she might find something that'd be useful to you, too, medical history or photos or something. If you're up for working with her."

Cree had assumed Bert would've worked this out with Skobold earlier, and she wondered how he liked having the arrangement sprung on him.

The proposition seemed to make Skobold uneasy, but he said somberly, "Of course, Bertie."

Skobold's expression stayed worried as he began to draw a dust cloth over the skeleton. He paused when only the savage-looking skull remained above the cover, and like a man putting his son to bed seemed to speak to it as he went on: "We consider confidentiality very important in this instance." He glanced at Bert and continued when Bert gave a nod of assent. "There are administrative, ah, sensitivities involved. This fellow is a most interesting specimen, but his remains have no medicolegal significance. Historical, accidental death, you see. Neither Bert's bosses nor mine would be happy we're spending taxpayers' money to take the time to identify him."

Bert waved that concern away. "I'm three months to retirement—what're they going to do, fire me? And you've got tenure."

"In any case," Skobold continued, "I'm sure the owners of the house where the remains were found would prefer not to see their name in sensational news reports or have their home become the object of interest of curiosity seekers or . . . oddballs. Of which, I'm afraid, San Francisco has rather more than its share. And I can't spend my days fending off tabloid reporters or curious faculty members. Or students, God forbid! This isn't a circus sideshow. We have work to do. We take our work seriously."

"Of course."

Bert clapped Skobold's shoulder, but Skobold didn't look reassured as he drew the sheet up the rest of the way, over the long, jagged grin and fractured cranium.

"Wolfman, of course." Skobold looked embarrassed and unhappy at the admission. "How could we resist? We call him Wolfman."

2

P
UT US IN a pot,
Cree mused,
boil everything else away, and what do you
get?

Of the psyche or soul, the residuum could be enormously varied and was usually very subtle stuff; for most people, it could never be as convincing as the hard, stubborn stuff of bones. Bones were unique, biology intersecting geology, concretions of minerals made by living things. Of the physical person, bones alone remained to tell the story—provided someone could figure out what they were saying.

She was following Bert's car into San Francisco to look at the house, the bones' resting place for a hundred years. Bert had written the address on a scrap of envelope in case they got separated, but so far caravanning was no problem. The rush hour traffic, bottled up on the 1-80 on-ramp, moved so slowly she never got far from his bumper. All she had to do was keep sight of the hump of the bubble light on Bert's dashboard.

A classic man of few words, Uncle Bert. In the airport, his conversation had been limited to
Hey, let me get that
and
You need something, cup of coffee,
slice of pizza?
Like Pop, he'd grown up in lower-middle class neighborhoods in Brooklyn and still retained the accent after all these years on the West Coast. She got the sense he was a man who didn't spend much time in the company of women. Definitely a career cop, cop to the core.

Cree's investigations rarely involved contact with police. In six years, Psi Research Associates had been consulted on police business only three times. The main reason was that they were seldom asked; police tended to be skeptics, and even open-minded cops were reluctant to call in parapsychology types to help solve a murder case. One homicide detective had explained that it was a great way to get your balls busted by your brothers in blue, and it invited sensationalistic press attention that didn't inspire citizens' confidence in their law enforcement agencies. Asking for help from somebody like Cree was functionally making a public admission that there were no other working lines of inquiry

The other reason was that murder made for bad ghosts—the persever-ating experiential echoes of a murder victim were often grotesque and tormented. After seeing what the first couple of cases did to Cree, Joyce and Edgar had insisted that she avoid investigations involving recent homicides.

Fortunately, Cree rationalized, that concern didn't apply here. These bones might be unusual, but they were old, and they didn't belong to a murder victim. And anyway, this wasn't actually a PRA job, this was just a personal favor for Uncle Bert, a pro bono investigation for an old friend on what struck Cree as an intriguing mystery. It had all come up quickly—the call from Bert that coincided with a gap in their work schedule. Edgar was off on vacation in Flawaii, which precluded his participation; Joyce had flown back to New York to be with her mother, who was recovering from a minor stroke.

Anyway, for all she knew, there were no ghosts involved, and this was simply a historical research job. Uncle Bert had bristled with skepticism when she'd asked him about supernatural elements.

Uncle Bert. One odd bird, Cree thought.

The Black family had mostly lost touch with Bert Marchetti after he'd moved out west. She remembered him only from early childhood: Ben Black's handsome Navy buddy, who used to greet her by kissing her on the lips as if she were a grown woman—his Italian showing, as Pop said. The men would sit at the kitchen table, smoking, drinking grappa, telling tales about Navy misadventures. Pop was naturally a more reserved person, but Bert's visits gave him a chance to let his hair down. They'd get too loud, laughing, and Mom would shush them,
You'll wake the kids!
and Bert would flatter her into submission and make her drink grappa, too, even though she said it tasted like garbage juice. In summertime, the men wore sleeveless undershirts. Cree and Deirdre liked Bert because he could always make Mom laugh—maybe because if Bert was a little unrefined, he was "romantic" in a way Pop usually was not.

Pop had admired him for moving to San Francisco, because not too many guys from the neighborhood ever managed to break loose. After a few years they had fallen out of touch, and Cree knew only the barest outline of Bert's life since he'd gone west: becoming a policeman, getting married, a long-ago divorce. He'd flown east for Pop's funeral, fifteen years ago, but since then they'd heard even less from him—just the rare late-night call to Mom, who would complain afterward that Bert was drinking too much.

Cree had been surprised to answer the phone and hear this voice from the past, the blunt consonants and gramma tic ellipses so much like Pop's, the theme music of her early childhood. At this point, Bert was less a family friend than a semilegendary figure from the early years, the Brooklyn period of their lives.

The old man it had taken her so long to recognize at the airport had short silvering hair and a beefy chest and shoulders with a hard paunch to match. His gray suit bore the wrinkles of too much sitting, but his shirt was so white and crisp that Cree suspected he'd just put it on, straight from the package. As he'd bent to hoist her bags, his jacket had parted over the broad seat of his trousers and she'd glimpsed the gun he carried in a belt holster high on one side. He was about Mom's age, sixty-three, but he looked much older: weary, unsurprisable, pouched eyes, a downward tug at the corners of his mouth, doubling chins and jowling cheeks. His quick clumsy hug smelled of cigarettes and aftershave. His smile looked wary, as if it didn't know his face very well.

After the toll booth, the bridge rose and the view expanded: the bright water of the Bay, a tight cluster of tall downtown buildings with the pastel city spread on the hills around it. Emerging from the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island, she could see beyond the skyscrapers to the orange towers of the Golden Gate Bridge and the arcs of cable that swept to the hills of Marin. With the sun lowering over the Pacific, the crag of Alcatraz was stretched by its own shadow. An exhilarating vista.

The first time she'd come to San Francisco was during a vacation with Pop and Mom and Dee, when Cree was nine or ten. That was a decade after the golden era of the sixties, but forever afterward she'd thought of the city as a magical place, full of color and celebration and people who wore gypsy clothes and danced in the streets. She had found a part of herself then, a sense of who she would become. She felt it still, a thrill of expectation, an echo of a young girl's yearning for the dawning of the Age of Aquarius and the other world-birthing dreams of those Haight-Ashbury years of legend.

Wolfman
—Skobold's nickname harkened to a very different legendary tradition. Cree had to admit her curiosity had been aroused: lots of questions surrounding those bones. Not the least of them was Bert. His aura was opaque, dark hued, but she sensed there were energies working beneath his impassive surface. She had to wonder why a weary cop three months from retirement would put in all this extra work on the hundred-year-old skeleton of a John Doe and call for assistance from a dead friend's daughter he hadn't even talked to in ten years.

They got off just below Market Street, then began working their way north toward Pacific Heights. Uncle Bert drove like a man who knew his town, leading her on a zigzag course through smaller streets. Cree loved seeing the neighborhoods again, whites and beiges and rainbow pastels, streets rising in a series of steps lined with San Francisco's famously tall, narrow Victorians. On the dizzyingly steep final slope of Divisadero, Bert's car disappeared and the gap between buildings showed only sky. Cree brought her car to a stop with its nose in the air, checked cross traffic, then bucked back hard as the Honda breasted the top of the hill. She crossed the flat and slowed when it seemed there was nothing but air beyond the hood; in another instant she pitched forward and the drop from Pacific Fleights to the Marina opened beneath: houses clinging to the slope, streets stretching away into miniature far below and ending abruptly at the broad waters of the bay The distant hills of Sausalito were bright with ocean sun, shadows in their folds. Directly below, Bert's car waited at the first intersection, turn signal flashing.

A minute later, Cree pulled behind him into a driveway on the uphill side of the house. They both got out and she followed him to the front sidewalk, where he lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and turned to look up at the tall facade.

"It's good we're coming in now," he said, "the contractors have gone home. Otherwise we'd never park within a couple blocks. Nice digs, huh?"

It was a big, mostly Italianate Victorian just a block down from the crest of the hill, with bay windows, bracketed cornices, elaborate pillars and ornamentation on the porches. The dusty, curtainless windows, one framing a stepladder, showed it was unoccupied and under repair. It was separated from its uphill neighbor by only a thin screen of green stuff that ran along the gangway where they'd parked, but the downhill side faced a garden terrace that took up a full additional lot and exposed the north wall of the house to the big vista. Given the slant, the far end of the terrace was a good sixteen feet above the street.

Cree made an appreciative murmur.

"Yeah, the new owners, they got to be millionaires," Bert said. "They'll have a real showpiece when they're done fixing it up."

"How do they like finding a skeleton in their basement?"

Bert flicked his ash with a tossing gesture. "Not too happy. They're moving from Boston, need the place ready by their move date, and it set the work back while we exhumed the bones. I still got the basement room closed off in case we want a second look, kind of a hassle for them. Plus they have a couple of kids, they don't want to put the kids off the new place, make it seem scary. I haven't told them about the unusual characteristics of the remains, why saddle them with that."

He looked up at the house, drawing deeply on his cigarette, apparently in no hurry to go inside. Cree shifted gears to match his tempo. If he was working himself up to confiding in her, she'd give him the time. Anyway, it was pleasant, here on the steep slope, with the long views, the late-afternoon sunshine. She tipped her face toward the sky and soaked it in.

"My social skills are a little rusty, Cree," Bert admitted. His pouched eyes slid over, reconnoitered her response. "I was in such a hurry to get to Skobold's shop I didn't even ask about the family."

She gave him a quick rundown. Mom was pretty happy; she had a nice little apartment and loved her work at the neighborhood rec center. The angioplasty had relieved the heart congestion they'd been worrying about, and her blood pressure was much better with the new medication. Cree saw a lot of Deirdre; Dee's two kids were fabulous nieces, twins but with completely different personalities, and Dee and her husband had a terrific marriage. Between Don's carpentering and Dee's teaching, they were doing all right.

Uncle Bert nodded noncommitally. "How about Cree?"

I
’
m great,
she almost started to say. Then it occurred to her that candor might elicit the same from Bert. "Frankly? The last few months have been a little funky for me. It's coming together, though."

Another noncommital nod. "Your husband—" Bert's hand groped for the name.

"Mike."

"Mike. It's been like ten, twelve years, now. You got a boyfriend now or—"

"That issue is under review at this time." Cree tipped her hand side to side,
yes and no.
She tried to keep it light, gave him a wry grin.

Bert sucked on his cigarette. "Yeah, relationships, they can bend you out of shape, huh?"

"This is pretty well my regular shape."

If Bert noticed the tightening of her tone, he didn't acknowledge it. "So this outfit of yours, Psi Research Associates, the whole parapsychology thing . . . how'd that happen?"

"How'd a nice girl like me end up in a profession like this?"

"If that's how you see it."

"I had a very disturbing experience some years ago. At the time, I was skeptical about anything paranormal, didn't believe in ghosts. But then I got a very convincing demonstration that we don't know anything about how the mind really works, how the world works. The experience turned all my beliefs upside down. Afterward, I was . . . drawn to doing research in the field."

"That would do it," he agreed expressionlessly.

Cree would have gone on, but this was sounding too confessional, and Bert wasn't buying any of it anyway. She went on crisply, "Along the way I discovered I have certain cognitive attributes that sensitize me and make me unusually accessible to experiences like that one. I have a business partner, Edgar Mayfield, who approaches our research as a physicist and engineer, and an assistant, Joyce Wu, who covers most of the historical and forensic investigation side of it. I'm sorry she couldn't come help with this, but she had a family emergency. Our little firm is keeping surprisingly busy."

Uncle Bert said nothing, but there was something apologetic about the way he nodded, as if he regretted probing difficult territory.

"What's your opinion, Uncle Bert? You sure you don't believe in ghosts?" She was trying to make it easier for him. She couldn't shake the conviction that something must have happened during the exhumation of the bones, something that prompted him to call her.

Bert threw down his cigarette and ground it out with his toe. "My opinion is, we should get inside, look the place over while we still got some daylight. About ghosts, all I know is, I've been around one hell of a lot of dead people, and I've never seen one. At this point, I don't expect to, either."