Bones nd-14

by Bill Pronzini

  She was sitting with one elbow on the table and her chin propped on that hand, giving me her rapt attention. My business always interested her-too damned much sometimes, as I had cause to rue-and she found the Harmon Crane matter particularly intriguing because of the pulp angle. Like Crane, both of her parents had been pulp writers. Ivan Wade had written horror stories-still did-and as far as I was concerned, was something of a horror himself. Cybil Wade, surprisingly enough for an angelic little woman with a sweet smile, had produced a substantial number of very good Black Mask — style private eye yarns under the male pseudonym of Samuel Leatherman.

  So there we were, Kerry with her martini and me with my one alloted beer, discussing Harmon Crane while we waited for our minestrone. I was just about to ask her if she thought her folks might have known Crane-and then the shaking started.

  It wasn't much at the beginning; and my first thought was that one of the big Muni Metro trains was rumbling by outside, because Piombo's is on the L Taraval streetcar line and you can sometimes feel the vibrations of the Metros' passage. But instead of diminishing after a couple of seconds, the tremors gathered intensity. Kerry said, “Earthquake?” and I said, “Yeah,” and we just sat there. So did everybody else in the room, all of us poised, diners at their tables, a few people on stools at the bar, the barman and the waiters and waitresses in various freeze-frame poses-waiting.

  The tremors went on and on, still sharpening. Ten seconds, fifteen-each second stretched out so that it seemed like a full minute. Silverware clattered on the tables; glasses hopped, spilling beer out of mine and knocking somebody else's off onto the floor with a dull crash. The chandeliers were swaying; the gilt mirrors quivered and leaned drunkenly; the wine bottles in their wall niches made jumpy rattling noises. The flickering of the candle flames gave the room an eerie, unstable look, as if we were all inside a giant box that was being rocked from side to side.

  But this was a very San Francisco crowd: natives and long-time residents who had been through earthquakes before and were conditioned to them. Nobody panicked, nobody went charging out into the streets yelling like Chicken Little. The people sitting under the chandeliers and in the shadows of the mirrors got up and backed off; the rest of us just sat still, waiting, not saying anything. Except for the rattling and rumbling of inanimate objects, it was as still as a tomb in there.

  What seemed like a long time passed before the tremors began to subside; I had no idea how long until the media announced it later. I thought the biggest of the mirrors was going to break loose and fall, and it might have if the quake had gone on any longer; as it was, nothing fell off the walls or off the tables except that one glass. When the tremors finally quit altogether, a kind of rippling sigh went through the room-a release of tension that was both audible and palpable. The people who were on their feet sat down again. The barman moved; the waiters and waitresses moved. A woman laughed nervously. Everybody began talking at once, not just among their own little groups but to others in the room. A man said in a loud voice, “Big one-five point five at least,” and the mustachioed barman called back in jovial tones, “ Voto contrario, signore! Sei a cinque! Six point five!” It was as if we were all old friends at some sort of festive party. An earthquake has that effect on strangers in public places: it creates the same kind of brief camaraderie, in a small way at least, that the survivors of the London Blitz must have felt.

  Kerry said, “Wow,” and drank the rest of her martini. But she didn't look unnerved; if anything, the quake seemed to have put an end to her twitchiness and given her a subdued aspect. I didn't feel unnerved either. That is another thing about earthquakes: when you've experienced enough of them, even the bigger ones like this no longer frighten you. All you feel while they're happening is a kind of numb helplessness, because in your mind is the thought that maybe this is the Big One, the one that knocks down buildings and kills hundreds if not thousands of people. And when they end, and you and your surroundings are still in one piece, you find yourself thinking, No big deal, just another quake, and all you feel then is relief. There is little or no lingering worry. Worrying about earthquakes is like worrying about some damn-fool politician starting a nuclear war: all it does is make you a little crazy.

  The guy at the next table asked me if I thought there'd be any aftershocks and I said I didn't know. The barman already had the TV over the back bar turned on and was flipping channels to catch the first news reports-epicenter of the quake, the damage it had done, how high it had measured on the Richter scale at the Berkeley seismology lab. Two guys across the room were making bets, one saying it had been over six and the other wagering under six. That sort of thing seemed a little ghoulish at this point, with the severity of the quake still in doubt, but it was understandable enough: a right of survival.

  Kerry and I talked a little, not much, while things got back to normal around us; the thirty-five-year-old suicide of a pulp writer didn't seem quite so interesting or important at the moment. One of the waitresses brought our minestrone. The shakeup hadn't had any effect on my appetite, except maybe to sharpen it. The same was true with Kerry, and apparently with everyone else in Piombo's. We put the minestrone away with gusto, along with a couple of slices of bread each, even though I hadn't been going to have any bread on account of my semi-diet, and our entrees were being served when the barman called out to someone in the kitchen, “Hey, Dino! Sei a due! Minuto secondo trenta-sette. I told you, didn't I?” and then turned up the volume on the TV set.

  We all looked up at the screen. A newscaster was repeating the facts that the quake had measured 6.2 on the Richter scale and had lasted for thirty-seven seconds. Its epicenter was down around Morgan Hill, near San Jose, and it had been felt as far north as Fort Bragg, as far east as Lake Tahoe. There were scattered reports of property damage, of earth fissures, but no one had been reported killed or badly injured and no structures had collapsed anywhere. There had been three aftershocks, none above three-point and none felt in San Francisco. A minor quake, really, despite its original magnitude. Nothing to fret about. The Big One was still somewhere in the future, the newscaster said, smiling.

  Yeah, I thought. Like that other Big One, death itself.

  Which was a morbid thought and I put it out of my head and attacked my veal saltimbocca. It was as good as ever. I had a second beer with it, the hell with my semi-diet, and Kerry had some wine with her eggplant. Neither of us wanted coffee or dessert. All we wanted now was to get out of there, to be alone somewhere; the feeling of camaraderie had evaporated and Piombo's was again a place full of strangers.

  On the sidewalk outside Kerry said, “My apartment, okay? If I know Cybil she's already called at least three times. She'll be frantic if I don't phone and tell her I'm all right.”

  “How come? They have earthquakes in L.A. too.”

  “Bigger than up here. But she subscribes to the theory that one of these days San Francisco is going to disappear into the Pacific.”

  “The country would be better off if it was L.A. that disappeared into the Pacific,” I said. “Think of all the lousy movies and TV shows that would never get made.”

  “Hollywood can go,” she said, “but not Pasadena.” Pasadena was where Cybil and Ivan the Terrible lived. “Come on, we'll make a fire. It's a good night for a fire.”

  Her apartment is on Diamond Heights, a fashionable newer section of the city whose main attraction is a sweeping view of San Francisco, the Bay, and the East Bay communities. Less than ten seconds after we came in, the telephone rang. “See?” she said. “Cybil-I'll bet you five dollars.”

  “No bet. When you get done, let me talk to her.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to ask her about Harmon Crane.”

  She lifted the receiver on the fourth ring, and it was Cybil, all right. Kerry spent the better part of ten minutes reassuring her mother that the earthquake hadn't done her or her possessions any harm. I suppose that was how the conversation went, anyway; I quit paying much at
tention after the first fifteen seconds. I considered turning on the TV, to see if there were other news bulletins, and decided I didn't really want to hear any more tonight about the quake. Instead I went and got a Pine Mountain log and put it on the grate in the fireplace. I was hunting around for some matches when Kerry finished talking and called me to the phone.

  Cybil was in one of her manic, chatty moods; it took me a couple of minutes to introduce the topic of Harmon Crane, to ask her if she'd known him.

  “Not really,” she said. “I met him once, at a publishing party in New York-the late forties, I think. Why on earth are you asking about Harmon Crane? He's been dead… my God, it must be more than thirty years.”

  “Thirty-five years,” I said. “He committed suicide.”

  “Yes, that's right. He shot himself.”

  “You wouldn't have any idea why, would you?”

  “The usual reasons writers do away with themselves, I suppose,” she said wryly. “Why are you so interested?”

  I told her about Michael Kiskadon and the reason he'd hired me. Then I asked, “Would Ivan have known Crane any better than you?”

  “I doubt it. Do you want me to put him on?”

  “Uh, no, that's all right.” Ivan and I didn't get along; in fact, we hated each other a little. He thought I was too old and too coarse for Kerry, and in a dangerous and unstable and slightly shady profession. I thought he was a pompous, overbearing jerk. A conversation with him, even on the telephone, was liable to degenerate into a sniping match, if not something worse, and that would only get Kerry upset. “Do you know anyone who might have been friendly with Crane back in 1949? Any other pulp writer, for instance?”

  “Well… have you talked to Russ Dancer?”

  “Dancer? He didn't move to California until 1950, did he?”

  “Not permanently. But he lived in San Francisco off and on during 1949-I'm sure he did. He's still living up there somewhere, isn't he?”

  “Redwood City. As of last Christmas, anyway.”

  “Well, he might have known Crane. I can't think of anyone else. Ivan and I did't know many people in the San Francisco area back then.”

  “Just out of curiosity-what was your impression of Crane the one time you met him?”

  “Oh, I liked him. He was funny in a silly sort of way, very much like his books and pulp stories. He drank a lot, but then we all did in those days.”

  I thanked her and we said our good-byes. Dancer, huh? I thought as I put the receiver back into its cradle. I had crossed paths with Russell Dancer twice in the past six years, once on a case in Cypress Bay down the coast and once here in San Francisco, at the same pulp magazine convention where I'd met Kerry and her parents. Dancer had managed to get himself arrested for murder at that convention, and I had proved him innocent and earned his slavish and undying gratitude. Or so he'd claimed when the police let him out of jail. That had been two years ago and I hadn't seen him since; had only had a couple of scrawled Christmas cards, one from Santa Cruz and the other from Redwood City, some twenty-five miles down the Peninsula.

  The prospect of seeing Dancer again was not a particularly pleasing one, which was the reason I hadn't bothered to look him up. Dancer was a wasted talent, a gifted writer who had taken the easy road into hackwork thirty-odd years ago and who still cranked out pulp for the current paperback markets-adult Westerns, as of our last meeting. He was also a self-hating alcoholic with a penchant for trouble and a deep, bitter, and unrequited love for Cybil Wade. A little of him went a long way. Still, if there was a chance he had known Harmon Crane, it would be worth getting in touch with him. Assuming I could find him, in Redwood City or elsewhere: he moved around a lot, mostly to keep ahead of the IRS and his creditors.

  I swung away from the telephone table. Kerry was standing by the sliding glass doors to the balcony, her arms folded under her breasts, looking out at the lights of the city and the East Bay. I said her name, but she didn't turn right away. And when she did turn she gazed at me for a few seconds, an odd expression on her face, before she spoke.

  “It's cold in here,” she said.

  “Is it? Well, I'll light the fire-”

  “No, don't.”

  “Why not?”

  “Let's go to bed,” she said.

  “Bed? It's not even nine o'clock…”

  “Don't be dense,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Now. Right away.”

  “Big hurry, huh?”

  She came over and took hold of my arm. Her eyes were bright with the sudden urgency. “Right now,” she said, and pulled me toward the bedroom.

  It wasn't that she was hot for me; it wasn't even sex, really. It was a belated reaction to the quake-a need to be close to someone, to reaffirm life, after having faced all that potentially destructive force. Earthquakes have that effect on people too, sometimes.

  SIX

  The morning Chronicle was full of quake news, not that that was surprising. I seldom read the papers anymore-I have to deal with enough bad news on a daily basis without compounding it-but my curiosity got the better of me in this case; so I skimmed through the various reports while I was having coffee and waiting for Kerry to get dressed.

  There was more damage than originally estimated, though none of it involving major loss or casualties. Some mobile homes had been knocked off their foundations down in Morgan Hill, and a freeway overpass in San Ramon had suffered some structural ruin. Out along the coast, especially in West Marin, several earth cracks had been opened up, one of them fifty yards long and three feet wide on a cattle graze belonging to an Olema dairy rancher. He claimed one of his cows had been swallowed up by the break, even though it wasn't very deep and there was no physical evidence to support his contention. “For all I know,” he was quoted as saying, “that cow's all the way over in China by now.”

  I got a chuckle out of that, and so did Kerry when I read it to her. The lighter side of a grim subject.

  Before we left her apartment, I girded myself and told her about dinner with Eberhardt and Wanda. She didn't say anything for fifteen seconds or so, just looked at me the way she does, and I was certain I was in for a little verbal abuse; but Kerry is nothing if not unpredictable. She just sighed and said, “What time?”

  “I don't know yet. I'll call you after I talk to Eb.”

  “God, the things I do for you.”

  “Come on, babe, it won't be so bad.”

  “That's what you said last time.”

  “Was last time really so bad?”

  “Was the Spanish Inquisition really so bad?”

  “Well, I admit it did rack up a few people.”

  She glared at me, cracked me on the arm, said, “You and your puns,” and then burst out laughing. Another potential disaster averted.

  I followed her Mustang down off Twin Peaks and then detoured up Franklin and over to my flat on Pacific Heights. In a burst of energy last weekend, Kerry had forced me to help her clean the place up; it was spic and span, no dust mice nesting under the furniture, no dust clinging chummily to my shelved collection of some 6,500 pulps, which covered two full walls. It didn't look right and it didn't feel right. The home of an unrepentant slob ought to have some dust in it, for God's sake, if not a scatter of dirty dishes. Neatness depresses me.

  I went over to the secretary desk in the corner and rummaged around in one of the drawers until I found the box full of old Christmas cards. Dancer's was on the bottom, naturally. I copied down his Redwood City address, guessing at one numeral and a couple of letters in the street name-Dancer had never won any awards for penmanship. In the bedroom I pawed through the bookcase where I keep my modest collection of hard-covers and paperbacks. I used to pile them up in the closet, on the shelves and on the floor, but they fell over on me one day when I opened the door, in a kind of Fibber McGee chain reaction; when I got done cursing I went out and bought the bookcase. It takes me a long time to learn a lesson sometimes, but then it damned well stays lear
ned.

  I had only two of Harmon Crane's Johnny Axe novels-the first, Axe Marks the Spot, and Axe of Mercy. It had been a while since I'd read either one, and it seemed like a good idea to refamiliarize myself with his work when time permitted. I tucked the two books under my arm and went back into the nice, neat living room. And right out of it again. It was lonely in there, now that Kerry had murdered all my old friends, the dust mice.

  Eberhardt wasn't in yet when I got to the office; he seldom shows up before nine-thirty and sometimes not until ten. I opened the window behind his desk to get rid of the stale smell of his pipe, after which I filled the coffeepot from the bottle of Alhambra water and put it on the hotplate. Morning ritual. I completed it by checking the answering machine and discovering-lo! — that there weren't any messages.

  I sat down and rang up San Mateo County information and asked the operator if there was a listing for Russell Dancer. There wasn't. Damn. Now I would have to drive all the way down to Redwood City, on what might well be a wild goose chase. The way Dancer moved around, one hop and two skips ahead of his creditors and the IRS, he could be somewhere else in California by now. Like in an alcoholic ward, or maybe even in jail. With Dancer, anything was possible.

  Well, I had one other lead to follow up first: Stephen Porter, Amanda Crane's friend. I dialed the number I'd copied out of the directory yesterday, and this time I got an answer. The right one, too, for a change. A scratchy male voice, punctuated by coughs and wheezes, informed me that yes, he was Adam Porter's brother and yes, he would be willing to talk to me, either before eleven or possibly after three, though he might be busy then, because he had classes between those two times, not to mention lunch, heh, heh (which was either a feeble chuckle or some sort of nasal gasp). I said I could come over right away and he said fine and gave me the address. After which he hacked again in my ear, loud enough to make me wince, and hung up.