Bones nd-14

by Bill Pronzini

  At Hamilton Field the traffic began to move more or less normally, and once I got past Novato it thinned out enough so that I could maintain a steady sixty. I quit the freeway in Petaluma, picked up and followed the same two-lane county road I'd taken to Tomales on Wednesday. Dusk had settled when I got there; it was a few minutes before six. The fog was in, thick and restless, pressing down close to the ground so that it filled the hollows and dips and obscured the hilltops. Building and street lights shone pale and indistinct, like daubs of yellow in a hologram seen through gray gauze.

  The general store was still open; I turned off Shoreline Highway and stopped in front of it. The same dark-haired girl was behind the counter. I waited until she finished waiting on the only customer in the place and then said to her, “Hi. Remember me?”

  “Oh sure,” she said. “You're the man who was asking about Mr. Bertolucci the other day.”

  “Right. I wonder if you could answer a few more questions for me.”

  “Well… I guess so, if I can.”

  “Mr. Bertolucci used to be married, didn't he?”

  “A long time ago, I think. Way before I was born.”

  “Was his wife's name Kate?”

  “Kate. I think that was it.”

  “Do you know what happened to her?”

  “Gee, no. She ran off with another man or something. My mother could tell you. Do you want to talk to her?”

  “Where would I find her?”

  “She's here, back in the storeroom. I'll get her for you.”

  She left the counter and disappeared into the rear of the store. Trusting people up here in the country; I could have made off with the entire cash register, not to mention its contents. Too long in the city, that was my trouble. Too many dealings with criminal types. If I lived in a place like Tomales, such thoughts would probably never even enter my head.

  The girl came back with an older, graying version of herself, dressed in a leather apron over a man's shirt and a pair of Levi's. The older woman said her name was Martha Kramer and I gave her my name but not the fact that I was a detective; I told her I was a genealogical researcher trying to track down information on Angelo Bertolucci's wife, Kate, for a client in San Francisco.

  “Oh, I see,” she said, and nodded.

  “I went to see Mr. Bertolucci on Wednesday afternoon, after I spoke to your daughter. He wasn't very cooperative, I'm afraid. He seemed… well, kind of odd.”

  “Odd is the word for it,” Mrs. Kramer agreed.

  “Just as I was leaving he went out into his yard and shot a crow. With a twelve-gauge shotgun.”

  A faint wry smile. “He does that sometimes. It used to frighten his neighbors but no one pays much attention anymore.”

  “He must have lived alone for a long time,” I said.

  “Ever since Mrs. Bertolucci left him. That must have been… oh, more than thirty years ago.”

  “October 1949? That's as far as I've been able to trace her.”

  “I believe it was 1949, yes.”

  “You say she left him. Divorced him, you mean?”

  “No. Ran off.”

  “With another man?”

  “Evidently.”

  “She and Mr. Bertolucci didn't get along, then.”

  “Not very well. Fought all the time.”

  “Over anything in particular?”

  “His general cussedness, my mother used to say.”

  “Did the fights ever become physical?”

  “A time or two. He was free with his fists.”

  “A violent man?”

  “Well, you saw what he does to crows.”

  “Would you have any idea who Mrs. Bertolucci ran off with?”

  “Lord, no. I was only a child then.”

  “So her affair wasn't common knowledge.”

  “No. But people weren't surprised, the way he treated her.”

  “It was common knowledge, though, that she'd run off?”

  “He admitted it himself, more than once.”

  “Did he seem upset by the fact?”

  “I suppose he was. Who wouldn't be?”

  “And he never remarried?”

  “No. Never set foot out of Tomales since, that I know of.”

  I took out my notebook and made some squiggles in it, mostly for show. “What can you tell me about Mrs. Bertolucci?”

  “Well, let's see,” Mrs. Kramer said. “Her maiden name was Dunlap; she was Irish… but you must already know that.”

  “Mmm.”

  “I think Mr. Bertolucci met her through her father. He ran a plumbing supply company in Santa Rosa… no, he was a plumbing contractor, that's right. Used to hunt out here before all the land was posted, and Mr. Bertolucci made some of his trophies. He died a year or so before Mrs. Bertolucci disappeared.”

  “Did she have other relatives in Santa Rosa?”

  “Not that I know of. You haven't been able to find any?”

  “Not so far. Did she have any close friends here in Tomales, someone I might talk to?”

  “Well… her best friend was Bernice Toland, but Bernice died several years back. Kate wrote her a note before she left town, said she was going away with a man; that was the first Bernice knew about it, apparently.”

  “Bernice never heard from her again?”

  “No, never.”

  “Is there anybody else I might see?”

  “A couple of others, I suppose, but I don't think they can tell you much more than I have.”

  I took their names and addresses, thanked Mrs. Kramer and her daughter, and went out to my car. For a time I sat there watching the fog swirl across the deserted highway, mulling over what I had just learned. It all seemed to fit. And what seemed to fit, too, was the way Angelo Bertolucci had dealt with his wife's disappearance-the way a man would if he had something to hide, if he'd had something to do with the disappearing.

  Bertolucci was the one I wanted to talk to now; the two casual acquaintances of his wife's could wait. I started the car and swung out onto Dillon Beach Road and drove up toward Hill Street. The fog was so thick my headlight beams seemed to break off against the wall of it, smearing yellow across the gray but not penetrating it. I had to drive at a virtual crawl; I couldn't see more than twenty yards ahead.

  The street sign came up out of the mist-Hill Street-and then the joining of its unpaved surface with the road I was on. Out of habit I put on the turn signal just before I started the right-hand swing.

  There was a rush of thrumming sound in the fog ahead, and all at once a car came hurtling out of Hill Street, just a dark shape, no lights, like some sort of phantom materializing. I let out a yell, jerked the wheel hard right, came down on the brake pedal; the rear end broke loose and for a second or two I lost control, skidding on the rutted gravelly surface. The other driver had swerved too, which prevented a head-on collision, but as it was his car scraped along my left rear fender and booted my clunker around until it was slanted sideways across the road. The bump put an end to the skid, at least, and let me get the thing stopped. Meanwhile the other car bounced off, careened out onto Dillon Beach Road, and was almost immediately swallowed up by the gray mist. It had all happened so fast that I couldn't identify the make or model or even its color.

  I shouted, “You stupid goddamn son of a bitch bastard! ” at the top of my lungs, which wasn't very smart: coming on top of my fright, it might have given me a coronary. As it was, all I got was a raw throat and no satisfaction. I sat there for a minute or so, until I calmed down. Sat in silence, with nothing moving around me except the fog. The nearest house, the one with the Confederate flag for a window curtain, showed no light; the driver of the other car, drunk or sober, crazy or just plain witless, probably lived there. Christ!

  The engine had stalled; I started it again and got the car straightened out and drove it up to Bertolucci's front gate. The palms of my hands and my armpits were damp, and when I got out the fog turned the dampness clammy and cold. Shivering, I went to the
rear fender and shined my flashlight on it to check the damage. Foot-long scrape and a dent the size of my fist; the paint along the scrape was black.

  I tossed the flashlight onto the front seat, muttering to myself, and then gave my attention to Bertolucci's house. Dim light illuminated its front and side windows, blurred by the fog. If he'd heard the collision he hadn't been curious enough to come out to investigate. I pushed through the gate and made my way through the tangle of weeds and mist-damp lilac bushes to the porch. The same sign still hung from the door: Ring Bell and Come In. I followed instructions, just as I had on Wednesday.

  Bertolucci's display room was empty except for the poised animals and birds staring blankly with their glass eyes. The musty, gamy smell seemed even stronger tonight, overlain with the moist brackish odor of the fog. It was cold in there too; the old wood-stove in one corner was unlit and there weren't any furnace vents or registers that I could see.

  “Mr. Bertolucci?”

  One of the old house's joints creaked. Or maybe it was a mouse or something larger scurrying around inside the walls. Otherwise, silence.

  I walked past the stuffed raccoon sitting up on its hind paws, the owl about to take flight with its rabbit dinner, the two chicken hawks mounted combatively on pedestals. The sound in the wall came again; the stillness that followed it had an empty quality, the kind you feel in abandoned buildings.

  “Mr. Bertolucci?”

  The faint echo of my voice, nothing else.

  The door at the rear, behind the rodents on display in the glass cases, stood partially ajar; more pale lamplight came from the other side. I moved through an opening between the cases and shoved the door all the way open.

  Bertolucci's workroom. An organized clutter: big work-table in the middle, labeled containers on a shelf underneath that held clay, plaster of paris, varnish, something called tow; tools hanging from wall racks; battered chest of drawers with each drawer labeled in a spidery hand, one of them with the word Eyes; a chopping block, a carborundum wheel, an electric saw, a box overflowing with cotton batting, spools of thread and twine; tins of wax, paint, gasoline, formaldehyde, and wood alcohol; a tub of what looked to be corn meal. Dusty stacks of wooden shields and panels and mounts of various sizes, teetering in one corner; a jumble of old pieces of wire strewn in another. All this and more, shadowed and fusty in the pale light from a ceiling globe.

  But no Bertolucci.

  I called his name again, got the same faint echo and the same silence, and went at an angle to another door on my right. This one gave onto the kitchen, sink piled high with crusty dishes, ants crawling in a trail of spilled sugar on the floor. No Bertolucci here either. Two more doors opened off the kitchen, one to the rear of the house and one toward the front. I decided to try the rear one first, and started toward it, and that was when I first smelled the faint lingering stench of spent gunpowder.

  The muscles across my shoulders bunched up; my stomach jumped, knotted, brought up the taste of bile. No, I thought, ah Christ, not again, not another one. But I went ahead anyway, pushed open the door and eased through it.

  Narrow areaway, opening onto a laundry porch. And Bertolucci lying back there, blood all over him, blood on the floor and splashed on one wall-real blood, not the fake stuff they use in those damned death-mocking splatter movies. Torn and blackened and gaping hole where his chest had once been, and that was real too, and so was his twelve-guage shotgun on the floor to one side. Point blank range: the powder blackening said that. And buckshot, not birdshot.

  The back door was wide open; fog reached in like searching fingers, skeletal and gray and grave-cold. That was why I hadn't been able to smell the burnt gunpowder until I got to the kitchen: the wind had blown most of the odor away, even though the weapon couldn't have been fired more than a few minutes ago. The blood was still fresh, glistening wet red in the spill of light from the kitchen.

  Driver of that black car, I thought. Has to be. Not a crazy kid, not a Friday night drunk-a murderer fleeing the scene of a just-committed homicide. And if I'd come straight here instead of stopping at the general store, maybe it wouldn't have been committed at all…

  That's crap, I thought, you know better than that. Then I thought: If I stand here any longer I'll puke. I backed up and let the door wobble shut, blocking out the carnage in the areaway. But it was still there behind my eyes, all that blood, all that ruined flesh, as I stumbled back through the house to find a phone and call the sheriff's department.

  SEVENTEEN

  It was after nine before the authorities, in the person of Sergeant Chet DeKalb, allowed me to leave Tomales. DeKalb had come out even though he was off duty, because I had asked for him specifically. He wasn't pleased at having been yanked away from dinner with his family-he lived in Terra Linda and it was a long drive from there to Tomales-but he didn't take it out on me. He was polite; and when he saw the way Bertolucci's murder shaped up he even permitted a spark of interest to show through his stoicism.

  We did our talking in the display room, with those stuffed things looking on. Lab men, photographers, uniformed deputies, the county coroner paraded in and out, performing the grim aftermath ritual of violent death. Outside, knots of local residents shivered in the fog, as indistinct when you had glimpses of them as half-formed wraiths. The revolving red light on the county ambulance made one of the windows alternately light up with a crimson glow and then go dark, like the winking of a bloody eye.

  I told DeKalb everything I knew about Bertolucci, everything I had suspected about him and his connection with those bones. “But now I don't know,” I said. “What happened here tonight… it confuses the hell out of things.”

  “Not necessarily,” DeKalb said. “There doesn't have to be a correlation between your investigation and Bertolucci's death.”

  “Doesn't have to be, no.”

  “But you think there is.”

  “I don't know what to think right now.”

  “Could have been a prowler,” DeKalb said. “Bertolucci caught him, tried to scare him off with the shotgun; they struggled, the gun went off, bang the old man's dead.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Or somebody local had a grudge against him. You said nobody seemed to like him much.”

  “Why now, though? The same week a thirty-five-year-old can of worms opened up.”

  “Coincidences happen.”

  “Sure. I've had a few happen to me over the years. But this time… I don't know, it doesn't feel right that way.”

  “Hunches,” DeKalb said. “You can't always trust 'em.”

  “Granted. Hell, I don't see how the murder can be tied up with Harmon Crane and the missing wife, either.”

  “Anybody you can think of who might have had a motive?”

  “That's just it, I can't think of a single person or a single motive-not after all these years.”

  “You tell anybody your suspicions about Bertolucci and his wife?”

  “No. I only found out about her this afternoon, and I came straight here afterward.”

  “Who told you about the wife?”

  “Woman in Berkeley-Marilyn Dubek, the niece of Crane's widow. But she's fat, fifty, and a housefrau; the idea of her following me here and blowing Bertolucci away is ridiculous.”

  “What about the widow?”

  “No way. Late sixties and mentally incompetent ever since her husband's suicide.”

  “Well, maybe the Dubek woman told somebody else what she told you after you left.”

  “Maybe. But I got here as fast as anybody could in rush-hour traffic, and I was in the general store no more than fifteen minutes. Whoever killed Bertolucci pretty much had to have arrived at the same time I did and probably a while earlier. Don't you think?”

  “Seems that way,” he agreed.

  “I don't suppose any of the neighbors saw the car?”

  DeKalb shook his head. “Nobody home at two of the houses. Old woman who lives in the other place up the way was cooking her
supper; besides that, she's half-blind.”

  I said, “You know, if this was the perpetrator's first visit here, he might have had to stop over in the business section to ask directions.”

  “Already thought of that. Officers are checking it now. Let's get back to your investigation. Did you tell anybody about your first meeting with Bertolucci?”

  “Just my client.”

  “Michael Kiskadon,” DeKalb said, nodding. “I don't suppose you'd consider him a candidate?”

  I hesitated, remembering what I'd thought yesterday morning after talking to Kiskadon on the phone-that if his wife didn't get him some psychiatric help pretty soon, he was liable to come unwrapped. And then what? I'd wondered. What happens to a guy like Kiskadon when he starts to unravel? Well, murder was one thing that happens to head cases; the sheer terrifying number of lunatics running around committing atrocities these days was proof of that. But something had to trigger a homicidal act, and I had told Kiskadon nothing about Angelo Bertolucci that could have induced a murderous rage. Besides, there was Kiskadon's physical condition: he was weak, he could barely get around unaided, he seldom left the house even for short periods. I could no more envision him driving all the way up to Tomales to confront Bertolucci than I could Marilyn Dubek.

  I said these things to DeKalb and he concurred. But he felt that a talk with Kiskadon was indicated just the same. So did I, even though I did not relish the prospect; and I thought that for Kiskadon's sake, it would be better if I got to him first.

  Before DeKalb let me leave, he took down the names and addresses of all the other people I had interviewed this past week, including Russ Dancer. Methodical and thorough, that was Chet DeKalb-qualities possessed by all good cops, public and private. He also sent one of the lab men out to take scrapings of the black paint from the banged-up fender of my car. And when I drove away a few minutes later, past the morbid wraiths huddled together in the mist, the lab guy and one of the deputies were using portable crime-scene floodlights to comb the area near the Dillon Beach Road intersection, looking for anything that might have come off the black car during the collision.