“Nothing specific. Just that he felt he'd be better off dead. It was only a few lines long.”
“He'd been despondent, then?”
“For several weeks. He'd been drinking heavily.”
“Any clues as to why?”
“According to Yankowski, my father wouldn't discuss it with anyone. Yankowski thinks it was some sort of writer's block; my father wrote almost nothing during the last six weeks of his life. But I find that theory difficult to believe, considering how much fiction he produced. And how much writing meant to him—others have told me that.” Kiskadon's pipe had gone out; he paused to relight it. “In any case, his motive had to have been personal.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, I don't see how it could have been financial. He had contracts for two new Johnny Axe novels, and there was a film deal in the works. There was also talk of doing a Johnny Axe radio show.”
“Uh-huh. Well, if anyone knows the reason, it's his widow. Maybe I can pry it out of her. Where does she live?”
“In Berkeley. With her niece, a woman named Marilyn Dubek.” He gave me the address from memory and I wrote it down in my notebook.
“Is her name still Crane?”
“Yes. Amanda Crane. She never remarried.”
“Was your father her first husband?”
“Yes.”
“How long were they married?”
“Two years. The split with my mother wasn't over her, if that's what you're thinking. They didn't even know each other at the time of the separation.”
“What did cause the split with your mother?”
“She had extravagant ways; that was the main reason. She was a social animal—parties, nightclubs, that sort of thing—and my father liked his privacy. They just weren't very well matched, I guess.”
“How long were they married?”
“Four years.”
“Your father's first marriage?”
“No. His second.”
“Who was his first wife?”
“A woman named Ellen Corneal. He married her while they were both in college. It didn't last very long.”
“Why not?”
“I'm not sure. Incompatibility again, I think.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“No.”
“Back to Yankowski. Where did you talk to him?”
“At his home. He lives in St. Francis Wood.”
“How willing was he to see you?”
“Willing enough,” Kiskadon said. “I called and explained who I was, and he invited me over. He was a little standoffish in person, but he answered all my questions.”
“Can you give me the names of any of your father's friends in 1949?”
“He apparently didn't have any close friends.”
“What about other writers?”
“Well, he wasn't a joiner but he did know some of the other writers in the Bay Area. I managed to track down a couple who knew him casually, but they weren't any help. They only saw him at an occasional literary function.”
“You might as well give me their names anyway.”
He did and I wrote them down. One was familiar; the other wasn't. Neither had written for the pulps, unless the unfamiliar guy had cranked out stories under a pseudonym. I asked Kiskadon about that, and he said no, the man had written confession stories and fact articles for more than thirty years and was now retired and living on Social Security.
Be a writer, I thought, make big money and secure your future.
I spent the next five minutes settling with Kiskadon on my fee and the size of my retainer, and filling out the standard contract form I'd brought with me. He signed the form, and was working on a check when I heard the sound of a key in the front door lock. A moment later a woman came inside.
She stopped when she saw me and said, “Oh,” but not as if she were startled. She was a few years younger than Kiskadon, brown-haired, on the slender side except for flaring hips encased in a pair of too-tight jeans. Why women with big bottoms persist in wearing tight pants is a riddle of human nature the Sphinx couldn't answer, so I didn't even bother to try. Otherwise she was pretty enough in a Bonnie Bedelia sort of way.
Kiskadon said, “Lynn, hi. This is the detective I told you about.” He gave her my name, which impressed her about as much as if he'd given her a carpet tack. “He's going to take on the job.”
She gave me a doubtful look. Then she said, “Good. That's fine, dear,” in that tone of voice wives use when they're humoring their spouses.
“He'll get to the truth if anyone can,” Kiskadon said.
She didn't answer that; instead she looked up at me again. “How much are you charging?”
Practical lady. I told her, and she thought about it, biting her lip, and seemed to decide that I wasn't being too greedy. She nodded and said to him, “I'll get the groceries out of the car. We'll have lunch pretty soon.”
“Good, I'm starved.”
She asked me, “Will you be joining us?”
“Thanks, but I'd better get to work.”
“You're perfectly welcome to stay.…”
“No. Thanks, anyway.”
“Well,” she said, and shrugged, and turned and went out with her rear end wiggling and waggling. You could almost hear the stretched threads creaking in the seams of her jeans.
Kiskadon gave me his check and his hand and an eager smile; he looked better than he had when I'd arrived—color in his cheeks, a kind of zest in his movements, as if my agreeing to investigate for him had worked like a rejuvenating medicine. I thought: That's me, the Good Samaritan. But I had taken the job as much for me as for him: so much for virtue and the milk of human kindness.
When I got outside, Mrs. Kiskadon was hefting an armload of Safeway sacks out of the trunk of a newish green Ford Escort parked in the driveway. She seemed to want to say something to me as I passed by, but whatever she saw when she glanced toward the porch changed her mind for her. All I got was a sober nod, which I returned in kind. I looked back at the porch myself as I opened the gate; she was on her way there carrying the grocery sacks, and Kiskadon was standing out in plain sight, leaning on his cane and looking past her at me, still smiling.
He waved as I went through the gate, but I didn't wave back. I'm not sure why.
TWO
S
t. Francis Wood was only a ten-minute drive, so I went there to see Yank-'Em-Out Yankowski first. Unlike Golden Gate Heights, the Wood is one of the city's ritzy neighborhoods, spread out along the lower, westward slope of Mt. Davidson and full of old money and the old codgers who'd accumulated it. Some of the houses in there had fine views of the ocean a couple of miles distant, but Yankowski's wasn't one of them. It was a Spanish-style job built down off San Juanito Way, bordered on one side by a high cypress hedge and on the other by a woody lot overgrown with eucalyptus trees; half-hidden by flowering bushes, more cypress, and a tangle of other vegetation. Either Yankowski was a bucolic at heart, which I doubted, or he liked plenty of privacy.
I parked at the curb in front and went down a set of curving stone stairs and onto a tile-floored porch. The front door looked like the one that barred the entrance to the castle in every B-grade horror film ever made: aged black wood, ironbound, with nail studs and an ornate latch. There wasn't any bell; I lifted a huge black-iron knocker and let it make a bang like a gun going off.
Immediately a dog began barking inside. It was a big dog, and it sounded mad as hell at having been disturbed. But it didn't bark for long; when the noise stopped I heard it moving, heard the click and scrape of its nails on stone or tile, and then it slammed into the door snarling and growling and burbling like Lewis Carroll's jabberwock. It probably had eyes of flame, too, and its drooling jaws would no doubt have enjoyed making a snicker-snack of my throat. If I'd been a burglar I would have run like hell. As it was I backed off a couple of paces. I am not crazy about dogs, especially vicious dogs like whatever monstrosity Yankowski kept in th
ere.
It went right on snarling and burbling. Nobody came and told it to shut up; nobody opened the door, either, for which I was properly grateful. I debated leaving one of my business cards, and decided against it; when I saw Yank-'Em-Out I wanted to catch him unprepared, just in case he hadn't told Michael Kiskadon everything he knew about Harmon Crane's suicide.
The thing in the house lunged against the door again, making it quiver and creak in protest. I said, “Stupid goddamn beast,” but I said it under my breath while I was going back up the stairs.
Berkeley used to be a quiet, sleepy little college town, with tree-shaded side streets and big old houses as its main non-academic attraction. But its image had changed in the sixties, as a result of the flower children and radical politics fomented by the senseless war in Vietnam. In the seventies, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army had added a bizarre new dimension, which the media and the right-wingers had mushroomed into a silly reputation for Berkeley as the home of every left-wing nut group in the country. And in the eighties, it seemed to have become a magnet for a variety of criminals and the lunatic fringe: drug dealers, muggers, purse snatchers, burglars, pimps, panhandlers, bag ladies, bag men, flashers, acidheads, religious cultists, and just plain weirdos. Nowadays it had one of the highest crime rates in the Bay Area. And the downtown area centering on Telegraph Avenue near the university was a free daily freakshow. You could get high on marijuana just walking the sidewalks; and you were liable to see just about anything on a given day. The last time I'd been there I had seen, within the space of a single block, a filth-encrusted kid with bombed-out eyes reciting passages from the Rubaiyat; a guy dressed up like an Oriental potentate sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with a myna bird perched on his shoulder, plucking out Willie Nelson tunes on a sitar; and a jolly old fellow in a yarmulke selling half a kilo of grass to an aging hippie couple, the female member of which was carrying an infant in a shoulder sling.
No more sleepy little college town: Berkeley had graduated to the big time. Welcome to urban America, babycakes.
Still, the old, saner Berkeley continued to exist in pockets up in the hills and down on the flats. The Cal campus was pretty much the same as it had always been, and the kids who went there were mostly good kids with their priorities on straight. Most of the residents were good people too, no matter what their politics happened to be. And the tree-shaded side streets and big old houses were still there, with the only difference being that now the houses had alarm systems, bars on their windows, triple locks on their doors, and maybe a handgun or a shotgun strategically placed inside. Driving along one of those old-Berkeley streets, you could almost believe things were as simple and uncomplicated as they had been in the days when this was just another college town. Almost.
The street Amanda Crane lived on was like that: it seemed a long, long way from the Telegraph Avenue freak-show, even though only a couple of miles separated them. It was off Ashby Avenue up near the fashionable Claremont Hotel: Linden Street, named after the ferny trees that lined it and that, here and there along its length, joined overhead to create a tunnel effect. The number Michael Kiskadon had given me was down toward the far end—a brown-shingled place at least half a century old, with a brick-and-dark-wood porch that had splashes of red bouganvillea growing over it. A massive willow and a couple of kumquat trees grew in the front yard, providing plenty of shade.
A woman was sitting on an old-fashioned swing on the porch. But it wasn't until I parked the car and started along the walk that I had a good look at her: silver-haired, elderly, holding a magazine in her lap so that it was illuminated by dappled sunlight filtering down through the leaves of the willow tree.
She lifted her head and smiled at me as I came up onto the porch. I returned the smile, moving over to stand near her with my back to the porch railing. Inside the house, a vacuum cleaner was making a high-pitched screeching noise that would probably have done things to my nerves if I had been any closer to it.
The woman on the swing was in her mid-sixties, small, delicate, with pale and finely wrinkled skin that made you think of a fragile piece of bone china that had been webbed with tiny cracks. She had never been beautiful, but I thought that once, thirty-five years ago, she would have been quite striking. She was still striking, but in a different sort of way. There was a certain serenity in her expression and in her faded blue eyes, the kind of look you sometimes see on the faces of the ultra-devout—the look of complete inner peace. She was wearing an old-fashioned blue summer dress buttoned to the throat. A pair of rimless spectacles were tilted forward on a tiny nose dusted with powder to dull if not hide its freckles.
“Hello,” she said, smiling.
“Hello. Mrs. Crane—Amanda Crane?”
“Why, yes. Do I know you?”
“No, ma'am.”
“You're not a salesman, are you? This is my niece's house and she can't abide salesmen.”
“No, I'm not a salesman. I'm here to see you.”
“Really? About what?”
“Harmon Crane.”
“Oh,” she said in a pleased way. “You're a fan, then.”
“Fan?”
“Of Harmon's writing. His fans come to see me once in a while; one of them even wrote an article about me for some little magazine. You are one of his fans, aren't you?”
“Yes, I am,” I said truthfully. “Your husband was a very good writer.”
“Oh yes, so everyone says.”
“Don't you think so?”
“Well,” she said, and shrugged delicately, and closed her magazine—Ladies' Home Journal—and took off her glasses. “Harmon had rather a risqué sense of humor, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You did read his fiction, though?”
“Some of it. His magazine stories … some of those were nice. There was one about a young couple on vacation in Yosemite, I think it was in The Saturday Evening Post. Do you remember that story?”
“No, I'm afraid I don't.”
“It was very funny. Not at all risqué. I can't seem to remember the title.”
“Was your husband funny in person too?”
“Funny? Oh yes, he liked to make people laugh.”
“Would you say he was basically a happy man?”
“Yes, I would.”
“And you and he were happy together?”
“Quite happy. We had a lovely marriage. He was devoted to me, you know. And I to him.”
“No problems of any kind between you?”
“Oh no. No.”
“But he did have other problems,” I said gently. “Would you know what they were?”
“Problems?” she said.
“That led him to take his own life.”
She sat motionless, still smiling slightly; she might not have heard me. “I think it was ‘Never Argue with a Woman,’” she said at length.
“Pardon?”
“The story of Harmon's that I liked in The Saturday Evening Post. Yes, it must have been ‘Never Argue with a Woman.’”
“Mrs. Crane, do you know why your husband shot himself?”
Silence. A little brown-and-yellow bird swooped down out of one of the kumquat trees and landed on the porch railing; she watched as it hopped along, chittering softly to itself, its head darting from side to side. Her hands, folded together just under her breasts, had a poised, suspended look.
“Mrs. Crane?”
I moved when I spoke, startling the bird; it went away. The last of her smile went away with it. She blinked, and her hands settled on top of the copy of Ladies' Home Journal. Unconsciously she began to twist the small diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“You don't know why?”
“I won't talk about that. Not about that.”
“It's important, Mrs. Crane. If you could just give me some idea.…”
“No,” she said. Then she said
, “Oh, wait, I was wrong. It wasn't ‘Never Argue with a Woman’ that I liked so much. Of course it wasn't. It was ‘the Almost Perfect Vacation.’ How silly of me to have got the two mixed up.”
She smiled at me again, but it was a different kind of smile this time; her eyes seemed to be saying, “Please don't talk about this anymore, please don't hurt me.” I felt her pain—that had always been one of my problems, too much empathy—and it made me feel like one of the sleazy types that prowled Telegraph Avenue.
But I didn't quit probing at her, not just yet. I might not like myself sometimes, but that had never stopped me from doing my job. If it had I would have gone out of business years ago.
I said, “I'm sorry, Mrs. Crane. I won't bring that up again. Is it all right if I ask you some different questions?”
“Well …”
“Do you still see any old friends of your husband's ?”
She bit her lip. “We didn't have many friends,” she said. “We had each other, but … it wasn't …” The words trailed off into silence.
“There's no one you're still in touch with?”
“Only Stephen. He still comes to see me sometimes.”
“Stephen?”
“Stephen Porter.”
“Would he be any relation to Adam Porter?”
“Why, yes—Adam's brother. Did you know Adam?”
“No, ma'am. He was mentioned to me as a friend of your husband's.”
“More my friend than Harmon's, I must say.”
“Adam, you mean?”
“Yes. He was my art teacher. He was a painter, you know.”
“No, I didn't know.”
“A very good painter. Oils. I was much better with watercolors. Still life, mostly. Fruit and such.”
“Do you still paint?”
“Oh no, not in years and years.”
“Is Stephen Porter also a painter?”
“No, he's a sculptor. He teaches, too; it's very difficult for sculptors to make a living these days unless they also teach. I imagine that's the case with most artists, don't you?”
“Yes, ma'am. Does he have a studio?”
“Oh, of course.”
“In what city?”
Bones (The Nameless Detecive) Page 2
