Eberhardt had remembered to switch on the answering machine. But he might as well not have bothered: one hang-up call, followed by the usual screeching mechanical noise that sounds as if somebody is strangling a duck. A wrong number, maybe. Or my mysterious lady caller, whoever she was.
I sat down and opened the manila envelope. As Eberhardt had noted, there wasn't much to the report-no essentials that hadn't been in the newspaper stories or that I hadn't found out the past two days. Except, possibly, for one item: Harmon Crane had drawn $2,000 out of his savings account on November 6, the month before his death, and nobody seemed to know why. The money hadn't turned up anywhere among his effects, nor was there any record of what he might have done with it. Yankowski speculated that he might have lost it gambling-Crane had liked to play poker and the horses now and then-and that its loss had only deepened his depression. Nobody could say for sure if Crane had done any gambling during that last month of his life.
The police interrogation of Crane's neighbors had turned up nothing of a suspicious nature; no one had been seen entering or leaving the Crane house around the approximate time of death. Not that that had to mean much either way, though, since the house had been in a wooded area and was somewhat secluded from those near it. Likewise the results of a paraffin test-they were still using it back then-administered to determine if Crane had fired the shot that killed him: it had proved inconclusive. Which was the reason why police labs around the country had eventually stopped using paraffin tests; they were notoriously unreliable. As for the coroner's report, it confirmed that Crane had died of a single contact gunshot wound to the left temple and that he had been legally intoxicated at the time of death. And the lab technicians had found nothing questionable in Crane's office, no hint that the shooting might have been anything but a suicide.
Both windows had been latched, fine films of dust on their sills hadn't been disturbed, and nobody could have got in or out that way in any case because the office was on the second floor and there was nothing outside either window to hang onto; a ladder was out of the question because down below was a garden, it had rained heavily that afternoon, and there were no indentations or footprints or other marks in the muddy ground.
The office door had definitely been locked from the inside. The key was still in the latch when Yankowski and Adam Porter broke in, a fact corroborated by both men; the door fit tightly into its frame, making it a physical impossibility for anyone to turn the key from outside by means of string or some other device; and even though the bolt-plate had been torn from the jamb by the forced entry, and both it and the bolt had been damaged, neither had been tampered with beforehand. As far as I could see, the only way it could have been murder was through collusion between Yankowski and Porter-a set-piece carefully arranged before the police were called. But the inspector in charge of the investigation, a man named Gates, had ruled that out. From all I had learned at this late date, I agreed with him. Yankowski and Adam Porter had been anything but bosom pals. Besides which, why would both of them have wanted Harmon Crane dead badly enough to conspire to kill him? And for another thing, the circumstances of that night were such that Amanda Crane would also have had to be party to such a plot, and that made no sense at all.
Suicide, all right, I thought. Has to be.
I checked through the list of people Gates and his men had interrogated, looking for someone who had known Crane well enough to offer a theory about the nature of his depression. Aside from Yankowski and the Porters, there wasn't anyone. I wrote down the names of a few people, those who, like Dancer, had been in the same profession and/or who might have been occasional drinking companions. But it seemed a dead-end prospect. On the list were the two writers Kiskadon had spoken to and who hadn't been able to enlighten him; and the rest figured to be long gone from San Francisco or dead by now.
I put the report back in the manila envelope, hauled the phone over, and dialed Stephen Porter's number. I wanted to ask him about Crane's first wife, Ellen Corneal; if he knew what might have become of her. I also wanted to ask him his opinion as to why Crane had withdrawn that $2,000 from his savings account. But talking to him again would have to wait: there was no answer. Late afternoons seemed to be a bad time to try to reach him.
I called Bates and Carpenter. Kerry was on another line; I sat there for five minutes, listening to myself on hold, before she came on. I told her where we were going tonight, and what time, and she said, “Italian again? I might have known it. I hate that woman, I really do.”
“Just grin and bear it, okay?”
“If you promise me this is the last time.”
“You know I can't promise you that.”
“Oh, all right. The last time for a good long while, then. At least that.”
“Deal. How's your day been?”
“Shitty. So my evening better not be.”
“It won't,” I said, and hoped I wasn't lying in my teeth.
We settled on what time I would pick her up, at which point she had another call and had to ring off. “I should be so popular,” I said, but she was already gone.
I swiveled around to the typewriter stand and hammered out a brief report for Michael Kiskadon. I intended to go see him later, so I could check through his Johnny Axe novels; but clients like to have written as well as verbal reports. Words more or less neatly typed on agency stationery reassure them that I'm a sober, industrious, and conscientious detective and give them a feeling of security.
When I was done I dialed Kiskadon's number. Lynn Kidkadon answered. I asked for her husband, and she said, “He's sleeping. Who is this?” Her response when I told her came in a much lower voice, almost a whisper, so I could barely hear her: “Oh, good, I'm glad you called. I've been trying to reach you for two days.”
“So you're the woman who's called my office several times.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn't you leave your name?”
“I didn't want you ringing up here and asking for me if Michael answered.”
“Why not?”
“Because I don't want him to know I've gotten in touch with you. I think we need to talk.”
“What about?”
“Michael and his father. The job he hired you to do. Can we meet somewhere? Right away?”
“Well… I was going to ask your husband if I could stop by.”
“Here? Why?”
“I need to look at his father's novels.”
“What on earth for?”
“To find a name. Look, Mrs. Kiskadon-”
“We could meet in the park,” she said, “the one across the street. Just for a few minutes, before you see Michael. Please, it's important.”
“… All right. Where in the park?”
“There's a circle with benches around it, straight across the green from our house and along the first path you come to. You can't miss it. How long will you be?”
“Twenty-five minutes or so.”
“I'll be waiting,” she said.
The wind off the ocean was pretty stiff today, bending the trees in Golden Gate Heights Park and making humming and rattling noises in their foliage. Nobody was out on the green; the only people I saw anywhere were a couple of kids on the playground equipment on the north side. I parked the car where I had yesterday, across from the Kiskadon house, and crossed the lawn with my head down: the wind slapped at my face and made my eyes water.
I found the path with no trouble, and Mrs. Kiskadon a few seconds later. Huddled inside a white alpaca coat, a bright blue scarf over her short hair, she was sitting on one of the benches at the near end of the circle, opposite a big cedar that grew in its center. She looked cold and solemn and worried.
“Thanks for coming,” she said as I sat down beside her. Then she shivered and said, “God, that wind is like ice.”
“We could go sit in my car.”
“No. Michael was still sleeping when I left, but I don't want to take the chance.”
“Why should it matt
er if he sees you talking to me?”
“He'll figure out why, if he does. Then he'll make trouble for me later on.”
“Trouble?”
“He yells,” she said, “he says things he doesn't mean. Or maybe he does mean them, I don't know. Then he'll ignore me for days, pretend I'm not even there.”
“I don't understand, Mrs. Kiskadon.”
“It's his illness,” she said. “And his obsession with finding out about his father.”
“Suppose you start with the illness.”
“Did he tell you what it was? That he almost died from it?”
“He did, yes. Diabetes.”
“But I'll bet he didn't tell you what it did to him psychologically. I'm not even sure he knows. He used to be optimistic, cheerful… normal. Now he has severe mood swings, periods of deep depression. His whole personality has changed.”
“That's understandable, given the circumstances.”
“That's what his doctor says too. But the doctor doesn't have to live with Michael and I do. He can be… well, almost unbearable at times.”
“He doesn't get violent, does he?”
“No, no, not toward me. But his depression gets so bad sometimes I think…” She broke off and made a fluttery, frustrated gesture with one gloved hand. “He has a gun,” she said.
“Gun?”
“A pistol. He keeps it locked up in his den.”
“Has he always had it, this pistol?”
“No. He bought it after he came home from the hospital.”
“Why?”
“There were reports of prowlers in the neighborhood, a burglary down on Cragmont. He said the gun was for protection.”
“But you don't think so?”
“I don't know what to think.”
“Has he ever threatened to use it on himself?”
“No. But I don't like the idea of it in the house. You can't blame me, can you?”
I didn't say anything. It wasn't a question I could answer.
“Then, there's this obsession with his father,” Mrs. Kiskadon said. “It's just not healthy.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because it isn't. It's all he talks about lately, all that seems to interest him. He spent close to two thousand dollars collecting all of his father's writings, and now he wants to spend God-knows-how-much more on a private investigation. We're not rich, you know. We're not even well off anymore.”
I had nothing to say to that either.
She said, “You're not even getting anywhere, are you? How could you after all those years?”
“I might be,” I said carefully.
“I don't care if you are. What does it matter why Harmon Crane shot himself? It's Michael I care about. It's me. Don't think my life hasn't been hell this past year because it has.”
“So you want me to quit my investigation.”
“Yes. It's foolish and it's only feeding his obsession.”
“My quitting wouldn't do any good,” I said. “As determined as he is, he'd only hire someone else. Someone not as scrupulous as I am, maybe; someone who'd cost him, and you, a lot more money in the long run.”
“I didn't mean to imply that you were dishonest…” She broke off again and stared up at the big cedar, as if she thought insight and sympathy might be hiding among its branches. “I don't know what to do,” she said in a small voice.
“Have you tried to get him into counseling?”
“A head doctor? He'd never go.”
“But have you tried?”
“I mentioned it once. He threw a fit.”
“Then I'm sorry, Mrs. Kiskadon, but that's the only advice I can give you.”
“You're going to go right on investigating,” she said with some bitterness.
“I have to; I made a commitment to your husband. If he asks me to quit, then I will; but it's got to be him. Meanwhile there's a chance, given enough time, that I'll come up with an answer that will satisfy him.”
“How much time?”
“I can't answer that yet.”
“More than a week?”
“Probably not.”
She gnawed flecks of lipstick off her lower lip; one fleck stuck to her front tooth like a dark red cavity. “I suppose you're right,” she said at length. The bitterness was gone; she sounded resigned now.
I said, “Why don't you talk to his doctor? A physician might be able to convince him that counseling is a good idea.”
“Yes, I'll do that.”
I got up on my feet. “You want me to go over first?”
“Please. I'll come in later; he'll think I've been out for a walk.”
I left her sitting there, huddled and feeling sorry for herself, and went back along the path and across the green to Twelfth Avenue. Lynn Kiskadon struck me as a self-centered and self-pitying woman, at least as concerned with her own difficulties as she was with her husband's; but I still felt sorry for her. There was no question that she'd had a rough time of it since Kiskadon's illness was diagnosed, and she had stood by him throughout. It would have been nice to do something for her, something noble like take myself off the job as she'd asked, or refuse payment for services rendered. But I wasn't feeling particularly noble these days. Besides which, I like to eat and to pay my bills.
It took Kiskadon almost a minute to answer the doorbell, but he didn't look as if he'd been asleep. He'd been eating something with mustard on it, if the little yellow blob on his chin was any indication. As soon as he saw me his eyes got bright with anticipation. He said, squirming a little, “Come in, come in. Have you found out something?”
“Not exactly, Mr. Kiskadon.”
“Then why…?”
“I'll explain inside.”
He let me in, still eager, and limped with me into the big family room. I told him what I'd been doing since we last talked, and why I was here now, and watched him hang on every word as if I had just brought news of a possible miracle cure for his medical condition.
“You're making progress,” he said. “I knew you would, I knew it. I'll check the Axe books, you wait right here.”
“I can do it…”
“No, no, I think I know which one it is,” and he thumped out on his cane, moving more quickly than he had on my last visit here. When he came back after a couple of minutes he said, “It's the last book he wrote, Axe and Pains. I was pretty sure it was. The murderer's name is Bertolucci, Angelo Bertolucci.”
He handed me the book and I opened it to the last chapter to check the spelling of the name. Kiskadon watched me, rumpling his already tousled clump of black hair.
I asked him, “Does the name mean anything to you?”
“No, nothing.”
“No one you talked to mentioned it?”
“I'm sure I'd remember if they had. Are you going out to Tomales now?”
“Not tonight. Tomorrow morning.”
“And then what?”
“That depends on what I find out in Tomales.”
He had other questions for me, pointless questions that I answered with more patience than I felt. I wanted to get away from there; it was almost six-thirty, and I was picking Kerry up at seven. But that wasn't the only reason. After my talk with Mrs. Kiskadon, the house and Kiskadon's pathetic eagerness were having a depressing effect on me.
I managed to extricate myself with a promise to call him tomorrow, as soon as I returned from Tomales. He insisted on shaking my hand at the door; his palm was damp and a little clammy, and I had to resist the impulse to wipe my own on my coat when I let go.
Outside, there was no sign of Mrs. Kiskadon. I wondered if she'd slipped into the house while I was there; I hadn't heard her, if so. Or maybe she was still over on that bench in the park, looking for answers to her problems in the branches of the big cedar tree.
NINE
Dinner that evening was more of a disaster than the previous night's earthquake. And I don't mean that metaphorically.
To begin with, I should have known
from its location what Il Roccaforte would be like. San Bruno Avenue is not exactly one of the city's ritzier neighborhoods, adjoining as it does the Southern Freeway interchange and the Hunters Point ghetto. I know a guy who lives in that area and he says it's not bad-blue-collar residential, mostly. But it's one of the last places you'd go looking for haute cuisine and an elegant, atmospheric dining experience.
The owners of Il Roccaforte had never heard of either haute cuisine or elegance. But the place was definitely atmospheric-in the same way a condemned waterfront pier is atmospheric. And without a doubt eating there was one hell of an experience.
It was in a building all its own, so old and creaky-looking it might have been a survivor of the 1906 earthquake, sandwiched between a laundromat and a country-and-western bar called the Bull's Buns. Kerry said, “My God!” in a horrified voice as we drove up, and I couldn't tell if she meant Il Roccaforte or the Bull's Buns or both. She didn't have anything else to say. She had been conspicuously silent since I'd picked her up, which was always a storm warning with her: it was plain she'd had a very bad day in the advertising business, running ideas up flagpoles and seeing if they saluted, or whatever the current Madison Avenue slang expression was, and that she was in no mood for what awaited us inside Il Roccaforte.
Please, Lord, I thought, let it be an uneventful evening. Not a good one, not even a companionable one-just uneventful.
But He wasn't listening.
We got out of the car and went inside. The motif, if you could call it that, was early Depression: some dusty Chianti bottles on shelves here and there, the corpses of three house-plants of dubious origin, a cracked and discolored painting of a peasant woman stomping grapes, tables with linen cloths on them that had not been white since the Truman Administration, and the smells of grease, garlic, and sour wine. Some people might have called the place funky, but none of that type had discovered it yet. The people like myself who called it a relic and a probable health hazard were the ones who, having taken one good look at it, no doubt stayed away in droves. The only customers at the moment, aside from a waiter who looked as if he might have been stuffed and left there for decoration, were Eberhardt and Wanda, tucked up together at a table in one corner.
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