Bones nd-14

by Bill Pronzini

  The fog stayed thick and roiling, retarding my speed, until I neared Petaluma; then it lifted into a high overcast and I was able to make better time. It was twenty of eleven when I came across the Golden Gate Bridge, and eleven on the nose when I walked into my flat. I was tired and I felt crawly and I wanted a shower and some sleep. My stomach was giving me hell too; so even though I had no appetite, and before I did anything else, I ate some mortadella and a wedge of gorgonzola and a carton of pineapple cottage cheese. Which was a bad idea, as it turned out. The stuff congealed in my stomach for some reason and gave me the twin devilments of heartburn and gas.

  I lay in bed belching and farting and trying to sleep. But I couldn't get rid of the persistent image of Bertolucci's buckshot-savaged corpse, of all that glistening blood. And I couldn't stop thinking about the why of his death, either. If it was connected with what happened in 1949, and my gut instincts still said that it was, the reason for the killing escaped me completely.

  Motive, motive, what was the damned motive?

  I was up at seven-ten in the morning, gritty-eyed and headachy and depressed. It took a long shower, followed by three cups of strong coffee, to clear away the remnants of the nightmares that had plagued my sleep. It was always that way after I stumbled on violent death: the bad dreams, the day-after depression. Some cops had become inured to the residue of violence; I never had, which was one of the reasons I had quit the force twenty-five years ago to open my own agency. No corpses to deal with then, I'd thought; just the pain and tears of the living. Well, I'd been wrong-Christ, how wrong I'd been. I had seen more death these past twenty-five years than I ever would have if I had stayed on the cops.

  I called Kerry's number at eight-thirty. No answer. That stirred me up a little, until I remembered that it was Saturday: she went jogging on Saturday mornings, sometimes in Golden Gate Park, sometimes around Lake Merced, sometimes down on the Marina Green. She wasn't one of those jogging fanatics; she didn't run every day, she didn't run fifty miles a week, she just ran on Saturdays for exercise. I forgave her for it, now that she had quit trying to coerce me into running with her. Everybody is entitled to one small lunacy.

  So I called Eberhardt's house, and he wasn't home either. That nettled me. Over at Wanda's again, probably; spending too damn much time with her since the Il Roccaforte fiasco, soothing her ruffled feathers. Or more likely stroking her unfeathered chest. Neglecting his work, mooning around like a lovesick jerk-he was beginning to annoy the hell out of me, and the next time I saw him I was going to tell him so. I considered calling him at Wanda's and decided I didn't want to talk to her. Nor him very badly, for that matter. Let him read about Bertolucci's death in the papers.

  As early as it was, I went ahead and dialed Kiskadon's number. I figured he would probably be up by now, and I wanted to reach him before DeKalb did. He was up, all right-he answered right away-and he sounded neither happy nor unhappy to hear from me. But he didn't know about Bertolucci yet or he would have said something when I asked him if I could stop by. He wanted to know if I had news; I said yes but it would be better if we discussed it in person; he told me to come over any time. There was a bitter, hopeless note in his voice that I didn't like.

  It was foggy on Golden Gate Heights; you could barely see the tops of the trees over in the park. Nobody was out and around. The whole area had a gray, abandoned look, like a neighborhood in a plague city. Some mood I was in when that sort of thought crossed my mind.

  Lynn Kiskadon answered the door. Pale-featured except for dark circles under her eyes, and bulgy again in another pair of too-tight Calvin Klein jeans. Before I could say anything, she stepped out on the porch, pulled the door against its latch, and held it there with one hand.

  She said, “He's waiting in his den. He thinks you've got bad news-I can tell by the way he looks.”

  “I'm afraid I have.”

  “Oh God, I knew it,” she said, “I knew it.” The words were like a lament, soft and moaning and edged with self-pity. “What have you found out?”

  “I'd rather say it just once, Mrs. Kiskadon.”

  “He won't want me in the room with the two of you.”

  “Why not?”

  “We had another fight. Wednesday night, after you and I talked in the park. He hasn't said five words to me since.”

  I didn't say anything.

  “I tried to call you on Thursday and again yesterday. I thought… I don't know what I thought. I don't know who else to turn to.”

  “What was the fight about?”

  “He won't see a psychiatrist, he won't even talk to his own doctor. He just won't face the truth about himself.”

  “He sounded depressed on the phone,” I said.

  “Worse than I've ever seen him. He just sits in his den reading his father's books and stories. Won't eat, won't talk, just sits there until all hours. Do you have to tell him this news of yours?”

  “I don't have a choice.”

  “It's really so bad?”

  “Not to you or me. But it will be to him.”

  “Then don't tell him! God knows what he might do.”

  “Mrs. Kiskadon, if you're afraid of that gun of his, why don't you get it out of his desk and hide it somewhere?”

  “It's in a locked drawer and he has the only key. And he's in the den all the time.”

  “I've still got to tell him,” I said. “If I don't, the Marin County Sheriffs Department will.”

  “Sheriff's Department? My God, what-”

  “We'd better go inside, Mrs. Kiskadon.”

  She made a little whiny noise, but she let me reach around her and push open the door and prod her gently inside. It was quiet in the house-too quiet to suit me right now. We went through the living room and along the short hall to the door to Kiskadon's den. I knocked and said his name, and from inside he said, “It's open, come ahead,” and we went in.

  He was sitting in the recliner chair, his cane laid across his lap, a cold pipe in one corner of his mouth. The table at his elbow was stacked with pulps, issues of Collier's and American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, three of the Johnny Axe novels. He didn't look any different than he had the last time I'd been here-except for his eyes. There was no animation in them; they were as dark and lightless as burned-out bulbs. And the whites were flecked and streaked with blood.

  He said, “You'll excuse me if I don't get up. My leg's bothering me today.”

  I moved toward him by a couple of steps, and Lynn Kiskadon shut the door and stood back against it. Kiskadon looked at her, the kind of look that told her silently and bitterly to get out. She said, “I'm staying, Michael. I have a right to hear this too.”

  He didn't answer her. As far as he was concerned, she had gone out. He said to me, with the bitterness in his voice, “Glad tidings, I trust?”

  “I'm sorry, no.”

  “I didn't think so. Well? I'm ready.”

  I told him. The evident affair between Harmon Crane and Kate Bertolucci, my suspicions, Angelo Bertolucci's murder-not softening any of it but not going into unnecessary detail either. Once, when I first mentioned the murder, Lynn Kiskadon made the little whiny noise again behind me. Otherwise the only sound in the room was my own voice. Kiskadon didn't speak or move or display any reaction to what I said; his face was as blank as his eyes.

  When I finished there were maybe ten seconds of silence. Then he said, “So my father was an adulterer and a murderer. Well, well.” No bitterness in his tone now. No emotion at all. The flat, genderless voice of a programmed machine.

  “We don't know that he killed anyone, Mr. Kiskadon.”

  “Don't we? It seems plain enough to me.”

  “Not to me,” I said. “Bertolucci could just as easily have been the one responsible for his wife's death. Maybe even somebody else.”

  “Just the same, my father had to be involved, didn't he? If he wasn't involved, he wouldn't have become begun drinking so heavily afterward, he wouldn't have become so depressed
. He wouldn't have shot himself, now would he?”

  “We don't have all the facts yet-”

  “Enough to suit me.”

  “There's still the murder last night,” I said.

  “I don't care about that.”

  “You'd better care about it, Mr. Kiskadon. I think Bertolucci was killed because of what happened in 1949.”

  “Does that make my father any less guilty?”

  “I don't know. It might.”

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “You don't seem to understand. This isn't an archeological expedition anymore, it isn't a simple search for the motive in your father's suicide. It's a homicide case now.”

  “I don't give a damn,” he said.

  “Is that what you're going to say to Sergeant DeKalb when he shows up?”

  “To hell with Sergeant DeKalb. If he wants to arrest me for any reason, let him. I don't care. That's what you don't seem to understand. I don't care who killed Bertolucci, I don't care who killed his slut of a wife or why, I don't care about any of it anymore.”

  “Why not? Just because your father wasn't the kind of man you thought he was?”

  No answer. Kiskadon wasn't looking at me either, now. He reached for the canister of tobacco on the table and methodically began to load the bowl of his pipe.

  I glanced around at Lynn Kiskadon. Her expression was pleading, helpless; her eyes said, You see? You see?

  I saw, all right. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, not for him and not for her. What could I do? I was no head doctor; I didn't know the first thing about dealing with the kinds of neuroses running around inside Kiskadon's skull. I was fortunate if I could deal with the ones inside my own.

  Kiskadon struck a kitchen match and lit his pipe. When he had it drawing he said, still without looking at me, “I appreciate all you've done, but I won't need your services any longer. Send me a bill for the balance of what I owe you. Or I can write you a check right now if you'd prefer it that way.”

  Nothing to say to that except, “Have it your way, Mr. Kiskadon. I'll send you a bill.” Nothing to do then except to turn and walk out of there, avoiding Mrs. Kiskadon's eyes. And nothing to do after that except to feel twice as shitty and twice as frustrated on the drive back home.

  EIGHTEEN

  Ten minutes after I came into my flat, just as I was about to call Kerry, the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and said hello, and there was a wheezing intake of breath followed by a series of fitful coughs. So I knew it was Stephen Porter even before he identified himself.

  “That box of Harmon Crane's papers I told you about,” he said, panting a little. “I finally found it. It was in the basement, just as I thought, but hidden at the bottom of Adam's old steamer trunk.”

  “Anything among the papers that might help me?”

  “Well, I really can't say. Most of them are manuscript carbons. There are some letters written to Harmon, and some by him, but they seem mostly to be business-related. Of course-” He coughed again. “Of course, I haven't read everything. Perhaps you'll be able to find something useful.”

  “Perhaps. When can I have a look at them?”

  “Right away, if you like. I'd drop the box off to you, but I have a student coming at noon…”

  “No, no, I'll come by your studio. Half an hour okay?”

  “Yes, fine. I'll be”-more coughing-” I'll be here.”

  I postponed the call to Kerry and started immediately for North Beach. The weather was better over there and the tourists and Saturday slummers were out in full force; there was no way I was going to find legal street parking. And the nearest garage to Porter's place was blocks away. So I parked in a bus zone down the street from his building, the hell with it.

  Porter was wearing the same green smock and the same red bow tie, or at least identical twins to the ones he'd had on the last time I was here: both were spotted with dried clay. He had a cigarette burning in one hand and what breath he had left made burbling noises in his nose and throat.

  The box was on one of the clay-smeared worktables, cardboard and largish; the papers jammed into it looked to be mostly yellow foolscap. I asked Porter if he wanted me to sort through them here, and he said, “No, you can take the box with you,” and then lapsed into a coughing fit so severe it bent him double and turned his face an apoplectic beet red. I wanted to do something for him but there wasn't anything to do. I just stood there, feeling helpless, until he got his breath back.

  “One of my bad days,” he said. “Damned emphysema.”

  Damned cigarettes, I thought.

  I carried the box to the studio door. Porter went with me, firing up another Camel on the way. Walking dead man, I thought then. And tried not to let him see the pity I felt when I said good-bye.

  Manuscript carbons. Handwritten notes. Typed fragments and unfinished stories. Letters from Crane's New York agent and from the editors of various book and magazine publishers. Carbons of letters from Crane to those same individuals. A few personal letters addressed to Crane. Carbons of his responses and some other personal correspondence. Most of his papers, it seemed, from 1942 until the time of his death.

  Sitting at the kitchen table, thinking that Harmon Crane had been something of a pack rat, I finished sorting out the sheets of stationery and yellow foolscap and then began methodically to wade through them. The manuscript carbons first: two of the Johnny Axe novels, Axe for Trouble and Don't Axe Me; and more than thirty short stories and novelettes, most of them featuring Johnny Axe, all of them marked SOLD and bearing both a date and the name of either a pulp or a slick magazine. I riffled through some of the manuscripts from 1949. Plenty to interest a collector or a scholar; nothing to interest a detective. I put the carbons back into the box and gave my attention to the notes and fragments.

  Most of the handwritten notes-none of which were dated-seemed to be ideas for stories: “Carny owner shot, geek arrested by cops, Axe hired as new geek-funny or too bizarre?” The typed sheets were nearly all one and two pages in length: story openings, descriptions of places and people, clever bits of dialogue, brief plot synopses. There were also two longer fragments. The first was headed Kick Axe! ran to fourteen pages, and appeared to be an early draft of the opening chapter of Axe and Pains. I read through it, looking for Bertolucci's name, but it wasn't there.

  The other segment bore a pulpish title-“You Can't Run Away from Death”-and was a little over eight pages long. Unfinished pulp story, I thought. But it wasn't. Halfway through the first page I realized it was something much more than that.

  Numb with shock, Rick Durbin stared at the body on the cabin floor. Carla. It was Carla! Somebody had come here while he was in the village buying groceries. Somebody had beaten her to death with a chunk of stovewood.

  Borelli, he thought. It had to be her husband, Borelli.

  Durbin fell to his knees beside her. He wanted to cry but he had no tears. He'd loved her. Or had he? He didn't know. He didn't know anything right now except that she was dead. Murdered. Lying here so still, blood shining in her red hair, where only an hour ago she had been so warm and vibrant and alive.

  What was he going to do?

  What Durbin did, on page 2, was to pick up the body, carry it outside and away from the isolated cabin on a body of water called Anchor Bay, and bury it. In an earthquake fissure: there had been a “terrifying” earthquake the day before. He did that instead of notifying the authorities because he was afraid they would suspect him of the crime. He had no proof the husband, Borelli, had murdered Carla. And he was the cabin's tenant; he was staying there alone. And Carla was another man's wife; his wife was back home in San Francisco. Even if he could make the sheriff believe his story, there was the scandal to consider: Durbin was a writer, he had a film deal pending in Hollywood for one of his books, the notoriety would ruin his career.

  Durbin went back to the cabin and cleaned the bloodstains off the floor. Then he gathered up Carla's purse and other belongings, put th
em into the fissure with her body, and used dirt and grass and oyster shells to conceal his handiwork. No one would ever know, he thought; no one had suspected his affair with Carla-except Borelli-because they had been very careful to keep it a secret. There was nothing to connect Carla or her disappearance to him. With her buried, he thought, he was completely safe.

  When the job was done he packed his own belongings and drove straight home to San Francisco. But he couldn't forget Carla or what he'd done. Her dead face haunted his dreams, saying over and over, “You told me you loved me. How can you do this to someone you loved?” He couldn't sleep, couldn't work. He thought time and again of returning to Anchor Bay, making a clean breast to the authorities, showing them where he had buried her; but he couldn't find the courage-it was too late, they would never believe him now that so much time had elapsed. He began to drink too much in a futile effort to drown his guilt and to ward off a growing paranoia.

  Every time the telephone or doorbell rang, Durbin was terrified that it would be the police. Or, almost as bad, that it would be Borelli. Borelli was a violent man, a dangerous man. And he wasn't stupid. He knew something had been done with Carla's body. He knew who and why. He might not be satisfied to let it go at that. He might decide to eliminate the one man who knew the truth, who could put him in the gas chamber for Carla's murder. What if he comes here? What if he tries to kill me too? What if he

  What if

  That was where it ended. To Stephen Porter, to me before I began to realize what had happened at Tomales Bay in October of 1949, these pages would seem to be the beginning of a pulp story, unsalable and abandoned because it was too emotional and too immoral for its time; but what it really was was a pathetic attempt by Crane to purge his demons by fictionalizing the truth-a confession that was never intended to be read, that his pack-rat tendencies had kept him from destroying after he was no longer able to continue it. Positive proof of why he had taken his own life later on, all the dark, bleak, ugly motives: guilt, fear, self-loathing, paranoia. And maybe he had loved Kate Bertolucci, at least a little; maybe that was part of it too. He not only hadn't had the guts to try to see her murderer punished, he had tucked her away in the ground as if she were nothing more than a dead animal.