No part of the confession had surprised me much, but seeing it all down in black-on-yellow, in Harmon Crane's own words, had deepened my own depression. I got up from the table and opened a can of Miller Lite and carried it into the front room. Patches of fog were still swirling over this part of the city; I stood in the bay window, watching the clash of blue and gray overhead and thinking of how Kiskadon would react if he read those pages. Well, he wasn't going to read them, not if I could help it. He had fired me this morning; I no longer had an obligation to share my findings with him.
My findings. What was I doing here this afternoon, anyway, rummaging through all those old papers, fueling my rotten mood by wallowing in a poor dead writer's thirty-five-year-old weakness and torment? My job was done, for Christ's sake. I had been hired to find out why Crane killed himself, and I had found out, and I had been summarily fired for my efforts. And that was that.
Well, wasn't it?
Bertolucci's murder, I thought. Somebody killed him and the reason is linked to Harmon Crane and the hell with all this thinking. The job's not done yet and you know it. Quit maundering about it.
I finished the beer and went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table again. All right. Business correspondence. Letters from his agent informing him of acceptance of novels and short stories, of subsidiary rights sales on the Johnny Axe series. Other letters from the agent suggesting slick magazine story ideas or offering market tips. Letters from editors asking for revisions on this or that project. A two-page rejection letter detailing the reasons why a pulp editor was returning a story, across the first page of which Crane had scrawled the word Bullshit! Carbons of Crane's responses to some of the above. Carbons of cover letters sent with manuscript submissions to his agent and to various editors. Other business letters discussing financial matters with his agent, or making a specific point in rebuttal to an editorial request for revision; the latter were often phrased satirically, to take the sting out of the words: “Johnny Axe would never shoot an unarmed man, Mr. E., no matter that the unarmed man in this case is a 7-foot-tall Hindu snake charmer bent on remolding the shape of Johnny's spine. I have it on good authority that Mr. A. would not even shoot the snake unless it were packing a loaded gat.”
Nothing for me there; I went on to the personal letters addressed to Crane, those dated the last few months of 1949. Fan mail, most of them, including a note on baby blue stationery from a woman in Michigan who said she had had “a wickedly erotic dream about dear Johnny Axe” and wondered if Mr. Crane ever passed through East Lansing on his way to and from New York because she'd love to meet him. Nothing from Kate Bertolucci. Nothing from Angelo Bertolucci. A scribbled note from Russ Dancer, suggesting a possible collaborative story idea; Crane had written at the bottom: “Come on Russ-trite!” A fannish note from Stephen Porter, telling Crane how much he'd enjoyed Axe of Mercy. Nothing from anyone else whose name I was familiar with.
Which left me with the carbons of personal letters Crane himself had written. The bulk of these were responses to fan letters, including a polite but unencouraging note to the lady in East Lansing. Letters to Russ Dancer and a couple of other writers, most of which were both humorous and scatological in tone; none of these was dated later than September of 1949. Only a few bore a post-October 15 date, and among those was a personal note dated December 7, Pearl Harbor Day:
Dear L:
This is a difficult letter to write. Doubly so because I can't think straight these days (yes, I know the booze only makes it worse). But there's no one else I can turn to.
You know how I feel about Mandy. She's more important to me than anything else. If anything happens to me I want you to see to it she's cared for, financially and every other way. Can I count on you to do that?
The fact is, I can't go on much longer. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't work. Sometimes I think I'm close to losing my mind. There is too much festering inside me that I can't talk about, to you or to anyone else. No one must ever know the truth, least of all Mandy. It would hurt her too much.
Life terrifies me more than death, yet I've been too much of a coward to put an end to it. At least I have been up to now. Soon I may find the strength. Or perhaps circumstances will take it out of my hands. In any case I will be better off dead, free of all this pain. And Mandy will be better off without me, even though she will never understand why.
As Johnny might say, I axe no mercy and I seek no help. There is no mercy or help for me. I know what I am. I ask only your word that you will take care of Mandy.
That was all. If he'd had anything else to say, it had gone into a postscript on the original.
I read the carbon again, then a third time. Further proof that Crane had been contemplating suicide for some time before December 10; that his mind had deteriorated to the point where death was the only answer. A little rambling toward the end: his mental state combined with the alcohol. Otherwise, coherent enough. Nothing unintelligible about it, nothing off-key.
Yet it struck an odd note for me, and I couldn't figure out why.
Mandy was Amanda, of course. But who was L? Why was he or she the only one Crane felt he could turn to about his wife? I knew of no one close to Crane whose first or last name began with the letter L. A nickname?
Maybe Porter would know. I went into the bedroom and rang up his studio and got him on the line. And he said, “L? No, I can't think of anyone at all. Certainly none of Harmon's intimates had a name beginning with that letter.”
Back into the kitchen to reread the carbon. That same odd note… but why? Why?
The answer continued to elude me, even after three more readings. Put it aside for now, I thought, come back to it later. I paper-clipped it to Crane's fictionalized confession and left those sheets on the table. The rest of the stuff I put back into the cardboard box. Then I got another beer out of the refrigerator and went to call Kerry.
I needed some cheering up-bad.
She came over and cheered me up. A little while later I thought about rereading the carbon another time, but I didn't do it; I didn't want to get depressed all over again. Instead I reached for Kerry and suggested she cheer me up some more.
“Sex maniac,” she said.
“Damn right,” I said.
I cheered her up, too, this time.
At nine-thirty that night the telephone rang. Kerry and I were back in bed, watching an intellectual film- Godzilla vs. Mothra — on the tube. I caught up the receiver and said hello, and Wanda the Footwear Queen said, “You know who this is?” in a voice so slurred I could barely understand the words. Drunk as a barfly-the kind of drunk that teeters on the line between weepy and nasty.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Juss want you know I hate your guts. Hers too, lil miss two fried eggs. Both your guts.”
“Listen, why don't you go sleep it off-”
“Whyn't you go fuck yourself, huh?” she said, and I sighed and hung up on her.
“Who was that?” Kerry asked.
“The voice of unreason,” I said.
And I thought: Poor Eberhardt. Poor, blind, stupid Eberhardt.
NINETEEN
Sunday.
Kerry and I went downtown to the St. Francis Hotel for an early brunch, something we do occasionally. Afterward she suggested a drive down the coast and I said okay; the fog and high overcast had blown inland during the night, making the day clear and bright, if still windy. But I wasn't in much of a mood for that kind of Sunday outing. Not depressed so much today as restless-what a Texan I had known in the Army called a “daunciness”; I couldn't seem to relax, I couldn't seem to keep my mind off Harmon Crane and Michael Kiskadon and that damned letter carbon addressed to somebody with the initial L.
As perceptive as she is, Kerry read my mood and understood it. We were in Pacifica, following Highway One along the edge of the ocean, when she said, “Why don't we go back?”
“What?”
“Back home. You're not enjoying yourself and neither am
I. You can drop me at my place if you'd rather be alone.”
“Uh-uh. We'll go back, but I don't want to be alone. I'll only brood.”
“You're doing that now.”
“I'll do it worse if you're not around.”
It was noon when we got back to the city. I drove to Pacific Heights-doing it automatically, without consulting Kerry. But she didn't seem to mind. Inside my flat, she went to make us some fresh coffee and I sat down with the box of Harmon Crane's papers. I reread the letter carbon. I reread the fictionalized confession. I reread the carbon one more time.
I was still bothered. And I still didn't know why.
Kerry had brought me some coffee and was sitting on the couch, reading one of my pulps. I said to her, “Let's play some gin rummy.”
She looked up. “Are you sure that's what you want to do?”
“Sure I'm sure. Why?”
“You get grumpy when you lose at gin.”
“Who says I'm going to lose?”
“You always lose when you're in a mood like this. You don't concentrate and you misplay your cards.”
“Is that so? Get the cards.”
“I'm telling you, you'll lose.”
“Get the cards. I'm not going to lose.”
She got the cards, and we played five hands and I lost every one because I couldn't concentrate and misplayed my cards. I hate it when she's right. I lost the sixth hand, too: she caught me with close to seventy points-goddamn face cards, I never had learned not to hoard face cards.
“You're a hundred and thirty-seven points down already,” she said. “You want to quit?”
“Shut up and deal,” I said grumpily.
And the telephone rang.
“Now who the hell is that?”
“Why don't you answer it and find out?”
“Oh, you're a riot, Alice,” I said, which was a Jackie Gleason line from the old “Honeymooners” TV show. But she didn't get it. She said, “Who's Alice?” The telephone kept on ringing; I said, “One of these days, Alice, bang, zoom, straight to the moon,” and got up and went into the bedroom to answer it.
A woman's voice made an odd chattering sound: “Muh-muh-muh,” like an engine that kept turning over but wouldn't catch. But it wasn't funny; there was a familiar whining note of despair in the voice.
“Mrs. Kiskadon? What's the matter?”
She made the sound again, as if there were a liquidy blockage in her throat and she couldn't push the words past it. I told her to calm down, take a couple of deep breaths. I heard her do that; then she made a different noise, a kind of strangled gulping, that broke the blockage and let the words come spilling out.
“It's Michael… you've got to help me, please, I don't know what to do!”
“What about Michael?”
“He said… he said he was going to kill himself…”
I could feel the tension come into me, like air filling and expanding a balloon. “When was this?”
“A little while ago. He locked himself in his den last night after that Marin policeman left, he wouldn't come out, he sat in there all night doing God knows what. But this afternoon… he came out this afternoon and he had that gun in his hand, he was just carrying it in his hand, and he said… he…”
“Easy. Did you call his doctor?”
“No, I didn't think… I was too upset…”
“Have you called anyone else?”
“No. Just you… you were the only person I could think of.”
“All right. Is your husband in his den now?”
“I don't know,” she said, “I'm not home.”
“Not home? Where are you?”
“I couldn't stay there, I just… I couldn't, I had to get out of there…”
“Where are you?” I asked her again.
“A service station. On Van Ness.”
“How long have you been away from your house?”
“I don't know, not long…”
“Listen to me. What did your husband say before you left? Tell me his exact words.”
“He said… I don't remember his exact words, it was something about shooting himself the way his father did, like father like son, it was crazy talk…”
“Did he sound crazy? Incoherent?”
“No. He was calm, that awful calm.”
“Did he say anything else?”
“No, no, nothing.”
“What did he do?”
“Went back into the den and locked the door.”
“And then you left?”
“Yes. I told you, I couldn't stay there…”
“How soon did you leave?”
“Right away. A minute or two.”
“So it hasn't been more than fifteen or twenty minutes since he made his threat. He's probably all right; there's no reason to panic. You go back home and try to reason with him. Meanwhile, I'll call his doctor for you-”
“No,” she said, “I can't go back there alone. Not alone. If you come… I'll meet you there…”
“There's nothing I can do-”
“Please,” she said, “I'll go home now, I'll wait for you.”
“Mrs. Kiskadon, I think you-”
But there was a clicking sound and she was gone.
I put the handset back into its cradle. And left it there: I couldn't call Kiskadon's doctor because I didn't know who he was; she hadn't given me time to ask his name.
When I turned around Kerry was standing in the bedroom doorway. She said, “What was that all about?”
“Kiskadon threatened to kill himself a while ago. His wife is pretty upset; she wants me to go over there.”
“Do you think he meant it?”
“I hope not.”
“But he might have.”
“Yeah,” I said, “he might have.”
“Then what are you waiting for? Go, for God's sake.”
I went.
The green Ford Escort was parked in the driveway when I got to Twelfth Avenue and Lynn Kiskadon was sitting stiffly behind the wheel. She didn't move as I pulled to the curb in front, or when I got out and went around behind the Ford and up along her side. She didn't seem to know I was there until I tapped lightly on the window; then she jerked, like somebody coming out of a daze, and her head snapped around. Behind the glass her face had a frozen look, pale and haggard, the eyes staring with the same fixed emptiness as the stuffed rodents in Angelo Bertolucci's display cases.
I reached down and opened the door. She said, “I didn't think you were coming,” in a voice that was too calm, too controlled. She was one breath this side of a scream and two breaths short of hysteria.
“Did you check on your husband, Mrs. Kiskadon?”
“No. I've been sitting here waiting.”
“You should have gone in-”
“I can't go in there,” she said.
“You have to.”
“No. I can't go in there, don't you understand?”
“All right.”
“You go. I'll wait here.”
“You'll have to give me the key.”
She pulled the one out of the ignition and handed me the leather case it was attached to. “The big silver one,” she said. “You have to wiggle it to get it into the lock.”
I left her, went around the Ford and over onto the porch. I had just put the house key into the latch when I heard the car door slam. I didn't turn; I finished unlocking the door and pushed it open and walked inside.
Silence, except for the distant hum of an appliance that was probably the refrigerator. I went into the living room by a couple of paces, half-turning so that I could look back at the doorway. Lynn Kiskadon appeared there, hesitated, then entered and shut the door behind her.
“I couldn't wait out there,” she said. “I wanted to but I couldn't. It's cold in the car.”
I didn't say anything. Instead I went through into the hallway and along it to the closed door to Kiskadon's den. There wasn't anything to hear when I put my ear up close to the panel and li
stened. I knocked, called Kiskadon's name, and then identified myself.
No answer from inside.
Lynn Kiskadon was standing behind me, close enough so that I could hear the irregular rhythm of her breathing. There was a knot in my stomach and another one in my throat; the palms of my hands felt greasy. I wiped the right one on my pantleg, reached out and turned the doorknob. Locked.
I bent to examine the lock. It was the push-button kind that allows you to secure the door from either side. I straightened and looked at Mrs. Kiskadon; her skin seemed even paler now, splotched in places so that it resembled the color of buttermilk. “He might not be in there,” I said. “He might be somewhere else in the house. Or outside.”
“No,” she said. “He's in there.”
“I'll look around anyway. You wait here.”
“Yes. All right.”
It took me three minutes to search the place and determine that Michael Kiskadon wasn't anywhere else on the premises or in the yard out back. The knots in my stomach and throat were bigger, tighter, when I came back into the hallway. Lynn Kiskadon hadn't moved. She was standing there staring at the door as if it were the gateway to hell.
I said, “No other way inside except this door?”
“No.”
“What about the window?”
“You'd have to use a ladder from the yard.”
“Do you have a ladder?”
“Yes, but it's not high enough. We always hire somebody to do the windows, you see. There's a man who comes around, a handyman… he has a very high ladder.”
“Mrs. Kiskadon, the only way I can get in there is to break down the door. Do you want me to do that?”
“Yes.”
“You're sure?”
“Yes. Go ahead, do it. Break it down.”
I caught hold of the knob. And a thought came to me: This is the way it was thirty-five years ago, the night Harmon Crane died. I shook it away. One sharp bump of my shoulder against the panel told me it was a tight lock and that I wasn't going to get in by using that method. I stepped back, used the wall behind me for leverage, and drove the sole of my shoe into the wood just above the latch. That did it. There was a splintering sound as the bolt tore loose from the jamb-plate, and the door wobbled inward.
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