Bones nd-14

by Bill Pronzini

  Unscratched, undented. And gleaming with what had to be new paint. The whole damn car had been repainted.

  He was a shrewd bastard, Mr. TJY. He'd had bodywork done on the Caddy right away, followed by the brand-new paint job, and I should have known that was what he'd do. Hide anything that might be incriminating and hide it quick. And no ordinary body shop-the type that keeps records and cooperates with the police-to do the work, either. He'd been a shyster for too many years not to pick up the name of somebody who would do repair work, sanding, and painting on the QT, for the right price.

  And there, goddamn it, went the only solid piece of evidence linking Yankowski to the murder of Angelo Bertolucci.

  I moved away from the Caddy, over to the main asphalt path that led out onto the cliffs. Sunset Trail, they called it, and it was an apt name: the sunset starting on the horizon now, in deep golds streaked with red, was quite a sight from up here. Just as impressive, from farther along, was the view you had of Ocean Beach all the way to the Cliff House in the hazy distance. Not so impressive, lying closer in, were the offshore dredgers and the long finger of the pipeline pier that were part of an endless city sewage project.

  Irregular sandy paths branched off the main path, meandering through dark red and brown and green iceplant to the rim of the cliffs. A few people were out there, one of them with an easel set up, painting the sunset; none of them was old enough to be Yankowski. I stayed on Sunset Trail. I have a thing about heights, and the dropoff over there was sheer and at least two hundred feet to the strip of beach below.

  Benches were strung out at intervals along the trail, and on one of them a fifth of a mile from the parking lot I found Yankowski. He was sitting there alone, nobody else within a hundred yards, watching the quicksilver shimmer of the dying sun on the water. The wind was strong and turning cold and I wasn't dressed warmly enough; goosebumps had spread up my arms and across my shoulders. But old Yank-'Em-Out was bundled up in a heavy mackinaw and gloves and a Scottish cap, and he looked as relaxed and comfortable as he had the day I'd talked to him in his own back yard.

  He didn't pay any attention to me until I stopped in front of him, blocking his view, and said, “Hello, Yankowski.”

  His frown was full of displeasure. “You again. I thought I told you I didn't want anything more to do with you.”

  “Yes? Well, you're going to have plenty more to do with me, Counselor. Starting right now.”

  “I am not,” he said, and he got up and pushed past me and started back along Sunset Trail. At first I thought he was going to stay on it, which would have made bracing him easier for me; instead he veered off onto one of the sandy paths toward the cliff edge. I hesitated-I just don't like heights-but I went after him anyway, skirting scrub bushes and passing over tiny dunes like faceless heads with iceplant for hair.

  Yankowski stopped a few feet from the edge, where the ground rose a little and then fell away sharply into an eroded declivity. I stopped too, but a couple of steps farther back and at an angle to him. Still, I was close enough to the edge so that I could look down part of the cliff face, see the surf licking at the beach far away at the bottom. The gooseflesh rippled on my arms and shoulders, a sensation that had nothing to do with the wind or the cold.

  “Yankowski.”

  He turned. “Damn you, go away. Leave me alone.”

  “No. You're going to talk to me.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I know you killed Angelo Bertolucci,” I said. “And I know why.”

  He had a good poker face, from all his years in court, but he couldn't keep his body from stiffening. His gloved hands hooked into fists-and then relaxed. He watched me silently out of dark, cold eyes that had no fear in them, only wariness and an animal cunning.

  I said, “Well? Do we talk?”

  “You talk,” he said. “I'll listen.”

  “Sure, why not. I've got the whole thing figured out, starting with Harmon Crane. I'll tell you the way I think it was; you tell me if I'm right.”

  He pursed his lips and said nothing. Past him, the fiery rim of the sun was just fusing with the ocean; the swath it laid across the water was turning from silver to gold.

  I said, “All right. Crane liked to get away from the city from time to time, to be alone for a week or two; he worked better that way. He liked the isolation of Tomales Bay and he rented a cabin up there from Angelo Bertolucci. Bertolucci didn't like Crane much, but he liked Crane's money. What Crane liked was Bertolucci's wife, Kate.

  “I don't know how long he and Kate Bertolucci had been seeing each other, when or how it started. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter either that they both had reasons for turning to each other, or what those reasons were. What's important is that they had an affair, and that Bertolucci found out about it.

  “Bertolucci went to the cabin one day in late October of 1949, probably with the idea of catching his wife and Crane together. But she was there alone; Crane had gone to buy groceries. There was an argument; Bertolucci lost his head and clubbed her to death with a piece of stovewood. Then panic set in and he ran.

  “Crane came back and found the body and he panicked. Instead of notifying the county sheriff, he cleaned up the blood and buried Kate's body in a fissure opened by an earthquake the day before. After which he packed up and beat it back to San Francisco. But the whole ugly business was too much for his conscience. Guilt began to eat at him. And paranoia: he was afraid Bertolucci might decide to come after him too. He started hitting the bottle; he didn't have the guts to do anything else, including confront Bertolucci.

  “Six weeks or so went by and nothing happened except that Crane's mental condition kept getting wrose. He thought about killing himself but he didn't have the guts for that either, not quite. He almost wished Bertolucci would come and do it for him.”

  I paused. “How am I doing so far, Yankowski?”

  He stayed silent, unmoving. His eyes were small and black under the bill of his cap-little poison-drops of hate.

  “So then came the night of December tenth,” I said, “and Crane's death. But it wasn't suicide, the way everybody thought-the way I thought myself until this morning. That locked office was what threw all of us. The police had ruled out any gimmick work with the door and windows; it had to be suicide. Only it wasn't, it was murder.”

  Yankowski said, “And I suppose you think I murdered him.”

  “No. I think Bertolucci murdered him, just as Crane was afraid he might. And I think you covered it up for Bertolucci by making it look like a suicide.”

  “Now why would I do that?”

  “Because you were in love with Amanda Crane and you didn't want Crane's affair and the rest of it to come out; you knew she was the fragile type and you were afraid of what the scandal might do to her. But you miscalculated, Yankowski. You did it all for nothing. Her mind wasn't even strong enough to withstand a suicide; she cracked up and never recovered. And you, the big Prince Charming, you abandoned her. You weren't about to saddle yourself with half a woman who needed constant care-not a fast-rising young shyster like you.”

  He said between his teeth, “You son of a bitch.”

  “Me? That's a laugh, coming from one as nasty as you.”

  His hands fisted again. He seemed to lean forward a little, shifting his weight. The hate in his eyes was as cold and black as death.

  “Go ahead,” I said, “try it. But you'll be the one who goes over the edge, not me. I've got forty pounds and fifteen years on you.”

  The tension stayed in him a couple of seconds longer; he glanced away from me, down the sandy cut to the cliff wall and the beach far below. Then he relaxed, not slowly but all at once. He liked living, Yank-'Em-Out did, and he wanted to hang onto the time he had left. I watched him regroup. You could almost see the internal shifting of gears, almost hear the click and whir of the shrewd little computer inside his head.

  Pretty soon he said, “You think you know what happened at Crane's house that night? Go ah
ead, tell me.”

  I relaxed a little too, but I stayed wary. And I kept my feet spread and planted on the firmer footing of the iceplant. I said, “To begin with, Crane didn't telephone you and ask you to come to his house; it was the other way around. You went to see him at your initiative.”

  “Did I? Why?”

  “Because he sent you a letter asking you to take care of Amanda if anything happened to him; he either knew or suspected how you felt about her. The letter mentioned suicide, too-he must have worked himself up to the point where he figured he could finally do it-and also hinted that he had a deep dark secret he couldn't tell anyone, least of all his wife. You're not the type to let a challenge like that go by. You went to his place to try to pry it out of him.”

  “How do you know about this alleged letter?”

  “Crane kept a carbon of it. I found it among some papers of his.”

  “You claim it was addressed to me? That it has my name on it?”

  I didn't lie to him; if his memory was good enough, he knew better. I didn't say anything. But I was certain that the letter had been addressed to him; once the rest of it came clear, so had the meaning of the “Dear L” salutation. “L” wasn't the first letter of somebody's name. It was the first letter of Yankowski's profession. Dear L: Dear Lawyer.

  Yankowski said, “It makes no difference either way. If such a letter exists, I submit it contains nothing incriminating to me and I deny ever receiving it.”

  “We'll see what the law has to say about that.”

  “The law,” he said. Contempt bracketed the words. “Don't talk about the law to me, detective. The law is a tool, to be used and manipulated by those who understand it.”

  “What a sweet bastard you are.”

  We watched each other-the two old pit bulls, one of us with the stain of blood on his muzzle. The wind gusted, swirling particles of sand that stung my cheek. Out to sea, the bottom quarter of the sun had slid below the horizon. The surface in front of it looked as if it were on fire, the dredgers close to shore as if they were burned-out hulks that the flames had consumed before moving on.

  “You want to hear the rest of it?” I said at length. “Just to prove to you I know what I'm talking about?”

  “Go ahead. Talk. I'm listening.”

  “Bertolucci also picked the night of December tenth to pay a visit to Crane. Maybe he'd been watching the house; that would explain how he knew Crane was alone. He might have gone there with the intention of murdering Crane; he might only have wanted to talk to him, find out what he'd done with Kate's body. Still, he had to've taken the potential for another murder along with him. I figure that's one of the reasons he waited so long. He was scared and confused and no mental giant besides; it took time to nerve himself up.

  “So Bertolucci went into the house. Probably walked right in; I was told Crane never locked the front door. He found Crane in his office, drunk as usual, trying to work up the last bit of nerve he needed to shoot himself; that twenty-two of his must have been out in plain sight. As drunk as Crane was, as much as he wanted to die, maybe he invited Bertolucci to shoot him, get it over with. Or maybe it was Bertolucci's idea when he saw the twenty-two. In any case Bertolucci had gotten away with his wife's murder up to then and he wanted to keep on getting away with it. So he used that twenty-two-put it up against the side of Crane's head and pulled the trigger.

  “Enter Thomas J. Yankowski, servant of the people. Bertolucci might have shot you too; I wish to Christ he had. But it must have taken all his nerve to do the job on Crane. You got him calmed down, you got the full story out of him, you got him to trust you. Easy pickings for a glib young shyster. You told him you'd help him, gave him some kind of song and dance, then sent him on his way. And when he was gone you rigged the murder to look like suicide.”

  “Fascinating,” he said. “How did I accomplish that?”

  “Oh, you were smart. You didn't try anything fancy; you came up with a method so simple and clever everybody overlooked it. Until now. Until Michael Kiskadon got himself shot and killed in his den earlier today, under circumstances similar to what happened to his father. You didn't know about that, did you? Kiskadon's death?”

  Yankowski was silent again.

  “The first thing you did when you were alone with Crane's body that night was to type out the suicide note on his machine. But you wanted the phrasing to be just right-Crane's style, Crane's words, not yours. You'd brought along his letter to you and you realized that if you excerpted parts of it, it would make a perfect suicide note. So that's what you did: lifted sentences and partial sentences right out of the letter, changing nothing but the tenses here and there.

  “I saw the text of the suicide note in the old newspaper accounts, early in the week. When I read the letter carbon something about it struck me as odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it until this morning, after I found Kiskadon. Then it came to me how similar the letter was to the suicide note, phrases like ‘life terrifies me more than death.’ Crane was in no shape that night to plagiarize himself, either consciously or unconsciously-not exact wording in the exact order he'd used in his letter to you. Somebody else had to have typed the suicide note. And that somebody had to be you.”

  “Why did it have to be me?”

  “Because there's only one way the cover-up gimmick could have been worked, and the only man who could have worked it is the one who broke into the office later on, in the presence of Amanda Crane. You, Yankowski. Couldn't have been Adam Porter; his brother told me Adam was frail and frail men don't go busting in doors, not when there's a healthy young buck like you around. You broke into Crane's office that night. And not once-twice.

  “That's the explanation in one word: twice. After you typed the suicide note you went out into the hall, shut the door behind you, locked it with the key, and broke it in so that there'd be evidence of forced entry. Then you put the key in the lock on the inside and shut the door again. No one could tell from the hallway that it had been forced.

  “You left the house then, making sure you weren't seen, and waited around outside somewhere until Porter and Amanda returned home from dinner. At which point you pretended to have just arrived. When the three of you went upstairs to Crane's office, you grabbed the doorknob and pretended it was locked. ‘We'd better break in,’ you said. You threw your weight against the door, holding tight to the knob to provide some noise and resistance, and then let go and the door popped open. Porter and Amanda were too upset to notice anything amiss; and besides, there was plenty of evidence that there had been a forced entry. You also had Porter to verify to the police that the door was forced in his presence and that the key was in the lock on the inside.”

  Yankowski still didn't have anything to say. He looked away from me again, out to where a freighter, like a two-dimensional silhouette, seemed about to be engulfed by the shimmery fire on the horizon. The wind was even colder now. Distantly a foghorn sounded, spreading the news that fogbanks were lying out there somewhere and might soon be blowing in.

  I said, “For thirty-five years you got away with it, you and Bertolucci. Ancient history, half-forgotten, and the two of you probably long out of touch. But then Kiskadon showed up. And I showed up. You weren't worried at first; you didn't figure I could dig deep enough after all that time to get at the truth. But my bet is you hunted up Bertolucci just the same, first to determine if he was still alive and then to warn him about me.

  “My visit to Bertolucci on Wednesday didn't seem to unnerve him much; but when I found his wife's bones that same day-he read about it in the papers or heard about it somehow on Thursday-he got nervous and called you. You went up there to see him. With the intention of killing him to keep him quiet? No, probably not. But something happened when you got to his house, an argument of some kind: he was a crazy old coot and you're a mean bugger when you lose your temper. He probably waved that shotgun at you, and you took it away from him and let fly with both barrels.

  “You didn't find
out until later that it was my car you ran into when you were tearing out of there. If you needed any more reason to have the damage to your car fixed, that was it. Nice repair work, too; nice new paint job. But the authorities will find out who did the work for you.”

  “I doubt that,” Yankowski said.

  “Even if they don't, there'll be something else to tie you to Bertolucci and the murder.”

  “I also doubt that,” he said, “since everything you've said is an outrageous tall tale.” He seemed to have relaxed completely, to have regained his arrogant manner. The hate was still in his eyes, but it was shaded now by a thin veil of amusement. He took out one of his fat green cigars, turned his back to the wind, and managed to get the cigar fired with a gold butane lighter. When he faced me again he said, “You don't have a shred of proof to back up any of your allegations and you know it. You can't prove that I conspired with Angelo Bertolucci to cover up a murder in 1949. A letter addressed to me that happens to resemble Harmon Crane's suicide note is hardly evidence of any wrongdoing on my part. The police were satisfied that Crane's death was suicide; you have no legal grounds for reopening the case after all these years. You have no proof that I ever even met this man Bertolucci. You have no eyewitnesses who can identify me as being in or near his home on the night of his death. You have no physical evidence of any kind against me. You have nothing, in short, except a great deal of fanciful speculation. Fiction, not fact.”

  “That isn't going to stop me from taking it to the authorities,” I said.

  “Do as you like. But I warn you, detective. I'd like nothing better than to instigate a lawsuit against you for harassment and defamation of character.”