Bones (The Nameless Detecive)

by Bill Pronzini

  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 them 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.

  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 co
mbined 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

  S

  unday.

  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 hi
m. 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?”