Bones (The Nameless Detecive)

by Bill Pronzini

  “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 listened. 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.

  This is the way it was that night thirty-five years ago.…

  I stayed in the doorway, trying to shield Mrs. Kiskadon with my body. But she pushed at me from behind, hit me with her fist, came past me. When she saw what I saw at the opposite end she made a thin, keening noise. I caught hold of her, but she fought loose and did a stumbling about-face and tried to run away into the hall. She didn't get any farther than the doorway before both her voice and her legs gave out. She fell sideways into the jamb, hard enough so that her head made an audible smacking noise against the wood.

  She was on her knees when I got to her, shaking her head and moaning. But she wasn't hurt and she wasn't hysterical; just disoriented. I picked her up without resistance and carried her into the living room and put her down on the couch. She stayed there, not looking at me, not looking at anything in the room. I waited a few seconds anyway, just to make sure, before I went back into the den.

  Kiskadon lay slumped over the desk top, left arm out-flung, right arm hanging down toward the floor; his right temple was a mess of blood and torn and blackened flesh. Looking at him, I didn't feel any physical reaction—nothing at all this time except for the pity, always that same terrible feeling of pity. Second gunshot corpse in three days, and this one not nearly as bad as Bertolucci's had been. Maybe that was it. An overload that had temporarily short-circuited me inside.

  Harmon Crane's way out, I thought. Just like that night in 1949.

  A phone sat undisturbed on the desk, but I didn't want to use that one if there was another in the house. I started away—and something on the floor to one side and slightly behind the desk caught my attention. It was a brown leather handbag, overturned so that some of its contents had spilled out. I moved closer and leaned over to look at the items: comb, compact, lipstick, wallet. But no keys. From that position I could also see the weapon; it wasn't in Kiskadon's hand, it was all the way under the chair on the left side—a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38, the kind known as a belly gun.

  The sick feeling started then: short-circuit back the other way. But it was a different kind of sickness, as much a product of the actions of the living as of the presence of the dead. I clamped my teeth together and swallowed to keep it down.

  Suicide, I thought again. Like father, like son.

  Only now I didn't believe it.

  TWENTY

  A

  S if things weren't bad enough, Leo McFate was in charge of the Homicide team that responded to my call. McFate and I didn't get along. We had had run-ins a time or two in the past, but not for the usual reasons that an abrasiveness develops between cops and private detectives. The thing was, McFate didn't think of himself as a cop; he thought of himself as a temporary cop on his merry way to Sacramento and a job with the attorney general's office. He had ambitions, yes he did. He dressed in tailored suits and fancy ties, he read all the right books, he spoke with precise grammar, diction, and enunciation, he went to all the important social functions, and he sucked up to politicians, newspaper columnists, and flakes off the upper crust. He also considered himself a devilish ladies' man, with special attention to those women from eighteen to eighty who had money, social status, and the Right Connections. He didn't like me because he thought I was beneath him. I didn't like him because I knew he was an asshole.

  He came breezing in with another inspector, one I didn't know named Dwiggins, gave me a flinty-eyed look, and demanded to know where the deceased was. That was the way he talked; sometimes it was very comical to listen to him, but this wasn't one of them. I took him to the den and showed him the deceased. “Please wait in the kitchen,” he said, as if that was where I belonged. And when I didn't trot off fast enough to suit him he said, “Well? Do what I told you.”

  I wished Eberhardt were here; Eberhardt knew how to get under McFate's skin and deflate him. I hadn't figured out the knack yet. All I could think of was to tell him to take a handful of ground glass and pound it up his tailpipe. Instead I turned without saying anything and went into the kitchen. Antagonizing cops is a stupid thing for anyone to do, and that goes double if you happen to be a private investigator.

  McFate kept me waiting fifteen minutes, most of which time I spent prowling the kitchen like a cat in a cage. Once I thought of going in to check on Mrs. Kiskadon, but I didn't do it; I did not want to see her until after I had talked to McFate, and not even then if I could avoid it. She was in the bedroom, or
had been just before McFate's arrival. She had got up off the couch while I was telephoning and walked in there and laid down on the bed with the door open. The one time I'd looked in on her she had been lying on her back, stiff-bodied, eyes closed, hands stretched out tight against her sides, like an embalmed corpse that had been arranged for viewing.

  I felt keyed up, twitchy. Lynn Kiskadon and her dead husband were on my mind, but other things were rumbling around in there too. Things that I was beginning to understand and things that didn't seem to want to jell yet. None of them was very pleasant, but then murder never is.

  When McFate finally came in I didn't give him a chance to be supercilious. I said, “There are some things you ought to know,” and proceeded to explain about Kiskadon and Harmon Crane and the rest of it. Then I told him what I suspected about Kiskadon's death. He'd have figured it out himself eventually—it was pretty obvious, really, once you had all the facts—but I didn't feel like waiting around for his wheels to start turning on their own initiative.

  McFate looked at me the way an entomologist would look at a not very interesting bug. I looked right back at him, which was something I never enjoy doing. The son of a bitch is handsome on top of everything else: dark hair gray at the temples, precisely trimmed mustache, a cleft in his chin as big as a woman's navel. No wonder the ladies loved him—those of nondiscriminating taste, anyway. Hell, no wonder the politicians loved him.

  He said, “You think it's a one-eight-seven? Why?”

  One-eight-seven is police slang; Section 187 of the California Penal Code pertains to willful homicide. “I didn't say that,” I said.

  “If his wife killed him, it's a one-eight-seven.”

  “I know that. But I didn't say I think she killed him. I said I think she's covering up. She knew he was dead long before we found him.”

  “I repeat: Why?”

  “Three reasons. First, her actions today, the things she said to me on the phone and after I got here—they don't ring true. She said she didn't call her husband's doctor because she was too upset. She didn't call the police either. And she didn't try to get a friend or a neighbor to help her. Instead she left the house, drove down to Van Ness, and called me. Why? Because she wanted someone who knew how suicidal he'd been to find the body; she didn't want to admit that he was dead before she left here.”

  “Hardly conclusive,” McFate said.

  I said, “Then there's the gun.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “It's under Kiskadon's chair. You saw that. If he shot himself, how did it get all the way under there?”

  “It fell out of his hand and bounced on the carpet,” McFate said. “If you remember, his right arm is hanging down near the floor.”

  “Leo,” I said, and watched him wince. He hates for me to call him Leo; he would prefer that I call him Mr. McFate, or maybe just sir. “Leo, the gun is lying all the way under the chair, over on the left side. Even if it fell out of his hand, it's not likely that it could bounce more than a foot on a shag carpet.”

  He scowled at me. “I suppose you deduce from that that Mrs. Kiskadon threw the weapon under the chair.”

  “She had something to do with it being there, yes. I can't say whether or not she threw it under the chair, or whether or not she actually shot him. But she was in the room when he died.”

  “And just how do you deduce that?”

  “Her handbag, Leo. On the floor behind the desk with half its contents spilled out.”

  “I saw it,” he said stiffly. “I assumed she dropped it when the two of you found the deceased.”

  “Uh-uh. She didn't have that bag or any other when I got here. Not in her car, not in her hand when she followed me in. She told me her husband had come out of the den earlier, waving the gun around, and then went back in there and locked the door; she didn't say she'd been in there, and she would have unless she had something to hide. And if she wasn't in the den, what was the purse doing in there? And why is it upended on the floor unless there was a struggle or something that led to the shooting?”

  McFate didn't say anything. But he was thinking about it now. You didn't have to beat him over the head with logic—not too hard, anyhow.

  “The car keys must have been in her coat pocket,” I said. “Either that, or she scooped them up off the floor before she ran out. I guess you noticed that the door has a push-button lock. Kiskadon probably pushed the button when he went in there for the last time; all she did was shut the door on her way out, maybe without even realizing it. All she was interested in was getting away from here.”

  McFate said grudgingly, “If you're right, then she must have murdered him.”

  “Not necessarily. It could have been an accident—a struggle over the gun. Why don't you ask her?”

  “I don't need you to tell me my job.”

  “God forfend I should ever try.”

  “Wait here,” he said, and stalked out.

  I waited, but not for long. I was even twitchier now and the kitchen seemed too small and too much of a reminder of the life the Kiskadons had shared before today, when what they shared became death. People were moving around out in the hall; I opened the door and looked out. The assistant coroner had arrived and Dwiggins was ushering him into the den. I came out of the kitchen and wandered down there, being careful not to get in anybody's way.

  At an angle I could see part of the room, but not the part where the body lay. One of the lab men was down on his knees, poking among the splinters of wood that my forced entry had torn from the jamb. I watched him—and the thought came to me again that this was the way it had been thirty-five years ago, on the night Harmon Crane died. Man is shot in a locked office, door gets busted in, the cops come and poke around and clean up the remains. Some things don't change in thirty-five years; some things never change.

  And who says lightning doesn't strike twice? It had struck twice in this case, one father and one son all those years apart, one suicide and one manslaughter.…

  Twice, I thought.

  Or was it one of each? Kiskadon's death had looked like a suicide but wasn't. Why not the same with Harmon Crane? Even with that locked door, the door that the police back then had said couldn't have been gimmicked—wasn't it possible Crane had been murdered after all?

  Twice, I thought. Twice!

  And I had it. At first, just the simple misdirection gimmick that had fooled the police and everyone else in 1949. But once I had that much, I began to see the rest of it, too: the distortions and subterfuge and misconceptions that had befuddled me, the full circumstances of Crane's death, the significance of that letter carbon, the probable reason Angelo Bertolucci had died and the name of the person who had murdered him. All of it exposed at last, dark and ugly, like those mildewing bones out on the rim of Tomales Bay.

  I considered telling it to McFate, but that would have been like telling it to the wall. Besides, it wasn't his case; it was only peripherally related to Kiskadon's death. DeKalb was the man I wanted to tell it to. But not yet, not until I got some personal satisfaction first.

  Before long McFate reappeared. I was still in the hallway, still twitchy because I wanted to be on my way. He showed me his scowl and said, “I thought I told you to wait in the kitchen.”

  “I had to go to the toilet. What did Mrs. Kiskadon say?”

  “… You were right,” he said in reluctant tones. He was looking, now, at the top button on my jacket. “She admitted it.”

  “I thought she might. She isn't a very good liar.”

  “No, she isn't.”

  “She didn't murder him, did she?”

  “An accident, she claims.”

  “It probably was,” I said. “She's not the type to commit premeditated homicide.”

  McFate said with heavy sarcasm, “Thank you for your expert opinion.”

  “You're welcome. How did it happen?”

  “Her husband spent the night in his den, just as she told you. She tried to talk him out this morning
but he wouldn't come, not until about noon.”

  “And he was waving the gun around when he finally showed.”

  “Yes. He threatened to shoot himself and she told him to go ahead, she couldn't stand it any longer. Fed up, as she put it. He reentered the den and she followed him. She'd been about to go for a drive, just to get away for a while, which is why she was carrying her handbag.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Kiskadon sat at his desk. She tried to reason with him, but he wouldn't listen; he put the weapon to his temple and held it there with his finger on the trigger, saying he intended to fire.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said again. “At which point she panicked and tried to take it away from him. They struggled, she dropped her handbag, and the gun went off.”

  “So she alleges.”

  “How did the gun get under his chair?”

  “It fell on the desk after the discharge,” McFate said. “She must have swept it off onto the floor; she doesn't remember that part of it very clearly.”

  I nodded. “Poor Kiskadon. If she'd left him alone, he probably wouldn't have gone through with it. Suicides don't make a production number out of what they're going to do, usually; they just do it.”

  “Really? You're an accredited psychologist as well as an expert in criminal behavior, I suppose.”

  “If you say so, Leo.”

  The scowl again. “I don't like you, you know that?”

  “That's too bad. I think you're the cat's nuts.”

  “Are you trying to insult me?”

  “Me? Heavens no. How's Mrs. Kiskadon?”

  “Weepy,” McFate said, and grimaced. He didn't like women to be weepy; he liked them to be a) cooperative, b) generous, and c) naked. “Dwiggins is calling a matron and her doctor.”

  “Are you going to book her?”

  “Certainly.”

  “You could go a little easy on her. She's no saint, but she has had a rough time of it.”

  “You're trying to tell me my job again. I don't like that.”

  “Sorry. Is it all right if I leave now?”