Bones

ONE

The house was in one of San Francisco's secluded residential neighborhoods, so neatly tucked away on top of a hill that most of the city's inhabitants would have had to consult a map to find it. I hadn't needed a map, but that was only because I had received explicit directions from the owner of the house, a man named Michael Kiskadon, who wanted to hire me. He had been vague about what he wanted to hire me to do-“It's not something I can explain very easily on the phone,” he'd said. Then he'd said, “But I can guarantee it's a job you'll find interesting, one you're well suited for. Can you come here so we can talk? I've had some medical problems and my doctor keeps me housebound these days.”

So here I was, up at the top of Twelfth Avenue across from Golden Gate Heights Park. It was eleven o'clock on a Monday morning, the sun was shining, there wasn't much wind-all in all, a pleasant October day-but hardly anybody was out on the tennis courts or the children's playground or on the wide green that paralleled the street for more than a block. It was a nice park, with big trees and picnic facilities and woody hillside paths; and from its west end you would have a sweeping view of the ocean. But its seclusion probably meant it was used more or less exclusively by the people in the neighborhood. Lucky for them, too bad for everybody else.

Not that this was a particularly affluent area. The houses lining the uphill curve of Twelfth Avenue to the east, and those back down the hill on Cragmont, were middle-class and well kept up, but mostly plain and on the smallish side. The one I wanted was opposite the park green-a semi-detached place that resembled a cottage more than anything else. It was painted blue. Behind a picket fence was a yard full of shrubs and acid-blue hydrangeas and a walkway that blended into a covered side porch.

I parked next to the green and got out. The air smelled of bay laurel, which is a good spicy smell, and I found myself smiling a little as I crossed the street. I was in pretty high spirits today, for no reason other than the balmy weather and maybe the fact that Kerry and I had spent the night together, doing what people do when they spend the night together. Kerry is my lady and a joy to be with, in or out of bed-most of the time, anyway. This morning I loved her even more than usual. This morning I loved everybody, even my partner Eberhardt and his stupid blond fiancee, Wanda.

There was a gate in the picket fence; I unlatched it and went along the path to the porch and rang the bell. The guy who opened the door was in his mid-to-late thirties, long and lean and intense-looking. He had a clump of dry black hair that drooped down on both sides of his narrow face like a bush that had died for lack of nourishment. His skin had a whitish pallor, there were the vestiges of pain in his eyes, and he carried a cane in his left hand-testimony to the truth of his statement that he'd been ill.

He said, “You're the detective?” and I said I was and he said, “I'm Michael Kiskadon, please come in.”

I went in. A big family room opened off the entryway, across the rear of the house; Kiskadon led me in there, moving slowly with the aid of his cane, favoring his left leg. Windows with rattan blinds rolled up at their tops let you see Twin Peaks straight ahead and, off to the left, the ugly science-fictional skeleton of the Sutro telecommunications tower. Incoming sunlight made streaks and splashes across some nondescript furniture and a row of potted ferns and Wandering Jews set inside wicker stands.

“Some coffee?” Kiskadon asked. “My wife made a fresh pot before she went shopping.”

“Thanks, but I've already had plenty.”

He nodded. “Well-thank you for coming. As you can see, I'm not really fit for travel yet.”

“Medical problems, you said?”

“Yes. I'm a diabetic-diabetes mellitus. Do you know what that is?”

“I've heard of it.”

“Well, I have a severe form of the disease, a disorder of carbohydrate metabolism. Hyperglycemia, glycosuria-you name it, I had it or still have it. I was in the hospital for a month.” He gave me a wry, mirthless smile. “I damn near died,” he said.

What can you say to that? I said inadequately, “But it's under control now?”

“More or less, assuming there aren't any more complications.” He sank down on the arm of an overstuffed Naugahyde couch. “Look, I'm not after sympathy or pity. My medical problems don't have anything to do with why I want a detective. Except that they helped me make up my mind to call you. I've been thinking about it for some time.”

“I don't understand, Mr. Kiskadon.”

“I almost died, as I said. I could still die before my time. There are some things I have to know before that happens, things that are important to me.”

“Yes?”

“About my father. I never knew him, you see. He and my mother separated a month or so after I was conceived, and she moved back to Philadelphia, where her people were. She refused to tell my father she was pregnant.”

“Why?”

“She was very bitter about the split; it was my father's idea to end their marriage, not hers. She had always wanted a child and he'd been against it. I was a planned accident on her part, I think.” But he seemed not to have inherited any of his mother's bitterness toward his father; in his voice now was a kind of intense yearning; for what, I couldn't gauge yet.

I asked, “Did she tell him after you were born?”

“She never had the chance. She died giving birth to me.”

“I see.”

“I was raised by my mother's sister and her husband,” Kiskadon said. “They legally adopted me, gave me their name. My aunt hated my father, even blamed him for my mother's death; she also vowed not to tell him about me. He died without ever knowing he had fathered a son.”

“So it's not that you don't know who he was,” I said. That was what I'd begun to think he was leading up to: a search for his roots, for the identity of his old man.

“No, it's not that at all. Uncle Ned told me the truth two years ago, after my aunt died. He said he didn't think it was right that I go through the rest of my life believing my natural father was killed in Korea, which was what I'd always been told.”

“Did you make any effort to contact him, once you knew?”

The wry, mirthless smile again. “It was far too late by then,” he said. “But a few months later I had a job offer in San Francisco and I accepted it. It took me a while after I was settled, but I managed to make contact with my father's widow, the woman he married after his divorce from my mother. I also located the man who'd been his attorney. Neither of them could or would tell me what I need to know.”

“And that is?”

“Why he shot himself,” Kiskadon said.

“Suicide?”

“Yes. With a handgun.”

“Where was this?”

“At his home here in the city.”

“How long ago?”

“In 1949, when I was four years old.”

I stared at him. “Nineteen… did you say forty-nine? ”

“That's right. December 10, 1949.”

Well, Christ, I thought. I didn't say anything.

“I'm aware it might be impossible to find out the truth after thirty-five years,” he said, “but I have to try. It's important to me-I told you that. It's… oh hell, I might as well admit it: it's become an obsession. I have to know why he killed himself.”

I still didn't say anything.

“I'll pay you well,” he said. “I'm a design engineer for Bechtel; I make seventy-five thousand dollars a year when I'm working full-time.”

“I'm not thinking about money, Mr. Kiskadon,” I said. “The kind of job you want done… it's an exercise in futility and I'd be a liar if I told you otherwise. I can understand why you want to go ahead with it but I don't think I'm the right man to-”

“But you are the right man,” he said. He stood up again and made an emphatic gesture with his cane. “You're exactly the right man.”

“I don't understand.”

“Come into my office. I want you to see something.”

I shrugged and let him lead me into an adjacent room that had an L-shaped desk covered with computer equipment, a recliner chair, a table with a rack of pipes on it, and a big, glass-fronted bookcase along one wall. What was in the book-case caught my eye immediately. I glanced at Kiskadon, and he said, “Go ahead, take a look,” so I went over there and opened the glass doors and took a look.

Pulp magazines, upwards of two hundred of them. Mostly detective and mystery, with a sprinkling of adventure and Western titles. A pile of slick magazines, the top one a browning issue of Collier's from 1944. A shelf of books, hard-covers and paperbacks both, with the same author's name on the spines-a name I recognized. And a photograph in a silver frame, black and white and several years old, of a tall, angular man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and bearing a resemblance to Kiskadon, standing on somebody's lawn with a drink upraised in one hand. I turned to Kiskadon again.

“Yes,” he said. “My father was Harmon Crane.”

Harmon Crane. A name on the covers of scores of pulps in the thirties and forties; a name that sold magazines back then and was still selling them, to collectors such as myself. One of the best writers of pulp fiction, whose blend of hard-boiled action and whacky humor had been rivaled only by Norbert Davis among the unsung heroes of the pulps. But Harmon Crane hadn't remained unsung because he hadn't remained a pulpster. He had graduated to such slicks as Collier's, American Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post; and even more importantly, as far as aficionados of crime fiction were concerned, he had taken one of his pulp detectives, a screwball private eye named Johnny Axe, and fleshed him out and made him the hero of half a dozen novels that had sold remarkably well during the forties and that had been in print off and on ever since. Their titles, all of which were clever and outrageous puns, marched across the shelf behind me in their various editions: Axe Marks the Spot, The Axe-Raye Murders, Axe for Trouble, Axe of Mercy, Don't Axe Me, Axe and Pains.

I'd known that Crane had been a Bay Area resident since his college days at UC-Berkeley, and that he'd died here by his own hand around 1950; I had a vague memory of reading about his suicide in the papers back then, paying attention to it because of my interest in the pulps in general and his work in particular. But details about his personal life had been sketchy. I had always wondered what led such a successful writer to take his own life.

Crane was still one of my favorites; I read and collected his pulp work avidly. Which made things difficult as far as Michael Kiskadon was concerned. If his father had been anyone else I would have stuck to my guns and turned down his job offer. But because he had been sired by Harmon Crane, I could feel myself weakening. The prospect of poking around in Crane's life, even though he had been dead thirty-five years, held a perverse appeal. For some damn reason, the private lives of authors are endlessly fascinating to people like me who read their work.

Kiskadon was watching me in his intense way. “I started collecting his work as soon as I found out who he was,” he said. “It took time and quite a lot of money, but I have just about everything now; I'm only missing a dozen or so pulps. He wrote close to two hundred and fifty stories for the pulp market, you know.”

I nodded. “Sold his first to Black Mask in 1933, while he was still at Berkeley.”

“Yes. He was pre-med at the time.” The intensity in Kiskadon's expression had been joined by eagerness: he was pretty sure he had me now. “I knew you'd remember him. A well-known detective who collects pulp magazines… well, now you see what I meant when I said you're exactly the right man for the job.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Will you take it, then?”

“I'm leaning that way.” I glanced again at the photograph of Harmon Crane-the first I'd ever seen of him. He didn't look anything like the mental image I had formulated; he looked like a schoolteacher, or maybe an accountant. “Let's go sit down and talk. I've got a lot of questions.”

We went back into the family room. Kiskadon sat on the couch and I sat in the closest chair, a creaky rocker that made me feel like an old fart in a retirement facility-the California Home for the Curmudgeonly, Kerry might have said. I watched Kiskadon light up a pipe. His tobacco smelled like chicken droppings; Eberhardt would have loved it.

I said, “First of all, what do you know about the suicide?”

“Very little. Just what my uncle told me, what I read in old newspapers at the library, and what I was able to find out from his lawyer. His widow wouldn't talk about it at all.”

“He shot himself in his house, you said?”

“Yes. In his office.”

“Where was he living at the time?”

“North Beach. Up near Coit Tower.”

“Is the house still there?”

“No. There's an apartment building on the site now.”

“What time of day did it happen?”

“Sometime around eight P.M.”

“Was anybody else in the house at the time?”

“No. His wife was out to dinner with a friend.”

“Just the two of them lived there?”

“Yes. My father had no other children.”

“Who found his body?”

“His wife, her friend, and the lawyer.”

“How did the lawyer happen to be there?”

“My father called him and asked him to come over. He arrived just as Mrs. Crane and the friend returned home.”

“This friend-what's his name?”

“Adam Porter. He was Mrs. Crane's art teacher.”

“Is he still alive?”

“No. He died in 1971.”

“And the lawyer's name?”

“Thomas Yankowski.”

Ah Christ, I thought, old Yank-'Em-Out.

Kiskadon said, “You look as if you know him.”

“I know him, all right,” I said. “We've had a few dealings in the past.”

“You don't like him?”

“Not one bit.”

“Neither did I. A sour old bastard.”

“Yeah.” Yank-'Em-Out Yankowski, the scourge of the legal profession and the bosom buddy of every slum landlord within a fifty-mile radius of San Francisco. He was retired now, but in his day he had specialized in landlord-tenant relationships, usually working for the landlords but occasionally playing the other side when there was enough money involved. He had boasted publicly that there wasn't a lease written he couldn't break, or a tenant he couldn't evict. The name Yank-'Em-Out had been tacked onto him as a pejorative, but he had taken a liking to it and used it as a kind of unofficial slogan. “How did he happen to be Harmon Crane's lawyer?”

“I don't know.”

“Did he give you any hint what sort of legal service he might have been providing?”

“No.”

“Did he say what Crane wanted to see him about the night of the suicide?”

“Only that my father seemed distraught, that he wanted someone to talk to.”

“Were the two of them also friends?”

“That's what I gathered.”

“But your father didn't wait to talk to Yankowski?”

“No. He… was drunk that night. Maybe that explains it.”

“Maybe. Did he leave a note?”

“Yes. They found it in his typewriter when they broke in.”

“Broke in?”

“The office door was locked from the inside,” Kiskadon said. “His office was on the second floor, so they couldn't get in any other way.”

“Were the windows locked too?”

“I don't know. Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. What did the suicide note say?”

“Nothing specific. Just that he felt he'd be better off dead. It was only a few lines long.”

“He'd been despondent, then?”

“For several weeks. He'd been drinking heavily.”

“Any clues as to why?”

“According to Yankowski, my father wouldn't discuss it with anyone. Yankowski thinks it was some sort of writer's block; my father wrote almost nothing during the last six weeks of his life. But I find that theory difficult to believe, considering how much fiction he produced. And how much writing meant to him-others have told me that.” Kiskadon's pipe had gone out; he paused to relight it. “In any case, his motive had to have been personal.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, I don't see how it could have been financial. He had contracts for two new Johnny Axe novels, and there was a film deal in the works. There was also talk of doing a Johnny Axe radio show.”

“Uh-huh. Well, if anyone knows the reason, it's his widow. Maybe I can pry it out of her. Where does she live?”

“In Berkeley. With her niece, a woman named Marilyn Dubek.” He gave me the address from memory and I wrote it down in my notebook.

“Is her name still Crane?”

“Yes. Amanda Crane. She never remarried.”

“Was your father her first husband?”

“Yes.”

“How long were they married?”

“Two years. The split with my mother wasn't over her, if that's what you're thinking. They didn't even know each other at the time of the separation.”

“What did cause the split with your mother?”

“She had extravagant ways; that was the main reason. She was a social animal-parties, nightclubs, that sort of thing-and my father liked his privacy. They just weren't very well matched, I guess.”

“How long were they married?”

“Four years.”

“Your father's first marriage?”

“No. His second.”

“Who was his first wife?”

“A woman named Ellen Corneal. He married her while they were both in college. It didn't last very long.”

“Why not?”

“I'm not sure. Incompatibility again, I think.”

“Do you know what happened to her?”

“No.”

“Back to Yankowski. Where did you talk to him?”

“At his home. He lives in St. Francis Wood.”

“How willing was he to see you?”

“Willing enough,” Kiskadon said. “I called and explained who I was, and he invited me over. He was a little standoffish in person, but he answered all my questions.”

“Can you give me the names of any of your father's friends in 1949?”

“He apparently didn't have any close friends.”

“What about other writers?”

“Well, he wasn't a joiner but he did know some of the other writers in the Bay Area. I managed to track down a couple who knew him casually, but they weren't any help. They only saw him at an occasional literary function.”

“You might as well give me their names anyway.”

He did and I wrote them down. One was familiar; the other wasn't. Neither had written for the pulps, unless the unfamiliar guy had cranked out stories under a pseudonym. I asked Kiskadon about that, and he said no, the man had written confession stories and fact articles for more than thirty years and was now retired and living on Social Security.

Be a writer, I thought, make big money and secure your future.

I spent the next five minutes settling with Kiskadon on my fee and the size of my retainer, and filling out the standard contract form I'd brought with me. He signed the form, and was working on a check when I heard the sound of a key in the front door lock. A moment later a woman came inside.

She stopped when she saw me and said, “Oh,” but not as if she were startled. She was a few years younger than Kiskadon, brown-haired, on the slender side except for flaring hips encased in a pair of too-tight jeans. Why women with big bottoms persist in wearing tight pants is a riddle of human nature the Sphinx couldn't answer, so I didn't even bother to try. Otherwise she was pretty enough in a Bonnie Bedelia sort of way.

Kiskadon said, “Lynn, hi. This is the detective I told you about.” He gave her my name, which impressed her about as much as if he'd given her a carpet tack. “He's going to take on the job.”

She gave me a doubtful look. Then she said, “Good. That's fine, dear,” in that tone of voice wives use when they're humoring their spouses.

“He'll get to the truth if anyone can,” Kiskadon said.

She didn't answer that; instead she looked up at me again. “How much are you charging?”

Practical lady. I told her, and she thought about it, biting her lip, and seemed to decide that I wasn't being too greedy. She nodded and said to him, “I'll get the groceries out of the car. We'll have lunch pretty soon.”

“Good, I'm starved.”

She asked me, “Will you be joining us?”

“Thanks, but I'd better get to work.”

“You're perfectly welcome to stay…”

“No. Thanks, anyway.”

“Well,” she said, and shrugged, and turned and went out with her rear end wiggling and waggling. You could almost hear the stretched threads creaking in the seams of her jeans.

Kiskadon gave me his check and his hand and an eager smile; he looked better than he had when I'd arrived-color in his cheeks, a kind of zest in his movements, as if my agreeing to investigate for him had worked like a rejuvenating medicine. I thought: That's me, the Good Samaritan. But I had taken the job as much for me as for him: so much for virtue and the milk of human kindness.

When I got outside, Mrs. Kiskadon was hefting an armload of Safeway sacks out of the trunk of a newish green Ford Escort parked in the driveway. She seemed to want to say something to me as I passed by, but whatever she saw when she glanced toward the porch changed her mind for her. All I got was a sober nod, which I returned in kind. I looked back at the porch myself as I opened the gate; she was on her way there carrying the grocery sacks, and Kiskadon was standing out in plain sight, leaning on his cane and looking past her at me, still smiling.

He waved as I went through the gate, but I didn't wave back. I'm not sure why.