Bones

FOURTEEN

Red Ridge Road was a short, winding street shaded by old trees a dozen miles south of San Francisco and a half-mile or so downhill from Highway 280. It hadn't been built on a ridge and if any of the earth in the vicinity had ever been red, there was no longer any indication of it. Score another point for our sly old friends, the developers. A lot of the houses up there had broad, distant views of the Bay; others were half-hidden in copses of trees; still others sat at odd angles, on not much land and without much privacy, like squeezed-in afterthoughts. The house where Ellen Corneal Brown lived was one of the last group-a smallish split-level with a redwood-shake roof and an attached garage, primarily distinguished from its neighbors by a phalanx of camellia bushes that were now in bright red and pink blossom.

I parked at the curb in front, ran the camellia gauntlet, and rang the bell. The woman who opened the door was in her seventies, on the hefty side and trying to conceal it inside a loose-fitting dress. White hair worn short and carefully arranged, as if she had just come from the beauty parlor. Sharp, steady eyes and a nose that came to an oblique point at the tip.

I said, “Mrs. Brown?”

“Yes. You're the gentleman who called?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She kept me standing there another five seconds or so, while she looked me over. I looked her over too, but not in the same way. I was trying to imagine what she'd looked like fifty years ago, when she and Harmon Crane had gotten married, and not having any luck. She was one of those elderly people who look as if they were born old, as if they'd sprung from the womb white-haired and age-wrinkled like leprechauns or gnomes. I couldn't even decide if she'd been attractive, back in the days of her youth. She wasn't attractive now, nor was she unattractive. She was just elderly.

I must have passed muster myself because she said, “Come in, please,” and allowed me a small cordial smile. “We'll talk in the parlor.”

Age hadn't slowed her up much; she got around briskly and without any aids. The room she showed me into was a living room; “parlor” was an affectation. But it wasn't an ordinary living room. If I hadn't known her profession, and that of her husband, one look would have enabled me to figure it out.

The room was full of maps. Framed and unframed on the walls, one hanging suspended from the ceiling on thin gold chains, three in the form of globes set into antique wooden frames. Old maps and new maps. Topographic maps, geological maps, hydrographic and aviation charts. Strange maps I couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of, one of them marked with the words azimuthal projection, which for all I knew charted the geographical distribution of bronchial patients.

Mrs. Brown was watching me expectantly, waiting for a reaction, so I said, “Very impressive collection you have here.”

She nodded: that was what she wanted to hear. “My husband's, mostly, acquired before we were married, although I have contributed a few items myself. Some are extremely rare, you know.”

“I'm sure they are.”

“That gnomonic projection of the Indian Ocean,” she said, pointing, “dates back to the 1700s. The hachures are still quite vivid, don't you think?”

Hachures. It sounded like a sneeze. I nodded wisely and kept my mouth shut.

“Sit down, won't you,” Mrs. Brown said. “I have coffee or tea, if you'd care for a hot drink.”

“Nothing, thanks.”

I waited until she lowered her broad beam onto a quilted blue-and-white sofa and then lowered mine onto a matching chair nearby. Mrs. Brown said, “Well then. You're interested in my cartographic work, I believe you said.”

“Well…”

“My major contribution,” she said proudly, a little boastfully, “was in the area of conic projections. I developed a variant using the Lambert conformal conic projection in conjunction with the polyconic projection, so that-”

“Uh, Mrs. Brown, excuse me but I don't understand a word you're saying.”

She blinked at me. “Don't understand?”

“No, ma'am. I don't know the first thing about maps.”

“But on the telephone… you said…”

“I said I was interested in talking to you about your past history. I didn't mean your professional history; I meant your personal history. I'm sorry if you got the wrong impression,” I lied. “I didn't mean to deceive you.”

She sat looking bewildered for a few seconds. Then her eyes got flinty and her jaw got tight and I had a glimpse of another side of Ellen Corneal Brown, a less genteel and pleasant side that hadn't been softened much by the advent of old age.

“Who are you?” she said.

“A private detective. From San Francisco.”

“My God. What do you want with me?”

“The answers to a few questions, that's all.”

“What questions?”

“About your first husband, Harmon Crane.”

The eyes got even flintier; if she hadn't been curious, she would have told me to get the hell out of her house. But she was curious. She said, “Mr. Crane has been dead for more than thirty years.”

“Yes, ma'am, I know. I'm trying to find out why he committed suicide.”

“Do you expect me to believe that? After all this time?”

“It's the truth.”

“Who is your client?”

“His son, Michael Kiskadon.”

“Son? Mr. Crane had no children.”

“But he did. His second wife bore him a son after they were divorced and kept it a secret from him. He died without ever knowing he was a father.”

She thought that over. “Why would the son wait so many years to have Mr. Crane's suicide investigated? Why would he want to in the first place?”

I explained it all to her. She struggled with it at first, but when I offered to give her Kiskadon's address and telephone number, plus a few other references, she came around to a grudging acceptance. I watched another struggle start up then, between her curiosity and a reluctance to talk about either Harmon Crane or her relationship with him. Maybe she had something to hide and maybe it was just that she preferred not to disinter the past. In any case she was what the lawyers call a hostile witness. If I didn't handle her just right she would keep whatever she knew locked away inside her, under guard, and nobody would ever get it out.

I asked her, “Mrs. Brown, do you have any idea why Crane shot himself?”

“No,” she said, tight-lipped.

“None at all? Not even a guess?”

“No.”

“Did you have any inkling at the time that he was thinking of taking his own life?”

“Of course not.”

“But you did see him not long before his suicide?”

She hesitated. Then, warily, “What makes you think that? We had been divorced for fourteen years in 1949.”

“He mentioned to a friend in September or October of that year that you'd been to see him.”

“What friend?”

“A writer named Russell Dancer.”

“I don't know that name. Perhaps he has a faulty memory.”

“Does that mean you didn't visit Crane at that time?”

Another hesitation. “I don't remember,” she said stiffly.

“Were you living in San Francisco in 1949?”

“No.”

“In the Bay Area?”

“… In Berkeley.”

“Working as a cartographer?”

“Yes. I was with National Geographic then.”

“Married to your present husband?”

“No. Randolph and I were married in 1956.”

“You lived alone in Berkeley, then?”

“I did.”

“You must have been making a good salary.”

“It was… adequate. I don't see what-”

“Then you weren't poor at the time,” I said. “You didn't need a large sum of money for any reason. Say two thousand dollars.”

Her lips thinned out again, until they were like a horizontal line drawn across the lower half of her face. “Did this Dancer person tell you I tried to get money from Mr. Crane?”

“Did you, Mrs. Brown?”

“I won't answer that.”

“Did Crane give you two thousand dollars the month before his death?”

No response. She sat there with her hands twisted together in her lap, glaring at me.

“Why did he give you that much money, Mrs. Brown?”

No response.

“Was it a loan?”

No response.

“All right,” I said, “we won't talk about the money. Just tell me this: Did you visit Crane at his cabin at Tomales Bay?”

She took that one stoically, but her eyes said she knew what I was talking about. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.

“Surely you must have known about his little retreat.”

“No. How would I know?”

“It was common knowledge he went up there alone to write.”

No response.

“ Did you visit him there, Mrs. Brown?”

She got up on her feet, a little awkwardly because of her bulk and age, and gestured toward the entrance hall. “Get out of my house,” she said. “This minute, or I'll call the police.”

I stayed where I was. “Why? What are you afraid of?”

“I'm not afraid,” she said. “You and I have nothing more to say to each other. And my husband is due home from the country club any time; I don't want you here when he arrives.”

“No? Why not?”

“You'll upset him. He has a heart condition.”

“Maybe I ought to talk to him just the same.”

“You wouldn't dare.”

She was right: I wouldn't, not if he had a heart condition. But I said, “He might be more cooperative than you've been,” and I felt like a heel for badgering an old lady this way, even an unlikable old lady like Ellen Corneal Brown. But playing the heel is part of the job sometimes. Nobody ever said detective work was a gentleman's game, not even the coke-sniffing master of 221-B Baker Street himself.

“Randolph knows nothing about that part of my life,” Mrs. Brown said. She was standing next to one of the antique globes; she reached down and gave it an aggravated spin. “And I don't want him to. You leave him alone, you hear me? You leave both of us alone.”

“Gladly. All you have to do is tell me the truth. Did you see Harmon Crane during the two months prior to his death?”

“All right, yes, I saw him.”

“Where?”

“In San Francisco, at a tavern we frequented while we were married-a former speakeasy on the Embarcadero. I… well, we bumped into each other there one afternoon.” That last sentence was a lie: she didn't look at me as she said it.

“Where else did you see him? At Tomales Bay?”

“… Yes, once.”

“Did he invite you up there?”

“No. I… knew he'd be there and I decided to drive up.”

“For what reason?”

No response.

Money, I thought. And she just wasn't going to talk about money. I asked her, “Did anything happen on that visit? Anything unusual?”

“Unusual,” she said, and her mouth quirked into an unpleasant little sneer. “He had a woman with him.”

“His wife, you mean? Amanda?”

“Hardly. Another woman.”

“Do you know who she was?”

“No.” The sneer again. “He didn't introduce us.”

“Maybe she was just a casual visitor…”

“They were in bed together when I arrived,” Mrs. Brown said. “I wouldn't call that casual, would you?”

“No,” I said, “I wouldn't.”

“My Lord, the look on Mr. Crane's face when I walked in!” There was a malicious glint in her eyes now; you could tell she was relishing the memory. “I'll never forget it. It was priceless.”

“What happened after that?”

“Nothing happened. Mr. Crane took me aside and begged me not to tell anyone about his sordid little affair.”

“Is that the word he used, ‘affair’?”

“I don't remember what he called it. That was what it was.”

“Did he offer any explanation?”

“No. The explanation is obvious, isn't it?”

“Maybe. Did you agree not to tell anyone?”

“Reluctantly.”

“Did you keep your promise?”

“Of course I kept it.”

“Do you remember what day this happened? The date?”

“No, not exactly.”

“The month?”

“October, I think. Several weeks before his suicide.”

“Before or after the big earthquake?”

“… Before. A day or two before.”

“Did you see or talk to Crane again after that day?”

Hesitation. “I don't remember,” she said.

The money again, I thought. “What about the woman? Did you see or talk to her again?”

“I never spoke to her, not a word. Or saw her again.”

“Can you recall what she looked like? I assume you saw her up close that day.”

“I saw all of her up close, the little tart,” Mrs. Brown said. She laughed with malicious humor. “Red hair, white skin with freckles all over… hardly any bosom. I can't imagine what Mr. Crane saw in her.”

I could say the same about you, lady, I thought. “How old was she, would you say?”

“Under forty.”

“Had you ever seen her before that day?”

“No.”

“So you don't know where she lived.”

“I have no idea. Nor do I care.” She glanced at a map-faced clock on the mantel above the fireplace and then gave the globe another aggravated spin. “I've said enough, I'm not going to answer any more of your questions. Please go away.”

Her jaw had a stubborn set now; I wasn't going to get anything else out of her. I said, “All right, I won't bother you any longer,” and got up and went into the entrance hall. She followed me to the door, stood holding it as I stepped out onto the porch.

Turning, I said, “Thanks for your time, Mrs. Br-”

“Go to hell,” she said and slammed the door in my face.

On my way back to the city I put together what I had so far. It wasn't much, really, and what there was of it was open to more than one interpretation. But plenty of solid inferences could be drawn from it just the same.

Harmon Crane was married to a frigid woman. He met the redhead somewhere, San Francisco, Tomales Bay, wherever, and they became lovers. Dancer had told me he didn't think Crane was seeing another woman, but Dancer was a drunk and you can't always trust a drunk's memory or perceptions. I was inclined to believe Mrs. Brown's story of walking in on her ex-husband and the redhead; there had been too much nasty pleasure in her voice for it to have been a fabrication.

All right. Mrs. Brown had been pestering Crane for money, a loan for some purpose or other; Crane kept refusing her. On that score I believed Dancer. But then Ellen Corneal had walked in on Crane and the redhead, and all of a sudden she had something on him, a little leverage to pry loose that “loan” she'd been after-the $2,000 he'd withdrawn from his savings account on November 6, 1949, some ten days after his return from Tomales Bay. No wonder Mrs. Brown hadn't wanted to talk about the money angle. Technically she was guilty of blackmail and she knew it.

So far, so good. But now there were gaps, missing facts, that still had to be filled in. Assuming it was the red-haired woman's bones Emil Corda and I had found yesterday-and that wasn't a safe assumption yet-what had happened at the cabin the day of, or the day after, the earthquake? A fight of some kind between Crane and the redhead? An accidental death? A premeditated murder? And who was she in the first place? And why had Crane apparently covered up her death by burying her body in the fissure?

If you accepted Crane's culpability, the rest of it seemed cut and dried. He came back from Tomales, he began brooding and drinking heavily-a natural enough reaction, considering he was a sensitive and basically decent man. Then Ellen Corneal blackmailed him for the $2,000: more fuel for his depression and guilt. He finally reached a point on December 10 where it all became intolerable, and he put that. 22 of his to his temple and blew himself away.

Simple. The suicide motive explained at last.

Then why didn't I believe it?

Damn it, why did it seem wrong somehow?