Bones

SEVENTEEN

It was after nine before the authorities, in the person of Sergeant Chet DeKalb, allowed me to leave Tomales. DeKalb had come out even though he was off duty, because I had asked for him specifically. He wasn't pleased at having been yanked away from dinner with his family-he lived in Terra Linda and it was a long drive from there to Tomales-but he didn't take it out on me. He was polite; and when he saw the way Bertolucci's murder shaped up he even permitted a spark of interest to show through his stoicism.

We did our talking in the display room, with those stuffed things looking on. Lab men, photographers, uniformed deputies, the county coroner paraded in and out, performing the grim aftermath ritual of violent death. Outside, knots of local residents shivered in the fog, as indistinct when you had glimpses of them as half-formed wraiths. The revolving red light on the county ambulance made one of the windows alternately light up with a crimson glow and then go dark, like the winking of a bloody eye.

I told DeKalb everything I knew about Bertolucci, everything I had suspected about him and his connection with those bones. “But now I don't know,” I said. “What happened here tonight… it confuses the hell out of things.”

“Not necessarily,” DeKalb said. “There doesn't have to be a correlation between your investigation and Bertolucci's death.”

“Doesn't have to be, no.”

“But you think there is.”

“I don't know what to think right now.”

“Could have been a prowler,” DeKalb said. “Bertolucci caught him, tried to scare him off with the shotgun; they struggled, the gun went off, bang the old man's dead.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Or somebody local had a grudge against him. You said nobody seemed to like him much.”

“Why now, though? The same week a thirty-five-year-old can of worms opened up.”

“Coincidences happen.”

“Sure. I've had a few happen to me over the years. But this time… I don't know, it doesn't feel right that way.”

“Hunches,” DeKalb said. “You can't always trust 'em.”

“Granted. Hell, I don't see how the murder can be tied up with Harmon Crane and the missing wife, either.”

“Anybody you can think of who might have had a motive?”

“That's just it, I can't think of a single person or a single motive-not after all these years.”

“You tell anybody your suspicions about Bertolucci and his wife?”

“No. I only found out about her this afternoon, and I came straight here afterward.”

“Who told you about the wife?”

“Woman in Berkeley-Marilyn Dubek, the niece of Crane's widow. But she's fat, fifty, and a housefrau; the idea of her following me here and blowing Bertolucci away is ridiculous.”

“What about the widow?”

“No way. Late sixties and mentally incompetent ever since her husband's suicide.”

“Well, maybe the Dubek woman told somebody else what she told you after you left.”

“Maybe. But I got here as fast as anybody could in rush-hour traffic, and I was in the general store no more than fifteen minutes. Whoever killed Bertolucci pretty much had to have arrived at the same time I did and probably a while earlier. Don't you think?”

“Seems that way,” he agreed.

“I don't suppose any of the neighbors saw the car?”

DeKalb shook his head. “Nobody home at two of the houses. Old woman who lives in the other place up the way was cooking her supper; besides that, she's half-blind.”

I said, “You know, if this was the perpetrator's first visit here, he might have had to stop over in the business section to ask directions.”

“Already thought of that. Officers are checking it now. Let's get back to your investigation. Did you tell anybody about your first meeting with Bertolucci?”

“Just my client.”

“Michael Kiskadon,” DeKalb said, nodding. “I don't suppose you'd consider him a candidate?”

I hesitated, remembering what I'd thought yesterday morning after talking to Kiskadon on the phone-that if his wife didn't get him some psychiatric help pretty soon, he was liable to come unwrapped. And then what? I'd wondered. What happens to a guy like Kiskadon when he starts to unravel? Well, murder was one thing that happens to head cases; the sheer terrifying number of lunatics running around committing atrocities these days was proof of that. But something had to trigger a homicidal act, and I had told Kiskadon nothing about Angelo Bertolucci that could have induced a murderous rage. Besides, there was Kiskadon's physical condition: he was weak, he could barely get around unaided, he seldom left the house even for short periods. I could no more envision him driving all the way up to Tomales to confront Bertolucci than I could Marilyn Dubek.

I said these things to DeKalb and he concurred. But he felt that a talk with Kiskadon was indicated just the same. So did I, even though I did not relish the prospect; and I thought that for Kiskadon's sake, it would be better if I got to him first.

Before DeKalb let me leave, he took down the names and addresses of all the other people I had interviewed this past week, including Russ Dancer. Methodical and thorough, that was Chet DeKalb-qualities possessed by all good cops, public and private. He also sent one of the lab men out to take scrapings of the black paint from the banged-up fender of my car. And when I drove away a few minutes later, past the morbid wraiths huddled together in the mist, the lab guy and one of the deputies were using portable crime-scene floodlights to comb the area near the Dillon Beach Road intersection, looking for anything that might have come off the black car during the collision.

The fog stayed thick and roiling, retarding my speed, until I neared Petaluma; then it lifted into a high overcast and I was able to make better time. It was twenty of eleven when I came across the Golden Gate Bridge, and eleven on the nose when I walked into my flat. I was tired and I felt crawly and I wanted a shower and some sleep. My stomach was giving me hell too; so even though I had no appetite, and before I did anything else, I ate some mortadella and a wedge of gorgonzola and a carton of pineapple cottage cheese. Which was a bad idea, as it turned out. The stuff congealed in my stomach for some reason and gave me the twin devilments of heartburn and gas.

I lay in bed belching and farting and trying to sleep. But I couldn't get rid of the persistent image of Bertolucci's buckshot-savaged corpse, of all that glistening blood. And I couldn't stop thinking about the why of his death, either. If it was connected with what happened in 1949, and my gut instincts still said that it was, the reason for the killing escaped me completely.

Motive, motive, what was the damned motive?

I was up at seven-ten in the morning, gritty-eyed and headachy and depressed. It took a long shower, followed by three cups of strong coffee, to clear away the remnants of the nightmares that had plagued my sleep. It was always that way after I stumbled on violent death: the bad dreams, the day-after depression. Some cops had become inured to the residue of violence; I never had, which was one of the reasons I had quit the force twenty-five years ago to open my own agency. No corpses to deal with then, I'd thought; just the pain and tears of the living. Well, I'd been wrong-Christ, how wrong I'd been. I had seen more death these past twenty-five years than I ever would have if I had stayed on the cops.

I called Kerry's number at eight-thirty. No answer. That stirred me up a little, until I remembered that it was Saturday: she went jogging on Saturday mornings, sometimes in Golden Gate Park, sometimes around Lake Merced, sometimes down on the Marina Green. She wasn't one of those jogging fanatics; she didn't run every day, she didn't run fifty miles a week, she just ran on Saturdays for exercise. I forgave her for it, now that she had quit trying to coerce me into running with her. Everybody is entitled to one small lunacy.

So I called Eberhardt's house, and he wasn't home either. That nettled me. Over at Wanda's again, probably; spending too damn much time with her since the Il Roccaforte fiasco, soothing her ruffled feathers. Or more likely stroking her unfeathered chest. Neglecting his work, mooning around like a lovesick jerk-he was beginning to annoy the hell out of me, and the next time I saw him I was going to tell him so. I considered calling him at Wanda's and decided I didn't want to talk to her. Nor him very badly, for that matter. Let him read about Bertolucci's death in the papers.

As early as it was, I went ahead and dialed Kiskadon's number. I figured he would probably be up by now, and I wanted to reach him before DeKalb did. He was up, all right-he answered right away-and he sounded neither happy nor unhappy to hear from me. But he didn't know about Bertolucci yet or he would have said something when I asked him if I could stop by. He wanted to know if I had news; I said yes but it would be better if we discussed it in person; he told me to come over any time. There was a bitter, hopeless note in his voice that I didn't like.

It was foggy on Golden Gate Heights; you could barely see the tops of the trees over in the park. Nobody was out and around. The whole area had a gray, abandoned look, like a neighborhood in a plague city. Some mood I was in when that sort of thought crossed my mind.

Lynn Kiskadon answered the door. Pale-featured except for dark circles under her eyes, and bulgy again in another pair of too-tight Calvin Klein jeans. Before I could say anything, she stepped out on the porch, pulled the door against its latch, and held it there with one hand.

She said, “He's waiting in his den. He thinks you've got bad news-I can tell by the way he looks.”

“I'm afraid I have.”

“Oh God, I knew it,” she said, “I knew it.” The words were like a lament, soft and moaning and edged with self-pity. “What have you found out?”

“I'd rather say it just once, Mrs. Kiskadon.”

“He won't want me in the room with the two of you.”

“Why not?”

“We had another fight. Wednesday night, after you and I talked in the park. He hasn't said five words to me since.”

I didn't say anything.

“I tried to call you on Thursday and again yesterday. I thought… I don't know what I thought. I don't know who else to turn to.”

“What was the fight about?”

“He won't see a psychiatrist, he won't even talk to his own doctor. He just won't face the truth about himself.”

“He sounded depressed on the phone,” I said.

“Worse than I've ever seen him. He just sits in his den reading his father's books and stories. Won't eat, won't talk, just sits there until all hours. Do you have to tell him this news of yours?”

“I don't have a choice.”

“It's really so bad?”

“Not to you or me. But it will be to him.”

“Then don't tell him! God knows what he might do.”

“Mrs. Kiskadon, if you're afraid of that gun of his, why don't you get it out of his desk and hide it somewhere?”

“It's in a locked drawer and he has the only key. And he's in the den all the time.”

“I've still got to tell him,” I said. “If I don't, the Marin County Sheriffs Department will.”

“Sheriff's Department? My God, what-”

“We'd better go inside, Mrs. Kiskadon.”

She made a little whiny noise, but she let me reach around her and push open the door and prod her gently inside. It was quiet in the house-too quiet to suit me right now. We went through the living room and along the short hall to the door to Kiskadon's den. I knocked and said his name, and from inside he said, “It's open, come ahead,” and we went in.

He was sitting in the recliner chair, his cane laid across his lap, a cold pipe in one corner of his mouth. The table at his elbow was stacked with pulps, issues of Collier's and American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, three of the Johnny Axe novels. He didn't look any different than he had the last time I'd been here-except for his eyes. There was no animation in them; they were as dark and lightless as burned-out bulbs. And the whites were flecked and streaked with blood.

He said, “You'll excuse me if I don't get up. My leg's bothering me today.”

I moved toward him by a couple of steps, and Lynn Kiskadon shut the door and stood back against it. Kiskadon looked at her, the kind of look that told her silently and bitterly to get out. She said, “I'm staying, Michael. I have a right to hear this too.”

He didn't answer her. As far as he was concerned, she had gone out. He said to me, with the bitterness in his voice, “Glad tidings, I trust?”

“I'm sorry, no.”

“I didn't think so. Well? I'm ready.”

I told him. The evident affair between Harmon Crane and Kate Bertolucci, my suspicions, Angelo Bertolucci's murder-not softening any of it but not going into unnecessary detail either. Once, when I first mentioned the murder, Lynn Kiskadon made the little whiny noise again behind me. Otherwise the only sound in the room was my own voice. Kiskadon didn't speak or move or display any reaction to what I said; his face was as blank as his eyes.

When I finished there were maybe ten seconds of silence. Then he said, “So my father was an adulterer and a murderer. Well, well.” No bitterness in his tone now. No emotion at all. The flat, genderless voice of a programmed machine.

“We don't know that he killed anyone, Mr. Kiskadon.”

“Don't we? It seems plain enough to me.”

“Not to me,” I said. “Bertolucci could just as easily have been the one responsible for his wife's death. Maybe even somebody else.”

“Just the same, my father had to be involved, didn't he? If he wasn't involved, he wouldn't have become begun drinking so heavily afterward, he wouldn't have become so depressed. He wouldn't have shot himself, now would he?”

“We don't have all the facts yet-”

“Enough to suit me.”

“There's still the murder last night,” I said.

“I don't care about that.”

“You'd better care about it, Mr. Kiskadon. I think Bertolucci was killed because of what happened in 1949.”

“Does that make my father any less guilty?”

“I don't know. It might.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

“You don't seem to understand. This isn't an archeological expedition anymore, it isn't a simple search for the motive in your father's suicide. It's a homicide case now.”

“I don't give a damn,” he said.

“Is that what you're going to say to Sergeant DeKalb when he shows up?”

“To hell with Sergeant DeKalb. If he wants to arrest me for any reason, let him. I don't care. That's what you don't seem to understand. I don't care who killed Bertolucci, I don't care who killed his slut of a wife or why, I don't care about any of it anymore.”

“Why not? Just because your father wasn't the kind of man you thought he was?”

No answer. Kiskadon wasn't looking at me either, now. He reached for the canister of tobacco on the table and methodically began to load the bowl of his pipe.

I glanced around at Lynn Kiskadon. Her expression was pleading, helpless; her eyes said, You see? You see?

I saw, all right. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, not for him and not for her. What could I do? I was no head doctor; I didn't know the first thing about dealing with the kinds of neuroses running around inside Kiskadon's skull. I was fortunate if I could deal with the ones inside my own.

Kiskadon struck a kitchen match and lit his pipe. When he had it drawing he said, still without looking at me, “I appreciate all you've done, but I won't need your services any longer. Send me a bill for the balance of what I owe you. Or I can write you a check right now if you'd prefer it that way.”

Nothing to say to that except, “Have it your way, Mr. Kiskadon. I'll send you a bill.” Nothing to do then except to turn and walk out of there, avoiding Mrs. Kiskadon's eyes. And nothing to do after that except to feel twice as shitty and twice as frustrated on the drive back home.