Bones

EIGHTEEN

Ten minutes after I came into my flat, just as I was about to call Kerry, the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and said hello, and there was a wheezing intake of breath followed by a series of fitful coughs. So I knew it was Stephen Porter even before he identified himself.

“That box of Harmon Crane's papers I told you about,” he said, panting a little. “I finally found it. It was in the basement, just as I thought, but hidden at the bottom of Adam's old steamer trunk.”

“Anything among the papers that might help me?”

“Well, I really can't say. Most of them are manuscript carbons. There are some letters written to Harmon, and some by him, but they seem mostly to be business-related. Of course-” He coughed again. “Of course, I haven't read everything. Perhaps you'll be able to find something useful.”

“Perhaps. When can I have a look at them?”

“Right away, if you like. I'd drop the box off to you, but I have a student coming at noon…”

“No, no, I'll come by your studio. Half an hour okay?”

“Yes, fine. I'll be”-more coughing-” I'll be here.”

I postponed the call to Kerry and started immediately for North Beach. The weather was better over there and the tourists and Saturday slummers were out in full force; there was no way I was going to find legal street parking. And the nearest garage to Porter's place was blocks away. So I parked in a bus zone down the street from his building, the hell with it.

Porter was wearing the same green smock and the same red bow tie, or at least identical twins to the ones he'd had on the last time I was here: both were spotted with dried clay. He had a cigarette burning in one hand and what breath he had left made burbling noises in his nose and throat.

The box was on one of the clay-smeared worktables, cardboard and largish; the papers jammed into it looked to be mostly yellow foolscap. I asked Porter if he wanted me to sort through them here, and he said, “No, you can take the box with you,” and then lapsed into a coughing fit so severe it bent him double and turned his face an apoplectic beet red. I wanted to do something for him but there wasn't anything to do. I just stood there, feeling helpless, until he got his breath back.

“One of my bad days,” he said. “Damned emphysema.”

Damned cigarettes, I thought.

I carried the box to the studio door. Porter went with me, firing up another Camel on the way. Walking dead man, I thought then. And tried not to let him see the pity I felt when I said good-bye.

Manuscript carbons. Handwritten notes. Typed fragments and unfinished stories. Letters from Crane's New York agent and from the editors of various book and magazine publishers. Carbons of letters from Crane to those same individuals. A few personal letters addressed to Crane. Carbons of his responses and some other personal correspondence. Most of his papers, it seemed, from 1942 until the time of his death.

Sitting at the kitchen table, thinking that Harmon Crane had been something of a pack rat, I finished sorting out the sheets of stationery and yellow foolscap and then began methodically to wade through them. The manuscript carbons first: two of the Johnny Axe novels, Axe for Trouble and Don't Axe Me; and more than thirty short stories and novelettes, most of them featuring Johnny Axe, all of them marked SOLD and bearing both a date and the name of either a pulp or a slick magazine. I riffled through some of the manuscripts from 1949. Plenty to interest a collector or a scholar; nothing to interest a detective. I put the carbons back into the box and gave my attention to the notes and fragments.

Most of the handwritten notes-none of which were dated-seemed to be ideas for stories: “Carny owner shot, geek arrested by cops, Axe hired as new geek-funny or too bizarre?” The typed sheets were nearly all one and two pages in length: story openings, descriptions of places and people, clever bits of dialogue, brief plot synopses. There were also two longer fragments. The first was headed Kick Axe! ran to fourteen pages, and appeared to be an early draft of the opening chapter of Axe and Pains. I read through it, looking for Bertolucci's name, but it wasn't there.

The other segment bore a pulpish title-“You Can't Run Away from Death”-and was a little over eight pages long. Unfinished pulp story, I thought. But it wasn't. Halfway through the first page I realized it was something much more than that.

Numb with shock, Rick Durbin stared at the body on the cabin floor. Carla. It was Carla! Somebody had come here while he was in the village buying groceries. Somebody had beaten her to death with a chunk of stovewood.

Borelli, he thought. It had to be her husband, Borelli.

Durbin fell to his knees beside her. He wanted to cry but he had no tears. He'd loved her. Or had he? He didn't know. He didn't know anything right now except that she was dead. Murdered. Lying here so still, blood shining in her red hair, where only an hour ago she had been so warm and vibrant and alive.

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 combined 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.