Bones

NINETEEN

Sunday.

Kerry and I went downtown to the St. Francis Hotel for an early brunch, something we do occasionally. Afterward she suggested a drive down the coast and I said okay; the fog and high overcast had blown inland during the night, making the day clear and bright, if still windy. But I wasn't in much of a mood for that kind of Sunday outing. Not depressed so much today as restless-what a Texan I had known in the Army called a “daunciness”; I couldn't seem to relax, I couldn't seem to keep my mind off Harmon Crane and Michael Kiskadon and that damned letter carbon addressed to somebody with the initial L.

As perceptive as she is, Kerry read my mood and understood it. We were in Pacifica, following Highway One along the edge of the ocean, when she said, “Why don't we go back?”

“What?”

“Back home. You're not enjoying yourself and neither am I. You can drop me at my place if you'd rather be alone.”

“Uh-uh. We'll go back, but I don't want to be alone. I'll only brood.”

“You're doing that now.”

“I'll do it worse if you're not around.”

It was noon when we got back to the city. I drove to Pacific Heights-doing it automatically, without consulting Kerry. But she didn't seem to mind. Inside my flat, she went to make us some fresh coffee and I sat down with the box of Harmon Crane's papers. I reread the letter carbon. I reread the fictionalized confession. I reread the carbon one more time.

I was still bothered. And I still didn't know why.

Kerry had brought me some coffee and was sitting on the couch, reading one of my pulps. I said to her, “Let's play some gin rummy.”

She looked up. “Are you sure that's what you want to do?”

“Sure I'm sure. Why?”

“You get grumpy when you lose at gin.”

“Who says I'm going to lose?”

“You always lose when you're in a mood like this. You don't concentrate and you misplay your cards.”

“Is that so? Get the cards.”

“I'm telling you, you'll lose.”

“Get the cards. I'm not going to lose.”

She got the cards, and we played five hands and I lost every one because I couldn't concentrate and misplayed my cards. I hate it when she's right. I lost the sixth hand, too: she caught me with close to seventy points-goddamn face cards, I never had learned not to hoard face cards.

“You're a hundred and thirty-seven points down already,” she said. “You want to quit?”

“Shut up and deal,” I said grumpily.

And the telephone rang.

“Now who the hell is that?”

“Why don't you answer it and find out?”

“Oh, you're a riot, Alice,” I said, which was a Jackie Gleason line from the old “Honeymooners” TV show. But she didn't get it. She said, “Who's Alice?” The telephone kept on ringing; I said, “One of these days, Alice, bang, zoom, straight to the moon,” and got up and went into the bedroom to answer it.

A woman's voice made an odd chattering sound: “Muh-muh-muh,” like an engine that kept turning over but wouldn't catch. But it wasn't funny; there was a familiar whining note of despair in the voice.

“Mrs. Kiskadon? What's the matter?”

She made the sound again, as if there were a liquidy blockage in her throat and she couldn't push the words past it. I told her to calm down, take a couple of deep breaths. I heard her do that; then she made a different noise, a kind of strangled gulping, that broke the blockage and let the words come spilling out.

“It's Michael… you've got to help me, please, I don't know what to do!”

“What about Michael?”

“He said… he said he was going to kill himself…”

I could feel the tension come into me, like air filling and expanding a balloon. “When was this?”

“A little while ago. He locked himself in his den last night after that Marin policeman left, he wouldn't come out, he sat in there all night doing God knows what. But this afternoon… he came out this afternoon and he had that gun in his hand, he was just carrying it in his hand, and he said… he…”

“Easy. Did you call his doctor?”

“No, I didn't think… I was too upset…”

“Have you called anyone else?”

“No. Just you… you were the only person I could think of.”

“All right. Is your husband in his den now?”

“I don't know,” she said, “I'm not home.”

“Not home? Where are you?”

“I couldn't stay there, I just… I couldn't, I had to get out of there…”

“Where are you?” I asked her again.

“A service station. On Van Ness.”

“How long have you been away from your house?”

“I don't know, not long…”

“Listen to me. What did your husband say before you left? Tell me his exact words.”

“He said… I don't remember his exact words, it was something about shooting himself the way his father did, like father like son, it was crazy talk…”

“Did he sound crazy? Incoherent?”

“No. He was calm, that awful calm.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“No, no, nothing.”

“What did he do?”

“Went back into the den and locked the door.”

“And then you left?”

“Yes. I told you, I couldn't stay there…”

“How soon did you leave?”

“Right away. A minute or two.”

“So it hasn't been more than fifteen or twenty minutes since he made his threat. He's probably all right; there's no reason to panic. You go back home and try to reason with him. Meanwhile, I'll call his doctor for you-”

“No,” she said, “I can't go back there alone. Not alone. If you come… I'll meet you there…”

“There's nothing I can do-”

“Please,” she said, “I'll go home now, I'll wait for you.”

“Mrs. Kiskadon, I think you-”

But there was a clicking sound and she was gone.

I put the handset back into its cradle. And left it there: I couldn't call Kiskadon's doctor because I didn't know who he was; she hadn't given me time to ask his name.

When I turned around Kerry was standing in the bedroom doorway. She said, “What was that all about?”

“Kiskadon threatened to kill himself a while ago. His wife is pretty upset; she wants me to go over there.”

“Do you think he meant it?”

“I hope not.”

“But he might have.”

“Yeah,” I said, “he might have.”

“Then what are you waiting for? Go, for God's sake.”

I went.

The green Ford Escort was parked in the driveway when I got to Twelfth Avenue and Lynn Kiskadon was sitting stiffly behind the wheel. She didn't move as I pulled to the curb in front, or when I got out and went around behind the Ford and up along her side. She didn't seem to know I was there until I tapped lightly on the window; then she jerked, like somebody coming out of a daze, and her head snapped around. Behind the glass her face had a frozen look, pale and haggard, the eyes staring with the same fixed emptiness as the stuffed rodents in Angelo Bertolucci's display cases.

I reached down and opened the door. She said, “I didn't think you were coming,” in a voice that was too calm, too controlled. She was one breath this side of a scream and two breaths short of hysteria.

“Did you check on your husband, Mrs. Kiskadon?”

“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 amp; 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.