Bones

THREE

As I drove away from there, back down Ashby, I cursed Michael Kiskadon. Why the hell hadn't he told me about his stepmother's condition? But the anger didn't last long. Pretty soon I thought: Quit jumping to conclusions; maybe he never realized it at all. She looked and sounded normal enough; it was only when you analyzed what she said and the way she said it that you understood how off-key it was. Look how long it had taken me to realize the truth, and at that I might not have tumbled if it hadn't been for the way the niece treated her.

Some detective I was. There were times when I couldn't detect a fart in a Skid Row beanery.

It was almost one-thirty when I came back across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. I took the Broadway exit that leads to North Beach, stopped at the first service station off the freeway, and looked up Stephen Porter in the public telephone directory. Only one listed-and just the number, no street address. I fished up a dime and dialed the number. Nobody answered.

Yeah, I thought, that figures.

The prospect of food had no appeal, but my stomach was rumbling and it seemed a wise idea to fill the empty spaces; I hadn't had anything to eat all day except for an orange with my breakfast coffee at eight A.M. I drove on through the Broadway tunnel and stopped at a place on Polk, where I managed to swallow a tuna-fish-on-rye and a glass of iced tea. I wanted a beer instead of the iced tea, but I was on short rations again where the suds were concerned; after losing a lot of weight earlier in the year I had started to pork up a little again, and I was damned if I was going to get reacquainted with my old nemisis, the beer belly. So it was one bottle of Lite per day now-and the way this day was progressing, I was going to need my one bottle even more later than I did now.

From the restaurant I went down to Civic Center, wasted fifteen minutes looking for a place to park, and finally got into the microfilm room at the main library. Kiskadon had told me the date of his father's death was December 10, 1949. San Francisco had had four newspapers back then- News, Call-Bulletin, Chronicle, and Examiner; I requested the issues of December 11 and 12, 1949, from all four. Then I sat down at one of the magnifying machines and proceeded to abuse my eyes and give myself a headache squinting at page after page of blurry newsprint.

The facts of Harmon Crane's suicide-or at least the facts that had been made public-were pretty much as Kiskadon had given them to me. On the night of December 10, Amanda Crane had gone out to dinner on Fisherman's Wharf with Adam Porter; Harmon Crane had been invited but had declined to accompany them. According to Porter, Crane had seemed withdrawn and depressed and had been drinking steadily all day. “I had no inkling that he might be contemplating suicide,” Porter was quoted as saying. “Harmon just never struck me as the suicidal type.”

Porter and Mrs. Crane had returned to the secluded North Beach house at 8:45. Thomas Yankowski arrived just after they entered the premises; he had been summoned by a call from Crane, who had “sounded desperate and not altogether coherent,” and had rushed right over. Alarmed by this, Mrs. Crane began calling her husband's name. When he didn't respond, Yankowski and Porter ran upstairs, where they found the door to Crane's office locked from the inside. Their concern was great enough by this time to warrant breaking in. And inside they had found Crane slumped over his desk, dead of a gunshot wound to the right temple.

The weapon, a. 22 caliber Browning target automatic, was clenched in his hand. It was his gun, legally registered to him; he had been fond of target shooting and owned three such small-caliber firearms. A typed note “spattered with the writer's blood,” according to some yellow journalist on the Call, lay on top of Crane's typewriter. It said: “I can't go on any longer. Can't sleep, can't eat, can't work. I think I'm losing my mind. Life terrifies me more than death. I will be better off dead and Mandy will be better off without me.”

There were no quotes from Amanda Crane in any of the news stories; she was said to be in seclusion, under a doctor's care-which usually indicated severe trauma. Yankowski and Porter both expressed shock and dismay at the suicide. Porter said, “Harmon hadn't been himself lately-withdrawn and drinking too much. We thought it was some sort of a slump, perhaps writer's block. We never believed it would come to this.” Yankowski said, “The only explanation I can find is that he ran out of words. Writing meant more to Harmon than anything else in this world. Not being able to write would be a living death to a man of his temperament.”

No one else who knew Crane had any better guesses to make. He had been closemouthed about whatever was troubling him, and evidently confided in no one at all. As far as anyone knew, his reasons for embracing death had died with him.

So how was I supposed to find out what they were, thirty-five years later? What did it matter, really, why he had knocked himself off? We all die sooner or later, some with cause, some without. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and who the hell cares in the long run?

Amanda Crane cared. Michael Kiskadon cared. And maybe I cared too, a little: there's always some damn fool like me to care about things that don't matter in the long run.

I left the library, picked up my car and the overtime parking ticket flapping under the windshield wiper, said a few words out loud about the way the city of San Francisco treats its citizens, and drove back up Van Ness to O'Farrell Street. The office I share with Eberhardt is on O'Farrell, not far from Van Ness, and in the next block is a parking garage that by comparison with the garages farther downtown offers a dirt-cheap monthly rate. I put the car in my alloted space on the ground floor and walked back to my building.

The place doesn't look like much from the outside: bland and respectable in a shabby sort of way. It doesn't look like much on the inside either. The ground floor belongs to a real estate company, the second floor belongs to an outfit that makes custom shirts (“The Slim-Taper Look is the Right Look”), and the third and top floor belongs to Eberhardt and me. That floor is a converted loft that once housed an art school, which is why it has a skylight in the ceiling. Very classy, an office with a skylight-except when it rains. Then the noise the rain makes beating down on the glass is so loud you have to yell when you're talking on the telephone.

Eberhardt was talking on the telephone when I came in-settled back in his chair with his feet up on his desk-but he wasn't yelling; he was crooning and cooing into the receiver like a constipated dove. Which meant that he was talking to Wanda. He always crooned and cooed when he talked to Wanda-a man fifty-five years old, divorced, a tough ex-cop. It was pretty disgusting to see and hear.

But he was in love, or thought he was. Wanda Jaworski, an employee of the downtown branch of Macy's-the footwear department. They had met in a supermarket a couple of months ago, when he dropped a package of chicken parts on her foot. This highly romantic beginning had evolved into a whirlwind courtship and a (probably drunken) proposal of marriage. They hadn't set a definite date yet; Wanda was still assembling her trousseau. Or “truss-o,” as she put it, which sounded like some kind of device for people with hernias. Wanda was not long on brains. Nor was Wanda long on sophistication; Wanda, in fact, was coarse, silly, and an incessant babbler. Nor was she long on looks, unless you happen to covet overweight forty-five-year-old women with double chins and big behinds and the kind of bright yellow hair that looks as if it belongs on a Raggedy Ann doll. What Wanda was long on was chest. She had the biggest chest I have ever seen, a chest that would have dwarfed Mamie Van Doren's, a chest that would have shamed Dolly Parton's, a chest among chests.

It was Kerry's considered opinion that Eberhardt was not in love with Wanda so much as he was in love with Wanda's chest. He was fascinated by it-or them. Whenever he and Wanda were together he seemed unable to take his eyes off it-or them. It was also Kerry's considered opinion that if he married her, he would be making a monumental mistake.

“What he's doing,” she'd said to me in her typically caustic way on the occasion of our first meeting Wanda, “is making a molehill out of a couple of mountains.”

I tended to agree, but there wasn't much I could do about it. You don't tell your business partner, your best friend for more than thirty years, that he is contemplating marriage to a pea-brained twit. You don't tell him that he can't see the forest for the chest. You don't tell him anything; you just keep your mouth shut and hope that he comes to his senses before it's too late.

He waggled a hand at me as I crossed to my desk. I didn't feel like doing any waggling in return, so I nodded at him and then made a slight detour when I saw that he had a pot of coffee on the hot plate. I poured myself a cup and sat down with it and tried calling Stephen Porter's number again. Still no answer. So then I just sat there, sipping coffee and waiting for Eberhardt to come back to the real world.

The office was big, about twenty feet square; otherwise it wasn't anything to get excited about. The walls and the carpet we'd put down ourselves were a funny beige color that clashed with some hideous mustard yellow fiberboard file cabinets Eberhardt had bought on a whim and refused to repaint. The furnishings consisted of our two desks, some chairs, my file cabinets and his, and an old-fashioned water cooler with a bottle of Alhambra on it that we used to make the coffee. And suspended from the middle of the ceiling was a light fixture that resembled nothing so much as a bunch of brass testicles soldered onto a grappling hook, which someday I was going to tear down and hurl out a window. Not the window behind Eberhardt's desk, which looked out on the blank brick wall of the building next door; the one behind my desk, which had a splendid view of the backside of the Federal Building down on Golden Gate Avenue, not to metion the green copper dome of City Hall further downhill at Civic Center.

Spade and Archer, I thought, circa 1929. Only there was no black bird and no Joel Cairo or Caspar Gutman or Brigid O'Shaughnessy in our lives. There was only Wanda the Footwear Queen, and some poor bastard of a writer who had gotten into the Christmas spirit one December night three and a half decades ago by putting a bullet through his brain.

Eberhardt muttered something into the telephone receiver, cupped his hand over it, and poked his jowly, graying head in my direction. “Hey, paisan,” he said, “you got anything on for tomorrow night?”

“I don't know, I don't think so. Why?”

“How about the four of us going out to dinner? Wanda knows this great little out-of-the-way place.”

I hesitated. The last thing I wanted to do tomorrow night was to have dinner with Wanda. The last thing Kerry would want to do ever was to have dinner with Wanda; Kerry disliked the Footwear Queen even more than I did, and was not always careful to hide her feelings. The four of us had had dinner together once, not long after Eberhardt had found true love via a package of Foster Farms drumsticks, and it had not been a memorable evening. “The only thing bigger than that woman's tits,” Kerry had said later, “is her mouth. I wonder if she talks the whole time they're in bed together too?” Which was something I still didn't want to think about.

I said lamely, “Uh, well, I don't know, Eb…”

“Kerry's free, isn't she?”

“Well, I'm not sure…”

“You said last Friday she'd be free all this week. How about it, paisan? We'll make a night of it.”

A night of it, I thought. I said No, no, no! inside my head, but my mouth said, “Sure, okay, if Kerry's not doing anything.” It was a mistake; I knew it was a mistake and that I would pay for it when I told Kerry, but I hadn't wanted to offend him. He got grumpy when he was offended and there was something I needed him to do for me.

He said, “All set, then,” and did a little more crooning and cooing to Wanda. I half expected him to play kissy-face with her when the coversation finally ended, a spectacle that would have made me throw up, but it didn't happen. I think he said, “Bye-bye, sugar,” which was bad enough. Then he took his feet down and gave me a sappy, lovestruck grin.

“That was Wanda,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“What a peach,” he said.

What a pair, I thought. Wanda's chest and him. I asked him, “Anything happen today?”

“Nah, it's been quiet. Some woman called for you; wouldn't leave her name, wouldn't say what she wanted. Said it was a private matter and she'd call back.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Only other call was from that asshole runs the credit company out in Daly City.”

“Dennison? What did he want?”

“Another repo job. A new Jaguar, can you believe it?”

“I can believe it. You take the job?”

“Sure I took it.”

“That's good.”

“I never drove a Jag before,” he said. “That's the only reason.” He shook his head. “Repossesing cars. For Christ's sake, what kind of job is that for a detective?”

“The bread-and-butter kind.”

“Nickels and dimes, you mean. Hell, I don't want Wanda to have to work after we're married. I want to buy her the kind of things she deserves.”

Like a tent for her chest and a sack for her face, I thought, and immediately felt guilty. He was in love with her, after all. Maybe she had her good points. Maybe underneath all that chest there beat a heart of pure gold.

Maybe the Pope is Jewish, I thought.

Eberhardt said, “So how'd it go with you? The guy up on Twelfth Avenue?”

“I took him on,” I said, and explained what kind of job it was and what I'd been doing all day.

“A nut case,” he said, grimacing. “You better make sure his check doesn't bounce before you do any more work.”

“It won't bounce.”

“It's the pulp angle, right? That's why you took it on.”

“In the beginning. Now it's more than that.”

“It always is with you.” Another headshake. “Nut cases and car repos-what a hell of a glamorous business we got going for us here.”

“You want glamour? Go to work for the Pinkertons.”

“Yeah, sure, and wind up a security guard in a bank.”

“Then don't bitch.”

He sighed, rummaged around among the clutter on his desk, found one of his pipes, took it apart, and ran a pipe cleaner through the stem. “Old Yank-'Em-Out Yankowski,” he said musingly. “What a miserable son of a bitch he was, in and out of court.”

“He probably still is.”

“You ever have dealings with him?”

“Some.”

“Me too. A goddamn bloodsucker. You know, I thought he was dead. Didn't he have a heart attack or something a couple of years ago?”

“I don't know, did he?”

“Seems I heard he did. Too bad he survived.”

“Bad karma, Eb.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Listen, how far back do the Department's files go? Would they still have the inspector's report on a routine suicide in 1949?”

“Probably. Never get rid of anything-that was the policy before I retired.” Eb had taken an early retirement from the cops less than a year ago-he was a year older than me, fifty-five-and he'd been my partner for about six months. He still had plenty of friends in the Department, plenty of old favors to call in; there wasn't much going on at the Hall of Justice that he didn't know about and nothing much in the way of official documentation that he couldn't lay hands on. “I suppose you want a look at the Crane report.”

“Right.”

“Why bother? It won't tell you any more than the newspaper stories.”

“It might. Could be something in it, some hint of Crane's motive, that the reporters didn't get.”

He shrugged. “Okay, I'll get it for you-if it hasn't been lost, stolen, or misfiled. Thirty-five years is a long time.”

“Don't I know it. How soon?”

“Tomorrow sometime.”

I nodded. My watch said it was almost four-thirty; I finished my coffee and lifted myself out of the chair. “I'd better get moving. You mind hanging around until five and locking up?”

“No problem. Where you off to?”

“A talk with Yank-'Em-Out, if he's home by now. And then dinner with Kerry.”

“Dinner, yeah,” he said. “Don't forget tomorrow night.”

“I won't forget,” I said. “Kerry won't let me.”

And that was the truth in more ways than one.