Bones

FOUR

This time when I rang the bell at the Yankowski house, there was somebody home besides the fire-breathing jabberwock. The thing started up in there again, whiffling and burbling, but the noise came distantly, from the back of the place, and never got any closer. Pretty soon the door opened on a chain and a white female face topped by frizzy gray hair appeared in the opening. It said suspiciously, “Yes? What is it?”

“I'd like to see Mr. Yankowski.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“No, but I think he'll see me. Just tell him it concerns Harmon Crane and his son.”

“Your name?”

I held up one of my business cards. A chubby white arm slithered out through the door opening, snatched the card, and then disappeared with it. The face said, “Wait, please,” after which it, too, disappeared and the door snicked shut.

I stood there. A thin breeze off the ocean carried the smells of eucalyptus and jasmine; it was that kind of early evening. Inside the house, the jabberwock continued to make a lot of distant noise, including a couple of thumps and a faint hollow crash. Probably eating some furniture, I thought. Or maybe eating the housekeeper, if that was who owned the white face and the white arm and the frizzy gray hair; as far as I knew, Yankowski had never been married.

But no, the door opened again finally, still on its chain, and there she was. She said, “He'll see you. You can go on around back.”

“Around back?”

“He's in the garden.”

There were some stepping stones that led away from the tile porch, through jasmine shrubs and dwarf cypress pruned into eccentric shapes. All the windows of the house had iron bars bolted across them, I noticed: an added precaution to ease the usual city dweller's paranoia. In Yankowski's case, though, there was probably more to it than that. There must have been a couple of thousand people in the Bay Area with just cause to break into his house and murder him in his bed.

At the rear I found a high fence with a gate in it. From the top of the fence, another six feet or so of clear molded plastic curved up and then back to the house wall; the effect was of a kind of bubble that would enclose and also secure the garden within. I tried the gate latch, found it unlocked, and walked in.

The garden contained a twenty-foot square of well-barbered lawn, bordered on three sides by rose bushes and on the fourth by the rear staircase and a path leading from it to the gate. On the lawn were a Weber barbecue and some pieces of redwood outdoor furniture. And on one of the chairs was old Yank-'Em-Out himself, sitting comfortably with his legs crossed, a drink in one hand and a fat green cigar in the other.

“Flip the lock on the gate when you close it,” he said. “I unlocked it for you.”

Yeah, I thought, paranoia. I shut the gate, flipped the lock, and went to where he was sitting. The rear of the house faced west and the sun was starting to set now over the Pacific; the glare of it coming through that plastic bubble overhead gave the enclosure an odd reddish tinge, as if it were artificially lighted. The glow made Yankowski look gnomish and feral, like a retired troll who had moved out from under his bridge to a house in the city. Which was a fanciful thought, but one that pleased me just the same.

My business card lay all by itself on a redwood table next to him; he tapped it with a crooked forefinger, not quite hard enough to knock the long gray ash off his cigar. “I'm honored,” he said. “It isn't every day a famous private eye comes calling on me.”

There was no irony or sarcasm in his voice. I didn't let any come into mine, either, when I said, “It isn't every day that I get to pay a call on a distinguished member of the legal profession.”

“An honor for both of us, then. But we've met before, haven't we? I seem to recall that you worked for me once a few years ago.”

“Just once. After that I worked for your opponents.”

He thought that was funny; he had a fine sense of humor, Yank-'Em-Out did. He also had his own teeth, the bastard, and a fine head of dark brown hair with only a little gray at the temples-Grecian Formula, I thought; has to be-and a strong, lean body and not many more wrinkles than I've got. He had to be at least seventy, but he looked ten years younger than that. He looked prosperous and content and healthy as hell.

But he lived in a house with bars on its windows and a vicious dog prowling its rooms, and sat in a garden with a plastic bubble over it, and told guests to be sure to lock the gate after they entered. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, he lived in fear-and that is a damned poor way for any man to live.

He swallowed some of his drink, put the glass down on top of my card-deliberately, I thought-and pointed his cigar at me. “Annie says you're here about Harmon Crane.”

“That's right.”

“Michael Kiskadon hired you, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“I'm not surprised. Well, sit down. I don't mind talking to you, although I don't see what you or Michael hope to accomplish this long after the fact.”

I stayed where I was; I liked the idea of looking down at him. “He wants to know why his father committed suicide,” I said.

“Of course he does. So do I.”

“I understand your theory is that Crane shot himself because he was no longer able to write.”

“Yes. But obviously I have no proof.”

“Did he ever communicate to you that he had writer's block?”

“Not in so many words,” Yankowski said. “But he hadn't written anything in weeks and it was plain to anyone who knew him that he was despondent about it.”

“Did he ever mention suicide?”

“Not to me. Nor to anyone else I know of.”

“So you were surprised when you found him dead that night.”

“Surprised? Yes and no. I told you, he was despondent and we were all worried about him.”

“This despondence… it came on all of a sudden, didn't it?”

“No, it was a gradual thing. Did someone tell you otherwise?”

“Kiskadon seems to think his father was all right up until a few weeks before his death.”

“Nonsense,” Yankowski said. “Who told him that?”

“He didn't say.”

“Well, it wasn't that way at all. I told you, Harmon's mental deterioration was gradual. He'd been having trouble working for more than three months.”

“Had he been drinking heavily for that long?”

“More or less. Harmon was always fond of liquor, and he always turned to it when there was a crisis in his life. The writer's favorite crutch. Or it was in those days, before drugs became fashionable.”

“You seem pretty positive about all this, Counselor.” He shrugged, and I said, “Do you also have a clear memory of the night of Crane's suicide?”

The question didn't faze him. “As clear as anyone's memory can be of a thirty-five-year-old incident,” he said. “Do I strike you as senile?”

“On the contrary.”

He favored me with a lopsided grin. “Aren't you going to sit down?”

“I'd rather stand. Aren't you going to offer me a drink or one of your cigars?”

“Certainly not.”

We watched each other like a couple of old pit bulls. I knew what he was thinking and he knew what I was thinking and yet here we were, putting on polite conventions for each other, pretending to be civilized while we sniffed around and nipped at each other's heels. It was a game he'd play for a while, but not indefinitely. If you cornered him, or if you just bothered him a little too much, he would go straight for your throat.

I said, “About the night of the suicide. Crane called and asked you to come to his house, is that right?”

“It is.”

“And he was very upset, barely coherent.”

“That's right.”

“Drunk?”

“Very.”

“What did he say, exactly?”

“Words to the effect that he needed to talk.”

“He didn't say about what?”

“No.”

“Did he sound suicidal?”

“No. If he had I would have called the police.”

“Instead you went over there.”

“I did.”

“And met Mrs. Crane and Adam Porter.”

“Yes. They had just returned from dinner.”

“Did they seem worried about Crane?”

“Not unduly. Not until I'd told them of his call.”

“Then he hadn't given either of them any indication he might be considering suicide?”

“No.”

“What happened after you told Porter and Mrs. Crane about the call?”

“She became upset and called Crane's name. When there was no answer we all went upstairs and found the door to his office locked. We shouted his name several times, and when there was still no response we broke in.”

“You and Porter.”

“Yes.”

“Whose idea was it, to break in?”

“Adam's, I think. Does it matter?”

“I suppose not. Was there anything unusual about the office?”

“Unusual? The man was lying dead across his desk.”

“I think you know what I mean, Counselor. Anything that struck you after you looked at the body and found the suicide note.”

He sighed elaborately. He had put on his courtroom manner like a sweater; I might have been a jury, or maybe a judge. “We were all quite distraught; Amanda, in fact, was close to hysterics. The only thing I remember noticing was that the room reeked of whiskey, which was hardly unusual.”

“Had Crane been dead long?”

“Less than an hour,” Yankowski said, “according to the best estimate of the police coroner. He must have shot himself within minutes after he telephoned me.”

“Why do you suppose he'd call you to come talk to him and then almost immediately shoot himself?”

He gave me a reproachful look. “You've been a detective almost as many years as I practiced law,” he said. “Suicides are unstable personalities, prone to all manner of unpredictable behavior. You know that as well as I do.”

“Uh-huh. Were you a close friend of Crane's, Counselor?”

“Not really. Our relationship was mostly professional.”

“Then why did he call you that night? Why not someone close to him?”

Yankowski shrugged. “Harmon had no close friends; he was an intensely private man. I think he called me because I represented stability-an authority figure, the voice of reason. I think he wanted to be talked out of killing himself. But his personal demons, coupled with whiskey, drove him to it anyway. He simply couldn't make himself wait.”

There wasn't anything to say to that; it sounded reasonable enough. So I said, “I understand you met Crane while he was researching a book.”

“That's right. He sat through a narcotics trial at which I was assistant defense counsel-a similar case to one in a novel he was writing at the time-and we struck up an acquaintance.”

“How did you happen to become his attorney?”

“A short time after we met, a woman in Menlo Park began harassing him, claiming he had stolen her idea for one of his early Johnny Axe novels-I don't remember which one. Nothing came of it; I persuaded her to drop her notion of a plagiarism suit.”

“I'll bet you did. What was her name, do you remember?”

“Tinklehoff. Maude Tinklehoff. No one could forget a name like that.”

“Did she make any other trouble for Crane?”

“I hardly think so. She was in her late sixties and suffering from cancer; I believe she died a short time after my dealings with her.”

“How long before his suicide was this plagiarism business?”

“At least two years. Perhaps three.”

“Did you ever do any other legal work for him?”

“I drew up his will.”

“Uh-huh. Who got the bulk of his estate?”

“His wife, of course.”

“You mean Amanda Crane.”

“Certainly.”

“Did he happen to leave you anything?”

This question didn't faze him either. “Nothing at all.”

“Did he leave anything to either of his ex-wives?”

“No. He wasn't on speaking terms with Michael's mother, Susan, and he had long since fallen out of touch with his first wife.”

“Ellen Corneal.”

“I believe that was her name, yes.”

“Did you know her?”

“No. Nor Susan, if that's your next question.”

“Do you know what happened to Ellen Corneal?”

“I have no idea.”

“Amanda Crane seems to think her husband was married just once before her,” I said, “to Kiskadon's mother. Why do you suppose that is?”

He frowned at me around the nub of his cigar. “How do you know what Amanda Crane thinks?”

“I spoke to her this morning in Berkeley.”

For some reason that made him angry. He came bouncing up out of his chair and leaned his face to within a couple of inches of mine and breathed the odors of bourbon and tobacco at me. I stood my ground; I wasn't about to back down from the likes of Yank-'Em-Out Yankowski, bad breath or no bad breath.

“I don't like the idea of you bothering her,” he said.

“Why should my seeing Mrs. Crane concern you?”

“She's a sick woman. Mentally disturbed.”

“So I gathered. But if you're so worried about her, how come you haven't been to see her in years?”

“That is my business.”

“The reason wouldn't be that she turned you down when you proposed to her, would it?”

His eyes went all funny, hot and cold at the same time, like flames frozen in ice. He put his free hand against my chest and shoved, hard enough to stagger me a little. “Get out of here,” he said in a low, dangerous voice. “And don't come back.”

I stayed where I was for a time. I was afraid if I moved it would be in his direction, and taking a poke at a seventy-year-old shyster lawyer in his own back yard would be a prize-winning act of stupidity.

“I told you to get off my property. Now! ”

“My pleasure, Counselor.”

I put my back to him and went out through the gate, leaving it wide open behind me. Inside the house I could hear the dog making growling noises, but they weren't as vicious as the ones I'd just heard from Yankowski. Pit bull-yeah. Sniff around, sniff around, and then right for the throat.

Whatever that thing in the house was, its master was a far nastier son of a bitch.