“I used to think so too. Not anymore.”

I let that pass. “He must have loved her quite a bit, to put up with that kind of relationship.”

“I guess he did.” Dancer showed me another of his lopsided grins. “Love does crazy things to people. Always has, always will.”

“What other problems did Crane have?”

“The booze, for one; he put it away like water. And one of his ex-wives was bugging him.”

That was news. I asked, “Which one?”

“Some broad he married when he was in college, I forget her name.”

“Ellen Corneal.”

“If you say so.”

“What was she bugging him about?”

“Money, what else? She was broke, she'd heard how well Harmie was doing, she figured he'd float her a loan for past services.” Dancer laughed sardonically. “He sure knew how to pick his women.”

“Did Crane give her the money?”

“No. Told her to bugger off. But she kept pestering him anyway.”

“Was she living in San Francisco at the time?”

“He didn't say. But if she wasn't, she was close by.”

“You know anything about her? What she did for a living, whether she was remarried-like that?”

“Nothing. Harmie didn't say much about her.”

“How upset was he that she'd shown up in his life again?”

“Not nearly as upset as he was about not getting laid.”

“He seem depressed the last time you saw him?”

“Not that I remember.”

“Were you in touch with him after you went back to New York?”

“Nah. Dropped him a note but he didn't answer it. Next thing I knew, he was dead.”

“You get to know any of his friends while you were out here?”

“Don't recall any.”

“But you did meet some of them.”

“One or two, I guess.”

“His lawyer, Thomas Yankowski?”

“Name doesn't ring a bell.”

“Adam Porter? Stephen Porter?”

“No bells there either.”

I had run out of questions to ask. I drank some of my beer while Dancer lit yet another cigarette; then I said it had been good talking to him again and that I appreciated his help, and started to slide out of the booth. But he reached over and caught hold of my arm.

“Hey, come on, don't rush off,” he said. “You didn't finish your beer.”

“I'm working, Russ, remember?”

“Sure, sure, but you've got time for one more, haven't you? For old times' sake? Hell, it's been two years. Who knows how long it'll be till we hoist another one together.”

He was a little drunk now, and inclined toward the maudlin; but there was also a kind of pathetic quality in his voice and manner-a tacit reaching out for a little companionship, a little kindness, that I couldn't bring myself to ignore. He was a lot of things, Dancer was, and one of them was lonely. And maybe another was afraid.

I said, “All right-one more. And I'll buy.”

I spent another twenty minutes with him, talking about this and that-a rehash of the pulp convention two years ago, mostly, and how grateful he was to me for clearing him of the murder charge. Just before I left him I asked how he was doing these days, how things were in the writing business.

“Hack business, you mean,” he said. The sardonic grin again. “It's lousy. Worst I've ever seen it. Too many hacks and not enough free-lance work; they're lined up around the block trying to get an assignment.”

“I thought you had a deal to do a bunch of adult Westerns.”

“I did but it blew up. Wrote one and the editor hated it, said I had my history screwed up and didn't know anything about life in the Old West. Some twenty-two-year-old cunt from Bryn Mawr, never been west of Philadelphia, she says I don't know anything about the Old West. Jesus Christ, I was writing horse opera before she was born.”

“You pick up any other assignments since?”

“… Not yet, no.”

“Then how are you surviving?”

“Social Security. I hit the magic sixty-five a few months ago. It's not much, but it pays the rent and keeps me in booze and cigarettes.”

“You're still writing, though?”

“Sure. Always at the mill. Got a few proposals with my agent, a few irons in the fire. And I'm working up an idea for a big paperback suspense thing that might have a shot. It's just that the market is so goddamned tight right now.” Shrugging, he lifted his glass and stared into it. “You know how it is,” he said.

I thought about his furnished room over on Stambaugh Street, the empty bottle of generic bourbon and the absence of a typewriter or any other tool of the writer's trade. And I thought about what we both knew was staring back at him from the bottom of his glass.

“Yeah,” I said. “I know just how it is.”

EIGHT

Eberhardt was out when I got back to the office a little past four. But he had left me a note, as he sometimes did; it was lying on top of a manila envelope on my desk blotter. His typing is almost as bad as his handwriting, what with strikeovers and misspellings and a smeary ribbon on his old Remington, but it's at least decipherable.

3 P.M.

Here's the report on the Crane suicide. Not much there, it was cut and dried.

Woman called for you three times, same one as yesterday. Still wouldn't leave her name or tell me what she wanted, just kept saying she'd call back. Does Kerry know about this?

I'm going out on that repo job for Dennison. In case I don't make it back before you leave the name of the restaurant is Il Roccaforte. 2621 San Bruno Ave. Wanda says 7:30 if that's okay with you and Kerry.

I'll be counting the minutes, Eb, I thought, and sighed, and put the note in my pocket. Il Roccaforte. The Stronghold. Some name for a restaurant. It sounded more like an outfit that rented you storage space, or maybe one of those S amp;M leather bars over on Folsom. Leave it to Wanda to pick a place called Il Roccaforte-and an Italian place, to boot. Rich Italian food two nights in a row. Kerry was going to love that almost as much as renewing her acquaintance with the Footwear Queen herself.

Eberhardt had remembered to switch on the answering machine. But he might as well not have bothered: one hang-up call, followed by the usual screeching mechanical noise that sounds as if somebody is strangling a duck. A wrong number, maybe. Or my mysterious lady caller, whoever she was.

I sat down and opened the manila envelope. As Eberhardt had noted, there wasn't much to the report-no essentials that hadn't been in the newspaper stories or that I hadn't found out the past two days. Except, possibly, for one item: Harmon Crane had drawn $2,000 out of his savings account on November 6, the month before his death, and nobody seemed to know why. The money hadn't turned up anywhere among his effects, nor was there any record of what he might have done with it. Yankowski speculated that he might have lost it gambling-Crane had liked to play poker and the horses now and then-and that its loss had only deepened his depression. Nobody could say for sure if Crane had done any gambling during that last month of his life.

The police interrogation of Crane's neighbors had turned up nothing of a suspicious nature; no one had been seen entering or leaving the Crane house around the approximate time of death. Not that that had to mean much

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