“No questions about those, either.”
“Or written evaluations, personal or classroom.”
“Just background data, that's all.”
She relented finally, said it would take a while to look through the files, and suggested I go away and come back again in an hour. So I went out and walked around the campus, all the way past the Earth Sciences buildings to the North Gate and back again, and was standing in front of the horse-faced clerk in exactly one hour.
“You're very prompt,” she said, and showed me some of her teeth. I half expected her to whinny a little to emphasize her approval of punctuality.
I asked her some questions about Ellen Corneal's family background; she kept the records at a safe distance while she consulted them and provided answers, as if she were afraid I might leap over the counter and yank them out of her hands. But what she told me wasn't very helpful. Ellen Corneal had been born in Bemidji, Minnesota; her mother had died when she was two, her father when she was eleven, and she had come to California to live with a maiden aunt after the father's death. She had no siblings and no other relatives. The aunt had been sixty-two-years old in 1932, when Ellen Corneal entered UC, and would now be one hundred and fourteen years old if she were still alive, which was a highly unlikely prospect. The Corneal woman had dropped out of school in 1933, after marrying Harmon Crane, but had returned two years later to finish out her schooling and earn her degree.
“In what?” I asked.
“I beg your pardon?”
“In what did she earn her degree? What was her major?”
“Oh. A B.A. in cartography.”
“Map-making?”
“That is what cartography is, sir.”
“Uh-huh. An unusual profession.”
“I suppose you might say that. At least it was for a woman back then.”
“Women have come a long way,” I said, and smiled at her.
She didn't smile back. “We still have a long way to go,” she said. From the ominous note in her voice, she might have been issuing a warning. I wanted to tell her that I wasn't the enemy-Kerry had once called me a feminist, in all sincerity, something I still considered a high compliment-but trying to explain myself to a twenty- year-old woman who read Proust and Sartre and Joyce and thought mysteries were trash was an undertaking that would have required weeks, not to mention far more patience than I possessed. I thanked her again instead and left Sproul Hall and then the campus through the Bancroft gate.
But I didn't go back down Telegraph Avenue to get to my car; I took the long way around, up Bancroft and down Bowditch. One trip through the sideshow was all I could stand today.
There was still nobody home on Linden Street. So I drove back across the Bay Bridge, put my car in the garage on O'Farrell, and went up to the office. The door was unlocked; and when I opened it and walked in, there was Eberhardt sitting behind his desk, scowling down at some papers spread out in front of him. He transferred the scowl to me as I shut the door, but he didn't say anything. So I did the ice-breaking myself.
“Well, well,” I said. “Look who's here.”
“I don't want to talk about it,” he said.
“Talk about what?”
“You know what. I'm not talking about it.”
“All right.”
“Business, that's all. Just business.”
“Whatever you say, Eb.”
“Kerry called, I told her the same thing.”
“What did she say to that?”
“What do you think she said? She said okay.”
“Good.”
“Yeah. Good. You got two calls this morning.”
“From?”
“Michael Kiskadon both times. He wants you to call him.”
“He say what he wanted?”
“No. But he sounded pissed.” Eberhardt paused and then said, “Kerry do something to him too?”
“I thought you didn't want to talk about that.”
“What?”
“What happened at Il Roccaforte.”
“I don't. I told you that.”
“Okay by me.”
I hung up my hat and coat, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down at my desk with it. Eberhardt watched me without speaking as I dialed Kiskadon's number.
Kiskadon was angry, all right. He answered on the first ring, as if he'd been hovering around the phone, and as soon as I gave my name he said, “Damn it, why didn't you call me yesterday? Why didn't you tell me what's going on?”
“I'm not sure I know what you mean.”
“The hell you don't know what I mean. Those bones you found up at Tomales Bay.”
“How did you hear-?”
“The Marin County Sheriff's office, that's how. Sergeant DeKalb. He wanted to verify that you're working for me. Are you, or what?”
“Working for you? Of course I am-”
“Then why didn't you call me? How do you think I felt, hearing it from that cop?”
“Look, Mr. Kiskadon,” I said with forced patience, “I didn't call you because there wasn't anything definite to report. Those bones may have nothing to do with your father.”
“Maybe you believe that but I don't. They're connected with his suicide, they have to be.”
I didn't say anything.
“They were a woman's bones,” Kiskadon said.
“Did Sergeant DeKalb tell you that?”
“Yes. Something he found with the bones confirmed that.”
“What something?”
“He wouldn't tell me. Nobody tells me anything.” Now he sounded petulant. “I thought I could trust you,” he said.
“You can. I told you, I didn't call because-”
“I want to know everything from now on,” he said. “Do you understand? Everything you do, everything you find out.”
I was silent again.
“Are you still there?”
“I'm still here,” I said. “But I won't be much longer if you start handing me ultimatums. I don't do business that way.”
Silence from him this time. Then he said, with less heat and more petulance, “I wasn't giving you an ultimatum.”
“That's good. And I wasn't withholding anything from you; I don't do business that way either. When I have something concrete to report I'll notify you. Now suppose you let me get on with my work?”
“… All right. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to blow up at you like that. It's just that… those bones, buried up there like that… I don't know what to think.”
“Don't think anything,” I said. “Wait for some more facts. Good-bye for now, Mr. Kiskadon; I'll be in touch.”
“Yes,” he said, and both the anger and the petulance were gone and that one word was cloaked in gloom.
Manic depressive, I thought as I put the receiver down. His wife was right about him; if she didn't get him some help pretty soon, somebody to fix his head, he was liable to crack up. And then what? What happens to a guy
