an oblique point at the tip.
I said, “Mrs. Brown?”
“Yes. You're the gentleman who called?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
She kept me standing there another five seconds or so, while she looked me over. I looked her over too, but not in the same way. I was trying to imagine what she'd looked like fifty years ago, when she and Harmon Crane had gotten married, and not having any luck. She was one of those elderly people who look as if they were born old, as if they'd sprung from the womb white-haired and age-wrinkled like leprechauns or gnomes. I couldn't even decide if she'd been attractive, back in the days of her youth. She wasn't attractive now, nor was she unattractive. She was just elderly.
I must have passed muster myself because she said, “Come in, please,” and allowed me a small cordial smile. “We'll talk in the parlor.”
Age hadn't slowed her up much; she got around briskly and without any aids. The room she showed me into was a living room; “parlor” was an affectation. But it wasn't an ordinary living room. If I hadn't known her profession, and that of her husband, one look would have enabled me to figure it out.
The room was full of maps. Framed and unframed on the walls, one hanging suspended from the ceiling on thin gold chains, three in the form of globes set into antique wooden frames. Old maps and new maps. Topographic maps, geological maps, hydrographic and aviation charts. Strange maps I couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of, one of them marked with the words azimuthal projection, which for all I knew charted the geographical distribution of bronchial patients.
Mrs. Brown was watching me expectantly, waiting for a reaction, so I said, “Very impressive collection you have here.”
She nodded: that was what she wanted to hear. “My husband's, mostly, acquired before we were married, although I have contributed a few items myself. Some are extremely rare, you know.”
“I'm sure they are.”
“That gnomonic projection of the Indian Ocean,” she said, pointing, “dates back to the 1700s. The hachures are still quite vivid, don't you think?”
Hachures. It sounded like a sneeze. I nodded wisely and kept my mouth shut.
“Sit down, won't you,” Mrs. Brown said. “I have coffee or tea, if you'd care for a hot drink.”
“Nothing, thanks.”
I waited until she lowered her broad beam onto a quilted blue-and-white sofa and then lowered mine onto a matching chair nearby. Mrs. Brown said, “Well then. You're interested in my cartographic work, I believe you said.”
“Well…”
“My major contribution,” she said proudly, a little boastfully, “was in the area of conic projections. I developed a variant using the Lambert conformal conic projection in conjunction with the polyconic projection, so that-”
“Uh, Mrs. Brown, excuse me but I don't understand a word you're saying.”
She blinked at me. “Don't understand?”
“No, ma'am. I don't know the first thing about maps.”
“But on the telephone… you said…”
“I said I was interested in talking to you about your past history. I didn't mean your professional history; I meant your personal history. I'm sorry if you got the wrong impression,” I lied. “I didn't mean to deceive you.”
She sat looking bewildered for a few seconds. Then her eyes got flinty and her jaw got tight and I had a glimpse of another side of Ellen Corneal Brown, a less genteel and pleasant side that hadn't been softened much by the advent of old age.
“Who are you?” she said.
“A private detective. From San Francisco.”
“My God. What do you want with me?”
“The answers to a few questions, that's all.”
“What questions?”
“About your first husband, Harmon Crane.”
The eyes got even flintier; if she hadn't been curious, she would have told me to get the hell out of her house. But she was curious. She said, “Mr. Crane has been dead for more than thirty years.”
“Yes, ma'am, I know. I'm trying to find out why he committed suicide.”
“Do you expect me to believe that? After all this time?”
“It's the truth.”
“Who is your client?”
“His son, Michael Kiskadon.”
“Son? Mr. Crane had no children.”
“But he did. His second wife bore him a son after they were divorced and kept it a secret from him. He died without ever knowing he was a father.”
She thought that over. “Why would the son wait so many years to have Mr. Crane's suicide investigated? Why would he want to in the first place?”
I explained it all to her. She struggled with it at first, but when I offered to give her Kiskadon's address and telephone number, plus a few other references, she came around to a grudging acceptance. I watched another struggle start up then, between her curiosity and a reluctance to talk about either Harmon Crane or her relationship with him. Maybe she had something to hide and maybe it was just that she preferred not to disinter the past. In any case she was what the lawyers call a hostile witness. If I didn't handle her just right she would keep whatever she knew locked away inside her, under guard, and nobody would ever get it out.
I asked her, “Mrs. Brown, do you have any idea why Crane shot himself?”
“No,” she said, tight-lipped.
“None at all? Not even a guess?”
“No.”
“Did you have any inkling at the time that he was thinking of taking his own life?”
“Of course not.”
“But you did see him not long before his suicide?”
She hesitated. Then, warily, “What makes you think that? We had been divorced for fourteen years in 1949.”
“He mentioned to a friend in September or October of that year that you'd been to see him.”
“What friend?”
“A writer named Russell Dancer.”
“I don't know that name. Perhaps he has a faulty memory.”
“Does that mean you didn't visit Crane at that time?”
Another hesitation. “I don't remember,” she said stiffly.
“Were you living in San Francisco in 1949?”
“No.”
“In the Bay Area?”
“… In Berkeley.”
“Working as a cartographer?”
“Yes. I was with National Geographic then.”
“Married to your present husband?”
“No. Randolph and I were married in 1956.”
“You lived alone in Berkeley, then?”
“I did.”
“You must have been making a good salary.”
“It was… adequate. I don't see what-”
“Then you weren't poor at the time,” I said. “You didn't need a large sum of money for any reason. Say two thousand dollars.”
