“That's right. Buried in an old earthquake fissure at Tomales Bay. Probably right after one of the bigger quakes-the one in 1949, for instance.”
“You don't think Harmon buried those bones? My God!”
“It wasn't bones that were buried. It was the body of a woman.”
“That's crazy. Harmon? Harmon and some woman?”
“You don't believe that's possible?”
“Of course not. Harmon wasn't a philanderer like that lowlife I married; he and Auntie were devoted to each other.” She scowled and waggled the saucepan at me. “What woman are you talking about? Whose bones?”
“The police aren't sure yet. But she was probably a redhead, the kind with milk-white skin and freckles. Would you know if the Cranes knew anyone who fits that description?”
“Redhead, you say? Milk-white skin?”
“And freckles. Lots of freckles.”
“How do you know all of that, anyway? What she looked like? If it was just bones that were found-”
“The police have ways,” I said cryptically. “About that redhead, Miss Dubek…”
“You stop that now. I won't tell you again, it's missus-missus, missus, missus!”
“About that redhead, Mrs. Dubek.”
Another scowl, but it was in concentration this time. Pretty soon she said, “I remember I went up to Tomales Bay with Auntie one summer to see Harmon, 1948 or 1949, I was just a girl at the time. We had lunch with some other people; I think one of the women was a redhead… yes, I'm sure she was. Red hair and white skin and freckles.”
“Do you remember her name?”
“Some Italian name. Her last name, I mean. I thought that was funny because she looked Irish-all that red hair, Irish, not Italian. And her first name was… let's see… Kate, that's it. Kate.”
I said, “The last name wouldn't have been Bertolucci, would it?”
“Well, it might have been,” she said. “Bertolucci. Mmm, yes, Kate Bertolucci. Her husband was the man who rented Harmon the cabin.”
SIXTEEN
My watch read a quarter of four when I drove away from the Dubek house. I could have let a second talk with Angelo Bertolucci slide until tomorrow, or even until Monday; I could have driven back to San Francisco and relaxed with a cold bottle of Miller Lite in my living room. Instead I turned north on the Eastshore Freeway and headed for the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, the quickest route from Berkeley to Marin County and eventually to Tomales. Bird dog on the scent.
Traffic wasn't bad until I got onto the bridge. Then it began to snarl and it stayed snarled all the way through San Rafael and halfway to Novato. Rush hour, they called it, which was a laugh-the painful kind, like a fart in church. Nobody was rushing this afternoon; nobody ever rushed on the freeways after four P.M. on Friday, good old TGIF. I quit muttering and cursing after a while and resigned myself to doing what I'd avoided doing last night: smelling exhaust fumes, watching out for idiot drivers, and otherwise dealing with the Great American Traffic Jam.
While I crawled along I brooded about the Bertoluccis, Angelo and Kate. It seemed probable that she was the woman Harmon Crane had been having his affair with, the woman Ellen Corneal had caught him in bed with and used for blackmail leverage; and it also seemed probable that those were her bones we'd found at the old cabin site. But identifying her raised plenty of new questions. Had Bertolucci known about the affair? And if he had, had he done anything about it? How had he reacted to his wife's disappearance? How had he explained it to his friends and neighbors?
Bertolucci had the answers to those questions. And maybe he also had the answers to two others, the two big ones: Why had his wife died? Who was responsible? I kept thinking what a queer old duck he was; and I kept remembering the way he'd looked the other day, standing out there in his vegetable patch with his shotgun in one hand and the dead and bloody crow in the other…
At Hamilton Field the traffic began to move more or less normally, and once I got past Novato it thinned out enough so that I could maintain a steady sixty. I quit the freeway in Petaluma, picked up and followed the same two-lane county road I'd taken to Tomales on Wednesday. Dusk had settled when I got there; it was a few minutes before six. The fog was in, thick and restless, pressing down close to the ground so that it filled the hollows and dips and obscured the hilltops. Building and street lights shone pale and indistinct, like daubs of yellow in a hologram seen through gray gauze.
The general store was still open; I turned off Shoreline Highway and stopped in front of it. The same dark- haired girl was behind the counter. I waited until she finished waiting on the only customer in the place and then said to her, “Hi. Remember me?”
“Oh sure,” she said. “You're the man who was asking about Mr. Bertolucci the other day.”
“Right. I wonder if you could answer a few more questions for me.”
“Well… I guess so, if I can.”
“Mr. Bertolucci used to be married, didn't he?”
“A long time ago, I think. Way before I was born.”
“Was his wife's name Kate?”
“Kate. I think that was it.”
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“Gee, no. She ran off with another man or something. My mother could tell you. Do you want to talk to her?”
“Where would I find her?”
“She's here, back in the storeroom. I'll get her for you.”
She left the counter and disappeared into the rear of the store. Trusting people up here in the country; I could have made off with the entire cash register, not to mention its contents. Too long in the city, that was my trouble. Too many dealings with criminal types. If I lived in a place like Tomales, such thoughts would probably never even enter my head.
The girl came back with an older, graying version of herself, dressed in a leather apron over a man's shirt and a pair of Levi's. The older woman said her name was Martha Kramer and I gave her my name but not the fact that I was a detective; I told her I was a genealogical researcher trying to track down information on Angelo Bertolucci's wife, Kate, for a client in San Francisco.
“Oh, I see,” she said, and nodded.
“I went to see Mr. Bertolucci on Wednesday afternoon, after I spoke to your daughter. He wasn't very cooperative, I'm afraid. He seemed… well, kind of odd.”
“Odd is the word for it,” Mrs. Kramer agreed.
“Just as I was leaving he went out into his yard and shot a crow. With a twelve-gauge shotgun.”
A faint wry smile. “He does that sometimes. It used to frighten his neighbors but no one pays much attention anymore.”
“He must have lived alone for a long time,” I said.
“Ever since Mrs. Bertolucci left him. That must have been… oh, more than thirty years ago.”
“October 1949? That's as far as I've been able to trace her.”
“I believe it was 1949, yes.”
“You say she left him. Divorced him, you mean?”
“No. Ran off.”
“With another man?”
“Evidently.”
“She and Mr. Bertolucci didn't get along, then.”
“Not very well. Fought all the time.”
“Over anything in particular?”
