not birdshot.
The back door was wide open; fog reached in like searching fingers, skeletal and gray and grave-cold. That was why I hadn't been able to smell the burnt gunpowder until I got to the kitchen: the wind had blown most of the odor away, even though the weapon couldn't have been fired more than a few minutes ago. The blood was still fresh, glistening wet red in the spill of light from the kitchen.
Driver of that black car, I thought. Has to be. Not a crazy kid, not a Friday night drunk-a murderer fleeing the scene of a just-committed homicide. And if I'd come straight here instead of stopping at the general store, maybe it wouldn't have been committed at all…
That's crap, I thought, you know better than that. Then I thought: If I stand here any longer I'll puke. I backed up and let the door wobble shut, blocking out the carnage in the areaway. But it was still there behind my eyes, all that blood, all that ruined flesh, as I stumbled back through the house to find a phone and call the sheriff's department.
SEVENTEEN
It was after nine before the authorities, in the person of Sergeant Chet DeKalb, allowed me to leave Tomales. DeKalb had come out even though he was off duty, because I had asked for him specifically. He wasn't pleased at having been yanked away from dinner with his family-he lived in Terra Linda and it was a long drive from there to Tomales-but he didn't take it out on me. He was polite; and when he saw the way Bertolucci's murder shaped up he even permitted a spark of interest to show through his stoicism.
We did our talking in the display room, with those stuffed things looking on. Lab men, photographers, uniformed deputies, the county coroner paraded in and out, performing the grim aftermath ritual of violent death. Outside, knots of local residents shivered in the fog, as indistinct when you had glimpses of them as half-formed wraiths. The revolving red light on the county ambulance made one of the windows alternately light up with a crimson glow and then go dark, like the winking of a bloody eye.
I told DeKalb everything I knew about Bertolucci, everything I had suspected about him and his connection with those bones. “But now I don't know,” I said. “What happened here tonight… it confuses the hell out of things.”
“Not necessarily,” DeKalb said. “There doesn't have to be a correlation between your investigation and Bertolucci's death.”
“Doesn't have to be, no.”
“But you think there is.”
“I don't know what to think right now.”
“Could have been a prowler,” DeKalb said. “Bertolucci caught him, tried to scare him off with the shotgun; they struggled, the gun went off, bang the old man's dead.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Or somebody local had a grudge against him. You said nobody seemed to like him much.”
“Why now, though? The same week a thirty-five-year-old can of worms opened up.”
“Coincidences happen.”
“Sure. I've had a few happen to me over the years. But this time… I don't know, it doesn't feel right that way.”
“Hunches,” DeKalb said. “You can't always trust 'em.”
“Granted. Hell, I don't see how the murder can be tied up with Harmon Crane and the missing wife, either.”
“Anybody you can think of who might have had a motive?”
“That's just it, I can't think of a single person or a single motive-not after all these years.”
“You tell anybody your suspicions about Bertolucci and his wife?”
“No. I only found out about her this afternoon, and I came straight here afterward.”
“Who told you about the wife?”
“Woman in Berkeley-Marilyn Dubek, the niece of Crane's widow. But she's fat, fifty, and a housefrau; the idea of her following me here and blowing Bertolucci away is ridiculous.”
“What about the widow?”
“No way. Late sixties and mentally incompetent ever since her husband's suicide.”
“Well, maybe the Dubek woman told somebody else what she told you after you left.”
“Maybe. But I got here as fast as anybody could in rush-hour traffic, and I was in the general store no more than fifteen minutes. Whoever killed Bertolucci pretty much had to have arrived at the same time I did and probably a while earlier. Don't you think?”
“Seems that way,” he agreed.
“I don't suppose any of the neighbors saw the car?”
DeKalb shook his head. “Nobody home at two of the houses. Old woman who lives in the other place up the way was cooking her supper; besides that, she's half-blind.”
I said, “You know, if this was the perpetrator's first visit here, he might have had to stop over in the business section to ask directions.”
“Already thought of that. Officers are checking it now. Let's get back to your investigation. Did you tell anybody about your first meeting with Bertolucci?”
“Just my client.”
“Michael Kiskadon,” DeKalb said, nodding. “I don't suppose you'd consider him a candidate?”
I hesitated, remembering what I'd thought yesterday morning after talking to Kiskadon on the phone-that if his wife didn't get him some psychiatric help pretty soon, he was liable to come unwrapped. And then what? I'd wondered. What happens to a guy like Kiskadon when he starts to unravel? Well, murder was one thing that happens to head cases; the sheer terrifying number of lunatics running around committing atrocities these days was proof of that. But something had to trigger a homicidal act, and I had told Kiskadon nothing about Angelo Bertolucci that could have induced a murderous rage. Besides, there was Kiskadon's physical condition: he was weak, he could barely get around unaided, he seldom left the house even for short periods. I could no more envision him driving all the way up to Tomales to confront Bertolucci than I could Marilyn Dubek.
I said these things to DeKalb and he concurred. But he felt that a talk with Kiskadon was indicated just the same. So did I, even though I did not relish the prospect; and I thought that for Kiskadon's sake, it would be better if I got to him first.
Before DeKalb let me leave, he took down the names and addresses of all the other people I had interviewed this past week, including Russ Dancer. Methodical and thorough, that was Chet DeKalb-qualities possessed by all good cops, public and private. He also sent one of the lab men out to take scrapings of the black paint from the banged-up fender of my car. And when I drove away a few minutes later, past the morbid wraiths huddled together in the mist, the lab guy and one of the deputies were using portable crime-scene floodlights to comb the area near the Dillon Beach Road intersection, looking for anything that might have come off the black car during the collision.
The fog stayed thick and roiling, retarding my speed, until I neared Petaluma; then it lifted into a high overcast and I was able to make better time. It was twenty of eleven when I came across the Golden Gate Bridge, and eleven on the nose when I walked into my flat. I was tired and I felt crawly and I wanted a shower and some sleep. My stomach was giving me hell too; so even though I had no appetite, and before I did anything else, I ate some mortadella and a wedge of gorgonzola and a carton of pineapple cottage cheese. Which was a bad idea, as it turned out. The stuff congealed in my stomach for some reason and gave me the twin devilments of heartburn and gas.
I lay in bed belching and farting and trying to sleep. But I couldn't get rid of the persistent image of Bertolucci's buckshot-savaged corpse, of all that glistening blood. And I couldn't stop thinking about the why of his death, either. If it was connected with what happened in 1949, and my gut instincts still said that it was, the reason for the killing escaped me completely.
Motive, motive, what was the damned motive?
