I was up at seven-ten in the morning, gritty-eyed and headachy and depressed. It took a long shower, followed by three cups of strong coffee, to clear away the remnants of the nightmares that had plagued my sleep. It was always that way after I stumbled on violent death: the bad dreams, the day-after depression. Some cops had become inured to the residue of violence; I never had, which was one of the reasons I had quit the force twenty-five years ago to open my own agency. No corpses to deal with then, I'd thought; just the pain and tears of the living. Well, I'd been wrong-Christ, how wrong I'd been. I had seen more death these past twenty-five years than I ever would have if I had stayed on the cops.
I called Kerry's number at eight-thirty. No answer. That stirred me up a little, until I remembered that it was Saturday: she went jogging on Saturday mornings, sometimes in Golden Gate Park, sometimes around Lake Merced, sometimes down on the Marina Green. She wasn't one of those jogging fanatics; she didn't run every day, she didn't run fifty miles a week, she just ran on Saturdays for exercise. I forgave her for it, now that she had quit trying to coerce me into running with her. Everybody is entitled to one small lunacy.
So I called Eberhardt's house, and he wasn't home either. That nettled me. Over at Wanda's again, probably; spending too damn much time with her since the Il Roccaforte fiasco, soothing her ruffled feathers. Or more likely stroking her unfeathered chest. Neglecting his work, mooning around like a lovesick jerk-he was beginning to annoy the hell out of me, and the next time I saw him I was going to tell him so. I considered calling him at Wanda's and decided I didn't want to talk to her. Nor him very badly, for that matter. Let him read about Bertolucci's death in the papers.
As early as it was, I went ahead and dialed Kiskadon's number. I figured he would probably be up by now, and I wanted to reach him before DeKalb did. He was up, all right-he answered right away-and he sounded neither happy nor unhappy to hear from me. But he didn't know about Bertolucci yet or he would have said something when I asked him if I could stop by. He wanted to know if I had news; I said yes but it would be better if we discussed it in person; he told me to come over any time. There was a bitter, hopeless note in his voice that I didn't like.
It was foggy on Golden Gate Heights; you could barely see the tops of the trees over in the park. Nobody was out and around. The whole area had a gray, abandoned look, like a neighborhood in a plague city. Some mood I was in when that sort of thought crossed my mind.
Lynn Kiskadon answered the door. Pale-featured except for dark circles under her eyes, and bulgy again in another pair of too-tight Calvin Klein jeans. Before I could say anything, she stepped out on the porch, pulled the door against its latch, and held it there with one hand.
She said, “He's waiting in his den. He thinks you've got bad news-I can tell by the way he looks.”
“I'm afraid I have.”
“Oh God, I knew it,” she said, “I knew it.” The words were like a lament, soft and moaning and edged with self-pity. “What have you found out?”
“I'd rather say it just once, Mrs. Kiskadon.”
“He won't want me in the room with the two of you.”
“Why not?”
“We had another fight. Wednesday night, after you and I talked in the park. He hasn't said five words to me since.”
I didn't say anything.
“I tried to call you on Thursday and again yesterday. I thought… I don't know what I thought. I don't know who else to turn to.”
“What was the fight about?”
“He won't see a psychiatrist, he won't even talk to his own doctor. He just won't face the truth about himself.”
“He sounded depressed on the phone,” I said.
“Worse than I've ever seen him. He just sits in his den reading his father's books and stories. Won't eat, won't talk, just sits there until all hours. Do you have to tell him this news of yours?”
“I don't have a choice.”
“It's really so bad?”
“Not to you or me. But it will be to him.”
“Then don't tell him! God knows what he might do.”
“Mrs. Kiskadon, if you're afraid of that gun of his, why don't you get it out of his desk and hide it somewhere?”
“It's in a locked drawer and he has the only key. And he's in the den all the time.”
“I've still got to tell him,” I said. “If I don't, the Marin County Sheriffs Department will.”
“Sheriff's Department? My God, what-”
“We'd better go inside, Mrs. Kiskadon.”
She made a little whiny noise, but she let me reach around her and push open the door and prod her gently inside. It was quiet in the house-too quiet to suit me right now. We went through the living room and along the short hall to the door to Kiskadon's den. I knocked and said his name, and from inside he said, “It's open, come ahead,” and we went in.
He was sitting in the recliner chair, his cane laid across his lap, a cold pipe in one corner of his mouth. The table at his elbow was stacked with pulps, issues of Collier's and American Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post, three of the Johnny Axe novels. He didn't look any different than he had the last time I'd been here-except for his eyes. There was no animation in them; they were as dark and lightless as burned-out bulbs. And the whites were flecked and streaked with blood.
He said, “You'll excuse me if I don't get up. My leg's bothering me today.”
I moved toward him by a couple of steps, and Lynn Kiskadon shut the door and stood back against it. Kiskadon looked at her, the kind of look that told her silently and bitterly to get out. She said, “I'm staying, Michael. I have a right to hear this too.”
He didn't answer her. As far as he was concerned, she had gone out. He said to me, with the bitterness in his voice, “Glad tidings, I trust?”
“I'm sorry, no.”
“I didn't think so. Well? I'm ready.”
I told him. The evident affair between Harmon Crane and Kate Bertolucci, my suspicions, Angelo Bertolucci's murder-not softening any of it but not going into unnecessary detail either. Once, when I first mentioned the murder, Lynn Kiskadon made the little whiny noise again behind me. Otherwise the only sound in the room was my own voice. Kiskadon didn't speak or move or display any reaction to what I said; his face was as blank as his eyes.
When I finished there were maybe ten seconds of silence. Then he said, “So my father was an adulterer and a murderer. Well, well.” No bitterness in his tone now. No emotion at all. The flat, genderless voice of a programmed machine.
“We don't know that he killed anyone, Mr. Kiskadon.”
“Don't we? It seems plain enough to me.”
“Not to me,” I said. “Bertolucci could just as easily have been the one responsible for his wife's death. Maybe even somebody else.”
“Just the same, my father had to be involved, didn't he? If he wasn't involved, he wouldn't have become begun drinking so heavily afterward, he wouldn't have become so depressed. He wouldn't have shot himself, now would he?”
“We don't have all the facts yet-”
“Enough to suit me.”
“There's still the murder last night,” I said.
“I don't care about that.”
“You'd better care about it, Mr. Kiskadon. I think Bertolucci was killed because of what happened in 1949.”
“Does that make my father any less guilty?”
“I don't know. It might.”
“Bullshit,” he said.
“You don't seem to understand. This isn't an archeological expedition anymore, it isn't a simple search for the
