motive in your father's suicide. It's a homicide case now.”
“I don't give a damn,” he said.
“Is that what you're going to say to Sergeant DeKalb when he shows up?”
“To hell with Sergeant DeKalb. If he wants to arrest me for any reason, let him. I don't care. That's what you don't seem to understand. I don't care who killed Bertolucci, I don't care who killed his slut of a wife or why, I don't care about any of it anymore.”
“Why not? Just because your father wasn't the kind of man you thought he was?”
No answer. Kiskadon wasn't looking at me either, now. He reached for the canister of tobacco on the table and methodically began to load the bowl of his pipe.
I glanced around at Lynn Kiskadon. Her expression was pleading, helpless; her eyes said, You see? You see?
I saw, all right. But there wasn't anything I could do about it, not for him and not for her. What could I do? I was no head doctor; I didn't know the first thing about dealing with the kinds of neuroses running around inside Kiskadon's skull. I was fortunate if I could deal with the ones inside my own.
Kiskadon struck a kitchen match and lit his pipe. When he had it drawing he said, still without looking at me, “I appreciate all you've done, but I won't need your services any longer. Send me a bill for the balance of what I owe you. Or I can write you a check right now if you'd prefer it that way.”
Nothing to say to that except, “Have it your way, Mr. Kiskadon. I'll send you a bill.” Nothing to do then except to turn and walk out of there, avoiding Mrs. Kiskadon's eyes. And nothing to do after that except to feel twice as shitty and twice as frustrated on the drive back home.
EIGHTEEN
Ten minutes after I came into my flat, just as I was about to call Kerry, the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and said hello, and there was a wheezing intake of breath followed by a series of fitful coughs. So I knew it was Stephen Porter even before he identified himself.
“That box of Harmon Crane's papers I told you about,” he said, panting a little. “I finally found it. It was in the basement, just as I thought, but hidden at the bottom of Adam's old steamer trunk.”
“Anything among the papers that might help me?”
“Well, I really can't say. Most of them are manuscript carbons. There are some letters written to Harmon, and some by him, but they seem mostly to be business-related. Of course-” He coughed again. “Of course, I haven't read everything. Perhaps you'll be able to find something useful.”
“Perhaps. When can I have a look at them?”
“Right away, if you like. I'd drop the box off to you, but I have a student coming at noon…”
“No, no, I'll come by your studio. Half an hour okay?”
“Yes, fine. I'll be”-more coughing-” I'll be here.”
I postponed the call to Kerry and started immediately for North Beach. The weather was better over there and the tourists and Saturday slummers were out in full force; there was no way I was going to find legal street parking. And the nearest garage to Porter's place was blocks away. So I parked in a bus zone down the street from his building, the hell with it.
Porter was wearing the same green smock and the same red bow tie, or at least identical twins to the ones he'd had on the last time I was here: both were spotted with dried clay. He had a cigarette burning in one hand and what breath he had left made burbling noises in his nose and throat.
The box was on one of the clay-smeared worktables, cardboard and largish; the papers jammed into it looked to be mostly yellow foolscap. I asked Porter if he wanted me to sort through them here, and he said, “No, you can take the box with you,” and then lapsed into a coughing fit so severe it bent him double and turned his face an apoplectic beet red. I wanted to do something for him but there wasn't anything to do. I just stood there, feeling helpless, until he got his breath back.
“One of my bad days,” he said. “Damned emphysema.”
Damned cigarettes, I thought.
I carried the box to the studio door. Porter went with me, firing up another Camel on the way. Walking dead man, I thought then. And tried not to let him see the pity I felt when I said good-bye.
Manuscript carbons. Handwritten notes. Typed fragments and unfinished stories. Letters from Crane's New York agent and from the editors of various book and magazine publishers. Carbons of letters from Crane to those same individuals. A few personal letters addressed to Crane. Carbons of his responses and some other personal correspondence. Most of his papers, it seemed, from 1942 until the time of his death.
Sitting at the kitchen table, thinking that Harmon Crane had been something of a pack rat, I finished sorting out the sheets of stationery and yellow foolscap and then began methodically to wade through them. The manuscript carbons first: two of the Johnny Axe novels, Axe for Trouble and Don't Axe Me; and more than thirty short stories and novelettes, most of them featuring Johnny Axe, all of them marked SOLD and bearing both a date and the name of either a pulp or a slick magazine. I riffled through some of the manuscripts from 1949. Plenty to interest a collector or a scholar; nothing to interest a detective. I put the carbons back into the box and gave my attention to the notes and fragments.
Most of the handwritten notes-none of which were dated-seemed to be ideas for stories: “Carny owner shot, geek arrested by cops, Axe hired as new geek-funny or too bizarre?” The typed sheets were nearly all one and two pages in length: story openings, descriptions of places and people, clever bits of dialogue, brief plot synopses. There were also two longer fragments. The first was headed Kick Axe! ran to fourteen pages, and appeared to be an early draft of the opening chapter of Axe and Pains. I read through it, looking for Bertolucci's name, but it wasn't there.
The other segment bore a pulpish title-“You Can't Run Away from Death”-and was a little over eight pages long. Unfinished pulp story, I thought. But it wasn't. Halfway through the first page I realized it was something much more than that.
Numb with shock, Rick Durbin stared at the body on the cabin floor. Carla. It was Carla! Somebody had come here while he was in the village buying groceries. Somebody had beaten her to death with a chunk of stovewood.
Borelli, he thought. It had to be her husband, Borelli.
Durbin fell to his knees beside her. He wanted to cry but he had no tears. He'd loved her. Or had he? He didn't know. He didn't know anything right now except that she was dead. Murdered. Lying here so still, blood shining in her red hair, where only an hour ago she had been so warm and vibrant and alive.
What was he going to do?
What Durbin did, on page 2, was to pick up the body, carry it outside and away from the isolated cabin on a body of water called Anchor Bay, and bury it. In an earthquake fissure: there had been a “terrifying” earthquake the day before. He did that instead of notifying the authorities because he was afraid they would suspect him of the crime. He had no proof the husband, Borelli, had murdered Carla. And he was the cabin's tenant; he was staying there alone. And Carla was another man's wife; his wife was back home in San Francisco. Even if he could make the sheriff believe his story, there was the scandal to consider: Durbin was a writer, he had a film deal pending in Hollywood for one of his books, the notoriety would ruin his career.
Durbin went back to the cabin and cleaned the bloodstains off the floor. Then he gathered up Carla's purse and other belongings, put them into the fissure with her body, and used dirt and grass and oyster shells to conceal his handiwork. No one would ever know, he thought; no one had suspected his affair with Carla-except Borelli- because they had been very careful to keep it a secret. There was nothing to connect Carla or her disappearance to him. With her buried, he thought, he was completely safe.
When the job was done he packed his own belongings and drove straight home to San Francisco. But he couldn't forget Carla or what he'd done. Her dead face haunted his dreams, saying over and over, “You told me you loved me. How can you do this to someone you loved?” He couldn't sleep, couldn't work. He thought time and again of returning to Anchor Bay, making a clean breast to the authorities, showing them where he had buried her; but he couldn't find the courage-it was too late, they would never believe him now that so much time had elapsed. He
