he thought of himself as a temporary cop on his merry way to Sacramento and a job with the attorney general's office. He had ambitions, yes he did. He dressed in tailored suits and fancy ties, he read all the right books, he spoke with precise grammar, diction, and enunciation, he went to all the important social functions, and he sucked up to politicians, newspaper columnists, and flakes off the upper crust. He also considered himself a devilish ladies' man, with special attention to those women from eighteen to eighty who had money, social status, and the Right Connections. He didn't like me because he thought I was beneath him. I didn't like him because I knew he was an asshole.
He came breezing in with another inspector, one I didn't know named Dwiggins, gave me a flinty-eyed look, and demanded to know where the deceased was. That was the way he talked; sometimes it was very comical to listen to him, but this wasn't one of them. I took him to the den and showed him the deceased. “Please wait in the kitchen,” he said, as if that was where I belonged. And when I didn't trot off fast enough to suit him he said, “Well? Do what I told you.”
I wished Eberhardt were here; Eberhardt knew how to get under McFate's skin and deflate him. I hadn't figured out the knack yet. All I could think of was to tell him to take a handful of ground glass and pound it up his tailpipe. Instead I turned without saying anything and went into the kitchen. Antagonizing cops is a stupid thing for anyone to do, and that goes double if you happen to be a private investigator.
McFate kept me waiting fifteen minutes, most of which time I spent prowling the kitchen like a cat in a cage. Once I thought of going in to check on Mrs. Kiskadon, but I didn't do it; I did not want to see her until after I had talked to McFate, and not even then if I could avoid it. She was in the bedroom, or had been just before McFate's arrival. She had got up off the couch while I was telephoning and walked in there and laid down on the bed with the door open. The one time I'd looked in on her she had been lying on her back, stiff-bodied, eyes closed, hands stretched out tight against her sides, like an embalmed corpse that had been arranged for viewing.
I felt keyed up, twitchy. Lynn Kiskadon and her dead husband were on my mind, but other things were rumbling around in there too. Things that I was beginning to understand and things that didn't seem to want to jell yet. None of them was very pleasant, but then murder never is.
When McFate finally came in I didn't give him a chance to be supercilious. I said, “There are some things you ought to know,” and proceeded to explain about Kiskadon and Harmon Crane and the rest of it. Then I told him what I suspected about Kiskadon's death. He'd have figured it out himself eventually-it was pretty obvious, really, once you had all the facts-but I didn't feel like waiting around for his wheels to start turning on their own initiative.
McFate looked at me the way an entomologist would look at a not very interesting bug. I looked right back at him, which was something I never enjoy doing. The son of a bitch is handsome on top of everything else: dark hair gray at the temples, precisely trimmed mustache, a cleft in his chin as big as a woman's navel. No wonder the ladies loved him-those of nondiscriminating taste, anyway. Hell, no wonder the politicians loved him.
He said, “You think it's a one-eight-seven? Why?”
One-eight-seven is police slang; Section 187 of the California Penal Code pertains to willful homicide. “I didn't say that,” I said.
“If his wife killed him, it's a one-eight-seven.”
“I know that. But I didn't say I think she killed him. I said I think she's covering up. She knew he was dead long before we found him.”
“I repeat: Why?”
“Three reasons. First, her actions today, the things she said to me on the phone and after I got here-they don't ring true. She said she didn't call her husband's doctor because she was too upset. She didn't call the police either. And she didn't try to get a friend or a neighbor to help her. Instead she left the house, drove down to Van Ness, and called me. Why? Because she wanted someone who knew how suicidal he'd been to find the body; she didn't want to admit that he was dead before she left here.”
“Hardly conclusive,” McFate said.
I said, “Then there's the gun.”
“What about the gun?”
“It's under Kiskadon's chair. You saw that. If he shot himself, how did it get all the way under there?”
“It fell out of his hand and bounced on the carpet,” McFate said. “If you remember, his right arm is hanging down near the floor.”
“Leo,” I said, and watched him wince. He hates for me to call him Leo; he would prefer that I call him Mr. McFate, or maybe just sir. “Leo, the gun is lying all the way under the chair, over on the left side. Even if it fell out of his hand, it's not likely that it could bounce more than a foot on a shag carpet.”
He scowled at me. “I suppose you deduce from that that Mrs. Kiskadon threw the weapon under the chair.”
“She had something to do with it being there, yes. I can't say whether or not she threw it under the chair, or whether or not she actually shot him. But she was in the room when he died.”
“And just how do you deduce that?”
“Her handbag, Leo. On the floor behind the desk with half its contents spilled out.”
“I saw it,” he said stiffly. “I assumed she dropped it when the two of you found the deceased.”
“Uh-uh. She didn't have that bag or any other when I got here. Not in her car, not in her hand when she followed me in. She told me her husband had come out of the den earlier, waving the gun around, and then went back in there and locked the door; she didn't say she'd been in there, and she would have unless she had something to hide. And if she wasn't in the den, what was the purse doing in there? And why is it upended on the floor unless there was a struggle or something that led to the shooting?”
McFate didn't say anything. But he was thinking about it now. You didn't have to beat him over the head with logic-not too hard, anyhow.
“The car keys must have been in her coat pocket,” I said. “Either that, or she scooped them up off the floor before she ran out. I guess you noticed that the door has a push-button lock. Kiskadon probably pushed the button when he went in there for the last time; all she did was shut the door on her way out, maybe without even realizing it. All she was interested in was getting away from here.”
McFate said grudgingly, “If you're right, then she must have murdered him.”
“Not necessarily. It could have been an accident-a struggle over the gun. Why don't you ask her?”
“I don't need you to tell me my job.”
“God forfend I should ever try.”
“Wait here,” he said, and stalked out.
I waited, but not for long. I was even twitchier now and the kitchen seemed too small and too much of a reminder of the life the Kiskadons had shared before today, when what they shared became death. People were moving around out in the hall; I opened the door and looked out. The assistant coroner had arrived and Dwiggins was ushering him into the den. I came out of the kitchen and wandered down there, being careful not to get in anybody's way.
At an angle I could see part of the room, but not the part where the body lay. One of the lab men was down on his knees, poking among the splinters of wood that my forced entry had torn from the jamb. I watched him-and the thought came to me again that this was the way it had been thirty-five years ago, on the night Harmon Crane died. Man is shot in a locked office, door gets busted in, the cops come and poke around and clean up the remains. Some things don't change in thirty-five years; some things never change.
And who says lightning doesn't strike twice? It had struck twice in this case, one father and one son all those years apart, one suicide and one manslaughter…
Twice, I thought.
Or was it one of each? Kiskadon's death had looked like a suicide but wasn't. Why not the same with Harmon Crane? Even with that locked door, the door that the police back then had said couldn't have been gimmicked- wasn't it possible Crane had been murdered after all?
Twice, I thought. Twice!
And I had it. At first, just the simple misdirection gimmick that had fooled the police and everyone else in 1949. But once I had that much, I began to see the rest of it, too: the distortions and subterfuge and misconceptions that had befuddled me, the full circumstances of Crane's death, the significance of that letter carbon, the probable reason Angelo Bertolucci had died and the name of the person who had murdered him. All of it
