Unscratched, undented. And gleaming with what had to be new paint. The whole damn car had been repainted.
He was a shrewd bastard, Mr. TJY. He'd had bodywork done on the Caddy right away, followed by the brand-new paint job, and I should have known that was what he'd do. Hide anything that might be incriminating and hide it quick. And no ordinary body shop-the type that keeps records and cooperates with the police-to do the work, either. He'd been a shyster for too many years not to pick up the name of somebody who would do repair work, sanding, and painting on the QT, for the right price.
And there, goddamn it, went the only solid piece of evidence linking Yankowski to the murder of Angelo Bertolucci.
I moved away from the Caddy, over to the main asphalt path that led out onto the cliffs. Sunset Trail, they called it, and it was an apt name: the sunset starting on the horizon now, in deep golds streaked with red, was quite a sight from up here. Just as impressive, from farther along, was the view you had of Ocean Beach all the way to the Cliff House in the hazy distance. Not so impressive, lying closer in, were the offshore dredgers and the long finger of the pipeline pier that were part of an endless city sewage project.
Irregular sandy paths branched off the main path, meandering through dark red and brown and green iceplant to the rim of the cliffs. A few people were out there, one of them with an easel set up, painting the sunset; none of them was old enough to be Yankowski. I stayed on Sunset Trail. I have a thing about heights, and the dropoff over there was sheer and at least two hundred feet to the strip of beach below.
Benches were strung out at intervals along the trail, and on one of them a fifth of a mile from the parking lot I found Yankowski. He was sitting there alone, nobody else within a hundred yards, watching the quicksilver shimmer of the dying sun on the water. The wind was strong and turning cold and I wasn't dressed warmly enough; goosebumps had spread up my arms and across my shoulders. But old Yank-'Em-Out was bundled up in a heavy mackinaw and gloves and a Scottish cap, and he looked as relaxed and comfortable as he had the day I'd talked to him in his own back yard.
He didn't pay any attention to me until I stopped in front of him, blocking his view, and said, “Hello, Yankowski.”
His frown was full of displeasure. “You again. I thought I told you I didn't want anything more to do with you.”
“Yes? Well, you're going to have plenty more to do with me, Counselor. Starting right now.”
“I am not,” he said, and he got up and pushed past me and started back along Sunset Trail. At first I thought he was going to stay on it, which would have made bracing him easier for me; instead he veered off onto one of the sandy paths toward the cliff edge. I hesitated-I just don't like heights-but I went after him anyway, skirting scrub bushes and passing over tiny dunes like faceless heads with iceplant for hair.
Yankowski stopped a few feet from the edge, where the ground rose a little and then fell away sharply into an eroded declivity. I stopped too, but a couple of steps farther back and at an angle to him. Still, I was close enough to the edge so that I could look down part of the cliff face, see the surf licking at the beach far away at the bottom. The gooseflesh rippled on my arms and shoulders, a sensation that had nothing to do with the wind or the cold.
“Yankowski.”
He turned. “Damn you, go away. Leave me alone.”
“No. You're going to talk to me.”
“Why should I?”
“Because I know you killed Angelo Bertolucci,” I said. “And I know why.”
He had a good poker face, from all his years in court, but he couldn't keep his body from stiffening. His gloved hands hooked into fists-and then relaxed. He watched me silently out of dark, cold eyes that had no fear in them, only wariness and an animal cunning.
I said, “Well? Do we talk?”
“You talk,” he said. “I'll listen.”
“Sure, why not. I've got the whole thing figured out, starting with Harmon Crane. I'll tell you the way I think it was; you tell me if I'm right.”
He pursed his lips and said nothing. Past him, the fiery rim of the sun was just fusing with the ocean; the swath it laid across the water was turning from silver to gold.
I said, “All right. Crane liked to get away from the city from time to time, to be alone for a week or two; he worked better that way. He liked the isolation of Tomales Bay and he rented a cabin up there from Angelo Bertolucci. Bertolucci didn't like Crane much, but he liked Crane's money. What Crane liked was Bertolucci's wife, Kate.
“I don't know how long he and Kate Bertolucci had been seeing each other, when or how it started. Doesn't matter. Doesn't matter either that they both had reasons for turning to each other, or what those reasons were. What's important is that they had an affair, and that Bertolucci found out about it.
“Bertolucci went to the cabin one day in late October of 1949, probably with the idea of catching his wife and Crane together. But she was there alone; Crane had gone to buy groceries. There was an argument; Bertolucci lost his head and clubbed her to death with a piece of stovewood. Then panic set in and he ran.
“Crane came back and found the body and he panicked. Instead of notifying the county sheriff, he cleaned up the blood and buried Kate's body in a fissure opened by an earthquake the day before. After which he packed up and beat it back to San Francisco. But the whole ugly business was too much for his conscience. Guilt began to eat at him. And paranoia: he was afraid Bertolucci might decide to come after him too. He started hitting the bottle; he didn't have the guts to do anything else, including confront Bertolucci.
“Six weeks or so went by and nothing happened except that Crane's mental condition kept getting wrose. He thought about killing himself but he didn't have the guts for that either, not quite. He almost wished Bertolucci would come and do it for him.”
I paused. “How am I doing so far, Yankowski?”
He stayed silent, unmoving. His eyes were small and black under the bill of his cap-little poison-drops of hate.
“So then came the night of December tenth,” I said, “and Crane's death. But it wasn't suicide, the way everybody thought-the way I thought myself until this morning. That locked office was what threw all of us. The police had ruled out any gimmick work with the door and windows; it had to be suicide. Only it wasn't, it was murder.”
Yankowski said, “And I suppose you think I murdered him.”
“No. I think Bertolucci murdered him, just as Crane was afraid he might. And I think you covered it up for Bertolucci by making it look like a suicide.”
“Now why would I do that?”
“Because you were in love with Amanda Crane and you didn't want Crane's affair and the rest of it to come out; you knew she was the fragile type and you were afraid of what the scandal might do to her. But you miscalculated, Yankowski. You did it all for nothing. Her mind wasn't even strong enough to withstand a suicide; she cracked up and never recovered. And you, the big Prince Charming, you abandoned her. You weren't about to saddle yourself with half a woman who needed constant care-not a fast-rising young shyster like you.”
He said between his teeth, “You son of a bitch.”
“Me? That's a laugh, coming from one as nasty as you.”
His hands fisted again. He seemed to lean forward a little, shifting his weight. The hate in his eyes was as cold and black as death.
“Go ahead,” I said, “try it. But you'll be the one who goes over the edge, not me. I've got forty pounds and fifteen years on you.”
The tension stayed in him a couple of seconds longer; he glanced away from me, down the sandy cut to the cliff wall and the beach far below. Then he relaxed, not slowly but all at once. He liked living, Yank-'Em-Out did, and he wanted to hang onto the time he had left. I watched him regroup. You could almost see the internal shifting of gears, almost hear the click and whir of the shrewd little computer inside his head.
Pretty soon he said, “You think you know what happened at Crane's house that night? Go ahead, tell me.”
I relaxed a little too, but I stayed wary. And I kept my feet spread and planted on the firmer footing of the
