Harmon would have been proud of him, I'm sure.”
“Did you know Michael's mother?”
“No. Harmon was already divorced from her when I met him.”
“Did you know his first wife?”
“First wife?”
“Ellen Corneal.”
“No, you're mistaken,” she said. “Harmon was never married to a woman named Ellen.”
“But he was. While they were attending UC…”
“No,” she said positively. “He was only married once before we took our vows. To Michael's mother, Susan. Only once.”
“Is that what he told you?”
She didn't have the chance to answer my question. The front door opened just then and a woman came out-a dumpy woman in her forties, with dyed black hair bound up with a bandanna and a face like Petunia Pig. She said, “I thought I heard voices out here,” and gave me a suspicious look. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
“We've been talking about Harmon,” Mrs. Crane said.
“Yes,” I said, “we have,” and let it go at that.
“God, another one of those,” the dumpy woman said. “You haven't been upsetting her, have you? You fan types always upset her.”
“I don't think so, no.”
She turned to Mrs. Crane. “Auntie? Has he been upsetting you?”
“No, Marilyn. Do I look upset, dear?”
“Well, I think you'd better come inside now.”
“I don't want to come inside, dear.”
“We'll have some tea. Earl Grey's.”
“Well, tea would be nice. Perhaps the gentleman…”
“The gentleman can come back some other time,” Petunia Pig said. She was looking at me as she spoke and her expression said: I'm lying for her benefit. Go away and don't come back.
“But he might want to ask me some more questions…”
“No more questions. Not today.”
Mrs. Crane smiled up at me. “It has been very nice talking to you,” she said.
“Same here. I appreciate your time, Mrs. Crane.”
“Not at all. I enjoy talking about Harmon.”
“Of course you do, Auntie,” Petunia Pig said, “but you know it isn't good for you when it goes on too long. Come along, now. Upsy-daisy.”
She helped Mrs. Crane up off the swing, putting an arm protectively around her shoulders, and Mrs. Crane smiled at her and then smiled at me and said, “Marilyn takes such good care of me,” and all of a sudden I realized, with a profound sense of shock, that her air of serenity did not come from inner peace at all; it and her smile both were the product of a mental illness.
The niece, Marilyn, glared at me over her shoulder as she walked Mrs. Crane to the door. I moved quickly to the stairs, went down them, and when I looked back they were gone inside. The door banged shut behind them.
I sat in the car for a couple of minutes, a little shaken, staring up at the house and remembering Mrs. Crane's smile and the pain that had come into her eyes when I pressed her about her husband's suicide. That must have been what did it to her, what unsettled her mind and made her unable to care for herself. And that meant she had been like this for thirty-five years. Thirty-five years!
I felt like a horse's ass.
No. I felt like its droppings.
THREE
As I drove away from there, back down Ashby, I cursed Michael Kiskadon. Why the hell hadn't he told me about his stepmother's condition? But the anger didn't last long. Pretty soon I thought: Quit jumping to conclusions; maybe he never realized it at all. She looked and sounded normal enough; it was only when you analyzed what she said and the way she said it that you understood how off-key it was. Look how long it had taken me to realize the truth, and at that I might not have tumbled if it hadn't been for the way the niece treated her.
Some detective I was. There were times when I couldn't detect a fart in a Skid Row beanery.
It was almost one-thirty when I came back across the Bay Bridge into San Francisco. I took the Broadway exit that leads to North Beach, stopped at the first service station off the freeway, and looked up Stephen Porter in the public telephone directory. Only one listed-and just the number, no street address. I fished up a dime and dialed the number. Nobody answered.
Yeah, I thought, that figures.
The prospect of food had no appeal, but my stomach was rumbling and it seemed a wise idea to fill the empty spaces; I hadn't had anything to eat all day except for an orange with my breakfast coffee at eight A.M. I drove on through the Broadway tunnel and stopped at a place on Polk, where I managed to swallow a tuna-fish-on- rye and a glass of iced tea. I wanted a beer instead of the iced tea, but I was on short rations again where the suds were concerned; after losing a lot of weight earlier in the year I had started to pork up a little again, and I was damned if I was going to get reacquainted with my old nemisis, the beer belly. So it was one bottle of Lite per day now-and the way this day was progressing, I was going to need my one bottle even more later than I did now.
From the restaurant I went down to Civic Center, wasted fifteen minutes looking for a place to park, and finally got into the microfilm room at the main library. Kiskadon had told me the date of his father's death was December 10, 1949. San Francisco had had four newspapers back then- News, Call-Bulletin, Chronicle, and Examiner; I requested the issues of December 11 and 12, 1949, from all four. Then I sat down at one of the magnifying machines and proceeded to abuse my eyes and give myself a headache squinting at page after page of blurry newsprint.
The facts of Harmon Crane's suicide-or at least the facts that had been made public-were pretty much as Kiskadon had given them to me. On the night of December 10, Amanda Crane had gone out to dinner on Fisherman's Wharf with Adam Porter; Harmon Crane had been invited but had declined to accompany them. According to Porter, Crane had seemed withdrawn and depressed and had been drinking steadily all day. “I had no inkling that he might be contemplating suicide,” Porter was quoted as saying. “Harmon just never struck me as the suicidal type.”
Porter and Mrs. Crane had returned to the secluded North Beach house at 8:45. Thomas Yankowski arrived just after they entered the premises; he had been summoned by a call from Crane, who had “sounded desperate and not altogether coherent,” and had rushed right over. Alarmed by this, Mrs. Crane began calling her husband's name. When he didn't respond, Yankowski and Porter ran upstairs, where they found the door to Crane's office locked from the inside. Their concern was great enough by this time to warrant breaking in. And inside they had found Crane slumped over his desk, dead of a gunshot wound to the right temple.
The weapon, a. 22 caliber Browning target automatic, was clenched in his hand. It was his gun, legally registered to him; he had been fond of target shooting and owned three such small-caliber firearms. A typed note “spattered with the writer's blood,” according to some yellow journalist on the Call, lay on top of Crane's typewriter. It said: “I can't go on any longer. Can't sleep, can't eat, can't work. I think I'm losing my mind. Life terrifies me more than death. I will be better off dead and Mandy will be better off without me.”
There were no quotes from Amanda Crane in any of the news stories; she was said to be in seclusion, under a doctor's care-which usually indicated severe trauma. Yankowski and Porter both expressed shock and dismay at the suicide. Porter said, “Harmon hadn't been himself lately-withdrawn and drinking too much. We thought it was some sort of a slump, perhaps writer's block. We never believed it would come to this.” Yankowski said, “The only explanation I can find is that he ran out of words. Writing meant more to Harmon than anything else in this world. Not being able to write would be a living death to a man of his temperament.”
