Bones (The Nameless Detecive) Page 12

  She looked at me over the rim of her wineglass. I had said it as a joke, but she wasn't laughing. For that matter, neither was I.

  “You really think they'd do that?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “God, I can't imagine Eberhardt married to that woman.”

  “Neither can I. I don't even want to try. Let's talk about something else. That roast out there, for instance.”

  “Ten more minutes. Tell me some more about the bones you found.”

  “There's nothing more to tell. All I know right now is that they're human. And I didn't find them; Emil Corda did.”

  “Well, he wouldn't have if you hadn't been there,” she said. “What are the chances the Marin authorities can identify them?”

  “Hard to say. Modern technology isn't infallible.”

  “Can't they do it through dental charts and things like that?”

  “Maybe. It all depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how long ago the victim was buried. On how much dental work he or she had done. On whether or not the dentist is still alive and can be found. On a whole lot of other factors.”

  “Victim,” Kerry said. “Uh-huh.”

  “What?”

  “You used the word victim. You think it was murder, don't you.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “It has to be murder,” she said. “People don't bury bodies in convenient earth fissures unless they're trying to cover up a homicide.”

  “By ‘people’ I suppose you mean Harmon Crane.”

  “Who else? He killed some woman up there, that's obvious.”

  “Is it? Why do you think it was a woman?”

  “He had a frigid wife, didn't he? Besides, there's that cigarette case—”

  “Men also carried cigarette cases back then, you know.”

  “—and the brooch. Men didn't wear brooches back then.”

  “If it was a brooch.”

  “Of course it was. The brooch and the cigarette case and the keys and other items must have been in her purse. He buried the purse with her and it rotted away to nothing, leaving the buckles. Simple.”

  I sighed. Kerry fancies herself a budding detective; and ever since she'd had some success along those lines—as a but-tinsky on a case of mine in Shasta County this past spring, at considerable peril to her life and my sanity—she had been slightly insufferable where her supposed deductive abilities were concerned. It was a bone of contention between us, but I didn't feel like worrying it anymore right now. The only bone I wanted to worry tonight was the one in that roast in the oven.

  “Go check on dinner, will you?” I said. “I'm starving here.”

  “You're always starving,” she said, but she got up and carried her empty wineglass into the kitchen with her. She was just the slightest bit sloshed again tonight, a state to which she was entitled considering how hard she'd been working and her futile efforts to soothe her conscience about last night's fiasco. Not to mention her ex-husband, Ray Dunston, who had given up his law practice a while back to join a Southern California religious cult and who was pestering her to “re-mate” with him in a new life of communal bliss and daily prayer chants. But if being sloshed again was an omen of things to come, I didn't like it much. I had already had a demonstration of Kerry's impulsive behavior while under the influence, and one demonstration was all I wanted to witness, thank you.

  I wandered over to the nearest shelf of my pulps and browsed through a few issues at random. I was in the mood for pulp tonight. Bad pulp. Something by Robert Leslie Bellem from Spicy Detective, for instance. I found a 1935 issue with two stories by Bellem—one, under a pseudonym, called “The Fall of Frisco Freddie”—and took it back to the couch. But I couldn't concentrate yet. That damned roast …

  I got up again and lumbered into the kitchen. Kerry had the roast out; but she said, “Five more minutes,” and started to push it back into the oven again. I said, “Give me that thing, I don't care if it's done or not,” and grabbed a carving knife out of the rack and hacked off an end and stuffed it into my mouth.

  Kerry said, “Barbarian.”

  I said, “Mmmmff.”

  It was a good roast. It was so good, in fact, that it put an end to my funk, allowed me to enjoy “The Fall of Frisco Freddie” a little while later, and to bring about the Lay of Kerry Wade a little while after that.

  The lay kept her from inhaling any more wine, which was my primary intention, of course. The things I do to maintain harmony in my life.…

  THIRTEEN

  O

  n Thursday morning, without stopping at the office, I drove back across the Bay to Berkeley. I was not about to make a habit of hanging around waiting for Eberhardt to get over his mad and come back to work. Or of worrying that he wouldn't do either one. If the Il Roccaforte incident loomed large enough for him to bust up both our friendship and our partnership, then he was a damn fool and there was no use making myself crazy over the fact. I had enough trouble trying to shepherd one damn fool through life—me—without fretting and stewing about another one.

  Some mood I was in again this morning. And for no particular reason I could figure out, except that the fog had come in during the night and the day was gray and bleak. Even in normally sunny Berkeley it was gray and bleak, which would make Telegraph Avenue even harder to take than usual.

  But the first place I went was to Linden Street, to the house where Amanda Crane lived with her niece. Not to see Mrs. Crane this time; it was the niece I wanted a conversation with—if I could break through her defenses long enough to get one. She must know the full story of what had happened back in 1949 and she might have picked up something from Mrs. Crane, or from some other source, that would be of help.

  Moot possibility for now, though: neither she nor Amanda Crane was home. Or if they were, they weren't answering the doorbell for the likes of me.

  I drove downtown via Shattuck, found a place to park on Channing Way, walked back to Telegraph, and turned north toward the Bancroft gate to the UC campus. The sidewalks were crowded with the usual admixture of students, shoppers, hustlers, dope peddlers and buyers, musicians, street artists selling everything from cheap jewelry to hand-carved hash pipes, and assorted misfits. A girl wearing a poncho and half a pound of brass bracelets, rings, earrings, and neck adornments leaned against an empty storefront and sang Joan Baez protest songs to her own guitar accompaniment; a red-and-white emblem on the base part of the guitar said Death to the Warmongers. A young-old paraplegic rumbled past me in a motorized wheelchair, going somewhere in a hurry, or maybe going nowhere at all. You see a lot of paraplegics on the streets of Berkeley—some born that way, others the wasted and forgotten residue of Vietnam. Three different kids tried to panhandle me in the two blocks to Bancroft, one of them stoned on some sort of controlled substance that gave him the vacuous, drooling expression of an idiot. A bag lady dressed in black knelt in the gutter to pry loose a crushed Coca-Cola can that was wedged in a sewer grating. A man carrying a Bible in one hand and a stack of leaflets in the other told me God was angry, God would not contain His wrath much longer, and handed me a leaflet that bore a pair of headlines in bold black type: THE END IS NEAR—BE PREPARED! THERE IS NO ESCAPING JUDGMENT DAY!

  Go tell it on a mountain, brother, I thought. Maybe then someone will listen.

  The street depressed me; it always did. The ugliness, the pervasive sense of hopelessness. The waste. And we were all to blame—mankind was to blame. We had all created the Telegraph Avenues of this world just as surely as we had created war and nurtured greed and applauded the actions of fools and knaves these past eighty-odd years. Some century, the twentieth. The age of enlightenment, understanding, wisdom, and compassion.

  Cynical philosophy on a cold, bleak October morning. Maybe I ought to stand next to the guy with the leaflets, I thought, and shout it out for all to hear. Then passersby could laugh at me too: just another freak in the Telegraph Avenue sideshow.

 
The UC campus was something of an antidote for the depression, at least. Clean, attractive, well cared for; crowded with kids who for the most part looked like typical college students. I wandered among them, past the Student Union and Ludwig's Fountain to Sproul Hall. Sproul was where the registrar's office was, on the first floor. Except for a couple of student clerks, there was nobody in it when I entered. The rush for fall registration had long since ended and things were quiet here at this time of year.

  The clerk who waited on me was a young woman with a body like a colt and a face like the colt's mother: pointy ears, hair that hung down over her eyes, a long muzzle, and lots of teeth. I told her my name was William Collins and that I was a writer doing a biography about a former Cal student in the thirties, a well-known mystery writer named Harmon Crane. She had never heard of Harmon Crane—she didn't read mysteries, she said snootily; they had no redeeming literary merit; she read Proust, Sartre, Joyce.

  Proust to Sartre to Joyce, the old double-play combination, I thought in my lowbrow way. But I didn't say it.

  I said I was trying to track down information about Harmon Crane's first wife, Ellen Corneal, who had also been a student at UC in the early thirties, and would it be possible for her to let me see Ellen Corneal's records? She said no, absolutely not, it was against school policy. I argued, reasonably enough, that those records were now half a century old and that no harm could possibly be done by me seeing them at this late date. I appealed to her sense of literary history, even though we were only talking about a lowly mystery writer here. I can be persuasive sometimes, and this was one of them: I could see her weakening.

  “I can't let you see the records,” she said. She was firm about that. “Definitely not.”

  “How about if I ask you some questions and you tell me the answers?”

  “I can't answer any questions about a person's admissions materials,” she said.

  “Then I won't ask any.”

  “Or about transcripts.”

  “No questions about those, either.”

  “Or written evaluations, personal or classroom.”

  “Just background data, that's all.”

  She relented finally, said it would take a while to look through the files, and suggested I go away and come back again in an hour. So I went out and walked around the campus, all the way past the Earth Sciences buildings to the North Gate and back again, and was standing in front of the horse-faced clerk in exactly one hour.

  “You're very prompt,” she said, and showed me some of her teeth. I half expected her to whinny a little to emphasize her approval of punctuality.

  I asked her some questions about Ellen Corneal's family background; she kept the records at a safe distance while she consulted them and provided answers, as if she were afraid I might leap over the counter and yank them out of her hands. But what she told me wasn't very helpful. Ellen Corneal had been born in Bemidji, Minnesota; her mother had died when she was two, her father when she was eleven, and she had come to California to live with a maiden aunt after the father's death. She had no siblings and no other relatives. The aunt had been sixty-two-years old in 1932, when Ellen Corneal entered UC, and would now be one hundred and fourteen years old if she were still alive, which was a highly unlikely prospect. The Corneal woman had dropped out of school in 1933, after marrying Harmon Crane, but had returned two years later to finish out her schooling and earn her degree.

  “In what?” I asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “In what did she earn her degree? What was her major?”

  “Oh. A B.A. in cartography.”

  “Map-making?”

  “That is what cartography is, sir.”

  “Uh-huh. An unusual profession.”

  “I suppose you might say that. At least it was for a woman back then.”

  “Women have come a long way,” I said, and smiled at her.

  She didn't smile back. “We still have a long way to go,” she said. From the ominous note in her voice, she might have been issuing a warning. I wanted to tell her that I wasn't the enemy—Kerry had once called me a feminist, in all sincerity, something I still considered a high compliment—but trying to explain myself to a twenty-year-old woman who read Proust and Sartre and Joyce and thought mysteries were trash was an undertaking that would have required weeks, not to mention far more patience than I possessed. I thanked her again instead and left Sproul Hall and then the campus through the Bancroft gate.

  But I didn't go back down Telegraph Avenue to get to my car; I took the long way around, up Bancroft and down Bowditch. One trip through the sideshow was all I could stand today.

  There was still nobody home on Linden Street. So I drove back across the Bay Bridge, put my car in the garage on O'Farrell, and went up to the office. The door was unlocked; and when I opened it and walked in, there was Eberhardt sitting behind his desk, scowling down at some papers spread out in front of him. He transferred the scowl to me as I shut the door, but he didn't say anything. So I did the ice-breaking myself.

  “Well, well,” I said. “Look who's here.”

  “I don't want to talk about it,” he said.

  “Talk about what?”

  “You know what. I'm not talking about it.”

  “All right.”

  “Business, that's all. Just business.”

  “Whatever you say, Eb.”

  “Kerry called, I told her the same thing.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  “What do you think she said? She said okay.”

  “Good.”

  “Yeah. Good. You got two calls this morning.”

  “From?”

  “Michael Kiskadon both times. He wants you to call him.”

  “He say what he wanted?”

  “No. But he sounded pissed.” Eberhardt paused and then said, “Kerry do something to him too?”

  “I thought you didn't want to talk about that.”

  “What?”

  “What happened at Il Roccaforte.”

  “I don't. I told you that.”

  “Okay by me.”

  I hung up my hat and coat, poured myself a cup of coffee, and sat down at my desk with it. Eberhardt watched me without speaking as I dialed Kiskadon's number.

  Kiskadon was angry, all right. He answered on the first ring, as if he'd been hovering around the phone, and as soon as I gave my name he said, “Damn it, why didn't you call me yesterday? Why didn't you tell me what's going on?”

  “I'm not sure I know what you mean.”

  “The hell you don't know what I mean. Those bones you found up at Tomales Bay.”

  “How did you hear—?”

  “The Marin County Sheriff's office, that's how. Sergeant DeKalb. He wanted to verify that you're working for me. Are you, or what?”

  “Working for you? Of course I am—”

  “Then why didn't you call me? How do you think I felt, hearing it from that cop?”

  “Look, Mr. Kiskadon,” I said with forced patience, “I didn't call you because there wasn't anything definite to report. Those bones may have nothing to do with your father.”

  “Maybe you believe that but I don't. They're connected with his suicide, they have to be.”

  I didn't say anything.

  “They were a woman's bones,” Kiskadon said.

  “Did Sergeant DeKalb tell you that?”

  “Yes. Something he found with the bones confirmed that.”

  “What something?”

  “He wouldn't tell me. Nobody tells me anything.” Now he sounded petulant. “I thought I could trust you,” he said.

  “You can. I told you, I didn't call because—”

  “I want to know everything from now on,” he said. “Do you understand? Everything you do, everything you find out.”

  I was silent again.

  “Are you still there?”

  “I'm still here,” I said. “But I won't be much longer if you start handing me ultimatums. I don't do busin
ess that way.”

  Silence from him this time. Then he said, with less heat and more petulance, “I wasn't giving you an ultimatum.”

  “That's good. And I wasn't withholding anything from you; I don't do business that way either. When I have something concrete to report I'll notify you. Now suppose you let me get on with my work?”

  “… All right. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to blow up at you like that. It's just that … those bones, buried up there like that … I don't know what to think.”

  “Don't think anything,” I said. “Wait for some more facts. Good-bye for now, Mr. Kiskadon; I'll be in touch.”

  “Yes,” he said, and both the anger and the petulance were gone and that one word was cloaked in gloom.

  Manic depressive, I thought as I put the receiver down. His wife was right about him; if she didn't get him some help pretty soon, somebody to fix his head, he was liable to crack up. And then what? What happens to a guy like Kiskadon when he falls over the line?

  Eberhardt was still watching me. He said, “What was that all about? That stuff about bones?”

  I told him. Then I asked, “Do you know a Marin Sheriff's investigator named DeKalb?”

  “What's his first name?”

  “Chet.”

  “Yeah, I know him. Why?”

  “I could use an update on those bones and the other stuff from the fissure. I'm not sure he'd give it to me.”

  “But you think he might give it to me.”

  “He might. You mind calling him?”

  “Shit,” he said, but he reached for his phone just the same.

  I got out the Yellow Pages and looked up Professional Organizations. No listing for cartographers, not that that was very surprising. So then I looked up the number for the big Rand McNally store downtown, Rand McNally being the largest map company around, and dialed it and asked to speak to somebody who could help me with a question about cartographers. A guy came on after a time, and I asked him if there was a professional organization for map-makers, and he said there was—The American Society of Cartographers—and gave me a local number to call. I also asked him if he knew a cartographer named Ellen Corneal, but he had never heard of her.