Bill Pronzini - Bones

Yeah, I thought. Like that other Big One, death itself.

Which was a morbid thought and I put it out of my head and attacked my veal saltimbocca. It was as good as ever. I had a second beer with it, the hell with my semi-diet, and Kerry had some wine with her eggplant. Neither of us wanted coffee or dessert. All we wanted now was to get out of there, to be alone somewhere; the feeling of camaraderie had evaporated and Piombo's was again a place full of strangers.

On the sidewalk outside Kerry said, “My apartment, okay? If I know Cybil she's already called at least three times. She'll be frantic if I don't phone and tell her I'm all right.”

“How come? They have earthquakes in L.A. too.”

“Bigger than up here. But she subscribes to the theory that one of these days San Francisco is going to disappear into the Pacific.”

“The country would be better off if it was L.A. that disappeared into the Pacific,” I said. “Think of all the lousy movies and TV shows that would never get made.”

“Hollywood can go,” she said, “but not Pasadena.” Pasadena was where Cybil and Ivan the Terrible lived. “Come on, we'll make a fire. It's a good night for a fire.”

Her apartment is on Diamond Heights, a fashionable newer section of the city whose main attraction is a sweeping view of San Francisco, the Bay, and the East Bay communities. Less than ten seconds after we came in, the telephone rang. “See?” she said. “Cybil-I'll bet you five dollars.”

“No bet. When you get done, let me talk to her.”

“Why?”

“I want to ask her about Harmon Crane.”

She lifted the receiver on the fourth ring, and it was Cybil, all right. Kerry spent the better part of ten minutes reassuring her mother that the earthquake hadn't done her or her possessions any harm. I suppose that was how the conversation went, anyway; I quit paying much attention after the first fifteen seconds. I considered turning on the TV, to see if there were other news bulletins, and decided I didn't really want to hear any more tonight about the quake. Instead I went and got a Pine Mountain log and put it on the grate in the fireplace. I was hunting around for some matches when Kerry finished talking and called me to the phone.

Cybil was in one of her manic, chatty moods; it took me a couple of minutes to introduce the topic of Harmon Crane, to ask her if she'd known him.

“Not really,” she said. “I met him once, at a publishing party in New York-the late forties, I think. Why on earth are you asking about Harmon Crane? He's been dead… my God, it must be more than thirty years.”

“Thirty-five years,” I said. “He committed suicide.”

“Yes, that's right. He shot himself.”

“You wouldn't have any idea why, would you?”

“The usual reasons writers do away with themselves, I suppose,” she said wryly. “Why are you so interested?”

I told her about Michael Kiskadon and the reason he'd hired me. Then I asked, “Would Ivan have known Crane any better than you?”

“I doubt it. Do you want me to put him on?”

“Uh, no, that's all right.” Ivan and I didn't get along; in fact, we hated each other a little. He thought I was too old and too coarse for Kerry, and in a dangerous and unstable and slightly shady profession. I thought he was a pompous, overbearing jerk. A conversation with him, even on the telephone, was liable to degenerate into a sniping match, if not something worse, and that would only get Kerry upset. “Do you know anyone who might have been friendly with Crane back in 1949? Any other pulp writer, for instance?”

“Well… have you talked to Russ Dancer?”

“Dancer? He didn't move to California until 1950, did he?”

“Not permanently. But he lived in San Francisco off and on during 1949-I'm sure he did. He's still living up there somewhere, isn't he?”

“Redwood City. As of last Christmas, anyway.”

“Well, he might have known Crane. I can't think of anyone else. Ivan and I did't know many people in the San Francisco area back then.”

“Just out of curiosity-what was your impression of Crane the one time you met him?”

“Oh, I liked him. He was funny in a silly sort of way, very much like his books and pulp stories. He drank a lot, but then we all did in those days.”

I thanked her and we said our good-byes. Dancer, huh? I thought as I put the receiver back into its cradle. I had crossed paths with Russell Dancer twice in the past six years, once on a case in Cypress Bay down the coast and once here in San Francisco, at the same pulp magazine convention where I'd met Kerry and her parents. Dancer had managed to get himself arrested for murder at that convention, and I had proved him innocent and earned his slavish and undying gratitude. Or so he'd claimed when the police let him out of jail. That had been two years ago and I hadn't seen him since; had only had a couple of scrawled Christmas cards, one from Santa Cruz and the other from Redwood City, some twenty-five miles down the Peninsula.

The prospect of seeing Dancer again was not a particularly pleasing one, which was the reason I hadn't bothered to look him up. Dancer was a wasted talent, a gifted writer who had taken the easy road into hackwork thirty-odd years ago and who still cranked out pulp for the current paperback markets-adult Westerns, as of our last meeting. He was also a self-hating alcoholic with a penchant for trouble and a deep, bitter, and unrequited love for Cybil Wade. A little of him went a long way. Still, if there was a chance he had known Harmon Crane, it would be worth getting in touch with him. Assuming I could find him, in Redwood City or elsewhere: he moved around a lot, mostly to keep ahead of the IRS and his creditors.

I swung away from the telephone table. Kerry was standing by the sliding glass doors to the balcony, her arms folded under her breasts, looking out at the lights of the city and the East Bay. I said her name, but she didn't turn right away. And when she did turn she gazed at me for a few seconds, an odd expression on her face, before she spoke.

“It's cold in here,” she said.

“Is it? Well, I'll light the fire-”

“No, don't.”

“Why not?”

“Let's go to bed,” she said.

“Bed? It's not even nine o'clock…”

“Don't be dense,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

“Now. Right away.”

“Big hurry, huh?”

She came over and took hold of my arm. Her eyes were bright with the sudden urgency. “Right now,” she said, and pulled me toward the bedroom.

It wasn't that she was hot for me; it wasn't even sex, really. It was a belated reaction to the quake-a need to be close to someone, to reaffirm life, after having faced all that potentially destructive force. Earthquakes have that effect on people too, sometimes.

The morning Chronicle was full of quake news, not that that was surprising. I seldom read the papers anymore-I have to deal with enough bad news on a daily basis without compounding it-but my curiosity got the better of me in this case; so I skimmed through the various reports while I was having coffee and waiting for Kerry to get dressed.

There was more damage than originally estimated, though none of it involving major loss or casualties. Some mobile homes had been knocked off their foundations down in Morgan Hill, and a freeway overpass in San Ramon had suffered some structural ruin. Out along the coast, especially in West Marin, several earth cracks had been opened up, one of them fifty yards long and three feet wide on a cattle graze belonging to an Olema dairy rancher. He claimed one of his cows had been swallowed up by the break, even though it wasn't very deep and there was no physical evidence to support his contention. “For all I know,” he was quoted as saying, “that cow's all the way over in China by now.”