Bill Pronzini - Bones

“I didn't really know any of Harmon's friends,” he said. “I don't believe he had many. He spent most of his time writing or researching. Have you talked to Yankowski yet?”

“Yes. He wasn't very helpful.”

“I'm not surprised. An unpleasant sort. I don't know why Harmon dealt with him.”

“How did your brother feel about Yankowski?”

“The same as I do. He found him overbearing. And the way he pestered poor Amanda after Harmon's death…”

“Pestered her how?”

“He wanted to marry her. That was before he found out her mind was permanently damaged, of course.”

“He left her alone after he found out?”

“Fortunately, yes.”

There didn't seem to be anything more to ask Porter; I waited while he lighted another Camel and got done coughing, thanked him for his time, and started for the door. But he wasn't quite ready to let go of me yet. He tagged along, with his face scrunched up thoughtfully again and his breath making funny little rattling noises in his throat.

When we got to the door he said, “There is one thing. I don't know that I ought to bring it up, after all this time, but… well, it's something that has bothered me for thirty-five years. Bothered Adam, too, while he was alive.”

“What is it, Mr. Porter?”

“The circumstances of Harmon's death. They just didn't seem right.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well… in the first place, it's very hard to believe that he would have killed himself, even in a state of severe depression. If you'd known Harmon you'd understand. He wasn't a courageous man; he feared death more than most of us.”

I frowned at him. “Are you suggesting his death might not have been suicide?”

“I'm suggesting that it is a possibility.”

“Who had reason to want him dead?”

“No one that I know of. Or that Adam knew of. That was one of the reasons the police discounted the idea when Adam broached it to them.”

“What were the other reasons?”

“The main one was the locked office door. They said there was no way anyone but Harmon could have locked it from the inside. But that door was exactly what bothered us the most.”

“Why?”

“Harmon never locked doors, not even the front door to his house; he was a trusting man and he was forever misplacing things like keys. Besides, he was alone in the house that night. Why would a man alone in his own home lock his office door, even if he did intend to take his own life?”

I didn't say anything.

“You see?” Porter said. “It could have been murder, couldn't it?”

When I left North Beach I drove over to the foot of Clay Street and got onto the freeway interchange, heading south for Redwood City. As I drove I mulled over what Porter had told me. Not suicide-murder. Well, it was a possibility, as he'd said; and it would make an intriguing mystery out of Crane's death. But the police had determined that there was no way for a locked-room gimmick to have been worked, and I had a healthy respect for the SFPD Homicide Detail; I knew a lot of the men who'd been on it over the years, from my own days on the cops and from my friendship with Eberhardt, who had worked that detail for a decade and a half as inspector and then lieutenant. No, if they'd felt Crane's death was suicide, then it must have been suicide. And never mind why he decided to lock the office door before he put his. 22 Browning against his temple and pulled the trigger. He'd been drunk at the time, depressed and overwrought; a man in that condition is liable to commit any sort of irrational act.

Sure, I thought, sure. But all the same I wanted a look at the police report-if it still existed and if Eberhardt could find it. Even the best of cops makes mistakes now and then, just like the rest of us.

It was a little past noon when I reached the Redwood City exit off 101. For the San Mateo county seat, it's a quiet little town sprawled out on both sides of El Camino Real and the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks. Not nearly as affluent as Atherton and Palo Alto to the south, or Burlingame and Hillsborough to the north. Just a town like a lot of other towns, with a fair amount of low-income housing along tree-shaded streets. A few writers had lived there over the years, some of whom had written for the pulps. I wondered if any of those were still alive and if Russ Dancer knew them. And if he did, if he had anything in common with them after all these years.

I pulled into a Chevron station near Broadway, the main downtown arterial. And pumped my own gas while a fat, indolent teenager looked on, waiting to take my money. Self-service at gas stations is one of my pet peeves. High prices, and you do all the work yourself. What the hell did attendants like this one do to earn their salary? Not much, that was for damned sure. Instead of walking over to where he was, I got back into the car so that he had to move his fat in order to get paid. Small satisfaction, but you take your satisfactions where you can these days.

I took another one by sitting there at the pump for an extra couple of minutes while I dug a Redwood City street map out of the bag of maps in the glove compartment and looked up Stambough Street, Dancer's last known address. Only it wasn't Stambough, it was Stambaugh: I had mistaken an a for an o in the scrawled return address on Dancer's Christmas card envelope. Stambaugh Street was only a few blocks from where I was, not far off Broadway-more or less downtown and more or less close to the SP tracks.

But I didn't go there directly after I left the nonservice station. I stopped instead on Broadway and went into the first cafe I saw to eat lunch. I was hungry, and Dancer isn't somebody you want to deal with on an empty stomach.

I took my copies of Axe Marks the Spot and Axe of Mercy with me, and skimmed through them while I ate. Neither one had an Italian villain in it. I couldn't recall which of the others did have; it had been too long since I'd read them. I would have to go see Kiskadon later on and check through his copies.

With a cheese omelette and a glass of iced tea under my belt, I drove to Stambaugh Street. The number I wanted turned out to be a somewhat seedy rooming house near a block-long thrift store: a sprawling, two-story Victorian with turrets and gables and brick chimneys, all badly in need of paint and general repair. Two sickly palm trees grew in a front yard enclosed by a picket fence with a fourth of the pickets broken or missing altogether. Nice place. Every time I crossed paths with Dancer, he seemed to have tumbled a little further downhill.

I parked in front and went through the gate and up onto the creaky front porch. There was only one entrance and no marked mailboxes to identify who lived there. Just a doorbell button and a small card above it that said ROOM FOR RENT-SEE MANAGER. I tried the door, found it locked, and pushed the bell. Pretty soon somebody buzzed me into a dark hallway that smelled of Lysol and, curiously, popcorn. The somebody-a woman-was leaning out of a doorway beyond a flight of stairs, giving me a squint-eyed look.

I went over to her. The door was marked MANAGER and the woman was about fifty, gray-haired, wearing sequin-rimmed glasses. She had a face like something in an old, discolored wallpaper pattern-the gargoyle kind.

“Something I can do for you?” Brillo-pad voice, like Lauren Bacall with a sore throat.

“I'm looking for a man named Russell Dancer.”

Her mouth got all quirky with what I took to be disgust. “Him,” she said. “You wouldn't be a cop, would you?”

“I wouldn't. Why?”

“You look like a cop. Dancer's been in jail before.”

“In Redwood City, you mean?”

“Sure. He been in jail somewhere else too?”

He had, but I wasn't about to tell her that. “What was he arrested for?”