Bill Pronzini: Bones

“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 iceplant. I said, “To begin with, Crane didn't telephone you and ask you to come to his house; it was the other way around. You went to see him at your initiative.”

“Did I? Why?”

“Because he sent you a letter asking you to take care of Amanda if anything happened to him; he either knew or suspected how you felt about her. The letter mentioned suicide, too-he must have worked himself up to the point where he figured he could finally do it-and also hinted that he had a deep dark secret he couldn't tell anyone, least of all his wife. You're not the type to let a challenge like that go by. You went to his place to try to pry it out of him.”

“How do you know about this alleged letter?”

“Crane kept a carbon of it. I found it among some papers of his.”

“You claim it was addressed to me? That it has my name on it?”

I didn't lie to him; if his memory was good enough, he knew better. I didn't say anything. But I was certain that the letter had been addressed to him; once the rest of it came clear, so had the meaning of the “Dear L” salutation. “L” wasn't the first letter of somebody's name. It was the first letter of Yankowski's profession. Dear L: Dear Lawyer.

Yankowski said, “It makes no difference either way. If such a letter exists, I submit it contains nothing incriminating to me and I deny ever receiving it.”

“We'll see what the law has to say about that.”

“The law,” he said. Contempt bracketed the words. “Don't talk about the law to me, detective. The law is a tool, to be used and manipulated by those who understand it.”

“What a sweet bastard you are.”

We watched each other-the two old pit bulls, one of us with the stain of blood on his muzzle. The wind gusted, swirling particles of sand that stung my cheek. Out to sea, the bottom quarter of the sun had slid below the horizon. The surface in front of it looked as if it were on fire, the dredgers close to shore as if they were burned-out hulks that the flames had consumed before moving on.

“You want to hear the rest of it?” I said at length. “Just to prove to you I know what I'm talking about?”

“Go ahead. Talk. I'm listening.”

“Bertolucci also picked the night of December tenth to pay a visit to Crane. Maybe he'd been watching the house; that would explain how he knew Crane was alone. He might have gone there with the intention of murdering Crane; he might only have wanted to talk to him, find out what he'd done with Kate's body. Still, he had to've taken the potential for another murder along with him. I figure that's one of the reasons he waited so long. He was scared and confused and no mental giant besides; it took time to nerve himself up.

“So Bertolucci went into the house. Probably walked right in; I was told Crane never locked the front door. He found Crane in his office, drunk as usual, trying to work up the last bit of nerve he needed to shoot himself; that twenty-two of his must have been out in plain sight. As drunk as Crane was, as much as he wanted to die, maybe he invited Bertolucci to shoot him, get it over with. Or maybe it was Bertolucci's idea when he saw the twenty-two. In any case Bertolucci had gotten away with his wife's murder up to then and he wanted to keep on getting away with it. So he used that twenty-two-put it up against the side of Crane's head and pulled the trigger.