Bill Pronzini: Bones

“Enter Thomas J. Yankowski, servant of the people. Bertolucci might have shot you too; I wish to Christ he had. But it must have taken all his nerve to do the job on Crane. You got him calmed down, you got the full story out of him, you got him to trust you. Easy pickings for a glib young shyster. You told him you'd help him, gave him some kind of song and dance, then sent him on his way. And when he was gone you rigged the murder to look like suicide.”

“Fascinating,” he said. “How did I accomplish that?”

“Oh, you were smart. You didn't try anything fancy; you came up with a method so simple and clever everybody overlooked it. Until now. Until Michael Kiskadon got himself shot and killed in his den earlier today, under circumstances similar to what happened to his father. You didn't know about that, did you? Kiskadon's death?”

Yankowski was silent again.

“The first thing you did when you were alone with Crane's body that night was to type out the suicide note on his machine. But you wanted the phrasing to be just right-Crane's style, Crane's words, not yours. You'd brought along his letter to you and you realized that if you excerpted parts of it, it would make a perfect suicide note. So that's what you did: lifted sentences and partial sentences right out of the letter, changing nothing but the tenses here and there.

“I saw the text of the suicide note in the old newspaper accounts, early in the week. When I read the letter carbon something about it struck me as odd, but I couldn't put my finger on it until this morning, after I found Kiskadon. Then it came to me how similar the letter was to the suicide note, phrases like ‘life terrifies me more than death.’ Crane was in no shape that night to plagiarize himself, either consciously or unconsciously-not exact wording in the exact order he'd used in his letter to you. Somebody else had to have typed the suicide note. And that somebody had to be you.”

“Why did it have to be me?”

“Because there's only one way the cover-up gimmick could have been worked, and the only man who could have worked it is the one who broke into the office later on, in the presence of Amanda Crane. You, Yankowski. Couldn't have been Adam Porter; his brother told me Adam was frail and frail men don't go busting in doors, not when there's a healthy young buck like you around. You broke into Crane's office that night. And not once-twice.

“That's the explanation in one word: twice. After you typed the suicide note you went out into the hall, shut the door behind you, locked it with the key, and broke it in so that there'd be evidence of forced entry. Then you put the key in the lock on the inside and shut the door again. No one could tell from the hallway that it had been forced.

“You left the house then, making sure you weren't seen, and waited around outside somewhere until Porter and Amanda returned home from dinner. At which point you pretended to have just arrived. When the three of you went upstairs to Crane's office, you grabbed the doorknob and pretended it was locked. ‘We'd better break in,’ you said. You threw your weight against the door, holding tight to the knob to provide some noise and resistance, and then let go and the door popped open. Porter and Amanda were too upset to notice anything amiss; and besides, there was plenty of evidence that there had been a forced entry. You also had Porter to verify to the police that the door was forced in his presence and that the key was in the lock on the inside.”

Yankowski still didn't have anything to say. He looked away from me again, out to where a freighter, like a two-dimensional silhouette, seemed about to be engulfed by the shimmery fire on the horizon. The wind was even colder now. Distantly a foghorn sounded, spreading the news that fogbanks were lying out there somewhere and might soon be blowing in.

I said, “For thirty-five years you got away with it, you and Bertolucci. Ancient history, half-forgotten, and the two of you probably long out of touch. But then Kiskadon showed up. And I showed up. You weren't worried at first; you didn't figure I could dig deep enough after all that time to get at the truth. But my bet is you hunted up Bertolucci just the same, first to determine if he was still alive and then to warn him about me.

“My visit to Bertolucci on Wednesday didn't seem to unnerve him much; but when I found his wife's bones that same day-he read about it in the papers or heard about it somehow on Thursday-he got nervous and called you. You went up there to see him. With the intention of killing him to keep him quiet? No, probably not. But something happened when you got to his house, an argument of some kind: he was a crazy old coot and you're a mean bugger when you lose your temper. He probably waved that shotgun at you, and you took it away from him and let fly with both barrels.

“You didn't find out until later that it was my car you ran into when you were tearing out of there. If you needed any more reason to have the damage to your car fixed, that was it. Nice repair work, too; nice new paint job. But the authorities will find out who did the work for you.”

“I doubt that,” Yankowski said.

“Even if they don't, there'll be something else to tie you to Bertolucci and the murder.”

“I also doubt that,” he said, “since everything you've said is an outrageous tall tale.” He seemed to have relaxed completely, to have regained his arrogant manner. The hate was still in his eyes, but it was shaded now by a thin veil of amusement. He took out one of his fat green cigars, turned his back to the wind, and managed to get the cigar fired with a gold butane lighter. When he faced me again he said, “You don't have a shred of proof to back up any of your allegations and you know it. You can't prove that I conspired with Angelo Bertolucci to cover up a murder in 1949. A letter addressed to me that happens to resemble Harmon Crane's suicide note is hardly evidence of any wrongdoing on my part. The police were satisfied that Crane's death was suicide; you have no legal grounds for reopening the case after all these years. You have no proof that I ever even met this man Bertolucci. You have no eyewitnesses who can identify me as being in or near his home on the night of his death. You have no physical evidence of any kind against me. You have nothing, in short, except a great deal of fanciful speculation. Fiction, not fact.”

“That isn't going to stop me from taking it to the authorities,” I said.

“Do as you like. But I warn you, detective. I'd like nothing better than to instigate a lawsuit against you for harassment and defamation of character.”

“And I warn you, Yankowski, you won't get away with it this time. Not this time.”

He smiled at me mirthlessly around his cigar. “Won't I?” he said, and turned his back-a gesture of contempt and dismissal-and walked a short distance away. Stood there smoking and looking out to sea, with his back still turned.

Frustration was sharp in me; he was right and I knew it, and I hated him, too, in that moment, as much as I have ever hated any man for his corruption. The hatred brought on an irrational impulse to go over and give him a push, one little push that would send him hurtling to his death. Immediately I swung around and went the other way, back through the sand and iceplant to Sunset Trail and along it to the parking lot.

I could never have done it, of course-pushed him off that cliff, killed him in cold blood. It would have made me just like him, it would have turned my soul to slime. No, I could never have done it.

But on the long drive home, thinking about him standing up there so smug and sure, so goddamn safe, I almost wished I had.

I did not call Sergeant DeKalb that night, although I considered it. What I had to say to him, the full story of Yankowski's guilt, was better dealt with in person. It could wait until the morning.