Bill Pronzini - Bones

“Right.”

“Why bother? It won't tell you any more than the newspaper stories.”

“It might. Could be something in it, some hint of Crane's motive, that the reporters didn't get.”

He shrugged. “Okay, I'll get it for you-if it hasn't been lost, stolen, or misfiled. Thirty-five years is a long time.”

“Don't I know it. How soon?”

“Tomorrow sometime.”

I nodded. My watch said it was almost four-thirty; I finished my coffee and lifted myself out of the chair. “I'd better get moving. You mind hanging around until five and locking up?”

“No problem. Where you off to?”

“A talk with Yank-'Em-Out, if he's home by now. And then dinner with Kerry.”

“Dinner, yeah,” he said. “Don't forget tomorrow night.”

“I won't forget,” I said. “Kerry won't let me.”

And that was the truth in more ways than one.

This time when I rang the bell at the Yankowski house, there was somebody home besides the fire-breathing jabberwock. The thing started up in there again, whiffling and burbling, but the noise came distantly, from the back of the place, and never got any closer. Pretty soon the door opened on a chain and a white female face topped by frizzy gray hair appeared in the opening. It said suspiciously, “Yes? What is it?”

“I'd like to see Mr. Yankowski.”

“Is he expecting you?”

“No, but I think he'll see me. Just tell him it concerns Harmon Crane and his son.”

“Your name?”

I held up one of my business cards. A chubby white arm slithered out through the door opening, snatched the card, and then disappeared with it. The face said, “Wait, please,” after which it, too, disappeared and the door snicked shut.

I stood there. A thin breeze off the ocean carried the smells of eucalyptus and jasmine; it was that kind of early evening. Inside the house, the jabberwock continued to make a lot of distant noise, including a couple of thumps and a faint hollow crash. Probably eating some furniture, I thought. Or maybe eating the housekeeper, if that was who owned the white face and the white arm and the frizzy gray hair; as far as I knew, Yankowski had never been married.

But no, the door opened again finally, still on its chain, and there she was. She said, “He'll see you. You can go on around back.”

“Around back?”

“He's in the garden.”

There were some stepping stones that led away from the tile porch, through jasmine shrubs and dwarf cypress pruned into eccentric shapes. All the windows of the house had iron bars bolted across them, I noticed: an added precaution to ease the usual city dweller's paranoia. In Yankowski's case, though, there was probably more to it than that. There must have been a couple of thousand people in the Bay Area with just cause to break into his house and murder him in his bed.

At the rear I found a high fence with a gate in it. From the top of the fence, another six feet or so of clear molded plastic curved up and then back to the house wall; the effect was of a kind of bubble that would enclose and also secure the garden within. I tried the gate latch, found it unlocked, and walked in.

The garden contained a twenty-foot square of well-barbered lawn, bordered on three sides by rose bushes and on the fourth by the rear staircase and a path leading from it to the gate. On the lawn were a Weber barbecue and some pieces of redwood outdoor furniture. And on one of the chairs was old Yank-'Em-Out himself, sitting comfortably with his legs crossed, a drink in one hand and a fat green cigar in the other.

“Flip the lock on the gate when you close it,” he said. “I unlocked it for you.”

Yeah, I thought, paranoia. I shut the gate, flipped the lock, and went to where he was sitting. The rear of the house faced west and the sun was starting to set now over the Pacific; the glare of it coming through that plastic bubble overhead gave the enclosure an odd reddish tinge, as if it were artificially lighted. The glow made Yankowski look gnomish and feral, like a retired troll who had moved out from under his bridge to a house in the city. Which was a fanciful thought, but one that pleased me just the same.

My business card lay all by itself on a redwood table next to him; he tapped it with a crooked forefinger, not quite hard enough to knock the long gray ash off his cigar. “I'm honored,” he said. “It isn't every day a famous private eye comes calling on me.”

There was no irony or sarcasm in his voice. I didn't let any come into mine, either, when I said, “It isn't every day that I get to pay a call on a distinguished member of the legal profession.”

“An honor for both of us, then. But we've met before, haven't we? I seem to recall that you worked for me once a few years ago.”

“Just once. After that I worked for your opponents.”

He thought that was funny; he had a fine sense of humor, Yank-'Em-Out did. He also had his own teeth, the bastard, and a fine head of dark brown hair with only a little gray at the temples-Grecian Formula, I thought; has to be-and a strong, lean body and not many more wrinkles than I've got. He had to be at least seventy, but he looked ten years younger than that. He looked prosperous and content and healthy as hell.

But he lived in a house with bars on its windows and a vicious dog prowling its rooms, and sat in a garden with a plastic bubble over it, and told guests to be sure to lock the gate after they entered. Whether he admitted it to himself or not, he lived in fear-and that is a damned poor way for any man to live.

He swallowed some of his drink, put the glass down on top of my card-deliberately, I thought-and pointed his cigar at me. “Annie says you're here about Harmon Crane.”

“That's right.”

“Michael Kiskadon hired you, I assume.”

“Yes.”

“I'm not surprised. Well, sit down. I don't mind talking to you, although I don't see what you or Michael hope to accomplish this long after the fact.”

I stayed where I was; I liked the idea of looking down at him. “He wants to know why his father committed suicide,” I said.

“Of course he does. So do I.”

“I understand your theory is that Crane shot himself because he was no longer able to write.”

“Yes. But obviously I have no proof.”

“Did he ever communicate to you that he had writer's block?”

“Not in so many words,” Yankowski said. “But he hadn't written anything in weeks and it was plain to anyone who knew him that he was despondent about it.”

“Did he ever mention suicide?”

“Not to me. Nor to anyone else I know of.”

“So you were surprised when you found him dead that night.”

“Surprised? Yes and no. I told you, he was despondent and we were all worried about him.”

“This despondence… it came on all of a sudden, didn't it?”

“No, it was a gradual thing. Did someone tell you otherwise?”

“Kiskadon seems to think his father was all right up until a few weeks before his death.”

“Nonsense,” Yankowski said. “Who told him that?”

“He didn't say.”

“Well, it wasn't that way at all. I told you, Harmon's mental deterioration was gradual. He'd been having trouble working for more than three months.”

“Had he been drinking heavily for that long?”

“More or less. Harmon was always fond of liquor, and he always turned to it when there was a crisis in his life. The writer's favorite crutch. Or it was in those days, before drugs became fashionable.”

“You seem pretty positive about all this, Counselor.” He shrugged, and I said, “Do you also have a clear memory of the night of Crane's suicide?”

The question didn't faze him. “As clear as anyone's memory can be of a thirty-five-year-old incident,” he said. “Do I strike you as senile?”