We all looked up at the screen. A newscaster was repeating the facts that the quake had measured 6.2 on the Richter scale and had lasted for thirty-seven seconds. Its epicenter was down around Morgan Hill, near San Jose, and it had been felt as far north as Fort Bragg, as far east as Lake Tahoe. There were scattered reports of property damage, of earth fissures, but no one had been reported killed or badly injured and no structures had collapsed anywhere. There had been three aftershocks, none above three-point and none felt in San Francisco. A minor quake, really, despite its original magnitude. Nothing to fret about. The Big One was still somewhere in the future, the newscaster said, smiling.
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.”