“Yes?”
“About my father. I never knew him, you see. He and my mother separated a month or so after I was conceived, and she moved back to Philadelphia, where her people were. She refused to tell my father she was pregnant.”
“Why?”
“She was very bitter about the split; it was my father's idea to end their marriage, not hers. She had always wanted a child and he'd been against it. I was a planned accident on her part, I think.” But he seemed not to have inherited any of his mother's bitterness toward his father; in his voice now was a kind of intense yearning; for what, I couldn't gauge yet.
I asked, “Did she tell him after you were born?”
“She never had the chance. She died giving birth to me.”
“I see.”
“I was raised by my mother's sister and her husband,” Kiskadon said. “They legally adopted me, gave me their name. My aunt hated my father, even blamed him for my mother's death; she also vowed not to tell him about me. He died without ever knowing he had fathered a son.”
“So it's not that you don't know who he was,” I said. That was what I'd begun to think he was leading up to: a search for his roots, for the identity of his old man.
“No, it's not that at all. Uncle Ned told me the truth two years ago, after my aunt died. He said he didn't think it was right that I go through the rest of my life believing my natural father was killed in Korea, which was what I'd always been told.”
“Did you make any effort to contact him, once you knew?”
The wry, mirthless smile again. “It was far too late by then,” he said. “But a few months later I had a job offer in San Francisco and I accepted it. It took me a while after I was settled, but I managed to make contact with my father's widow, the woman he married after his divorce from my mother. I also located the man who'd been his attorney. Neither of them could or would tell me what I need to know.”
“And that is?”
“Why he shot himself,” Kiskadon said.
“Suicide?”
“Yes. With a handgun.”
“Where was this?”
“At his home here in the city.”
“How long ago?”
“In 1949, when I was four years old.”
I stared at him. “Nineteen … did you say forty-nine?”
“That's right. December 10, 1949.”
Well, Christ, I thought. I didn't say anything.
“I'm aware it might be impossible to find out the truth after thirty-five years,” he said, “but I have to try. It's important to me—I told you that. It's … oh hell, I might as well admit it: it's become an obsession. I have to know why he killed himself.”
I still didn't say anything.
“I'll pay you well,” he said. “I'm a design engineer for Bechtel; I make seventy-five thousand dollars a year when I'm working full-time.”
“I'm not thinking about money, Mr. Kiskadon,” I said. “The kind of job you want done … it's an exercise in futility and I'd be a liar if I told you otherwise. I can understand why you want to go ahead with it but I don't think I'm the right man to—”
“But you are the right man,” he said. He stood up again and made an emphatic gesture with his cane. “You're exactly the right man.”
“I don't understand.”
“Come into my office. I want you to see something.”
I shrugged and let him lead me into an adjacent room that had an L-shaped desk covered with computer equipment, a recliner chair, a table with a rack of pipes on it, and a big, glass-fronted bookcase along one wall. What was in the book-case caught my eye immediately. I glanced at Kiskadon, and he said, “Go ahead, take a look,” so I went over there and opened the glass doors and took a look.
Pulp magazines, upwards of two hundred of them. Mostly detective and mystery, with a sprinkling of adventure and Western titles. A pile of slick magazines, the top one a browning issue of Collier's from 1944. A shelf of books, hard-covers and paperbacks both, with the same author's name on the spines—a name I recognized. And a photograph in a silver frame, black and white and several years old, of a tall, angular man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and bearing a resemblance to Kiskadon, standing on somebody's lawn with a drink upraised in one hand. I turned to Kiskadon again.
“Yes,” he said. “My father was Harmon Crane.”
Harmon Crane. A name on the covers of scores of pulps in the thirties and forties; a name that sold magazines back then and was still selling them, to collectors such as myself. One of the best writers of pulp fiction, whose blend of hard-boiled action and whacky humor had been rivaled only by Norbert Davis among the unsung heroes of the pulps. But Harmon Crane hadn't remained unsung because he hadn't remained a pulpster. He had graduated to such slicks as Collier's, American Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post; and even more importantly, as far as aficionados of crime fiction were concerned, he had taken one of his pulp detectives, a screwball private eye named Johnny Axe, and fleshed him out and made him the hero of half a dozen novels that had sold remarkably well during the forties and that had been in print off and on ever since. Their titles, all of which were clever and outrageous puns, marched across the shelf behind me in their various editions: Axe Marks the Spot, The Axe-Raye Murders, Axe for Trouble, Axe of Mercy, Don't Axe Me, Axe and Pains.