Bones(27)

“Yeah,” I said. “I know just how it is.”





EIGHT



E

berhardt was out when I got back to the office a little past four. But he had left me a note, as he sometimes did; it was lying on top of a manila envelope on my desk blotter. His typing is almost as bad as his handwriting, what with strikeovers and misspellings and a smeary ribbon on his old Remington, but it's at least decipherable.



3 P.M.



Here's the report on the Crane suicide. Not much there, it was cut and dried.



Woman called for you three times, same one as yesterday. Still wouldn't leave her name or tell me what she wanted, just kept saying she'd call back. Does Kerry know about this?



I'm going out on that repo job for Dennison. In case I don't make it back before you leave the name of the restaurant is Il Roccaforte. 2621 San Bruno Ave. Wanda says 7:30 if that's okay with you and Kerry.



I'll be counting the minutes, Eb, I thought, and sighed, and put the note in my pocket. Il Roccaforte. The Stronghold. Some name for a restaurant. It sounded more like an outfit that rented you storage space, or maybe one of those S&M leather bars over on Folsom. Leave it to Wanda to pick a place called Il Roccaforte—and an Italian place, to boot. Rich Italian food two nights in a row. Kerry was going to love that almost as much as renewing her acquaintance with the Footwear Queen herself.

Eberhardt had remembered to switch on the answering machine. But he might as well not have bothered: one hang-up call, followed by the usual screeching mechanical noise that sounds as if somebody is strangling a duck. A wrong number, maybe. Or my mysterious lady caller, whoever she was.

I sat down and opened the manila envelope. As Eberhardt had noted, there wasn't much to the report—no essentials that hadn't been in the newspaper stories or that I hadn't found out the past two days. Except, possibly, for one item: Harmon Crane had drawn $2,000 out of his savings account on November 6, the month before his death, and nobody seemed to know why. The money hadn't turned up anywhere among his effects, nor was there any record of what he might have done with it. Yankowski speculated that he might have lost it gambling—Crane had liked to play poker and the horses now and then—and that its loss had only deepened his depression. Nobody could say for sure if Crane had done any gambling during that last month of his life.

The police interrogation of Crane's neighbors had turned up nothing of a suspicious nature; no one had been seen entering or leaving the Crane house around the approximate time of death. Not that that had to mean much either way, though, since the house had been in a wooded area and was somewhat secluded from those near it. Likewise the results of a paraffin test—they were still using it back then—administered to determine if Crane had fired the shot that killed him: it had proved inconclusive. Which was the reason why police labs around the country had eventually stopped using paraffin tests; they were notoriously unreliable. As for the coroner's report, it confirmed that Crane had died of a single contact gunshot wound to the left temple and that he had been legally intoxicated at the time of death. And the lab technicians had found nothing questionable in Crane's office, no hint that the shooting might have been anything but a suicide.

Both windows had been latched, fine films of dust on their sills hadn't been disturbed, and nobody could have got in or out that way in any case because the office was on the second floor and there was nothing outside either window to hang onto; a ladder was out of the question because down below was a garden, it had rained heavily that afternoon, and there were no indentations or footprints or other marks in the muddy ground.

The office door had definitely been locked from the inside. The key was still in the latch when Yankowski and Adam Porter broke in, a fact corroborated by both men; the door fit tightly into its frame, making it a physical impossibility for anyone to turn the key from outside by means of string or some other device; and even though the bolt-plate had been torn from the jamb by the forced entry, and both it and the bolt had been damaged, neither had been tampered with beforehand. As far as I could see, the only way it could have been murder was through collusion between Yankowski and Porter—a set-piece carefully arranged before the police were called. But the inspector in charge of the investigation, a man named Gates, had ruled that out. From all I had learned at this late date, I agreed with him. Yankowski and Adam Porter had been anything but bosom pals. Besides which, why would both of them have wanted Harmon Crane dead badly enough to conspire to kill him? And for another thing, the circumstances of that night were such that Amanda Crane would also have had to be party to such a plot, and that made no sense at all.