“But on the telephone … you said …”
“I said I was interested in talking to you about your past history. I didn't mean your professional history; I meant your personal history. I'm sorry if you got the wrong impression,” I lied. “I didn't mean to deceive you.”
She sat looking bewildered for a few seconds. Then her eyes got flinty and her jaw got tight and I had a glimpse of another side of Ellen Corneal Brown, a less genteel and pleasant side that hadn't been softened much by the advent of old age.
“Who are you?” she said.
“A private detective. From San Francisco.”
“My God. What do you want with me?”
“The answers to a few questions, that's all.”
“What questions?”
“About your first husband, Harmon Crane.”
The eyes got even flintier; if she hadn't been curious, she would have told me to get the hell out of her house. But she was curious. She said, “Mr. Crane has been dead for more than thirty years.”
“Yes, ma'am, I know. I'm trying to find out why he committed suicide.”
“Do you expect me to believe that? After all this time?”
“It's the truth.”
“Who is your client?”
“His son, Michael Kiskadon.”
“Son? Mr. Crane had no children.”
“But he did. His second wife bore him a son after they were divorced and kept it a secret from him. He died without ever knowing he was a father.”
She thought that over. “Why would the son wait so many years to have Mr. Crane's suicide investigated? Why would he want to in the first place?”
I explained it all to her. She struggled with it at first, but when I offered to give her Kiskadon's address and telephone number, plus a few other references, she came around to a grudging acceptance. I watched another struggle start up then, between her curiosity and a reluctance to talk about either Harmon Crane or her relationship with him. Maybe she had something to hide and maybe it was just that she preferred not to disinter the past. In any case she was what the lawyers call a hostile witness. If I didn't handle her just right she would keep whatever she knew locked away inside her, under guard, and nobody would ever get it out.
I asked her, “Mrs. Brown, do you have any idea why Crane shot himself?”
“No,” she said, tight-lipped.
“None at all? Not even a guess?”
“No.”
“Did you have any inkling at the time that he was thinking of taking his own life?”
“Of course not.”
“But you did see him not long before his suicide?”
She hesitated. Then, warily, “What makes you think that? We had been divorced for fourteen years in 1949.”
“He mentioned to a friend in September or October of that year that you'd been to see him.”
“What friend?”
“A writer named Russell Dancer.”
“I don't know that name. Perhaps he has a faulty memory.”
“Does that mean you didn't visit Crane at that time?”
Another hesitation. “I don't remember,” she said stiffly.
“Were you living in San Francisco in 1949?”
“No.”
“In the Bay Area?”
“… In Berkeley.”
“Working as a cartographer?”
“Yes. I was with National Geographic then.”
“Married to your present husband?”
“No. Randolph and I were married in 1956.”
“You lived alone in Berkeley, then?”
“I did.”
“You must have been making a good salary.”
“It was … adequate. I don't see what—”
“Then you weren't poor at the time,” I said. “You didn't need a large sum of money for any reason. Say two thousand dollars.”
Her lips thinned out again, until they were like a horizontal line drawn across the lower half of her face. “Did this Dancer person tell you I tried to get money from Mr. Crane?”
“Did you, Mrs. Brown?”
“I won't answer that.”
“Did Crane give you two thousand dollars the month before his death?”
No response. She sat there with her hands twisted together in her lap, glaring at me.
“Why did he give you that much money, Mrs. Brown?”
No response.
“Was it a loan?”
No response.
“All right,” I said, “we won't talk about the money. Just tell me this: Did you visit Crane at his cabin at Tomales Bay?”
She took that one stoically, but her eyes said she knew what I was talking about. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.
“Surely you must have known about his little retreat.”
“No. How would I know?”
“It was common knowledge he went up there alone to write.”