No part of the confession had surprised me much, but seeing it all down in black-on-yellow, in Harmon Crane's own words, had deepened my own depression. I got up from the table and opened a can of Miller Lite and carried it into the front room. Patches of fog were still swirling over this part of the city; I stood in the bay window, watching the clash of blue and gray overhead and thinking of how Kiskadon would react if he read those pages. Well, he wasn't going to read them, not if I could help it. He had fired me this morning; I no longer had an obligation to share my findings with him.
My findings. What was I doing here this afternoon, anyway, rummaging through all those old papers, fueling my rotten mood by wallowing in a poor dead writer's thirty-five-year-old weakness and torment? My job was done, for Christ's sake. I had been hired to find out why Crane killed himself, and I had found out, and I had been summarily fired for my efforts. And that was that.
Well, wasn't it?
Bertolucci's murder, I thought. Somebody killed him and the reason is linked to Harmon Crane and the hell with all this thinking. The job's not done yet and you know it. Quit maundering about it.
I finished the beer and went back into the kitchen and sat down at the table again. All right. Business correspondence. Letters from his agent informing him of acceptance of novels and short stories, of subsidiary rights sales on the Johnny Axe series. Other letters from the agent suggesting slick magazine story ideas or offering market tips. Letters from editors asking for revisions on this or that project. A two-page rejection letter detailing the reasons why a pulp editor was returning a story, across the first page of which Crane had scrawled the word Bullshit! Carbons of Crane's responses to some of the above. Carbons of cover letters sent with manuscript submissions to his agent and to various editors. Other business letters discussing financial matters with his agent, or making a specific point in rebuttal to an editorial request for revision; the latter were often phrased satirically, to take the sting out of the words: “Johnny Axe would never shoot an unarmed man, Mr. E., no matter that the unarmed man in this case is a 7-foot-tall Hindu snake charmer bent on remolding the shape of Johnny's spine. I have it on good authority that Mr. A. would not even shoot the snake unless it were packing a loaded gat.”
Nothing for me there; I went on to the personal letters addressed to Crane, those dated the last few months of 1949. Fan mail, most of them, including a note on baby blue stationery from a woman in Michigan who said she had had “a wickedly erotic dream about dear Johnny Axe” and wondered if Mr. Crane ever passed through East Lansing on his way to and from New York because she'd love to meet him. Nothing from Kate Bertolucci. Nothing from Angelo Bertolucci. A scribbled note from Russ Dancer, suggesting a possible collaborative story idea; Crane had written at the bottom: “Come on Russ—trite!” A fannish note from Stephen Porter, telling Crane how much he'd enjoyed Axe of Mercy. Nothing from anyone else whose name I was familiar with.
Which left me with the carbons of personal letters Crane himself had written. The bulk of these were responses to fan letters, including a polite but unencouraging note to the lady in East Lansing. Letters to Russ Dancer and a couple of other writers, most of which were both humorous and scatological in tone; none of these was dated later than September of 1949. Only a few bore a post-October 15 date, and among those was a personal note dated December 7, Pearl Harbor Day:
Dear L:
This is a difficult letter to write. Doubly so because I can't think straight these days (yes, I know the booze only makes it worse). But there's no one else I can turn to.
You know how I feel about Mandy. She's more important to me than anything else. If anything happens to me I want you to see to it she's cared for, financially and every other way. Can I count on you to do that?
The fact is, I can't go on much longer. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I can't work. Sometimes I think I'm close to losing my mind. There is too much festering inside me that I can't talk about, to you or to anyone else. No one must ever know the truth, least of all Mandy. It would hurt her too much.
Life terrifies me more than death, yet I've been too much of a coward to put an end to it. At least I have been up to now. Soon I may find the strength. Or perhaps circumstances will take it out of my hands. In any case I will be better off dead, free of all this pain. And Mandy will be better off without me, even though she will never understand why.
As Johnny might say, I axe no mercy and I seek no help. There is no mercy or help for me. I know what I am. I ask only your word that you will take care of Mandy.
That was all. If he'd had anything else to say, it had gone into a postscript on the original.