Bones(65)

Kiskadon lay slumped over the desk top, left arm out-flung, right arm hanging down toward the floor; his right temple was a mess of blood and torn and blackened flesh. Looking at him, I didn't feel any physical reaction—nothing at all this time except for the pity, always that same terrible feeling of pity. Second gunshot corpse in three days, and this one not nearly as bad as Bertolucci's had been. Maybe that was it. An overload that had temporarily short-circuited me inside.

Harmon Crane's way out, I thought. Just like that night in 1949.

A phone sat undisturbed on the desk, but I didn't want to use that one if there was another in the house. I started away—and something on the floor to one side and slightly behind the desk caught my attention. It was a brown leather handbag, overturned so that some of its contents had spilled out. I moved closer and leaned over to look at the items: comb, compact, lipstick, wallet. But no keys. From that position I could also see the weapon; it wasn't in Kiskadon's hand, it was all the way under the chair on the left side—a Smith & Wesson snub-nosed .38, the kind known as a belly gun.

The sick feeling started then: short-circuit back the other way. But it was a different kind of sickness, as much a product of the actions of the living as of the presence of the dead. I clamped my teeth together and swallowed to keep it down.

Suicide, I thought again. Like father, like son.

Only now I didn't believe it.





TWENTY



A

S if things weren't bad enough, Leo McFate was in charge of the Homicide team that responded to my call. McFate and I didn't get along. We had had run-ins a time or two in the past, but not for the usual reasons that an abrasiveness develops between cops and private detectives. The thing was, McFate didn't think of himself as a cop; he thought of himself as a temporary cop on his merry way to Sacramento and a job with the attorney general's office. He had ambitions, yes he did. He dressed in tailored suits and fancy ties, he read all the right books, he spoke with precise grammar, diction, and enunciation, he went to all the important social functions, and he sucked up to politicians, newspaper columnists, and flakes off the upper crust. He also considered himself a devilish ladies' man, with special attention to those women from eighteen to eighty who had money, social status, and the Right Connections. He didn't like me because he thought I was beneath him. I didn't like him because I knew he was an asshole.



He came breezing in with another inspector, one I didn't know named Dwiggins, gave me a flinty-eyed look, and demanded to know where the deceased was. That was the way he talked; sometimes it was very comical to listen to him, but this wasn't one of them. I took him to the den and showed him the deceased. “Please wait in the kitchen,” he said, as if that was where I belonged. And when I didn't trot off fast enough to suit him he said, “Well? Do what I told you.”

I wished Eberhardt were here; Eberhardt knew how to get under McFate's skin and deflate him. I hadn't figured out the knack yet. All I could think of was to tell him to take a handful of ground glass and pound it up his tailpipe. Instead I turned without saying anything and went into the kitchen. Antagonizing cops is a stupid thing for anyone to do, and that goes double if you happen to be a private investigator.

McFate kept me waiting fifteen minutes, most of which time I spent prowling the kitchen like a cat in a cage. Once I thought of going in to check on Mrs. Kiskadon, but I didn't do it; I did not want to see her until after I had talked to McFate, and not even then if I could avoid it. She was in the bedroom, or had been just before McFate's arrival. She had got up off the couch while I was telephoning and walked in there and laid down on the bed with the door open. The one time I'd looked in on her she had been lying on her back, stiff-bodied, eyes closed, hands stretched out tight against her sides, like an embalmed corpse that had been arranged for viewing.

I felt keyed up, twitchy. Lynn Kiskadon and her dead husband were on my mind, but other things were rumbling around in there too. Things that I was beginning to understand and things that didn't seem to want to jell yet. None of them was very pleasant, but then murder never is.

When McFate finally came in I didn't give him a chance to be supercilious. I said, “There are some things you ought to know,” and proceeded to explain about Kiskadon and Harmon Crane and the rest of it. Then I told him what I suspected about Kiskadon's death. He'd have figured it out himself eventually—it was pretty obvious, really, once you had all the facts—but I didn't feel like waiting around for his wheels to start turning on their own initiative.

McFate looked at me the way an entomologist would look at a not very interesting bug. I looked right back at him, which was something I never enjoy doing. The son of a bitch is handsome on top of everything else: dark hair gray at the temples, precisely trimmed mustache, a cleft in his chin as big as a woman's navel. No wonder the ladies loved him—those of nondiscriminating taste, anyway. Hell, no wonder the politicians loved him.