He said between his teeth, “You son of a bitch.”
“Me? That's a laugh, coming from one as nasty as you.”
His hands fisted again. He seemed to lean forward a little, shifting his weight. The hate in his eyes was as cold and black as death.
“Go ahead,” I said, “try it. But you'll be the one who goes over the edge, not me. I've got forty pounds and fifteen years on you.”
The tension stayed in him a couple of seconds longer; he glanced away from me, down the sandy cut to the cliff wall and the beach far below. Then he relaxed, not slowly but all at once. He liked living, Yank-'Em-Out did, and he wanted to hang onto the time he had left. I watched him regroup. You could almost see the internal shifting of gears, almost hear the click and whir of the shrewd little computer inside his head.
Pretty soon he said, “You think you know what happened at Crane's house that night? Go ahead, tell me.”
I relaxed a little too, but I stayed wary. And I kept my feet spread and planted on the firmer footing of the iceplant. I said, “To begin with, Crane didn't telephone you and ask you to come to his house; it was the other way around. You went to see him at your initiative.”
“Did I? Why?”
“Because he sent you a letter asking you to take care of Amanda if anything happened to him; he either knew or suspected how you felt about her. The letter mentioned suicide, too—he must have worked himself up to the point where he figured he could finally do it—and also hinted that he had a deep dark secret he couldn't tell anyone, least of all his wife. You're not the type to let a challenge like that go by. You went to his place to try to pry it out of him.”
“How do you know about this alleged letter?”
“Crane kept a carbon of it. I found it among some papers of his.”
“You claim it was addressed to me? That it has my name on it?”
I didn't lie to him; if his memory was good enough, he knew better. I didn't say anything. But I was certain that the letter had been addressed to him; once the rest of it came clear, so had the meaning of the “Dear L” salutation. “L” wasn't the first letter of somebody's name. It was the first letter of Yankowski's profession. Dear L: Dear Lawyer.
Yankowski said, “It makes no difference either way. If such a letter exists, I submit it contains nothing incriminating to me and I deny ever receiving it.”
“We'll see what the law has to say about that.”
“The law,” he said. Contempt bracketed the words. “Don't talk about the law to me, detective. The law is a tool, to be used and manipulated by those who understand it.”
“What a sweet bastard you are.”
We watched each other—the two old pit bulls, one of us with the stain of blood on his muzzle. The wind gusted, swirling particles of sand that stung my cheek. Out to sea, the bottom quarter of the sun had slid below the horizon. The surface in front of it looked as if it were on fire, the dredgers close to shore as if they were burned-out hulks that the flames had consumed before moving on.
“You want to hear the rest of it?” I said at length. “Just to prove to you I know what I'm talking about?”
“Go ahead. Talk. I'm listening.”
“Bertolucci also picked the night of December tenth to pay a visit to Crane. Maybe he'd been watching the house; that would explain how he knew Crane was alone. He might have gone there with the intention of murdering Crane; he might only have wanted to talk to him, find out what he'd done with Kate's body. Still, he had to've taken the potential for another murder along with him. I figure that's one of the reasons he waited so long. He was scared and confused and no mental giant besides; it took time to nerve himself up.
“So Bertolucci went into the house. Probably walked right in; I was told Crane never locked the front door. He found Crane in his office, drunk as usual, trying to work up the last bit of nerve he needed to shoot himself; that twenty-two of his must have been out in plain sight. As drunk as Crane was, as much as he wanted to die, maybe he invited Bertolucci to shoot him, get it over with. Or maybe it was Bertolucci's idea when he saw the twenty-two. In any case Bertolucci had gotten away with his wife's murder up to then and he wanted to keep on getting away with it. So he used that twenty-two—put it up against the side of Crane's head and pulled the trigger.
“Enter Thomas J. Yankowski, servant of the people. Bertolucci might have shot you too; I wish to Christ he had. But it must have taken all his nerve to do the job on Crane. You got him calmed down, you got the full story out of him, you got him to trust you. Easy pickings for a glib young shyster. You told him you'd help him, gave him some kind of song and dance, then sent him on his way. And when he was gone you rigged the murder to look like suicide.”