“Come into my office. I want you to see something.”
I shrugged and let him lead me into an adjacent room that had an L-shaped desk covered with computer equipment, a recliner chair, a table with a rack of pipes on it, and a big, glass-fronted bookcase along one wall. What was in the book-case caught my eye immediately. I glanced at Kiskadon, and he said, “Go ahead, take a look,” so I went over there and opened the glass doors and took a look.
Pulp magazines, upwards of two hundred of them. Mostly detective and mystery, with a sprinkling of adventure and Western titles. A pile of slick magazines, the top one a browning issue of Collier's from 1944. A shelf of books, hard-covers and paperbacks both, with the same author's name on the spines-a name I recognized. And a photograph in a silver frame, black and white and several years old, of a tall, angular man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and bearing a resemblance to Kiskadon, standing on somebody's lawn with a drink upraised in one hand. I turned to Kiskadon again.
“Yes,” he said. “My father was Harmon Crane.”
Harmon Crane. A name on the covers of scores of pulps in the thirties and forties; a name that sold magazines back then and was still selling them, to collectors such as myself. One of the best writers of pulp fiction, whose blend of hard-boiled action and whacky humor had been rivaled only by Norbert Davis among the unsung heroes of the pulps. But Harmon Crane hadn't remained unsung because he hadn't remained a pulpster. He had graduated to such slicks as Collier's, American Magazine, and The Saturday Evening Post; and even more importantly, as far as aficionados of crime fiction were concerned, he had taken one of his pulp detectives, a screwball private eye named Johnny Axe, and fleshed him out and made him the hero of half a dozen novels that had sold remarkably well during the forties and that had been in print off and on ever since. Their titles, all of which were clever and outrageous puns, marched across the shelf behind me in their various editions: Axe Marks the Spot, The Axe-Raye Murders, Axe for Trouble, Axe of Mercy, Don't Axe Me, Axe and Pains.
I'd known that Crane had been a Bay Area resident since his college days at UC-Berkeley, and that he'd died here by his own hand around 1950; I had a vague memory of reading about his suicide in the papers back then, paying attention to it because of my interest in the pulps in general and his work in particular. But details about his personal life had been sketchy. I had always wondered what led such a successful writer to take his own life.
Crane was still one of my favorites; I read and collected his pulp work avidly. Which made things difficult as far as Michael Kiskadon was concerned. If his father had been anyone else I would have stuck to my guns and turned down his job offer. But because he had been sired by Harmon Crane, I could feel myself weakening. The prospect of poking around in Crane's life, even though he had been dead thirty-five years, held a perverse appeal. For some damn reason, the private lives of authors are endlessly fascinating to people like me who read their work.
Kiskadon was watching me in his intense way. “I started collecting his work as soon as I found out who he was,” he said. “It took time and quite a lot of money, but I have just about everything now; I'm only missing a dozen or so pulps. He wrote close to two hundred and fifty stories for the pulp market, you know.”
I nodded. “Sold his first to Black Mask in 1933, while he was still at Berkeley.”
“Yes. He was pre-med at the time.” The intensity in Kiskadon's expression had been joined by eagerness: he was pretty sure he had me now. “I knew you'd remember him. A well-known detective who collects pulp magazines… well, now you see what I meant when I said you're exactly the right man for the job.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Will you take it, then?”
“I'm leaning that way.” I glanced again at the photograph of Harmon Crane-the first I'd ever seen of him. He didn't look anything like the mental image I had formulated; he looked like a schoolteacher, or maybe an accountant. “Let's go sit down and talk. I've got a lot of questions.”
We went back into the family room. Kiskadon sat on the couch and I sat in the closest chair, a creaky rocker that made me feel like an old fart in a retirement facility-the California Home for the Curmudgeonly, Kerry might have said. I watched Kiskadon light up a pipe. His tobacco smelled like chicken droppings; Eberhardt would have loved it.
I said, “First of all, what do you know about the suicide?”
“Very little. Just what my uncle told me, what I read in old newspapers at the library, and what I was able to find out from his lawyer. His widow wouldn't talk about it at all.”
“He shot himself in his house, you said?”
“Yes. In his office.”
“Where was he living at the time?”
“North Beach. Up near Coit Tower.”
“Is the house still there?”
“No. There's an apartment building on the site now.”
“What time of day did it happen?”
“Sometime around eight P.M.”
“Was anybody else in the house at the time?”
“No. His wife was out to dinner with a friend.”
“Just the two of them lived there?”
“Yes. My father had no other children.”
“Who found his body?”
“His wife, her friend, and the lawyer.”
“How did the lawyer happen to be there?”
“My father called him and asked him to come over. He arrived just as Mrs. Crane and the friend returned home.”
“This friend-what's his name?”
“Adam Porter. He was Mrs. Crane's art teacher.”
“Is he still alive?”
“No. He died in 1971.”
“And the lawyer's name?”
“Thomas Yankowski.”
Ah Christ, I thought, old Yank-'Em-Out.
Kiskadon said, “You look as if you know him.”
“I know him, all right,” I said. “We've had a few dealings in the past.”
“You don't like him?”
“Not one bit.”
“Neither did I. A sour old bastard.”
“Yeah.” Yank-'Em-Out Yankowski, the scourge of the legal profession and the bosom buddy of every slum landlord within a fifty-mile radius of San Francisco. He was retired now, but in his day he had specialized in landlord-tenant relationships, usually working for the landlords but occasionally playing the other side when there was enough money involved. He had boasted publicly that there wasn't a lease written he couldn't break, or a tenant he couldn't evict. The name Yank-'Em-Out had been tacked onto him as a pejorative, but he had taken a liking to it and used it as a kind of unofficial slogan. “How did he happen to be Harmon Crane's lawyer?”
“I don't know.”
“Did he give you any hint what sort of legal service he might have been providing?”
“No.”
“Did he say what Crane wanted to see him about the night of the suicide?”
“Only that my father seemed distraught, that he wanted someone to talk to.”
“Were the two of them also friends?”
“That's what I gathered.”
“But your father didn't wait to talk to Yankowski?”
“No. He… was drunk that night. Maybe that explains it.”
“Maybe. Did he leave a note?”
“Yes. They found it in his typewriter when they broke in.”
“Broke in?”
“The office door was locked from the inside,” Kiskadon said. “His office was on the second floor, so they couldn't get in any other way.”
“Were the windows locked too?”
“I don't know. Does it matter?”
“I suppose not. What did the suicide note say?”
“Nothing specific. Just that he felt he'd be better off dead. It was only a few lines long.”
“He'd been despondent, then?”
“For several weeks. He'd been drinking heavily.”
“Any clues as to why?”
“According to Yankowski, my father wouldn't discuss it with anyone. Yankowski thinks it was some sort of writer's block; my father wrote almost nothing during the last six weeks of his life. But I find that theory difficult to believe, considering how much fiction he produced. And how much writing meant to him-others have told me that.” Kiskadon's pipe had gone out; he paused to relight it. “In any case, his motive had to have been personal.”