“I'm sorry, young man.”
“Would you at least give me a number where I can reach her?”
“Why? What do you want with her?”
I told him I was a writer doing a free-lance article on map-making, emphasis on women cartographers. That satisfied him; he gave me the number. No area code, which made it local. And from the first three numbers, it sounded like a Peninsula location-San Bruno, Millbrae, maybe Burlingame.
Eberhardt said when I hung up, “DeKalb's out somewhere and won't be back until after one. I'll call him back.”
“Thanks, Eb.”
“Goddamn flunky, that's all I am around here. Take messages, call up people, type reports. Might as well be your frigging secretary.”
“You'd look lousy in a dress,” I said.
“Funny,” he said.
“Who wants a secretary with hairy legs?”
“Hilarious,” he said. “See how I'm laughing?”
I dialed Ellen Corneal Brown's number. A woman answered, elderly but not anywhere near as shaky as the society representative, and admitted to being Ellen Corneal Brown. I told her how I'd gotten her number and asked if she was the Ellen Corneal who had graduated from UC in 1938. She said she was. I asked if I might stop by and interview her as part of a project involving her past history-not lying to her but letting her make the assumption that it was her past history in the field of cartography that I was interested in. She wasn't the overly suspicious type, at least not without sufficient cause. She said yes, she supposed she could let me have a few minutes this afternoon, would two o'clock be all right? Two o'clock would be fine, I said, and she gave me an address on Red Ridge Road in the Millbrae hills, and that was all there was to it. It happens that way sometimes. Days when things fall into place without much effort and hardly any snags.
But not very often.
I finished my coffee and got on my feet. “I think I'll go get some lunch,” I said to Eberhardt. “You want to join me?”
“No. I'm not hungry.”
“Late breakfast?”
“I'm just not hungry. Why don't you go eat with Kerry?”
“She's got a business lunch today.”
“Big agency client, huh?”
“Reasonably big.”
“Well, I hope she doesn't get drunk and decide to dump a bowl of spaghetti over his head.”
I didn't respond to that.
“That was a goddamn lousy thing she did the other night, you know that?” he said.
“You change your mind, Eb?”
“About what?”
“Talking out what happened at Il Roccaforte?”
“No. You heard me tell you I don't want to talk about it.”
“Then why do you keep talking about it?”
“ I'm not talking about it, you're talking about it. What the hell's the matter with you, anyway?”
I sighed. Eb, I said, sometimes I think you and Wanda deserve each other. But I said it to myself, not to him. I put my coat and hat on and opened the door.
Behind me Eberhardt muttered, “Tells her to shut her fat mouth and then dumps a goddamn bowl of spaghetti over her head, Jesus Christ!”
I went out and shut the door quietly behind me.
FOURTEEN
Red Ridge Road was a short, winding street shaded by old trees a dozen miles south of San Francisco and a half-mile or so downhill from Highway 280. It hadn't been built on a ridge and if any of the earth in the vicinity had ever been red, there was no longer any indication of it. Score another point for our sly old friends, the developers. A lot of the houses up there had broad, distant views of the Bay; others were half-hidden in copses of trees; still others sat at odd angles, on not much land and without much privacy, like squeezed-in afterthoughts. The house where Ellen Corneal Brown lived was one of the last group-a smallish split-level with a redwood-shake roof and an attached garage, primarily distinguished from its neighbors by a phalanx of camellia bushes that were now in bright red and pink blossom.
I parked at the curb in front, ran the camellia gauntlet, and rang the bell. The woman who opened the door was in her seventies, on the hefty side and trying to conceal it inside a loose-fitting dress. White hair worn short and carefully arranged, as if she had just come from the beauty parlor. Sharp, steady eyes and a nose that came to an oblique point at the tip.
I said, “Mrs. Brown?”
“Yes. You're the gentleman who called?”
“Yes, ma'am.”
She kept me standing there another five seconds or so, while she looked me over. I looked her over too, but not in the same way. I was trying to imagine what she'd looked like fifty years ago, when she and Harmon Crane had gotten married, and not having any luck. She was one of those elderly people who look as if they were born old, as if they'd sprung from the womb white-haired and age-wrinkled like leprechauns or gnomes. I couldn't even decide if she'd been attractive, back in the days of her youth. She wasn't attractive now, nor was she unattractive. She was just elderly.
I must have passed muster myself because she said, “Come in, please,” and allowed me a small cordial smile. “We'll talk in the parlor.”
Age hadn't slowed her up much; she got around briskly and without any aids. The room she showed me into was a living room; “parlor” was an affectation. But it wasn't an ordinary living room. If I hadn't known her profession, and that of her husband, one look would have enabled me to figure it out.
The room was full of maps. Framed and unframed on the walls, one hanging suspended from the ceiling on thin gold chains, three in the form of globes set into antique wooden frames. Old maps and new maps. Topographic maps, geological maps, hydrographic and aviation charts. Strange maps I couldn't even begin to guess the purpose of, one of them marked with the words azimuthal projection, which for all I knew charted the geographical distribution of bronchial patients.
Mrs. Brown was watching me expectantly, waiting for a reaction, so I said, “Very impressive collection you have here.”
She nodded: that was what she wanted to hear. “My husband's, mostly, acquired before we were married, although I have contributed a few items myself. Some are extremely rare, you know.”
“I'm sure they are.”
“That gnomonic projection of the Indian Ocean,” she said, pointing, “dates back to the 1700s. The hachures are still quite vivid, don't you think?”
Hachures. It sounded like a sneeze. I nodded wisely and kept my mouth shut.
“Sit down, won't you,” Mrs. Brown said. “I have coffee or tea, if you'd care for a hot drink.”
“Nothing, thanks.”
I waited until she lowered her broad beam onto a quilted blue-and-white sofa and then lowered mine onto a matching chair nearby. Mrs. Brown said, “Well then. You're interested in my cartographic work, I believe you said.”
“Well…”
“My major contribution,” she said proudly, a little boastfully, “was in the area of conic projections. I developed a variant using the Lambert conformal conic projection in conjunction with the polyconic projection, so that-”
“Uh, Mrs. Brown, excuse me but I don't understand a word you're saying.”
She blinked at me. “Don't understand?”
“No, ma'am. I don't know the first thing about maps.”
“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?”