“About your first husband, Harmon Crane.”
The eyes got even flintier; if she hadn't been curious, she would have told me to get the hell out of her house. But she was curious. She said, “Mr. Crane has been dead for more than thirty years.”
“Yes, ma'am, I know. I'm trying to find out why he committed suicide.”
“Do you expect me to believe that? After all this time?”
“It's the truth.”
“Who is your client?”
“His son, Michael Kiskadon.”
“Son? Mr. Crane had no children.”
“But he did. His second wife bore him a son after they were divorced and kept it a secret from him. He died without ever knowing he was a father.”
She thought that over. “Why would the son wait so many years to have Mr. Crane's suicide investigated? Why would he want to in the first place?”
I explained it all to her. She struggled with it at first, but when I offered to give her Kiskadon's address and telephone number, plus a few other references, she came around to a grudging acceptance. I watched another struggle start up then, between her curiosity and a reluctance to talk about either Harmon Crane or her relationship with him. Maybe she had something to hide and maybe it was just that she preferred not to disinter the past. In any case she was what the lawyers call a hostile witness. If I didn't handle her just right she would keep whatever she knew locked away inside her, under guard, and nobody would ever get it out.
I asked her, “Mrs. Brown, do you have any idea why Crane shot himself?”
“No,” she said, tight-lipped.
“None at all? Not even a guess?”
“No.”
“Did you have any inkling at the time that he was thinking of taking his own life?”
“Of course not.”
“But you did see him not long before his suicide?”
She hesitated. Then, warily, “What makes you think that? We had been divorced for fourteen years in 1949.”
“He mentioned to a friend in September or October of that year that you'd been to see him.”
“What friend?”
“A writer named Russell Dancer.”
“I don't know that name. Perhaps he has a faulty memory.”
“Does that mean you didn't visit Crane at that time?”
Another hesitation. “I don't remember,” she said stiffly.
“Were you living in San Francisco in 1949?”
“No.”
“In the Bay Area?”
“… In Berkeley.”
“Working as a cartographer?”
“Yes. I was with National Geographic then.”
“Married to your present husband?”
“No. Randolph and I were married in 1956.”
“You lived alone in Berkeley, then?”
“I did.”
“You must have been making a good salary.”
“It was… adequate. I don't see what-”
“Then you weren't poor at the time,” I said. “You didn't need a large sum of money for any reason. Say two thousand dollars.”
Her lips thinned out again, until they were like a horizontal line drawn across the lower half of her face. “Did this Dancer person tell you I tried to get money from Mr. Crane?”
“Did you, Mrs. Brown?”
“I won't answer that.”
“Did Crane give you two thousand dollars the month before his death?”
No response. She sat there with her hands twisted together in her lap, glaring at me.
“Why did he give you that much money, Mrs. Brown?”
No response.
“Was it a loan?”
No response.
“All right,” I said, “we won't talk about the money. Just tell me this: Did you visit Crane at his cabin at Tomales Bay?”
She took that one stoically, but her eyes said she knew what I was talking about. “I don't know what you're talking about,” she said.
“Surely you must have known about his little retreat.”
“No. How would I know?”
“It was common knowledge he went up there alone to write.”
No response.
“ Did you visit him there, Mrs. Brown?”
She got up on her feet, a little awkwardly because of her bulk and age, and gestured toward the entrance hall. “Get out of my house,” she said. “This minute, or I'll call the police.”
I stayed where I was. “Why? What are you afraid of?”
“I'm not afraid,” she said. “You and I have nothing more to say to each other. And my husband is due home from the country club any time; I don't want you here when he arrives.”
“No? Why not?”
“You'll upset him. He has a heart condition.”
“Maybe I ought to talk to him just the same.”
“You wouldn't dare.”
She was right: I wouldn't, not if he had a heart condition. But I said, “He might be more cooperative than you've been,” and I felt like a heel for badgering an old lady this way, even an unlikable old lady like Ellen Corneal Brown. But playing the heel is part of the job sometimes. Nobody ever said detective work was a gentleman's game, not even the coke-sniffing master of 221-B Baker Street himself.
“Randolph knows nothing about that part of my life,” Mrs. Brown said. She was standing next to one of the antique globes; she reached down and gave it an aggravated spin. “And I don't want him to. You leave him alone, you hear me? You leave both of us alone.”
“Gladly. All you have to do is tell me the truth. Did you see Harmon Crane during the two months prior to his death?”
“All right, yes, I saw him.”
“Where?”
“In San Francisco, at a tavern we frequented while we were married-a former speakeasy on the Embarcadero. I… well, we bumped into each other there one afternoon.” That last sentence was a lie: she didn't look at me as she said it.
“Where else did you see him? At Tomales Bay?”
“… Yes, once.”
“Did he invite you up there?”
“No. I… knew he'd be there and I decided to drive up.”
“For what reason?”
No response.
Money, I thought. And she just wasn't going to talk about money. I asked her, “Did anything happen on that visit? Anything unusual?”
“Unusual,” she said, and her mouth quirked into an unpleasant little sneer. “He had a woman with him.”
“His wife, you mean? Amanda?”
“Hardly. Another woman.”
“Do you know who she was?”
“No.” The sneer again. “He didn't introduce us.”
“Maybe she was just a casual visitor…”
“They were in bed together when I arrived,” Mrs. Brown said. “I wouldn't call that casual, would you?”
“No,” I said, “I wouldn't.”
“My Lord, the look on Mr. Crane's face when I walked in!” There was a malicious glint in her eyes now; you could tell she was relishing the memory. “I'll never forget it. It was priceless.”
“What happened after that?”
“Nothing happened. Mr. Crane took me aside and begged me not to tell anyone about his sordid little affair.”
“Is that the word he used, ‘affair’?”
“I don't remember what he called it. That was what it was.”
“Did he offer any explanation?”
“No. The explanation is obvious, isn't it?”
“Maybe. Did you agree not to tell anyone?”
“Reluctantly.”
“Did you keep your promise?”
“Of course I kept it.”
“Do you remember what day this happened? The date?”
“No, not exactly.”
“The month?”
“October, I think. Several weeks before his suicide.”
“Before or after the big earthquake?”
“… Before. A day or two before.”
“Did you see or talk to Crane again after that day?”
Hesitation. “I don't remember,” she said.
The money again, I thought. “What about the woman? Did you see or talk to her again?”
“I never spoke to her, not a word. Or saw her again.”
“Can you recall what she looked like? I assume you saw her up close that day.”
“I saw all of her up close, the little tart,” Mrs. Brown said. She laughed with malicious humor. “Red hair, white skin with freckles all over… hardly any bosom. I can't imagine what Mr. Crane saw in her.”
I could say the same about you, lady, I thought. “How old was she, would you say?”