Berkeley used to be a quiet, sleepy little college town, with tree-shaded side streets and big old houses as its main non-academic attraction. But its image had changed in the sixties, as a result of the flower children and radical politics fomented by the senseless war in Vietnam. In the seventies, Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army had added a bizarre new dimension, which the media and the right-wingers had mushroomed into a silly reputation for Berkeley as the home of every left-wing nut group in the country. And in the eighties, it seemed to have become a magnet for a variety of criminals and the lunatic fringe: drug dealers, muggers, purse snatchers, burglars, pimps, panhandlers, bag ladies, bag men, flashers, acidheads, religious cultists, and just plain weirdos. Nowadays it had one of the highest crime rates in the Bay Area. And the downtown area centering on Telegraph Avenue near the university was a free daily freakshow. You could get high on marijuana just walking the sidewalks; and you were liable to see just about anything on a given day. The last time I'd been there I had seen, within the space of a single block, a filth-encrusted kid with bombed-out eyes reciting passages from the Rubaiyat; a guy dressed up like an Oriental potentate sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk with a myna bird perched on his shoulder, plucking out Willie Nelson tunes on a sitar; and a jolly old fellow in a yarmulke selling half a kilo of grass to an aging hippie couple, the female member of which was carrying an infant in a shoulder sling.
No more sleepy little college town: Berkeley had graduated to the big time. Welcome to urban America, babycakes.
Still, the old, saner Berkeley continued to exist in pockets up in the hills and down on the flats. The Cal campus was pretty much the same as it had always been, and the kids who went there were mostly good kids with their priorities on straight. Most of the residents were good people too, no matter what their politics happened to be. And the tree-shaded side streets and big old houses were still there, with the only difference being that now the houses had alarm systems, bars on their windows, triple locks on their doors, and maybe a handgun or a shotgun strategically placed inside. Driving along one of those old-Berkeley streets, you could almost believe things were as simple and uncomplicated as they had been in the days when this was just another college town. Almost.
The street Amanda Crane lived on was like that: it seemed a long, long way from the Telegraph Avenue freak-show, even though only a couple of miles separated them. It was off Ashby Avenue up near the fashionable Claremont Hoteclass="underline" Linden Street, named after the ferny trees that lined it and that, here and there along its length, joined overhead to create a tunnel effect. The number Michael Kiskadon had given me was down toward the far end-a brown-shingled place at least half a century old, with a brick-and-dark-wood porch that had splashes of red bouganvillea growing over it. A massive willow and a couple of kumquat trees grew in the front yard, providing plenty of shade.
A woman was sitting on an old-fashioned swing on the porch. But it wasn't until I parked the car and started along the walk that I had a good look at her: silver-haired, elderly, holding a magazine in her lap so that it was illuminated by dappled sunlight filtering down through the leaves of the willow tree.
She lifted her head and smiled at me as I came up onto the porch. I returned the smile, moving over to stand near her with my back to the porch railing. Inside the house, a vacuum cleaner was making a high-pitched screeching noise that would probably have done things to my nerves if I had been any closer to it.
The woman on the swing was in her mid-sixties, small, delicate, with pale and finely wrinkled skin that made you think of a fragile piece of bone china that had been webbed with tiny cracks. She had never been beautiful, but I thought that once, thirty-five years ago, she would have been quite striking. She was still striking, but in a different sort of way. There was a certain serenity in her expression and in her faded blue eyes, the kind of look you sometimes see on the faces of the ultra-devout-the look of complete inner peace. She was wearing an old-fashioned blue summer dress buttoned to the throat. A pair of rimless spectacles were tilted forward on a tiny nose dusted with powder to dull if not hide its freckles.
“Hello,” she said, smiling.
“Hello. Mrs. Crane-Amanda Crane?”
“Why, yes. Do I know you?”
“No, ma'am.”
“You're not a salesman, are you? This is my niece's house and she can't abide salesmen.”
“No, I'm not a salesman. I'm here to see you.”
“Really? About what?”
“Harmon Crane.”
“Oh,” she said in a pleased way. “You're a fan, then.”
“Fan?”
“Of Harmon's writing. His fans come to see me once in a while; one of them even wrote an article about me for some little magazine. You are one of his fans, aren't you?”
“Yes, I am,” I said truthfully. “Your husband was a very good writer.”
“Oh yes, so everyone says.”
“Don't you think so?”
“Well,” she said, and shrugged delicately, and closed her magazine- Ladies' Home Journal — and took off her glasses. “Harmon had rather a risque sense of humor, you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Yes,” she said.
“You did read his fiction, though?”
“Some of it. His magazine stories… some of those were nice. There was one about a young couple on vacation in Yosemite, I think it was in The Saturday Evening Post. Do you remember that story?”
“No, I'm afraid I don't.”
“It was very funny. Not at all risque. I can't seem to remember the title.”
“Was your husband funny in person too?”
“Funny? Oh yes, he liked to make people laugh.”
“Would you say he was basically a happy man?”
“Yes, I would.”
“And you and he were happy together?”
“Quite happy. We had a lovely marriage. He was devoted to me, you know. And I to him.”
“No problems of any kind between you?”
“Oh no. No.”
“But he did have other problems,” I said gently. “Would you know what they were?”
“Problems?” she said.
“That led him to take his own life.”
She sat motionless, still smiling slightly; she might not have heard me. “I think it was ‘Never Argue with a Woman,’” she said at length.
“Pardon?”
“The story of Harmon's that I liked in The Saturday Evening Post. Yes, it must have been ‘Never Argue with a Woman.’”
“Mrs. Crane, do you know why your husband shot himself?”
Silence. A little brown-and-yellow bird swooped down out of one of the kumquat trees and landed on the porch railing; she watched as it hopped along, chittering softly to itself, its head darting from side to side. Her hands, folded together just under her breasts, had a poised, suspended look.
“Mrs. Crane?”
I moved when I spoke, startling the bird; it went away. The last of her smile went away with it. She blinked, and her hands settled on top of the copy of Ladies' Home Journal. Unconsciously she began to twist the small diamond ring on the third finger of her left hand.
“No,” she said. “No.”
“You don't know why?”
“I won't talk about that. Not about that.”
“It's important, Mrs. Crane. If you could just give me some idea…”
“No,” she said. Then she said, “Oh, wait, I was wrong. It wasn't ‘Never Argue with a Woman’ that I liked so much. Of course it wasn't. It was ‘the Almost Perfect Vacation.’ How silly of me to have got the two mixed up.”
She smiled at me again, but it was a different kind of smile this time; her eyes seemed to be saying, “Please don't talk about this anymore, please don't hurt me.” I felt her pain-that had always been one of my problems, too much empathy-and it made me feel like one of the sleazy types that prowled Telegraph Avenue.
But I didn't quit probing at her, not just yet. I might not like myself sometimes, but that had never stopped me from doing my job. If it had I would have gone out of business years ago.