by Sue Grafton
"You want me to tell him you haven't come in?" she asked.
"Yeah, do that for me, if you would. Just let me check my phone messages and I'll disappear," I said. I unlocked the file and took out the folder on Elaine Boldt, looking back at Vera. "I'll tell you something, Vera. This is hot. Leonard Grice has had six months to file a claim, but he hasn't lifted a finger. Now, all of the sudden, he's putting pressure on the insurance company to pay off. I'd like to know what prompted him."
"Hey, I gotta scoot before they come looking for me," Vera said. "Just don't cross Andy's path today or you'll pay for it."
I thanked her for the warning and told her I'd be in touch. She eased out into the hallway again, closing the door behind her. Belatedly, I felt my cheeks flush and my heart begin to thump. I got sent down to the principal's office once in first grade for passing notes in class and I've never recovered from the horror of it. I was guilty as charged, but I'd never been in trouble in my life. There I was, a timid little child with skinny legs, so stricken with fear that I left the school and went home in tears. My aunt marched me right back and read everybody out while I sat on a little wooden chair in the hall and prayed for death. It's hard to keep passing myself off as a grown-up when a piece of me is still six years old and utterly at the mercy of authority.
A glance at my answering machine showed no messages. I locked up again and went down the front way so that I could avoid passing the glass double doors of California Fidelity. I got back in my car and drove over to Elaine's old condominium. I wanted to have a brief talk with Tillie and let her know what was happening. I was turning right on Via Madrina when I glanced in the rearview mirror and realized there was some guy on a motorcycle roaring right up my tailpipe. I eased over slightly to let him pass and glanced back again. He was beeping away at me frantically. What had I done, run over his dog? I pulled over to the curb and he pulled up behind me, turning his bike off and booting his kickstand into place. He was wearing a shiny black jumpsuit, black gloves and boots, and a black helmet with a smoky face guard. I got out of my car and walked back toward him, watching him peel his helmet off as he approached. Oh hell, it was Mike. I should have guessed. The pink of his Mohawk seemed to be fading and I wondered whether he did his touch-ups with Rit dye, food coloring, or cooked beets. He was irked.
"God, I been honking at you for blocks! How come you never called me back? I left a message on your machine on Monday," he said.
"Sorry. I didn't realize it was you back there. I thought you said you were going to call me."
"Well, I tried to, but I kept getting your machine so I gave up. Where were you?"
"Out of town. I just got back last night. Why? What's happening?"
He pulled his motorcycle gloves off and tucked them in his helmet, which he cradled in the crook of his arm. "I think my Uncle Leonard has a girl friend. I just thought you might like to know."
"Oh really? How'd you find out about that?"
"I was moving that... uh... stash out of the shed at his old place and I saw him go into the building next door."
"The condo?"
"Well yeah, I guess that's what it is. That big apartment building."
"When was this?"
"Sunday night. That's why I called you so early Monday morning. At first, I wasn't sure it was him. I kind of thought it was his car pulling up out front but it was almost dark and I couldn't see that good. I figured he was coming over to the house for something and I was shovin' shit in my duffel bag like crazy. Man, I didn't know how I was going to explain what I was up to. Finally I was in such a panic, I whipped into the shed and pulled the door shut and watched through the crack. He ended up going over there instead."
"What makes you think he has a girl friend, though?"
"Because I saw him with her. I didn't have anything else to do, so I went across the street and hid behind a tree and waited until they came out. He was only in there five or ten minutes and then the lights went out, second floor left. Pretty soon they came out and shoved some stuff in the trunk and got in the car."
"Did you get a good look at her?"
"Not really. It was hard to see 'em from where I was and they were walking kind of fast. Then when they got in the car they were all over each other. He nearly jumped her bones right there in the front seat. It was kind of weird. I mean, you usually don't see people that age making out, you know what I mean? And anyway, I never thought about him like that. I figured he was just some old dried-out fart who couldn't even get it up. I didn't think he had it in him."
"Mike, the man is probably fifty-two years old. Would you knock that off! What did she look like? Had you ever seen her before?"
Mike held his hand up to his chin. "She came up to about here on him. I noticed that. She had her hair tied back with a scarf – like a babushka or whatever you call 'em. I don't think I'd seen her before. I mean, it wasn't like I thought, Oh yeah, there's old what's-her-face or anything like that. She was just some babe."
"Look, do me a favor. Go find a pencil and paper and write all this down while it's fresh in your mind. Make a note of the date and time and anything else you remember. You don't have to say what you were doing around here. You can always claim you came over to check on the house or something. Will you do that?"
"Okay, sure. What are you going to do?"
"I haven't made that part up yet," I said.
I got back in my car, and five minutes later I was being buzzed through from the lobby to Tillie's apartment.
She was waiting for me at the door and I followed her into the living room. She was wearing a pair of spectacles low on her nose and she peered at me over the rims. She took a seat in the rocker and picked up some needlework. It looked like a hunk of upholstery fabric printed with a scene of mountains and forest, deer grazing here and there, a stream gushing down through some rocks. She had wads of cotton and she was shoving them into the back of the cloth with a crochet hook. The deer were puffed out into three dimensions, surrounded by stitching, to produce a quilted effect.
"What is that?" I asked, sitting down. "Are you stuffing it?"
She smiled faintly. She'd finally let her new permanent wave have its way and her head was a nest of tight, frizzy curls the color of apricots. "That's right, I am. It's called trapunto. When I finish, I'll have it blocked and framed. I do it for the church bazaar in the fall. This is cotton I save out of the tops of pill bottles, so next time you open some Tylenol or cold caps, you keep the packing for me. Sit down. I haven't seen you for days. What have you been up to?"
I gave her a summary of events since Friday, which was when I had seen her last. I did some censoring. I told her how I'd found the cat, but deleted the stash of drugs Mike kept in the shed next door. I told her about Aubrey Danziger and my confrontation later with Beverly, the suitcases, the trip to Florida, the threatened lawsuit, and Mike's tale about Leonard Grice having a girl friend upstairs. That made her take her glasses off and click the stems against the frames.
"I don't believe it," she said flatly. "Mike must have been high."
"Well, of course he was high, Tillie, but a little grass isn't going to make him hallucinate."
"Then he's inventing it."
"I'm just telling you what he told me," I said.
"Well, who in the world could it be? I'd be willing to guarantee Leonard wasn't having an affair with any tenant of mine! And from his description, it would have been Elaine's apartment, and that's simply impossible."
"Oh come on, Tillie. Don't be naive. It's the perfect setup. Why couldn't he have a woman over here?"
"Because there's no one in the building who fits that description."
"What about the woman in apartment 6? The one you thought might be up early the day your place got broken into."
"She's seventy-five."
"But you have lots of other tenants."
"Young married couples. Kinsey, I have more single men who'd go for Leonard than I do single women."
"I'd buy that
too. What about Elaine? Why couldn't it be her?"
Tillie shook her head stubbornly.
"What about yourself?"
Tillie laughed and patted herself on the chest. "Well, I'm flattered. I'd like to believe I'm still capable of hip-grinding out on the street, but he's not exactly my type. Besides, Mike knows me. He'd have recognized me even in the dark."
I conceded that one. I truly couldn't picture Tillie in a liplock with Leonard Grice. It just didn't parse.
"What about Elaine?" I persisted. "What if she and Leonard had a thing going and decided to eliminate his wife? She does the deed while he's off at his sister's place that night. She takes off for Florida a few days later and then lays low for the next six months, waiting for him to get his affairs in order so they can run away together into the sunset. Once they realize I'm on to something, they step up the pace so they can blow town."
Tillie stared at me for a long time. "Then who is Pat Usher?"
I shrugged again. "Maybe they enlisted her help and she's covering for them."
"But who broke in here and why? I thought you were convinced Pat Usher did that."
I could feel myself getting exasperated. "I don't have all the answers, Tillie! I'm just telling you it's possible that he had some little tootsie stashed over here. Maybe it was Pat."
She didn't say a word. She just put her glasses back on and started stuffing the mountain with cotton, making it bulge like Mount St. Helens before it blew.
"Can I have the key to the apartment upstairs?"
"Of course," she said. "I'll go too."
She put down her needlework and went over to the secretary, taking a set of keys out of the drawer. She handed me a bunch of bills while she was at it and I stuffed them in the back pocket of my jeans. It reminded me vaguely of something, but I couldn't think what.
She locked her apartment and we headed for the elevator.
"You haven't heard anyone walking around overhead?"
She looked back at me. "Not at all, but this place is well built and someone could be upstairs without my hearing them. You really believe he was keeping someone up there?"
"It does make sense," I said. "With Elaine off the scene, it's a perfect little love nest. Maybe Pat Usher found a way to get in. I'm sure she's somewhere here in town. If she had access to Elaine's place in Florida, why not this one too? By the way, were you here Sunday night?"
She shook her head. "I was at a church social and didn't get home until shortly after ten."
The elevator door opened at the second floor and Tillie moved down the corridor to the left, talking to me over her shoulder. She reached Elaine's front door and turned the key in the lock.
"I can't believe anyone's been here," she said as we went in.
She was wrong, of course. Wim Hoover, the tenant from number 10, was sprawled in the entryway with a bullet hole just behind his right ear. The air smelled of stale cigarette smoke and the fetid perfume wafting up from his souring flesh. He'd been dead for at least three days. Tillie paled and went down to her place to call the police.
Chapter 23
* * *
As is my usual habit, I did a quick tour of the place while Tillie called the cops. I had cautioned her to keep my name out of it because I didn't want to have to stop and take one of Lieutenant Dolan's famous pop quizzes. I was already in trouble with California Fidelity and I couldn't take on Dolan as well. The place smelled so foul that I didn't think Tillie would have any trouble explaining what had brought her up here to investigate.
I didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that Pat Usher had been in residence. She'd made no attempt to disguise her presence. The gauzy float I'd seen her wear in Boca Raton was now tossed carelessly across Elaine's unmade bed. She'd apparently helped herself to whatever suited her – food, clothing, cosmetics. There were dirty dishes everywhere, ashtrays filled to the brim, trash spilling out of the brown paper bag with its neatly cuffed top. The crime-scene unit was going to have a ball with this place, but what interested me was the den. All the desk drawers had been opened, the contents scattered furiously, file folders ripped in half. It looked like Pat Usher's usual rage and impatience. I wondered what she'd been looking for and whether she'd found it. I didn't touch a thing. It had been maybe five minutes since Tillie went downstairs and I thought I better scram. I didn't want to be anywhere in the neighborhood when the black-and-whites came screaming into view.
I paused in the foyer and looked down at Wim. He was lying facedown, one hand tucked under his cheek as though he meant to nap. His flesh was swollen, the skin darkening, the bullet hole as tidy as the eyelet for a shoelace. The gun was probably a .22 – not a lethal weapon as a rule, but let a slug ricochet around inside a human skull and it could turn brains into scrambled eggs in no time flat. Poor Wim. I wondered why she'd killed him. There wasn't any doubt in my mind it was Pat. Had she killed Marty Grice as well? The autopsy hadn't shown any gunshot wounds, only the repeated blows of an unidentified blunt instrument. What was the weapon, and where?
I went down on the elevator and left the building without talking to Tillie again. I unlocked my car and got in, suddenly aware of the crackle of paper in my jeans pocket. I pulled out the bunch of bills Tillie had given me and let out an involuntary "ooohh." It had just dawned on me what Pat Usher might have been looking for upstairs. Elaine's passport. I had come across it myself the second time I searched the place and I'd stuck it in the back pocket of my jeans. I couldn't remember taking it into the office, so it must be somewhere in my apartment. Had Pat broken in to look for it? If she'd found it, she was probably already on a plane headed into the great beyond. On the other hand, Leonard hadn't collected his insurance money yet, so maybe the two of them were still somewhere in town.
I started the car and pulled out, determined to clear the neighborhood before the cops showed up. I was thinking hard. Pat and Leonard must have eliminated Marty first, then disposed of Elaine Boldt, maybe because she'd guessed what was going on. In any event, it must have opened up a whole new possibility. They had now gained entrance to her properties and all of her bank accounts, helping themselves to her credit while Leonard waited the requisite six months for Marty's estate to clear. The payoff there probably wasn't large, but add it to Elaine Boldt's assets and the profits began to mount. Once Leonard had acquired sole possession of the property on Via Madrina, he could sell it off for a hundred and fifteen thousand. The lot was probably worth more with the house gone anyway. In the meantime, all he had to do was pose as the grief-stricken spouse, feigning disinterest in the proceeds. Not only did he garner sympathy, but he deflected attention from his true motivation, which was monetary from the get-go. The scheme might have gone off without a hitch except that Beverly Danziger showed up, needing a routine signature on a minor document. Pat's claim about Elaine being off in Sarasota with friends simply wouldn't bear up under close scrutiny because Elaine's whereabouts couldn't really be accounted for. But how was I going to prove any of this? I was speculating like crazy, probably making a few wrong guesses here and there, but even if I had it right on the nose, I 'd have to come up with some kind of concrete evidence to take to the police.
In the meantime, Leonard had effectively blocked my path, putting me in check at least where the insurance company was concerned. I didn't dare go back and question him again and I knew I'd better be careful about any inquiries I made in the world at large. Any line I pursued was going to be interpreted as slander, harassment, or defamation from his point of view. What had I gotten myself into? Leonard Grice and Pat Usher would have to stonewall my investigation or the whole operation would come tumbling down around their ears.
I stopped off at the hardware store to pick up a pane of glass and then went back to my place. I had to find Elaine's passport. I checked the trash bags, behind couch cushions, under furniture, and all the other niches where I tend to tuck odds and ends. I didn't remember filing it and it hadn't occurred to me to hide it. I knew I hadn't thrown
it out, which meant it had to be here somewhere. I kept standing there, doing a 360 degree turn, surveying every corner of the room – desk top, bookcase, coffee table, the small counter that separates the kitchenette.
I went out to the car and looked in the glove compartment, map pocket, down behind the seat, sun visor, briefcase, jacket pocket-shit. I went back into my apartment and started all over again. Where had I put the damn thing? It might be at the office. I decided to try there after CF had closed up and Andy Montycka had gone home. God, what did he know anyway? I was beginning to unravel the knots and I only hoped I could finish before he got nervous and paid off the claim.
I checked my watch. It was a little after one and I had the locksmith coming at four. I sat down at my desk and hauled out my file on Elaine Boldt. Maybe there was something I'd overlooked. I baited my hook and started to cast about randomly. I felt like I'd been through my notes a hundred times and I couldn't believe anything new would surface. I went back and read every report I had. I tacked all my index cards to the bulletin board, first in order, then haphazardly just to see if any contradictions would appear. I reread all the material Jonah had photocopied from the homicide files and I studied glossy eight-by-tens of the murder scene until I knew every detail by heart. How had Marty been killed? A "blunt instrument" could mean just about anything.
A lot of things were bothering me – minor questions buzzing around at the back of my brain like a swarm of gnats. I had begun to believe that if Elaine was dead, she'd been killed fairly early on. I had no proof yet but I suspected that Pat Usher had masqueraded as Elaine and had staged that whole bogus departure for Florida as a sleight of hand, laying a false trail to create the illusion that Elaine was alive and well and on her way out of town when, in fact, she was already dead. But if she'd been killed in Santa Teresa, where was the body? Disposing of a corpse is no mean feat. Fling one in the ocean and it swells up and floats right back. Toss it in the bushes and a jogger will stumble across it by six A.M. What else do you do with one? You bury it. Maybe the body was concealed in the Grices' basement. I remembered the floor down – the cracked concrete and hard-packed dirt – and I thought, now that might explain why Leonard had never had the salvage crew come in. When I'd first searched the Grices' house, I'd just been grateful for my good luck, but even at the time it had seemed almost too good to be true. Maybe Leonard didn't want the demolition experts knocking around down there.