M Is for Malice

by Sue Grafton

  "I can talk to Bennet this afternoon."

  "Did anybody see Jack climb the fence? I doubt it. Anybody see the Harley during the period we're discussing?"

  "I can check it out," I said.

  "I know the line the cops are taking. They're saying Jack's room adjoined Guy's. All he had to do was slip from one room to the other, bash his brains out, and slip back again."

  "Not that simple," I said. "Don't forget he's got to hide the shoes at the bottom of the thrift box, wipe the blood off the bat, and return it to the pool house before he hightails it back to the country club."

  "Good point. Is there a guardhouse at the club? Someone might have noted what time he left."

  "I'll pop over there and check. I can also clock the time it takes to get from there to the house and back."

  "Hold off on that. We'll get to that eventually. For now, let's focus on finding someone else to blame."

  "That shouldn't be too hard. I mean, Jack's not the only one with access to Guy's room. Anybody in the house could have entered the same way. The cops have the murder weapon, but from what you've said, they don't have Jack's fingerprints."

  "Yeah, they can't find anybody else's either."

  "So how are they going to prove Jack was wielding the damn thing? Maybe he was framed."

  Lonnie snorted in my ear. "Somebody'd have to take a pair of forceps and fuckin' tweeze up brain material, then tiptoe into Jack's room, find the shoes in the closet, and deposit all the little brainy bits."

  "It's always possible, though, isn't it?"

  "It's possible Santa Claus came down the chimney and did the deed himself. Stinks. The whole thing stinks."

  "I like the idea about eyewitnesses. So far it doesn't sound like there's anyone who can place him at the murder scene."

  "Not so far, no, but I'm sure the cops are out scouring the neighborhood."

  "Well, then we'll scour some, too."

  "You're such an optimist," he said.

  I laughed. "Actually, I can't believe I'm standing here defending him. I don't even like Jack."

  "We're not paid to like him. We're being paid to get him out of this," Lonnie said.

  "I'll do what I can."

  "I know you will."

  Before I left the service station, I paused long enough to pull up to the pump so I could fill my gas tank. On the hood of my car, the early-morning dew had now combined with the dust from Monday's Santa Ana winds. My former VW was dingy beige and never showed dirt. With this snappy 1974 model, the streaks were more conspicuous, rivulets of pale blue cutting through a speckled patina of soot. A bird had passed its judgment on the hood as well. I paid for the gas and then turned the key in the ignition, peered over my right shoulder, and backed up into the area where the car wash was being held., The kids began to whistle and clap, and I found myself smiling at their enthusiasm.

  I stood to one side while one of them crawled inside with a bottle of window cleaner. Another fired up the Shop-Vac and began to suck grit up off the floor mats. A crew of three were sudsing down the outside, all of them towering over the vehicle. The kid with the Shop-Vac finished cleaning the interior and I watched him approach from the far side of the car with an envelope in hand. He held it out to me. "Have you been looking for this?"

  "Where did that come from?"

  "I found it beside the passenger seat in front. Looks like it slipped down in the crevice."

  "Thanks." I took the envelope, half expecting to see the now familiar typeface. Instead, my name was scrawled across the front in ballpoint pen. I waited until the kid had moved away and then I opened the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper. The message was handwritten in black ink; the penmanship distinct, a peculiar blend of cursive and printing. I flicked a glance at the signature. Guy Malek. I could feel ice crystals forming between my shoulder blades.

  Monday night. Waiting for you to show.

  Hey K...

  Sure hope I have the nerve to pass you this note. I guess I must have if you're reading it. I haven't asked a girl on a date since I was fifteen years old and that didn't work out so hot. I got a big zit on my chin and spent the whole evening trying to think up excuses to keep my face turned the other way.

  Anyway, here goes.

  Once this family mess is settled, would you like to take off for a day and go to Disneyland with me? We could eat snow cones and do Pirates of the Caribbean and then take the boat ride through Small World singing that song you can't get out of your head for six months afterward. I could use some silliness in my life and so could you.

  Think on it and let me know so I can stock up on Clearasil.

  Guy Malek

  P.S. Just for the record, if anything should happen to me, make sure my share of Dad's estate goes to jubilee Evangelical Church. I really love those folk.

  By the time I finished reading, my eyes had filled with tears. This was like a message from the dead. I stared off across the street, blinking rapidly. I could feel pain in my chest and my facial features were instantly defined by heat as my nasal passages seized up. I wondered if grief had the capacity to suffocate. In conjunction with the sorrow came a rush of pure rage. I sent Guy my thoughts across the Ether. I'm going to find out who killed you and I'm going to find out why. I swear I will do this. I swear it.

  "Miss? Your car's ready."

  I took a deep breath. "Thanks. It looks great." I gave the kid ten bucks and took off with the radio cranked up full blast.

  When I got home, I spotted Robert Dietz's little red Porsche parked out in front of my apartment. I set my briefcase on the pavement while I stood at the curb and studied it, afraid to believe. He'd told me he was going to be gone two weeks. This was just coming up on one. I circled the car and checked the license plate, which read DIETZ. I picked up my briefcase and let myself in the gate. I rounded the corner and unlocked my door. Dietz's suitcase was sitting beside the couch. His garment bag was hooked across the top of the bathroom door.

  I said, "Dietz?"

  No response.

  I left my handbag and the briefcase on the counter and crossed the patio to Henry's, where I peered in the kitchen window. Dietz was sitting in Henry's rocking chair, his pant leg pulled up to expose his injured knee. The swelling had visibly diminished and from various gestures he was making, it seemed safe to guess he'd had the fluid drained out of it. Even his pantomime of a hypodermic needle being stuck into his flesh made my palms start to sweat. At first he didn't see me. It was like watching a silent movie, the two men earnestly engrossed in medical matters. Henry, at eighty-five, was so familiar to me – handsome, good-hearted, lean, intelligent. Dietz was constructed along sturdier lines – solid, tough, stubborn, impulsive, just as smart as Henry, but more streetwise – than intellectual. I found myself smiling at the two of them. Where Henry was mild, Dietz was restless and rough, without artifice. I valued his honesty, distrusted his concern, resented his wanderlust, and yearned for definition in our relationship. In the midst of all the heaviness I felt, Dietz was leavening.

  He glanced up, spotting me. He raised a hand in greeting without rising from the chair.

  Henry crossed to the door and let me in. Dietz lowered his pant leg with a brief aside to me about a walk-in medical clinic up in Santa Cruz. Henry offered coffee, but Dietz declined. I don't even remember now what the three of us talked about. In the course of idle chitchat, Dietz put his hand on my elbow, setting off a surge of heat. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught his quizzical look. Whatever I was feeling must have been transmitted through the wires to him. I must have been buzzing like a power line because even Henry's easy flow of conversation seemed to falter and fade. Dietz glanced at his watch, making a startled sound as if late for an appointment. We made our hasty excuses, moving out of Henry's backdoor and across to my place without exchanging a word.

  The door closed behind us. The apartment felt cool. Pale sunlight filtered through the shuttered windows in a series of horizontal lines. The interior had the loo
k and the feel of a sailboat: compact, simple, with royal blue canvas chairs, walls of polished teak and oak. Dietz undid the bed in the window bay, easing out of his shoes. I slipped my clothes off, aware of flickering desire as each garment was removed. Dietz's clothes joined mine in a heap on the floor. We sank together, in a rolling motion. The sheets were chill at first, as blue as the sea, warming at contact with our bare limbs. His skin was luminous, as polished as the surface of an abalone shell. Something about the play of shadows infused the air with a watery element, bathing us both in its transparent glow. It felt as if we were swimming in the shallows, as smooth and graceful as a pair of sea otters tumbling through the surf. Our lovemaking played out in silence, except for a humming in his throat now and then. I don't often think of sex as an antidote to pain, but that's what this was and I fully confess – I used intimacy with the one man to offset the loss of the other. It was the only means I could think of to console myself. Even in the moment, what seemed odd to me was the flicker of confusion about which man I betrayed.

  Later, I said to Dietz, "Are you hungry? I'm starving."

  "I am, too," he said. Gentleman that he was, he'd padded over to the refrigerator where he stood buck naked in a shaft of hot light, contemplating the interior. "How could we be out of food? Don't you eat when I'm gone?"

  "There's food," I said defensively.

  "A jar of bread-and-butter pickles."

  "I can make sandwiches. There's bread in the freezer and half a jar of peanut butter in the cupboard up there."

  He gave me a look like I'd suggested cooking up a mess of garden slugs. He closed the refrigerator door and opened the freezer compartment, poking through some cellophane wrapped packages of meat products covered in ice crystals and suffering from freezer burn. He closed the freezer, returned to the sofa bed, and got under the sheets. "I'm not going to last long. We have to eat," he said.

  "I couldn't believe you came back. I thought you were taking the boys off on a trip."

  "Turns out they had plans to go camping with friends in Yosemite and didn't know how to tell me. When I read about the murder in the Santa Cruz papers, I told them I needed to drive back. I felt guilty as hell, but they were thrilled to death. Given the perversity of human nature, it pissed me off somehow. They could hardly get me in the car fast enough. I pull away and I'm looking in the rearview mirror. They don't even stop to wave. They're galloping up the outside stairs to grab their sleeping bags."

  "You had a few days together."

  "And that was good. I enjoyed them," he said. "So tell me about you and what's been happening down here."

  Having been through the drill with Lonnie, I laid out events with remarkable efficiency, faltering only slightly in my account of Guy. Even the sound of his name touched a well of sorrow in me.

  "You need a game plan," he said, briskly.

  I waggled my hand, maybe-so-maybe-not. "Jack will probably be arraigned tomorrow if he hasn't been already."

  "Will Lonnie waive time?"

  "I have no idea. Probably not."

  "Which means he'll insist on a prelim within ten court days. That doesn't give us much time. What about this business of Max Outhwaite? We could try chasing that down."

  I noted the "we," but let it sit there unacknowledged. Was he seriously proposing help? "What's to chase?" I asked. "I tried the hall of records and voter registration. Also the city directories. The name's as phony as the address."

  "What about the crisscross?"

  "I did that."

  "Old telephone books?"

  "Yeah, I did that, too."

  "How far back?"

  "Six years."

  "Why six? Why not take it all the way back to the year Guy Malek left? Even before that. Max Outhwaite, could be the victim of a rip-off during his teen crime years."

  "If the name's a fake, it's not going to matter how far back I go."

  "In other words, you were too lazy," he said, mildly. "Right," I said, without taking offense.

  "What about the letters themselves?"

  "One's a fax. The other's typed, on ordinary white bond. No distinguishing marks. I could have dusted for prints, but there didn't seem to be much point. We've got no way to run them and nothing for comparison even if a latent turned up. I did put the one letter in a plastic sleeve to protect it to some extent. Then I made copies of both letters. I left one set at the office, locked away in my desk. I get paranoid about these things."

  "You have the other set here?"

  "In my briefcase."

  "Let's take a look."

  I pushed the sheet back and got up. I retrieved my briefcase from the kitchen counter and sorted through the contents, returning to the sofa bed with my pack of index cards and the two letters. I slid between the sheets again and handed him the paperwork, turning over on my side so I could watch him work. He put his glasses on. "This is really romantic, you know that, Dietz?"

  "We can't screw around all day. I'm fifty. I'm old. I have to save my strength."

  "Yeah, right."

  We propped up the pillows and settled in side by side while Dietz read the two letters and thumbed through my index cards. "What do you think?" I asked.

  "I think Outhwaite's a good bet. Seems like the object of the exercise is to find another candidate, divert attention from Jack if nothing else."

  "Lonnie said the same thing. The evidence looks damning, but it's all circumstantial. Lonnie's hoping we can find someone else to point a finger at. I think he favors Donovan or Bennet."

  "The more the merrier. If the cops think Jack's motivation was Guy's share of the inheritance, then the same case could be made for the other two. It would have been just as easy for one of them to slip into Guy's room." He was thumbing through the index cards. He held a card up. "What's this mean? What kind of scam are you referring to?"

  I took the card and studied it. The note said: widow cheated out of nest egg. "Oh. I'm not sure. I wrote down everything I could remember from my first interview with Donovan. He was talking about the scrapes Guy'd been in over the years. Most sounded petty acts of vandalism, joyriding, stuff like that – but he was also involved in a swindle of some kind. I didn't ask at the time because I was just starting my search and I was focusing on ways to track him down. I didn't care what he'd done unless it somehow pertained."

  "Might be worth it to take a good hard look at his past. People knew he was back. Maybe somebody had a score to settle."

  "That crossed my mind, too. I mean, why else would Max Outhwaite notify the paper?" I said. "I've also toyed with the idea that one of Guy's brothers might have written the letters."

  "Why?"

  "To make it look like he had enemies, someone outside the family who might have wanted him dead. By the way, Bader kept a file of newspaper clippings, detailing Guy's escapades."

  Dietz turned and looked at me. "Anything of interest?"

  "Well, nothing jumps right out. I've got it at the office, if you want to see for yourself. Christie offered to let me take it when I was at the house."

  "Let's do that. It sounds good. It might help us develop another lead." He went back to the two letters, analyzing them closely. "What about the third one? What did Guy's letter say?"

  "I have no idea. Lieutenant Bower wouldn't tell me and I couldn't get much out of her. But I'd bet money it's the same person in all three cases."

  "Cops probably have their forensic experts doing comparisons."

  "Maybe. They may not care about Max Outhwaite now that Jack's in custody. If they're convinced he's good for it, why worry about someone else?"

  "You want some help with the grunt work?"

  "I'd love it."

  Chapter 18

  * * *

  I dropped Dietz at the public library while I drove out the freeway to Malek Construction. I hadn't expected to be gone long, but as I turned into the parking lot, I spotted Donovan getting into a company truck. I called his name and gave a quick wave, pulling into a visitor's space two
spots away from his. He waited while I approached and then leaned over and rolled down the window on the passenger side.

  Donovan's face creased with a smile, his dark eyes all but invisible behind dark sunglasses. "How are you?" he asked. He slid his glasses up on top of his head.

  "Fine. I can see I caught you on your way out. Will you be gone long? I have some questions."

  "I've got some business at the quarry. I'll only be gone about an hour if you want to come along with me."

  I thought about it briefly. "Might as well," I said.

  He moved his hard hat from the passenger seat to the floor, then opened the truck door for me. I hopped in. He wore blue jeans and a jean vest over a blue plaid sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His feet were shod in heavy-duty work boots with soles as waffled as tire treads.

  "Where's the quarry?"

  "Up the pass." He fired up the pickup and pulled out of the parking lot. "What's the latest word from Jack?"

  "I haven't talked to him, but Lonnie Kingman had a meeting with him before they took him off to jail. You talked to Christie?"

  "I took a late lunch," he said. "I must have gotten home about ten minutes after you left. I had no idea this stuff was going on. How's it looking at this point?"

  "Hard to say. Lonnie's in the process of working out his strategy. I'll probably take a run over to the country club later to start canvassing members who were there on Tuesday. We'd love to find someone who could place Jack at the club between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty."

  "Shouldn't be too hard."

  "You'd be surprised," I said.

  I'm about as perky as an infant when it comes to riding in trucks. Before we'd even reached the narrow highway that snaked up the pass, I could feel the tension seeping out of me. There's something lulling being a passenger in a moving vehicle. In Donovan's pickup, the combination of low grinding sound and gentle bumping nearly put me to sleep. I was tired of thinking about murder, though I'd have to bring the subject around to it eventually. In the meantime, I asked him about the business and took inordinate pleasure in the length of his reply. Donovan steered with one hand, talking over the rattle of the truck.