by Sue Grafton
“Yes?” The woman was small, in her midsixties, looking energetic and competent. She wore a pink floral-print blouse with long sleeves, a tweed skirt, hose, and penny loafers. Her gray hair was honest and her makeup was light. She was in the process of drying her hands on a dish towel, her expression inquiring.
“Hi. My name is Kinsey Millhone. Are you Mrs. Shine?”
“I’m Dorothy’s sister, Louise Mendelberg. Mr. Shine just passed away.”
“That’s what I heard and I’m sorry to disturb you. He was in the middle of some work for an attorney named Lonnie Kingman. I’ve been asked to take over his caseload. Did I come at a bad time?”
“There’s never going to be a good time when someone’s just died,” she replied tartly. This was a woman who didn’t take death seriously. In its aftermath, she’d come along to do the dishes and tidy up the living room, but she probably wouldn’t devote a lot of time to the hymn selection for the funeral service.
“I don’t want to be more of a bother than I have to. I was sorry to hear about Morley. He was a nice man and I liked him.”
She shook her head. “I’ve known Morley since he and Dorothy met in college back in the Depression. We all adored him, of course, but he was such a fool. The cigarettes and his weight and all the drinking he did. You can get away with a certain amount of that when you’re young, but at his age? No, ma’am. We warned him and warned him, but would he listen? Of course not. You should have seen him on Sunday. His color was awful. The doctor thinks the heart attack was aggravated by the flu he had. His electrolyte balance or something of the sort.” She shook her head again, breaking off.
“How’s she doing?”
“Not that well, to tell you the truth, which is why I came down from Fresno in the first place. My intention was to help out for a couple of weeks just to give him some relief. You know she’s been sick for months.”
“I didn’t know that,” I said.
“Oh, my, yes. She’s a mess. She was diagnosed with stomach cancer this last June. She had extensive surgery and she’s been taking chemotherapy off and on ever since. She’s just skin and bone and can’t keep a thing down. It’s all Morley talked about and here he up and went first.”
“Will they do an autopsy?”
“I don’t know what she’s decided about that. He just saw the doctor a week ago. Dorothy wanted him on a diet and he finally agreed. An autopsy’s not required under the circumstances, but you know how they are. Doctors like to get in there and poke and pry. I feel so sorry for her.”
I made some sympathetic sounds.
She gestured briskly. “Anyway, enough said. I suppose you came to take a look at his study. Why don’t you step on in here and let me show you where it is. You just take what you want, and if you need to come back, you can help yourself.”
“Thanks. I can leave you a list of any files I take.”
She waved off the suggestion. “No need to do that. We’ve known Mr. Kingman for years.”
I moved into the foyer. She proceeded down a short hallway with me following. There was no sign of Christmas. With Mrs. Shine’s illness and now Morley’s death, there might have been a sense of relief that no such effort would be required this year. The house smelled of chicken soup. “Does Morley still have an office here in Colgate?” I asked.
“Yes, but with Dorothy so sick, he did most of his work here. I believe he still went in most mornings to pick up his mail. Did you want to look there as well?” She opened a door to what had clearly once been a bedroom, converted now to office space by the addition of a desk and file cabinets. The walls were painted beige and the beige shag carpeting was just as shabby as I’d imagined it.
“That’s what I was thinking. If I can’t find the files here, it probably just means he had them out at the office. Is there some way I could get a key?”
“I’m not sure where he kept them, but I’ll check with Dorothy. My goodness,” she said then as she looked around. “No wonder Morley didn’t want anyone in here.”
The room was faintly chilly, the disorder that of a man who operates his affairs according to no known system. If he’d realized he was going to drop dead, would he have straightened up his desk? Unlikely, I thought. “I’ll Xerox what I need and bring the files back as soon as possible. Will someone be here in the morning?”
“What’s tomorrow, Wednesday? As far as I know. And if not, just go around to the back and set them on the dryer in the service porch. We usually leave that door open for the cleaning woman and the visiting nurse. I’m going to find you a key to Morley’s office. Dorothy probably knows where it is.”
“Thanks.”
While I waited for the woman to return, I did one circuit of the room, trying to get a feel for Morley’s methods of paper management. He must have tried to get himself under control at intervals because he’d made up files labeled “Action,” “Pending,” and “Current.” There were two marked “To Do,” one marked “Urgent,” and an accordion folder he’d designated as his “Tickler” file. The paperwork in each seemed outdated, mismatched, as disorderly as the room itself.
Louise stepped back into the study from the hall with a ring of keys in hand. “You better take this whole batch,” she said. “Lord only knows which is which.”
“You won’t need these?”
“I can’t think why we would. You can drop them off tomorrow if you’d be so kind. Oh. And I brought you a grocery bag in case you need to load things up.”
“Will there be a service?”
“The funeral’s Friday morning at the Wynington-Blake here in Colgate. I don’t know if Dorothy will be able to manage it or not. We held off on it because Morley’s brother is flying in from South Korea. He’s a project engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers at Camp Casey. He can’t get to Santa Teresa until late Thursday. We scheduled the service on Friday for ten o’clock. I know Frank will be jet-lagged, but we just couldn’t delay it any longer than that.”
“I’d like to be there,” I said.
“That would be lovely,” she said. “I know he’d appreciate that. You can let yourself out when you’re done. I have to give Dorothy her shot.”
I repeated my thanks, but she was already moving on to the next chore. She smiled at me pleasantly and closed the door behind her.
I spent the next thirty minutes unearthing every file that seemed relevant to Isabelle’s murder and the subsequent civil suit. Lonnie would have had a fit if he’d known how haphazardly Morley went about his work. In some ways, the measure of a good investigation is the attention to the paperwork. Without meticulous documentation, you can end up looking like a fool on the witness stand. The opposing attorney loves nothing better than discovering that an investigator hasn’t kept proper records.
I packed item after item in the grocery bag—his calendar, his appointment book. I checked his desk drawers and his “in” and “out” boxes, making sure there wasn’t a stray file stashed somewhere behind the furniture. When I was confident I’d lifted every pertinent folder, I put his key ring in my shoulder bag and closed the study door behind me. At the far end of the hall, I could hear the murmur of voices, Louise and Dorothy conversing.
As I returned to the front door, I passed the archway to the living room. I made an unauthorized detour to what had to be Morley’s easy chair, upholstered in ancient cracked leather, the cushions conforming to his portly shape. There was an ashtray that had been emptied of cigarette butts. The end table still bore the sticky circles where his whiskey tumblers had sat. Snoop that I am, I checked the end-table drawer and felt down in the crevices of the chair. There was nothing to find, of course, but I felt better for it.
Next stop was Morley’s office, located on a little side street in “downtown” Colgate. This whole residential section had been converted into small businesses: plumbers’ shops, auto detailing services, doctors’ offices, and real estate brokerages. The former single-family dwellings were identical frame bungalows. The living room in eac
h now served as the front office for an insurance company or, in Morley’s case, a beauty salon from which he rented a room with a bath at the rear. I went around to the outside entrance. Two steps led up to a small concrete porch with a small overhanging roof. The office door had a big pane of frosted glass in the upper half, so I couldn’t see in. Morley’s name was engraved on a narrow plaque to the right of the door, the kind of plate I could imagine his wife having made for him the day be went into business. I tried key after key, but none of them fit. I tried the door again. The place was locked up tighter than a jail. Without even thinking about it, I walked around to the rear and tried the window back there. Then I remembered I was playing by the rules. What a bummer, I thought. I’d been hired to do this. I was entitled to see the files, but not allowed to pick the lock. That didn’t seem right somehow. What were all the years of breaking and entering for?
I went back around to the front and entered the beauty salon like a law-abiding citizen. The windows had been painted with mock snowdrifts, two of Santa’s elves holding a painted banner reading MERRY X-MAS across the glass. There was a big decorated Christmas tree in the corner with a few wrapped boxes under it. There were four stations altogether, but only three were occupied. In one, a plastic-caped woman in her forties was having her hair permed. The beautician had divided the damp strands into sections, inserting small white plastic rollers as dainty as chicken bones. The permanent wave solution filled the air with the scent of spoiled eggs. In the second station, the woman in the chair had her head secured in a perforated bathing cap while the beautician pulled tiny strands through the rubber with what looked like a crochet hook. Tears were rolling down the woman’s cheeks, but she and the beautician were chatting away as if this were an everyday occurrence. To my right, a manicurist worked on a client, who was having her fingernails painted a bubblegum pink.
On the back wall, I spotted a paneled door that was probably connected to Morley’s office. There was a woman in the rear folding towels into tidy stacks. When she saw my hesitation, she moved up to the front. Her name tag said: Betty. Given her occupation, I was surprised she didn’t have a better cut. She’d apparently fallen into the hands of one of those cruel stylists (usually male) who delight in mismanaging the hair of women over fifty. The particular cut that had been inflicted on this woman consisted of a shaved backside and a frizzy pouf along the front that made her neck look wide and her facial expression fearful. She fanned the air, her nose wrinkling. “Pee-yew! If they’re smart enough to get a man on the moon, why can’t they make a perm lotion that don’t stink?” She picked up a plastic cape from the nearest chair and assessed me with a practiced eye. “Boy oh boy. You sure do have a hair emergency. Take a seat.”
I looked around to see who she was talking to. “Who, me?”
“Aren’t you the one who just called?”
“No, I’m here on some business for Morley Shine, but his office is locked up.”
“Oh. Well, I hate to be the one to tell you, honey, but Morley passed away this week.”
“I’m aware of that. Sorry. I guess I should have introduced myself.” I took out my identification and held it out to her.
She studied it for a moment and then frowned, pointing to my name. “How do you pronounce that?”
“Kinsey,” I said.
“No, the last name. Does that rhyme with baloney?”
“No, it doesn’t rhyme with baloney. It’s Mill-hone.”
“Oh. Mill-hone,” she said, mimicking me dutifully. “I thought it was Mill-hony, like the lunch meat.” She looked back at the photocopy of my private investigator’s license. “Are you from Los Angeles, by any chance?”
“No, I’m a local.”
She looked up at my hair. “I thought maybe that was one of those new mod cuts like they do down on Melrose. Asymmetrical, they call it, with a geometrical ellipse. Something like that. Usually looks like it’s been whacked off with a ceiling fan.” She laughed at herself, giving her chest a pat.
I leaned back to catch a glimpse of myself in the nearest mirror. It did look kind of weird. I’d been growing my hair for several months now and it was definitely longer on one side than it was on the other. It also seemed to have a few ragged places and a stick-up part near the crown. I experienced a moment of uncertainty. “You think I need a cut?”
She hooted out a laugh. “Well, I should hope to shout. It looks like some lunatic hacked your hair off with a pair of nail clippers!”
I didn’t think the analogy was quite as funny as she did. “Maybe some other time,” I said. I decided to get down to business before she talked me into a haircut I would later regret. “I’m working for an attorney by the name of Lonnie Kingman.”
“Sure. I know Lonnie. His wife used to go to my church. What’s he got to do with it?”
“Morley was doing some work for him and I’m taking over the case. I’d like to get into his office.”
“Poor guy,” she said. “With his wife sick and all that. He moped around here for months, doing nothing as far as I could tell.”
“I think he did a lot of work from his home,” I said. “Uh, can I get into his office through here? I saw the door back there. Does that connect to his suite?”
“Morley used to use it when he had a bill collector on his doorstep.” She began to walk me toward the back, which I took as cooperation.
“Was that often?” I asked. It was hard for me to mind my own business when I had someone else’s business within range of me.
“It was lately.”
“Would you mind if I stepped in and picked up the files I need?”
“Well, I don’t see why not. There’s nothing in there worth stealing. Go ahead and help yourself. It’s just a thumb-lock on this side.”
“Thanks.”
I let myself in through the connecting door. There was one room, the back bedroom in the days when the bungalow was used as a residence. The air smelled musty. The carpeting was a mud brown, a color probably chosen because it wouldn’t show dirt. What showed up instead was all the lint and dust. There was a small walk-in closet that Morley used for storage, a small bathroom with a brown vinyl tile floor, a commode with a wooden seat, a small Pullman sink, and a fiberglass shower stall. For one depressing moment, I wondered if this was how I’d end up: a small-town detective in a dreary nine-by-twelve room that smelled of mold and dust mites. I sat down in his swivel chair, listening to the creak as I rocked back. I snagged his Month at a Glance. I checked his drawers one by one. Pencils, old gum wrappers, a stapler empty of staples. He’d been sneaking fatty foods on the sly. A flat white bakery box had been folded in half and shoved down in the wastebasket. A large grease stain had spread across the cardboard and the remains of some kind of pastry had been tossed in on top. He probably came into the office every morning to sneak doughnuts and sweet rolls.
I got up and crossed to the file cabinets on the far wall. Under “V” as in VOIGT/BARNEY, I found several manila file folders stuffed with miscellaneous papers. I removed the folders and began to stack them on the desk. Behind me the door banged open and I felt myself jump.
It was Betty, from the beauty shop. “You find everything you need?”
“Yes. This is fine. Turns out he kept most of his files at home.”
She made a face, tuning in to the musty odor in the room. She went over to the desk and picked up the waste-basket. “Let me get this out of here. The trash isn’t picked up until Friday, but I don’t want to risk the ants. Morley used to order his pizzas here where his wife couldn’t check on him. I know he was supposed to diet, but I’d see him in here with cartons of take-out Chinese, bags from McDonald’s. I tell you, the man could eat. Of course, it wasn’t my place to make a fuss, but I wished he’d taken a little bit better care of himself.”
“You’re the second person who’s said that today. I guess you have to let people do what they’re going to do.” I picked up the files and the calendar. “Thanks for letting me in. I imagine someon
e will come over in a week or so and clean the place out.”
“You’re not looking for office space yourself?”
“Not this kind,” I said without hesitation. It occurred to me later she might have taken offense, but the words just popped out. The last I saw of her, she was opening his front door so she could stick the wastebasket out on the porchlet.
I returned to my car, dumped the stack of files in the backseat, and backtracked into town, where I turned into the parking garage adjacent to the public library. I grabbed a clipboard from the backseat, locked my car, and headed for the library. Once inside, I went down to the periodicals room, where I asked the guy at the counter for the six-year-old editions of the Santa Teresa Dispatch. In particular, I wanted to look at the news for December 25, 26, and 27 of the year Isabelle Barney was murdered. I took the reel of tape to one of the microfilm readers and threaded it through the viewer, patiently cranking my way back through time until I reached the period that interested me. I made notes about a few significant events of that weekend. Christmas had fallen on a Sunday. Isabelle had died very early on Monday. Maybe it’d be helpful to jog people’s memories with a few peripheral facts. A storm had dumped heavy rain over most of California, resulting in a major pileup on the northbound 101 just south of town. There’d been a minor crime wave that included the hit-and-run fatality of an elderly man, who’d been struck by a pickup out on upper State Street. There was also a market robbery, two household burglaries, and a suspected-arson fire, which destroyed a photographer’s studio in the early-morning hours of December 26. I also jotted down a reference to an incident in which a two-and-a-half-year-old boy suffered minor injuries when he fired a .44-caliber revolver left in the car with him. As I read the news accounts, I could feel my own memory ignite briefly. I’d forgotten all about the fire, which I’d actually caught sight of as I drove home at the close of a stakeout. The harsh glow of the blaze had been like a torch against the lowering night sky. The rain had contributed a surreal misty counterpoint and I’d been startled when James Taylor’s rendition of “Fire and Rain” suddenly came on my car radio. The fragment of memory terminated as abruptly as a light going out.