by Sue Grafton
At five twenty-five in the evening, when I finally opened my eyes, I felt so anchored to the bed I could barely move. I closed my eyes again, wondering if I’d picked up a superfluous three hundred pounds in my sleep. I checked my extremities but found no evidence of massive overnight weight gain. I rolled out of bed with a whimper, pulled myself together with minimal attention to the particulars, and headed out my front door. At the first fast-food establishment I passed, I picked up an oversize container of hot coffee and sucked on it like a baby, effectively burning my lips.
By six, when ordinary folk were heading home from work, I was bumping down the narrow dirt lane that led to Lorna’s cabin. I’d been driving with a constant eye on my rearview mirror, wondering if the fellows in the limousine were following. Whatever their tailing methods, they were experts. Since I’d started this case, I’d never been aware of being under surveillance. Even now I’d have been willing to swear there was no one watching.
I parked my car nose out, pausing as I had the first time to drink in the mossy perfume of the place. I set my empty cup on the floor and removed my flashlight and a screwdriver from the glove compartment. I got out of the car, pausing to assess the weather of the night. I was faintly aware of the ebb and flow of the freeway in the distance, a dull tide of passing cars. The air was soft and cold, the shadows shifting capriciously as if blown by the wind. I moved toward the cabin, stomach churning with uneasiness. It was amazing to me how much I’d learned about Lorna since I’d first seen the place. I’d reviewed the postmortem photographs so often, I could almost conjure up a vision of her as she’d been when she was discovered: softened, disintegrating, returning to the elements. If there were ghosts in this world, surely she was one.
The night was foggy, and I could hear the intermittent moaning of a foghorn sounding on the ocean. The night breeze had a saturated feel to it, rich with the scent of vegetation. I swept away the dark with the beam of my flashlight. The garden Leda’d planted was tangled and overgrown, tomato volunteers pushing up among the papery stalks of dead corn. A few onion sets had survived the last harvest. Come spring, even left to its own devices the garden might resurrect itself.
I stood in the front yard and studied the cabin, circling the outside. There was nothing to speak of: dirt, dead leaves, patches of dried grass. I went up the porch steps. The door was still off its hinges. I tapped to see if it was hollow, but it clunked back at me, dense and solid. I flipped on the overhead light. The dingy glow of a forty-watt bulb defined the interior spaces in a wash of faint yellow. I did a slow visual survey. Where would I hide twenty thousand dollars in cash? I started at the entryway and worked my way around to the right. The cabin was poorly insulated, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of nooks and crannies. I tapped and poked, sticking the tip of my screwdriver in every crevice and crack. I felt like a dentist probing for cavities.
The kitchen seemed to suggest the greatest possibility for hiding places. I took drawers out, measured the depth of cabinets, looking for any discrepancies that might hint at an opening. I crawled along the floor, getting filthy in the process. Surely the cops had done exactly this… if they’d known what to search for.
I tried the bathroom next, shining my light up behind and inside the toilet tank, testing tiles for loose ones. I pulled out the medicine cabinet, peering down into the lathing behind it. I scrutinized the space in the alcove where she’d kept her bed, checked the metal floor plate in the living room on which the wood-burning stove had rested. There was nothing. Whatever Lorna did with her money, she didn’t keep it on the premises. If she’d had jewelry or large sums of cash, she hadn’t stuck it in a hidey-hole. Well, let’s correct that. Whatever she’d done with her valuables, I didn’t know where they were. Maybe someone else got to them first or maybe, as Cheney suggested, she’d used the money some other way. I finished up the search with a second survey, feeling dissatisfied.
By chance my gaze dropped to the Belltone box. The housing had been popped loose, and I leaned toward it, using my screwdriver to explore the space. For an instant I prayed a secret compartment would open up and a wad of bills would spill out. Optimist that I am, I always hope for things like that. There was nothing, of course, except the tag end of electrical wire. I’d never actually seen the working mechanism of a doorbell, but the wire seemed odd. I stood and stared at it for a moment and then leaned closer, squinting. What was that?
I went outside, down the creaking wooden steps. The front porch was hiked up on concrete supports, elevated about three feet, the space narrowing down to nothing where the ground sloped upward at the back. The intention must have been to keep moisture away from the floor joists, but the net effect was to create a cinder-strewn crawl space that had been screened with wooden lathing. I crouched beside the lathing and stuck my fingers through the holes. I gave a pull and a small section lifted away, allowing me to peer at the space underneath the cabin. It was pitch black. I raked the area with the beam of my flashlight and was treated to the bouncing of daddy longlegs as they warned me away.
There was a flat piece of plywood on the ground with a few garden tools laid on top. I stood up again, aligning my sights with the approximate location of the Belltone box. I adjusted my position and shone my flashlight up along the joists. I could see where the green wire came down through the floor. It was stapled along the joists at long intervals, running toward the edge of the porch close to me. I was going to have to inch my way under, not a happy thought given all the spiders lurking in the dark.
Gingerly I got down on my hands and the balls of my feet and duck-walked my way under. The spider kiddies viewed me with alarm, and many of them fled in what must have been spider fear and panic. Later they would have horrified conversations about the unpredictability of humans. “Eeew. All those fingers,” they’d say. “And those big nasty feet. They always look like they’re about to squish you.” Spider mothers would console them. “Most humans are completely harmless, and they’re just as scared of us as we are of them,” they’d say.
I craned my head, sweeping the underside of the porch with the beam of my flashlight. Right at eye level a leather case had been stapled to the wood. I used the flat end of my screwdriver to force the staples out. The case was dusty and mealy where the leather had begun to deteriorate. I humped my way out from under the porch. I dusted my hands off, brushed gravel and dirt from my jeans, then flipped off the flashlight. I moved back into the cabin to examine my find. What I was holding looked like the carrying case for a little portable radio or tape recorder, complete with holes in the end into which an earphone or a mike could be plugged. There was a slit along one end for the volume control. It had to be a surveillance setup, not sophisticated by any means, but possibly effective. Somebody had planted something similar in my apartment a couple of years back, and I’d discovered it only by accident. In the meantime, the voice-activated recorder had captured my end of all phone calls, all incoming messages on my answering machine, both sides of any conversations I’d had on the premises.
Someone had been spying on Lorna. Of course, it was possible she’d planted the device herself, but only if she’d had a reason to keep an audible record of her conversations. If that were the case, I couldn’t believe she wouldn’t have planted the recorder inside the cabin, where reception would be good and the tapes easier to replace. Something like this, tacked to the underside of the cabin, was bound to pick up a lot of ambient noise.
Gosh-a-rudy, I thought, now who do I know who’d have access to all kinds of surveillance equipment? Could it be Miss Leda Selkirk, daughter of the PI who’d once had his license yanked for an illegal wiretap? I flipped my flashlight back on and turned the lights off in the cabin. I unlocked my car and turned the key in the ignition, easing the VW down the bumpy road toward the street.
I parked out in front of the Burkes’ half-darkened house.
When Leda answered my knock, I was standing with the decrepit leather case dangling off the end of my screwdriver
like the skin of some strange beast. Tonight, her midriff was bare. Here it was the middle of February and she was wearing an outfit that might have been suitable for a belly dancer: wrap-around sarong-style pants with wide legs in a thin floral fabric reminiscent of summer pajama bottoms. The top was a similar fabric, different print, with no sleeves and one button appearing right between her quite weensie breasts. I said, “Is J.D. here?”
She shook her head. “He’s not home yet.”
“Mind if I come in?” I pictured her playing dumb, a reaction ranging anywhere from denial to duh.
She looked at me and she looked at the leather case, apparently unable to think of a thing to say except, “Oh.”
She stepped back from the door, and I went into the darkened hall, following as she led the way toward the kitchen at the rear. A glance to the left showed Jack, the sticky-fingered toddler, lying in a stupor on the couch, watching a cartoon video. The infant slept, slumped sideways in a well-padded portable car seat while colored images flickered across its face.
The kitchen still smelled like the sautéed onions and ground beef from dinner on Monday, which seemed like ages ago. Some of the dishes piled in the sink looked the same, too, though several other meals’ worth had been piled on top. She was probably the type who waited until everything was used before she ventured into the washing process. “You want some coffee?” she asked. I could see a fresh pot on a Mr. Coffee stand, the mechanism still spitting out the last few drops.
“That’d be nice,” I said. I sat down at the banquette and checked the kitchen table for sticky spots. I found a clear couple of inches and propped my elbow with care.
She took down a mug and filled it, then refilled hers before she put the pot back on the machine. In profile, her nose seemed too long for her face, but the effect in certain lights was lovely nonetheless. Her neck was long and her ears elfin, her short-cropped dark hair trimmed to wisps around her face. Her eyes were lined in smudged black, and her lip gloss was a brownish tint.
I put the leather case in the middle of the table.
She took a seat on the bench, pulling her feet up under her. She ran her hand through her hair, her expression somewhat sheepish. “I kept meaning to take that out, but I never got around to it. What a dork.”
“You installed surveillance equipment?”
“Wasn’t much. Just a mike and a tape recorder.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I was worried,” she said. Her dark eyes seemed enormous, filled with innocence.
“I’m listening.”
Color was rising in her face. “I thought J.D. and Lorna might be fooling around, but I was wrong.” There was a baby bottle half-full of formula sitting on the table. She unscrewed the nipple and used the contents for cream. She offered me some, but I declined.
“What was it, voice-activated?”
“Well, yeah. I know it sounds kind of dumb in retrospect, but I’d just found out I was pregnant with the baby, and I was throwing up all day. Jack wasn’t even out of diapers, and I was frantic about J.D. I knew I was being bitchy, but I couldn’t help myself. I looked horrible and felt worse. And there was Lorna, slim and elegant. I’m not stupid. I figured out what she did for a living, and so did he. J.D. started finding excuses for going back there every other day. I knew if I confronted him, he’d laugh in my face, so I borrowed some of Daddy’s stuff.”
“Were they having an affair?”
Her expression was self-mocking. “He fixed her toilet. One of her screens had come loose, and he fixed that, too. The most he ever did was complain about me, and even that wasn’t bad. She had a fit and chewed him out. She said he had a hell of a nerve when I was the one doing all the suffering and hard work. Also, she got on him because he didn’t lift a finger with Jack. That’s when he started cooking, which has been a big help. I feel bad I never thanked her, but I wasn’t supposed to know she’d come to my defense.”
“How’d you know how to install the bug?”
“I’ve watched Daddy do it. Lorna was gone a lot, so it wasn’t hard. The doorbell never worked, but the box was there. I just drilled a hole in the floor and then crawled under the cabin. All I had to do was make sure the tape was close enough to the edge of the porch so I could switch it without a hassle. We kept the gardening tools under there. Any time I weeded, I would find a way to check the tape.”
“How many tapes did you run?”
“I only used one tape, but the first time was a bust because the mike was defective and didn’t pick up half the time. Second try was better, but the sound was distorted, so you couldn’t hear too well. She had the radio on. She played this jazz station all the time. Up front there’s this little fragment with her and J.D. I had to listen three times to be sure it was him. Then her drying her hair… that was entertaining. I got her end of a couple of phone calls, that, whole business where she’s cranking on J.D. Then more music, only country this time, then she’s talking to some guy. That part’s left over from the first round, I think.”
“Did you tell the police?”
“There wasn’t anything to tell. Besides, I was embarrassed,” she said. “I didn’t want J.D. to know I didn’t trust him, especially when it turned out he’s innocent. I felt like a fool. Plus, the whole thing’s illegal, so why incriminate myself? I’m still worried they’ll start thinking it was J.D. who killed her. It scared me silly when you started in on us, but at least this way I can prove the two of them were friends and got along okay.”
I stared at her. “Are you trying to tell me you still have the tapes?”
“Well, sure, but there’s only one,” she said. “The first time was mostly static, so I went ahead and taped over it.”
“You mind if I listen?”
“You mean right now?”
“If you don’t mind.”
Chapter 15
*
She unfolded herself and got up from the table. She moved out into the hallway and disappeared from sight. Moments later she returned with an empty cassette box and a little tape recorder, the cassette already in place and visible through the oval window. “I guess I didn’t have to keep this, but it made me feel better. Really, J.D. couldn’t have killed her because he wasn’t even in town. He took off Friday morning on a fishing trip. She wasn’t killed until Saturday when he was miles away.”
“Where were you that day?”
“I was gone too. I decided to go part of the way with him. He took me as far as Santa Maria and dropped Jack and me at my sister’s on Friday. I spent a week with her and then came home on the bus.”
“You have any objections to giving me her name and number?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Let’s don’t get into that, Leda. You’re not exactly a Girl Scout,” I said.
“Well, I know, but that doesn’t mean I’d kill anyone.”
“What about J.D.? Can he verify his whereabouts?”
“You can ask my sister’s husband, Nick. That’s who he went to Nacimiento with.”
I made a note of the name and number.
Leda punched the play button on the recorder. After a brief interval of white noise, the sound seemed to jump out. The reception was dismal, filled with clunks and banging as people moved around. With the equipment so close, the knocking on the door sounded like lightning cracks. A chair scraped, and someone thunked across the floor.
“Oh, hi. Come on in. I got the check right here.”
There were a couple of inaudible remarks between the two of them. The front door closed like a muffled explosion.
Footsteps clunking. “How’s Leda feeling?”
“She’s kind of down in the dumps, but she was this way last time. She gets to feeling fat and ugly. She’s convinced I’m going out to screw around on her, so she busts out crying every time I leave the house.”
I put out a hand. “Hold on a minute. That’s J.D.‘s voice?”
She pushed pause, and the recording stopped. “Yeah,
I know. It’s hard to recognize. I had to play it two or three times myself. You want to hear it again?”
“If you don’t mind,” I said. “I’ve never heard Lorna’s voice, but I’m assuming you can identify her as well.”
“Well, sure,” Leda said. She punched the rewind button. When the tape stopped, she pressed play, and we listened to the opening again. “Oh, hi. Come on in. I got the check right here.”
Again, muffled remarks between the two of them and the front door closed like a sonic boom.
Footsteps clunking. “How’s Leda feeling?”
“She’s kind of down in the dumps, but she was this way last time. She gets to feeling fat and ugly. She’s convinced I’m going out to screw around on her, so she busts out crying every time I leave the house.”
Lorna was saying, “What’s her problem? She looks darling.”
“Well, I think so, but she’s got some girlfriend that happened to.” Footsteps thunked across the floor and a chair scraped back, sounding like a lion roaring in the jungle.
“She only gained fifteen pounds with Jack. How could she feel fat? She doesn’t even show. My mother gained forty-six with me. Now, that’s uggers. I’ve seen pictures. Stomach hanging down to here. Boobs looked like footballs, and her legs looked like sticks.” Laughter. Mumbles. Static.
“Yeah, well, it isn’t real, so you can’t talk her out of it. You know how she is…. [mumble, mumble]… insecure.”
“That’s what you get for hooking up with someone half your age.”
“She’s twenty-one!”
“Serves you right. She’s an infant. Listen, you want me to keep Jack while you two go out to dinner?” More mumbles.
“xxxxxxx” The response here was completely missing, blotted out by static.
“… problem. He and I get along great. In exchange, you can do me a favor and fog the place for me next time I go out of town. The spiders are getting out of control.”
“Thanks…. ceipt in your mailbox.” Chairs scraping. Clump, clump of footsteps crossing the cabin. Muffled voices. The conversation continued outside and then stopped abruptly. Silence. When the tape picked up again, there were strains of country music with the high whine of a hair dryer running over it. A phone began to ring. The hair dryer was turned off. Clump, clump, clump of footsteps like a series of gunshots. The phone was picked up, and Lorna raised her voice in greeting. After that, much of her end of the call was a series of short responses… uhn-hun, sure, right, okay, that’s great. There was a fragmentary mention of the Palace that made me think she might be talking to Danielle. Hard to tell with the competing strains of country music overlaid. There was a second conversation between J.D. and Lorna, which was much as Leda indicated. J.D. complained, and Lorna chewed him out because he never helped at home.