B is for BURGLAR

by Sue Grafton

  She nodded. She got a compact out of her bag and checked her eye makeup, mopping up a run of mascara with Kleenex folded over her finger. Then she tucked the compact away and blew her nose without making a sound. It was just a sort of squeezing process. She opened her bag again and searched for her cigarettes and matches. Her hands were shaking, but the minute she got her cigarette lighted, all the tension seemed to leave her body. She inhaled deeply as though she were taking in ether before surgery. I wish cigarettes felt that good to me. Every time I’ve had a drag, my mouth has tasted like a cross between charred sticks and spoiled eggs. It’s made my breath smell about that good too, I’m sure. My office was now looking like the fog had rolled in.

  She began to shake her head hopelessly. “You have no idea what I’ve been through,” she said.

  “Look,” I said, “just to set the record straight ���”

  “I know you didn’t do anything. It’s not your fault.” Her eyes filled with tears briefly. “I should be used to it by now, I guess.”

  “Used to what?”

  She began to fold the Kleenex in her lap. She recited slowly, fighting for control, sentences punctuated with silences and little humming noises when the weeping closed off her throat. “He… um… goes around to people. And he tells them … um… that I drink and sometimes he claims I’m a nymphomaniac or he says I’m undergoing shock treatments. Whatever occurs to him. Whatever he thinks will do the most harm.”

  I wasn’t sure what to do with this. He had told me she was an alcoholic. He’d told me she went off on three-day toots. He’d told me she attacked him with a pair of scissors and had possibly murdered her sister in revenge for an affair he was having with her. Now here she sat, sobbing her tiny heart out, claiming that he was the perpetrator of this weird pathological stuff. Which of them was I to believe? She composed herself, giving her nose the old silent squeeze. She looked at me, the whites of her eyes now tinted with pink.

  “Didn’t he tell you something like that?” she asked.

  “I think he was just concerned about Elaine,” I said, trying to hedge until I could decide what to do. “We really didn’t discuss anything personal so don’t worry about that. How did you find out he’d been up here?”

  “Something came up in conversation,” she said. “I don’t even remember what. That’s how he handles these things. He gives me these clues. He leaves the evidence around and waits for me to discover it. And if I don’t stumble across it accidentally, he points me right to it and then sits back and pretends to be contrite and amazed.”

  I was just about to say, “Like his affair with Elaine,” but it suddenly occurred to me that it might not even be true, or if true, that she might not actually know about it. “Like what, for example?” I said.

  “He had an affair with Elaine. He was fucking around with my only sister. God, I can’t believe he did that to me. I didn’t doubt she’d do it. She was always jealous. She’d take anything she could. But him. I felt like such a fool. He was off balling her the minute Max died and I was such a dunce I didn’t figure it out for years! It took me years.”

  She did one of those bubbling laughs, filled more with hysteria than mirth. “Poor Aubrey. He must have been at his wit’s end trying to get me to pick up on that. He finally cooked up this absurd tale about the IRS auditing his taxes. I told him the accountant could take care of it, but he said Harvey wanted us to go through the canceled checks and credit-card receipts. So like a dodo I did it and there it was.”

  “Why don’t you leave?” I asked. “I don’t understand why you stay in a relationship like that.” I always say the same thing. Every time I hear a tale like this. Drunkenness, beatings, infidelity, and verbal abuse. I just don’t get it. Why do people put up with it? I had said it to Aubrey so I figured I might as well say it to her too. The marriage was a mess and regardless of where the truth lay, these two people were miserable. Was misery the point?

  “Oh, I don’t know. Part of it’s the money, I guess.” she said.

  “Screw the money. This is a community-property state.”

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “He’ll walk away with half of everything I have and it just seems so unfair.”

  I looked at her blankly. “The money’s yours?”

  “Well of course it’s mine, ” she said, and then her expression changed. “He told you it was his, didn’t he?”

  I shrugged uncomfortably. “More or less. He told me he put together real-estate syndicates.”

  She was startled for an instant and then she laughed.

  She started to cough, patting her chest. She stubbed out her cigarette, pecking it in the bottom of the ashtray. Smoke was streaming out of her nostrils as though her brain had caught fire. She was shaking her head, smile fading. “Sorry, but that’s a new one on me. I should have guessed. What else did he say?”

  I held a hand up in protest. “Hey,” I said. “Enough. I don’t want to play this game. I don’t know what your problems are and I don’t care…”

  “You’re right, you’re right. God, we must seem like lunatics to you. I’m sorry you got sucked in. It’s not your concern. It’s mine. How much do I owe you for your time?” She was rooting through her handbag for her checkbook and her famous rosewood pen-and-pencil set.

  I could feel my temper on the rise again.

  “I don’t want any money from you. Don’t be absurd. Why don’t you give me some straight answers for a change?”

  She blinked at me, the china blue eyes glazing over like ice on a pond. “About what?”

  “Elaine’s neighbor claims you were up here at Christmas and the two of you had a big fight. You told me you hadn’t seen her for years. Now which is it?”

  She stalled, reaching for another cigarette so she’d have time to frame a reply.

  I headed her off. “Come on, Beverly. Just tell me the truth. Were you up here or not?”

  She took out a packet of matches and removed a match, scratching it repeatedly across the packet without effect. She tossed that one, a dud apparently, into the ashtray and took out a second match. This time, she managed to light her cigarette. “I did come up,” she said carefully. She tapped the lighted cigarette on the lip of the ashtray as though to remove an ash when there was none yet.

  I was going to scream if she did any more shit with that cigarette. “Did you quarrel with her or didn’t you?”

  She switched to her officious tone, mouth going all prim. “Kinsey, I had just found out about the affair. Of course we quarreled. That’s exactly what Aubrey had in mind, I’m sure. What would you have done?”

  “What difference does it make? I’m not married to him so who gives a damn what I’d have done! I want to know why you lied to me.”

  She stared at the desk, her face taking on a stubborn look.

  I tried another tack. “Why’d you call me off? Why wouldn’t you let me contact the police?”

  She smoked for a moment and I thought at first she didn’t intend to answer that question either. “I was worried he’d done something.”

  I stared a her.

  She caught my look and leaned forward earnestly.

  “He’s crazy. He is a truly crazy man and I was worried that he’d… I don’t know… I suppose I was worried he’d killed her.”

  “All the more reason to call the police. Isn’t it?”

  “You don’t understand. I couldn’t turn the police loose on this. That’s why I hired you in the first place. When this whole business came up about the will, I didn’t think anything of it. It was such a minor matter. I just assumed she’d signed the paper and sent it to the attorney. And then when I realized no one had heard from her, it occurred to me that something might be wrong. I don’t even know what I thought it was.”

  “But when I mentioned she might be dead, the penny dropped, right?” I sounded bored. I sounded contemptuous too.

  She shifted uncomfortably. “Before that. I guess I’d just never really put it in words unti
l you said it and then I realized I better reassess the situation before I agreed to anything.”

  “What makes you think Aubrey’s involved?”

  “That day… when I drove up here and Elaine and I had words… she told me that the affair had been going on for years. She’d finally figured out that Aubrey was a psychopath and she was trying to break it off.” She paused and the blue eyes came up to mine. “You don’t understand about Aubrey yet. You don’t know what he’s like. You just don’t leave him. You just don’t break it off. I’ve threatened to do that myself. Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to me. But I’d never make it. I don’t know what he’d do, but I’d never get away from him. Never. He’d follow me to the ends of the earth and bring me back, only then he’d really make me pay.”

  “Bev, I’ve got to tell you I’m having trouble with this,” I said.

  “That’s because you fell for it. He came waltzing up here and he laid a number on you. He conned you good and now you can’t bear to admit you’ve been had. He’s done it before. He does it to everyone. The man is certifiably insane. He was in Camarillo for years until Reagan became governor. Remember that? He cut the state budget and turned them all out in the streets. Aubrey Danziger came home at that point and my life has been hell ever since.”

  I picked up a pencil and tapped on the edge of the desk, then tossed it aside. “I’ll tell you the truth. I want to find Elaine. That’s all I want to do. I’m like a terrier pup. Somebody tells me to do something and it gets done. I’ll worry the damn thing to death. I’m going to find out what happened to her and where she’s been all these months. And you better hope it doesn’t lead back to you.”

  She got up. She picked up her bag and leaned on my desk. “And you better hope it doesn’t lead back to Aubrey, my dear!” she spat.

  And then she was gone, leaving behind her the faint aura of whiskey that I’d just caught on her breath.

  I hauled out my typewriter and wrote a detailed report for Julia, itemizing expenses for the last couple of days. I needed time to assimilate what Beverly had told me about Aubrey. It was like the paradox of the jungle tribes where one always lies and the other always tells the truth. How could one ever determine which was which? Aubrey had told me Beverly was Mr. Hyde when she drank. She had told me he was certifiably mad, but she’d apparently been drinking when she said so. I hadn’t the faintest idea which of them was on the level and I wasn’t sure how to find out. I didn’t even know if it mattered. Was Elaine Boldt really dead? It had certainly crossed my mind more than once, but I hadn’t imagined that Beverly or Aubrey might be at the heart of it. I’d been looking in the opposite direction, assuming somehow that Elaine’s disappearance was linked to the murder of Marty Grice. Now I’d have to go back and take another look.

  I went home at lunchtime and did a run. I knew I was just treading water at this point, but in some ways I had to wait it out. Something would break. Some piece of information would come to light. In the meantime, I was feeling tense and I needed to work that off. The run was a bad one and that put me in a foul mood. I picked up a stitch in my side at the end of the first mile. I thought I could shake it. I tried digging my fingers in, bending at the waist, thinking that if it was a muscle cramp it might ease. No deal. Then I tried expelling breath after breath, again bending from the waist. The pain was no worse, but it didn’t go away either. Finally, I slowed to a walk until it subsided, but the minute I started to jog again, my side seized up, stopping me in my tracks. I’d reached the turnaround by then, but running seemed futile so I walked the entire mile and a half back to my place, cursing to myself. I hadn’t even broken a sweat, and my frustration, instead of dissipating, had doubled.

  I showered and dressed again. I didn’t want to go back to the office, but I forced myself. I was going to have to start all over again, go back to the beginning and cast a new set of lines in the water to see if I could get a bite somewhere. I had just about used up my whole bag of tricks, but there had to be something else.

  When I let myself into the office, I saw the message light blinking on my machine. I opened the French doors to let some air in and then punched playback.

  “Hi, Kinsey. This is Lupe, over at Santa Teresa Travel. It looks like you hit the jackpot on that luggage trace. I put a call through to Baggage Claim at TWA and had the agent check it out. The four bags were sitting right there. He said he could put ‘em on a plane this afternoon if you like. Could you call me back and let me know what you want to do?”

  I snapped the machine off and shook both fists in the air, mouthing “All riiight!” to myself with a big grin. I put a call through to Jonah first and told him what was going on. I was jazzed. It was the first good news I’d had since I tracked down the cat. “What should I do, Jonah? Am I going to need some kind of court order to open those bags?”

  “Screw that. Look, you have the claim tags, don’t you?”

  “Sure, I’ve got ‘em right here.”

  “Then go down to Florida and pick up the bags.”

  “Why not just have them flown out?”

  “Suppose she’s in one,” he said.

  That certainly conjured up an image I didn’t like. I could feel myself squirm. “Don’t you think someone would have noticed by now? You know, an odor… something dripping out the side?”

  “Hey, we found a body once had been in the trunk of a car for six months. Someone had shoved a high heel down some whore’s throat and she ended up mummified. Don’t ask me how or why, but she didn’t decompose at all. She just dried up. She looked like a big leather doll.”

  “Maybe I’ll get on a plane,” I said.

  By ten o’clock that night, I was back in the air again.

  Chapter 19

  *

  It was drizzling and the temperature was already in the seventies at 4:56 A.M. EST when we touched down. It was still dark outside, but the airport was filled with the flat light and artificial chill of a space station orbiting a hundred and ten miles out. Dawn travelers walked purposefully down deserted corridors while doors shushed open and shut automatically and the paging system seemed to drone on and on without hope of response. For all I knew, the whole operation was mechanical, running itself at that hour without any help from humankind.

  The TWA baggage-service office didn’t open until nine, so I had time to kill. I hadn’t brought any luggage of my own, just a big canvas bag where I kept a toothbrush and all the odds and ends of ordinary life, including clean underpants. I never go anywhere without a toothbrush and clean underpants. I went into the women’s room to freshen up. I washed my face and ran my wet fingers through my hair, noting how sallow my skin looked with the fluorescent lights overhead. There was a woman behind me, changing the diaper on one of those oversized babies who looks like a solemn adult with flushed cheeks. The child kept his eyes pinned on me gravely while his mother attended to him. Sometimes cats look at me that way, as though we’re foreign agents sending silent signals to one another in an out of the way meeting place.

  I paused at a stand and picked up a newspaper. There was a coffee shop open and I bought scrambled eggs, bacon, toast, and juice, taking my time about breakfast while I read a human-interest story about a man who’d left all his money to a mynah bird. I can’t cope with the front section before seven A.M.

  At quarter to nine, having walked the airport from end to end twice, I stationed myself near Baggage Claim with a portable cart I’d rented for a buck. I could see Elaine’s bags, neatly lined up at on end of the locked glass-fronted cabinets. It looked as if someone had hauled them out from the bottom of the pile in readiness. Finally, a middle-aged man in a TWA uniform, with a big set of jangling keys, unlocked the small cubicle and started turning on lights. It looked like the opening curtain of a one-act play with a modest set.

  I presented myself and the baggage-claim tags and then followed him out to the storage cabinets and waited while he extracted the suitcases and stacked them on the cart. I expected him to ask for iden
tification, but apparently he didn’t care who I was. Maybe abandoned bags are like litters of unwanted kittens. He was just grateful to have someone take them off his hands.

  When the Penny-Car Rental desk opened, I rented a compact car. I had given Julia a call the night before so she knew I was flying in. All I needed to do now was find the highway again and drive north. Once outside, I pushed the cart toward the slot where the rental car was parked. The drizzle settled on my skin like a layer of silk. The morning air was hot and close, smelling of rain and jet exhaust. I loaded the bags in the trunk of the car and headed toward Boca. It wasn’t until I reached the condominium parking lot, unloading the suitcases one by one, that I realized all four were locked and I had no key. Well, how very cute. Maybe Julia would have a plan. I lugged them over to the elevator and went up to the third floor, hauling them to Julia’s front door in two trips.

  I knocked and waited a long interval while Julia thumped her way to the front door with her cane, calling encouragement.

  “I’m coming. Don’t give up. Six more feet to go and I’m bearing down hard.”

  On my side of the door, I smiled, peering over at Elaine’s apartment. There was no sign of life. Even the welcome mat had been taken inside or thrown out, leaving a square of fine sand that had filtered through the bristles.

  Julia’s door opened. The dowager’s hump sat between her shoulder blades like a weight, forcing her to bend with its burden. She seemed to be staring at my waist, tilting her head of dandelion fuzz to one side so she could peer up at me. Her skin seemed as sheer as rubber, pulled over her hands like surgical gloves. I could see veins and broken capillaries,

  her knuckles as knotted as rope. Age was making her transparent, crushing her from both ends like a can of soda pop.

  “Well, Kinsey! I knew that was you. I’ve been awake since six this morning, looking forward to this. Come on in.”

  She hobbled to one side, making way for me. I set the four suitcases inside the door and closed it after me. She tapped one with her cane. “I recognize those.”