A is for ALIBI

by Sue Grafton

  “Yes, what is it?”

  The voice was low and husky and rude and the initial impression of adolescence gave way rapidly.

  “Charlotte Mercer?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  She was petite, probably five-four, maybe a hundred pounds if that. Sandals, tank top, white shorts, her legs tawny and shapely. Not a line on her face. Her hair was a dusty blond, cut short, her makeup subdued. She had to be fifty-five years old and there was no way she could have looked that good without a team of experts. There was an artificial firmness to her jaw and her cheeks had that sleek tucked-up look that only a face-lift can provide at that late date. Her neck was lined and the backs of her hands were knotted with veins but those were the only contradictions to the appearance of slim, cool youth. Her eyes were a pale blue, made vivid by the skillful application of mascara and an eye shadow in two shades of gray. Gold bracelets jangled on one arm.

  “I’m Kinsey Millhone,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

  “Goody for you. What brings you here?”

  “I’m looking into Laurence Fife’s death.”

  Her smile faltered, sinking from minimal good manners into something cruel. She gave me a cursory inspection, dismissing me in the same glance. “I hope it won’t take long”’ she said, and looked back. “Come out to the patio. I’ve left my drink there.”

  I followed her toward the back of the house. The rooms we passed looked spacious and elegant and unused: windows sparkling, the thick powder-blue carpeting still furrowed with vacuum-cleaner tracks, fresh-cut flowers in professional arrangements on glossy tabletops. The wallpaper and drapes were endless repetitions of the same blue floral print and everything smelled of Lemon Pledge. I wondered if she used it to disguise the mild scent of bourbon on the rocks that wafted after her. As we passed the kitchen, I could smell roast lamb laced with garlic.

  The patio was shaded by latticework. The furniture was white wicker with bright green canvas cushions. She took up her drink from a coffee table of glass and wrought iron, plunking herself down on a padded chaise. She reached automatically for her cigarettes and a slim gold Dunhill. She seemed amused, as though I’d arrived solely to entertain her during the cocktail hour.

  “Who sent you up here? Nikki or little Gwen?” Her eyes slid away from mine and she seemed to require no response. She lit her cigarette, pulling the half-filled ashtray closer. She waved a hand at me. “Have a seat.”

  I chose a padded chair not far from hers. An egg-shaped swimming pool was visible beyond the shrubs surrounding the patio. Charlotte caught my look.

  “You want to stop and have a swim or what?”

  I decided not to take offense. I had the feeling that sarcasm came easily to her, an automatic reaction, like someone with a smoker’s cough.

  “So who sent you up here?” she said, repeating herself. It was the second hint I had that she wasn’t as sober as she should have been, even at that hour of the day.

  “Word gets around.”

  “Oh, I’ll bet it does,” she said with a snort of smoke. “Well, I’ll tell you this, sweetie pie. I was more than a piece of ass to that man. I wasn’t the first and I wasn’t the last but I was the fucking best.”

  “Is that why he broke it off?”

  “Don’t be a bitch,” she said with a quick sharp look, but she laughed at the same time, low in her throat, and I suspected I might have gone up in her estimation. She apparently played fast and loose and didn’t object to a cut now and then in the interest of a fair game. “Sure he broke it off. Why should I have secrets these days? I had a little wingding with him before he divorced Gwen and then he came back around a few months before he died. He was like some old tomcat, always sniffin’ around the same back porch.”

  “What happened this last time?”

  She gave me a jaded look as if none of it seemed to matter much. “He got involved with somebody else. Very hush-hush. Very hot. Screw him. He discarded me like yesterday’s underpants.”

  “I’m surprised you weren’t a suspect,” I said.

  Her brows shot up. “Me?” She hooted. “The wife of a prominent judge? I never even testified and they knew damn well that I was involved with him. The cops tiptoed around me like I was a fussy baby taking an unexpected nap. And who asked ‘em to? I would have told ‘em anything. Hell, I didn’t give a shit. Besides, they already had their suspect.”

  “Nikki?”

  “Sure, Nikki,” she said expansively. Her gestures were relaxed, the hand with the cigarette waving languidly as she spoke. “You ask me, she was way too prissy to kill anyone. Not that anyone cared much what I thought. I’m just your Mrs. Loud-Mouth Drunk. What does she know? Who’s going to listen to her? I could tell you things about anybody in this town and who’d pay attention to me? And you know how I find out? I’ll tell you this. You’ll be interested in this because that’s what you do, too, find out about people, right?”

  “More or less,” I murmured, trying not to interrupt the flow. Charlotte Mercer was the type who’d barge right on if she didn’t get sidetracked. She took a long drag on her cigarette, blowing smoke through her nose in two fierce streams. She coughed, shaking her head.

  “Pardon me while I choke to death,” she said, pausing to cough again. “You tell secrets,” she went on, taking up from where she left off. “You tell the dirtiest damn thing you know and nine times out of ten, you’ll net yourself something worse. You can try it yourself. I say anything. I tell stories on myself just to see what I get back. You want gossip, honey, you came to the right place.”

  “What’s the word out on Gwen?” I asked, testing the waters.

  Charlotte laughed. “You don’t trade,” she said. “You got nothing to swap.”

  “Well no, that’s true. I wouldn’t be in business, if I didn’t keep my mouth shut.”

  She laughed again. She seemed to like that. My guess about her was that it made her feel important to know what she knew. I was hoping she liked to show off a little bit too. She might well have heard about Gwen’s affair but I couldn’t ask without tipping my hand so I just waited her out, hoping to pick up what I could.

  Gwen was the biggest chump who ever lived,” she said without much interest. “I don’t like the type myself and I don’t know how she held on to him as long as she did. Laurence Fife was one cold cookie, which was why I was so crazy about him if you haven’t guessed. I can’t stand a man who fawns, you know what I mean? I can’t stand a man sucking up to me, but he was the kind who took you right on the floor and he didn’t even look at you afterwards when he zipped up his pants.

  “That sounds crude enough,” I said.

  “Sex is crude, which is why we all run around doing it, which is why I was such a good match for him. He was crude as he was mean and that’s the truth about him. Nikki was too refined, too lah-de-dah. So was Gwen.”

  “So maybe he liked both extremes,” I suggested.

  “Well now, I don’t doubt that. Probably so. Maybe he married the snooty ones and fooled around with flash.”

  “What about Libby Glass? Did you ever hear about her?”

  “Nope. No dice. Who else?”

  God, this woman made me wish I had a list. I thought fast, trying to milk her while she was in the mood. I had the feeling the moment would pass and she’d turn sullen again.

  “Sharon Napier,” I said, as though it were a parlor game.

  “Oh yeah. I checked that one out myself. The first time I ever laid eyes on that little snake, I knew something was off.”

  “You think he was involved with her?”

  “Oh no, it’s better yet. Not her. Her mother. I hired a private dick to look that up. Ruined her life and Sharon knew about it, too, so up she pops years later and sticks it to him. Her parents broke up over him and Mommy had a nervous breakdown or turned to drink, some damn thing. I don’t know all the details except he fucked everyone over but good and Sharon collected on that for years.”

  “Wa
s she blackmailing him?”

  “Not for bucks. For her livelihood. She couldn’t type. She barely knew how to spell her own name. She just wanted revenge, so she shows up every day for work and she does what she feels like doing and thumbs her nose at him. He took anything she dished out.”

  “Could she have killed him?”

  “Sure, why not? Maybe the gig wore thin or maybe just taking his pay from week to week wasn’t good enough.” She paused, pushing the ember out on her cigarette with a number of ineffectual stabs. She smiled over at me with cunning.

  “I hope you don’t think I’m rude,” she said with a glance at the door. “But school’s out. My esteemed husband, the good judge, is due home any second now and I don’t want to sit and explain what you’re doing in my house.”

  “Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll let myself out. You’ve been a big help.”

  “I’ll bet.” She got to her feet, setting her drink down on the glass-topped table with a resounding crack. There was no harm done and she recovered herself with a long slow look of relief.

  She studied my face briefly. “You’re gonna have to get your eyes done in a couple of years. Right now, you’re okay,” she pronounced.

  I laughed. “I like lines,” I said. “I earn mine. But thanks anyway.”

  I left her on the patio and went around the side of the house to where my car was parked. The conversation wasn’t sitting that well with me and I was glad to be on my way. Charlotte Mercer was shrewd and perhaps not above using her drunkenness for its effect. Maybe she’d been telling the truth and maybe not. Somehow the revelation about Sharon Napier seemed too pat. As a solution, it seemed too obvious. On the other hand, the cops are sometimes right. Homicide usually isn’t subtle and most of the time, you don’t have that far to look.

  Chapter 9

  *

  It took me a day and a half to come up with an address on Sharon Napier. By means I’d just as soon not spell out, I tapped into the Department of Motor Vehicles computer and discovered that her driver’s license had expired some six years back. I checked with the Auto Title Department, making a quick trip downtown, and found that a dark green Karmann Ghia was registered in her name with an address that matched the last known address I had for her locally, but a side note indicated that the title had been transferred to Nevada, which probably meant that she’d left the state.

  I placed a call to Bob Dietz, a Nevada investigator whose name I looked up in the National Directory. I told him what information I needed, and he said he’d call me back, which he did that afternoon. Sharon Napier had applied for and had been issued a Nevada driver’s license; it showed a Reno address. His Reno sources, however, reported that she’d skipped out on a big string of creditors the previous March, which meant that she’d been gone for approximately fourteen months. He’d guessed that she was probably still in the state so he’d done some further nosing around. A small Reno credit company showed requests for information on her from Carson City and again from Las Vegas, which he thought was my best bet. I thanked him profusely for his efficiency and told him to bill me for his time but he said he’d just as soon trade tit for tat at some point, so I made sure he had my address and home phone if he needed it. I tried Information in Las Vegas, but there was no listing for her so I called a friend of mine down there and he said he’d check around. I told him I’d be driving to Los Angeles early in the week and gave him the number so he could reach me there in case it took him a while to pick up a lead on her.

  The next day was Sunday and I devoted that to myself: laundry, housecleaning, grocery shopping. I even shaved my legs just to show I still had some class. Monday morning I did clerical work. I typed up a report for Nikki and put in another call to the local credit bureau just to double-check. Sharon Napier had apparently left town with a lot of money owed and a lot of people mad. They had no forwarding address so I gave them the information I had. Then I had a long talk with California Fidelity on the subject of Marcia Threadgill. For forty-eight hundred dollars, the insurance company was almost ready to settle with her and move on, and I had to argue with as much cunning as I could muster. My services on that one weren’t costing them anything out of pocket and it pissed me off that they were halfway inclined to look the other way. I even had to stoop so low as the mention principles, which never sits that well with the claims manager. “She’s cheating your ass,” I kept saying, but he just shook his head as though there were forces at work that I was too dim to grasp. I told him to check with his boss and I’d get back to him.

  By 2:00, I was on the road to Los Angeles. The other piece of the puzzle was Libby Glass and I needed to know how she fit into all of this. When I reached L.A., I checked into the Hacienda Motor Lodge on Wilshire, near Bundy. The Hacienda is not even remotely hacienda-like ��� an L-shaped, two-story structure with a cramped parking lot and a swimming pool surrounded by a chain-link fence with a padlock. A very fat woman named Arlette doubles as manager and switchboard operator. I could see straight into her apartment from the desk. It’s furnished, I’m told, from her profits as a Tupperware lady, a little hustling she does on the side. She leans toward Mediterranean-style furniture upholstered in red plush.

  “Fat is beautiful, Kinsey,” she said to me confidentially as I filled out the registration card. “Looka here.”

  I looked. She was holding out her arm so that I could admire the hefty downhang of excess flesh.

  “I don’t know, Arlette,” I said dubiously. “I keep trying to avoid it myself.”

  “And look at all the time and energy it takes,” she said. “The problem is that our society shuns tubbos. Fat people are heavily discriminated against. Worse than the handicapped. Why, they got it easy compared to us. Everywhere you go now, there are signs out for them. Handicapped parking. Handicapped johns. You’ve seen those little stick figures in wheelchairs. Show me the international sign for the grossly overweight. We got rights.”

  Her face was moon-shaped, surrounded by a girlish cap of wispy blonde hair. Her cheeks were permanently flushed as though vital supply lines were being dangerously squeezed.

  “But it’s so unhealthy, Arlette,” I said. “I mean, don’t you have to worry about high blood pressure, heart attacks…”

  “Well there’s hazards to everything. All the more reason we should be treated decently.”

  I gave her my credit card and after she made the imprint she handed me the key to room #2. “That’s right up here close,” she said. “I know how you hate being stuck out back.”

  “Thanks.”

  I’ve been in room #2 about twenty times and it is always dreary in a comforting sort of way. A double bed. Threadbare wall-to-wall carpeting in a squirrel gray. A chair upholstered in orange plastic with one gimpy leg. On the desk, there is a lamp shaped like a football helmet with “UCLA” printed on the side. The bathroom is small and the shower mat is paper. It is the sort of place where you are likely to find someone else’s underpanties beneath the bed. It costs me $11.95 plus room tax in the off-season and includes a “Continental” breakfast, instant coffee and jelly doughnuts, most of which Arlette eats herself. Once, at midnight, a drunk sat on my front step and yelled for an hour and a half until the cops came and took him away. I stay there because I’m cheap.

  I set my suitcase on the bed and took out my jogging clothes. I did a fast walk from Wilshire to San Vicente and then headed west at a trot as far as Twenty-sixth Street, where I tagged a stop sign and turned around, jogging back up to Westgate and across to Wilshire again. The first mile is the one that hurts. I was panting hard when I got back. Given the exhaust fumes I’d taken in from passing motorists on San Vicente, I figured I was about neck-and-neck with toxic wastes. Back in room #2 again, I showered and dressed and then checked back through my notes. Then I made some phone calls. The first was to Lyle Abernathy’s last-known work address, the Wonder Bread Company, down on Santa Monica. Not surprisingly, he had left and the personnel office had no idea where he was. A qu
ick check in the phone book showed no listing for him locally, but a Raymond Glass still lived in Sherman Oaks and I verified the street number I had noted from the police files up in Santa Teresa. I placed another call to my friend in Vegas. He had a lead on Sharon Napier but said it would take him probably half a day to pin it down. I alerted Arlette that he might be calling and cautioned her to make sure the information, if she took it, was exact. She acted a little injured that I didn’t trust her to take phone messages for me, but she’d been negligent before and it had cost me plenty last time around.

  I called Nikki in Santa Teresa and told her where I was and what I was up to. Then I checked my answering service. Charlie Scorsoni had called but left no number. I figured if it was important he’d call back. I gave my service the number where I could be reached. Having tagged all those bases, I went next door to a restaurant that seems to change nationalities every time I’m there. Last time I was in town, it was Mexican fare, which is to say very hot plates of pale brown goo. This time it was Greek: turdlike lumps wrapped in leaves. I’d seen things in roadside parks that looked about that good but I washed them down with a glass of wine that tasted like lighter fluid and who knew the difference? It was now 7:15 and I didn’t have anything to do. The television set in my room was on the fritz so I wandered down to the office and watched TV with Arlette while she ate a box of caramel Ayds.

  In the morning, I drove over the mountain into the San Fernando Valley. At the crest of the hill, where the San Diego Freeway tips over into Sherman Oaks, I could see a layer of smog spread out like a mirage, a shimmering mist of pale yellow smoke through which a few tall buildings yearned as though for fresh air. Libby’s parents lived in a four-unit apartment building set into the crook of the San Diego and Ventura freeways, a cumbersome structure of stucco and frame with bay windows bulging out along the front. There was an open corridor dividing the building in half, with the front doors to the two downstairs apartments opening up just inside. On the right, a stairway led to the second-floor landing. The building itself affected no particular style and I guessed that it had gone up in the thirties before anybody figured out that California architecture should imitate southern mansions and Italian villas. There was a pale lawn of crab and Bermuda grasses intermixed. A short driveway along the left extended back to a row of frame garages, with four green plastic garbage cans chained to a wooden fence. The juniper bushes growing along the front of the building were tall enough to obscure the ground-floor windows and seemed to be suffering from some peculiar molting process that made some of the branches turn brown and the rest go bald. They looked like cut-rate Christmas trees with the bad side facing out. The season to be jolly, in this neighborhood, was long past.