A is for ALIBI

by Sue Grafton

  “Oh, and Kinsey,” he said, “she’s dealing blackjack at the Fremont but she’s also hustling some on the side, so I hear. I watched her operate last night. She’s very sharp but she’s not fooling anyone.”

  “Is she stepping on someone’s toes?”

  “Not quite, but she’s comin’ close. You know, in this town no one cares what you do as long as you don’t cheat. She shouldn’t call attention to herself.”

  “Thanks for the information,” I said.

  “For sure,” he said and hung up.

  I showered and put on a pair of slacks and a shirt, then went across the street and ate fried clams drowned in ketchup with an order of french fries on the side. I got two cups of coffee to go and went back to my room. As soon as the door shut behind me, the phone began to ring. This time it was Charlie Scorsoni.

  “How’s Denver?” I asked as soon as he identified himself.

  “Not bad. How’s L.A.?

  “Fair. I’m driving up to Las Vegas tonight.”

  “Gambling fever?”

  “Not a bit. I got a line on Sharon.”

  “Terrific. Tell her to pay me back my six hundred bucks.

  “Yeah. Right. With interest. I’m trying to find out what she knows about a murder and you want me to hassle her about a bad debt.”

  “I’ll never have occasion to, that’s for sure. When will you be back in Santa Teresa?”

  “Maybe Saturday. When I come back through L.A. on Friday, I want to see some boxes that belong to Libby Glass. But I don’t think it will take long. What makes you ask?”

  “I want to buy you a drink,” he said. “I’m leaving Denver day after tomorrow, so I’ll be in town before you. Will you call me when you get back?”

  I hesitated ever so slightly. “Okay.”

  “I mean, don’t put yourself out, Millhone,” he said wryly.

  I laughed. “I’ll call. I swear.”

  “Great. See you then.”

  After I hung up, I could feel a silly smile linger on my face long after it should have. What was it about that man?

  Las Vegas is about six hours from L.A. and I decided I might as well hit the road. It was just after 7:00 and not dark yet, so I threw my things in the backseat of my car and told Arlette I’d be gone for a couple of days.

  “You want me to refer calls or what?” she said.

  “I’ll call you when I get there and let you know how I can be reached,” I said.

  I headed north on the San Diego Freeway, picking up the Ventura, which I followed east until it turned into the Colorado Freeway, one of the few benign roads in the whole of the L.A. freeway system. The Colorado is broad and sparsely traveled, cutting across the northern boundary of metropolitan Los Angeles. It is possible to change lanes on the Colorado without having an anxiety attack and the sturdy concrete divider that separates east and westbound traffic is a comforting assurance that cars will not wantonly drift over and crash into your vehicle head-on. From the Colorado, I doglegged south, picking up the San Bernardino Freeway, taking 15 northeast on a long irregular diagonal toward Las Vegas. With any luck, I could talk to Sharon Napier and then head south to the Salton Sea, where Greg Fife was living. I could complete the circuit with a swing up to Claremont on my way back for a brief chat with his sister, Diane. At this point, I wasn’t sure what the journey would net me but I needed to complete the basics of my investigation. And Sharon Napier was bound to prove interesting.

  I like driving at night. I’m not a sightseer at heart and in travels across the country, I’m never tempted by detours to scenic wonders. I’m not interested in hundred-foot rocks shaped like crookneck squash. I’m not keen on staring down into gullies formed by rivers now defunct and I do not marvel at great holes in the ground where meteors once fell to earth. Driving anywhere looks much the same to me. I stare at the concrete roadway. I watch the yellow line. I keep track of large trucks and passenger vehicles with little children asleep in the backseat and I keep my foot pressed flat to the floor until I reach my destination.

  Chapter 12

  *

  By the time Las Vegas loomed up, twinkling on the horizon, it was well after midnight and I felt stiff. I was anxious to avoid the Strip. I would have avoided the whole town if I could. I don’t gamble, having no instincts for the sport and even less curiosity. Life in Las Vegas exactly suits my notion of some eventual life in cities under the sea. Day and night mean nothing. People ebb and surge aimlessly as though pulled by invisible thermal currents that are swift and disagreeably close. Everything is made of plaster of paris, imitative, larger than life, profoundly impersonal. The whole town smells of $1.89 fried shrimp dinners.

  I found a motel near the airport, on the outskirts of town. The Bagdad looked like a foreign legion post made of marzipan. The night manager was dressed in a gold satin vest and an orange satin shirt with full puffed sleeves. He wore a fez with a tassel. His breathing had a raspy quality that made me want to clear my throat.

  “Are you an out-of-state married couple?” he asked, not looking up.

  “No.”

  “There’s fifty dollars worth of coupons with a double if you’re an out-of-state married couple. I’ll put it down. Nobody checks.”

  I gave him my credit card, which he ran off while I filled out the registration form. He gave me my key and a small paper cup full of nickels for the slot machines near the door. I left them on the counter.

  I parked in the space outside my door and left the car, taking a cab into town through the artificial daylight of Glitter Gulch. I paid the cabbie and took a moment to orient myself. There was a constant stream of traffic on East Fremont, the sidewalks crowded with tourists, hot yellow sips, and flashing lights ��� THE MINT, THE FOUR QUEENS ��� illuminating a complete catalogue of hustlers: pimps and prostitutes, pickpockets, corn-fed con artists from the Midwest who flock to Vegas with the conviction that the system can be beaten with sufficient cunning and industry. I went into the Fremont.

  I could smell the Chinese food from the coffee shop and the odor of chicken chow mein mingled oddly with the perfumed jet trail left by a woman who passed me in a royal blue polyester print pantsuit that made her look like a piece of walking wallpaper. I watched idly as she began to feed quarters into a slot machine in the lobby. The blackjack tables were off to my left. I asked one of the pit bosses about Sharon Napier and was told she’d be in at 11:00 in the morning. I hadn’t really expected to run into her that night, but I wanted to get a feel for the place.

  The casino hummed, the croupiers at the craps tables shoveling chips back and forth with a stick like some kind of tabletop shuffleboard with rules of its own. I once made a tour of the Nevada Dice Company, watching with something close to reverence as the sixty-pound cellulose nitrate slabs, an inch thick, were cured and cut into cubes, slightly bigger than the finished size, hardened, buffed and drilled on all sides, a white resinous compound applied to the sunken dots with special brushes. The dice, in process, looked like tiny squares of cherry Jell-O that might have been served up like some sort of low-cal dessert. I watched people place their bets. The Pass line, the Don’t Pass line, Come, Don’t Come, the Field, the Big 6 and the Big 8 were mysteries of another kind and I couldn’t, for the life of me, penetrate the catechism of wins, losses, numbers being rattled out in a low chant of intense concentration and surprise. Over it all there hung a pale cloud of cigarette smoke, infused with the smell of spilled Scotch. The darkened mirrors above the tables must have been scanned by countless pairs of eyes, restlessly raking the patrons below for telltale signs of chicanery. Nothing could escape notice. The atmosphere was that of a crowded Woolworth’s at Christmas, where the throngs of frantic shoppers couldn’t be trusted not to lift an item now and then. Even the employees might lie, cheat, and steal, and nothing could be left to chance. I felt a fleeting respect for the whole system of checks and balances that keeps so much money flowing freely and allows so little to slip back into the individual pockets from
which it has been coaxed. A sudden feeling of exhaustion came over me. I walked back out to the street again and found a cab.

  The “Middle Eastern” decor of the Bagdad halted abruptly at the door to my room. The carpet was dark green cotton shag, the wallpaper lime-green foil in a pattern of overlapping palms, flocked with small clumps that might have been dates or clusters of fruit bats. I locked the door, kicked off my shoes, and pulled down the chenille spread, crawling under the covers with relief. I put a quick call through to my answering service and another to a groggy Arlette, leaving my latest location with the number where I could be reached.

  I woke up at 10:00 A.M., feeling the first faint stages of a headache as though I had a hangover in the making before I’d even had a drink. Vegas tends to affect me that way, some combination of tension and dread to which my body responds with all the symptoms of incipient flu. I took two Tylenols and showered for a long time, trying to wash away the roiling whisper of nausea. I felt like I’d eaten a pound of cold buttered popcorn and washed it down with bulk saccharin.

  I stepped out of my motel room, the light causing me to squint. The air, at least, was fresh and there was, by day, the sense of a town subdued and shrunken, flattened out again to its true proportions. The desert stretched away behind the motel in a haze of pale gray, fading to mauve at the horizon. The wind was mild and dry, the promise of summer heat only hinted at in the distant shimmering sunlight that sat on the desert floor in flat pools, evaporating on approach. Occasional patches of sagebrush, nearly silver with dust, broke up the long low lines of treeless wasteland fenced in by distant hills.

  I stopped off at the post office and left a fifty-dollar money order for my friend and then I checked out the address he had given me. Sharon Napier lived in a two-story apartment complex on the far side of town, salmon-pink stucco eroding around the edges as though animals had crept up in the night to gnaw the comers away. The roof was nearly flat, peppered with rocks, the iron railings sending streaks of rust down the sides of the building. The landscaping was rock and yucca and cactus plants. There were only twenty units, arranged around a kidney-shaped pool that was separated from the parking area by a dun-colored cinder-block wall. A couple of young kids were splashing about in the pool and a middle-aged woman was standing in front of her apartment up on the landing, a grocery bag wedged between her hip and the door as she let herself in. A Chicano boy hosed down the walks. The buildings on either side of the complex were single-family dwellings. There was a vacant lot across the street in back.

  Sharon’s apartment was on the ground floor, her name was neatly embossed on the mailbox on a white plastic strip. Her drapes were drawn, but some of the hooks had come loose at the top, causing the lined fabric to bow inward and sag, forming a gap through which I could see a beige Formica table and two beige upholstered plastic kitchen chairs. The telephone sat on one comer of the table, resting on a pile of papers. Beside it was a coffee cup with a waxy crescent of hotpink lipstick on the rim. A cigarette, also rimmed with pink, had been extinguished in the saucer. I glanced around. No one seemed to be paying any particular attention to me. I walked quickly through a passageway that connected the courtyard to the rear of the apartment building.

  Sharon’s apartment number was marked on the rear door, too, and there were four other back doors at intervals, the rear entrances emptying into little rectangles surrounded by shoulder-high cinder-block walls designed, I suspected, to create the illusion of small patios. The trash containers were lined up on the walkway outside the wall. Her kitchen curtains were drawn. I eased onto her little patio. She had arranged six geraniums in pots along the back step. There were two aluminum folding chairs stacked against the wall, a pile of old newspapers by the back door. There was a small window up on the right and a larger window beyond that. I couldn’t judge whether it might be her bedroom or her neighbor’s. I looked out across the vacant lot and then eased out of the patio, turning left along the walk, which opened out onto the street again. I got back in my car and headed for the Fremont.

  I felt as if I’d never left. The lady in royal blue was still pasted to the quarter slot machine, her hair sculpted into a glossy mahogany scrollwork on top of her head. The same crowd seemed to be pressed to the craps table as though by magnetic force, the croupier pushing chips back and forth with his little stick as if it were a flat-bottomed broom and someone had made an expensive mess. Waitresses circulated with drinks and a heavyset man, whom I guessed to be plainclothes security, wandered about trying to look like a tourist whose luck had gone bad. I could hear the sounds of a female vocalist in the Carnival Lounge, singing a slightly flat but lusty medley of Broadway show tunes. I caught a glimpse of her, emoting to a half-deserted room, her face a bright powder pink under the spotlight.

  Sharon Napier was not hard to find. She was tall, maybe five ten or better in her high-heeled shoes. She was the sort of woman you noticed from the ground up: long shapely legs looking slender in black mesh hose, a short black skirt flaring slightly at the tops of her thighs. She had narrow hips, a flat stomach, and her breasts were pushed together to form pronounced mounds. The bodice of her black outfit was tight and low-cut, her name stitched above her left breast. Her hair was an ashen blonde, pallid under the houselights; her eyes an eerie green, a luminous shade I guessed to be from tinted contact lenses. Her skin was pale and unblemished, the oval of her face as white as eggshell and as finely textured. Her lips were full and wide, the bright pink lipstick emphasizing their generous proportions. It was a mouth built for unnatural acts. Something about her demeanor promised cool improvisational sex for the right price and it would not be cheap.

  She dealt cards mechanically, with remarkable speed. Three men were perched on stools ranged around the table where she worked. No one said a word. The communication was by the slightest lift of a hand, cards turned over or placed under substantial bets, a shoulder shrugged as the up card showed. Two down, one up. Flick, flick. One man scraped the edge of his up card against the surface of the table, asking for a hit. On the second round, one man turned up a blackjack and she paid off ��� two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of chips. I could see his eyes take her in as she flicked the cards back, shuffling quickly, dealing out cards again. He was thin, with a narrow balding head and a dark mustache, shirt sleeves rolled up, underarms stained with sweat. His gaze drifted down across her body and back up again to the immaculate face, cold and clean, the green eyes blazing. She paid no particular attention to him, but I had the feeling the two of them might do some private business later on. I retreated to another table, watching her from an easy distance. At 1:30, she took a break. Another dealer took her place and she crossed the casino, heading toward the Fiesta Room, where she ordered a Coke and lit up a cigarette. I followed.

  “Are you Sharon Napier?” I asked.

  She looked up. Her eyes were rimmed with dark lashes, the green taking on an almost turquoise hue in the fluorescent light overhead.

  “I don’t think we’ve met,” she said.

  “I’m Kinsey Millhone,” I said. “May I sit down?”

  She shrugged by way of consent. She took a compact out of her pocket and checked her eye makeup’, removing a slight smudge of shadow from her upper lid. Her lashes were clearly false, but the effect was flashy, giving her eyes an exotic slant. She applied fresh lip gloss, using her little finger, which she dipped into a tiny pot of pink. “What can I do for you?” she asked, glancing up briefly from her compact mirror.

  “I’m looking into the death of Laurence Fife.”

  That stopped her. She paused, her whole body going still. If I’d been taking a picture, it would have been the perfect pose. A second passed and she was in motion again. She snapped the compact shut and tucked it away, taking up her cigarette. She took a long drag, watching me all the while. She flicked an ash. “He was a real shitheel,” she said brusquely, smoke wafting out with each word.

  “So I’ve heard,” I said. “Did you work for him lon
g?”

  She smiled. “Well, you’ve done your homework at any rate. I bet you even know the answer to that.”

  “More or less,” I said. “But there’s lots I don’t know. Want to fill me in?”

  “On what?”

  I shrugged. “What it was like to work for him? How you felt about his death…”

  “He was a prick to work for. I felt terrific about his death,” she said. “I hated secretarial work in case you haven’t guessed.”

  “This must suit you better,” I said.

  “Look, I got nothing to discuss with you,” she said flatly. “Who sent you up here anyway?”

  I took a flyer on that one. “Nikki.”

  She seemed startled. “She’s still in prison. Isn’t she?”

  I shook my head. “She’s out.”

  She took a moment to calculate and then her manner became somewhat more gracious. “She’s got bucks, right?”

  “She’s not hurting, if that’s what you mean.”

  She stubbed out her cigarette, bending the live ember under and mashing it flat. “I’m off at seven. Why don’t you come out to my place and we can chat.”

  “Anything you’d care to mention now?”

  “Not here,” she said.

  She rattled out her address and I dutifully jotted it down in my notebook. She glanced off to the left and I thought at first she was lifting a hand to greet a friend. Her smile flashed and then faltered and she glanced back at me with uncertainty, turning slightly so that my line of sight was blocked. I peered back over her shoulder automatically but she distracted my attention, touching the back of my hand with a fingernail. I looked at her. She towered over me, her expression remote.

  “That was the pit boss. End of my break.”

  She told lies the way I do, with a certain breezy insolence that dares the listener to refute or contradict.

  “I’ll see you at seven then, ” I said.

  “Make it seven forty-five,” she said easily. “I need time to unwind from work.”