by Sue Grafton
“Ash says Lyda Case called.”
Terry took my arm and steered me toward the entrance to the social hall. “She’s here in town. She wants to meet with me.”
“Bullshit. No way,” I whispered hoarsely.
Terry looked at me uneasily. “I know it sounds crazy, but she says she has some information that could be of help.”
“I’m sure she does. It’s probably in a box and goes boom when you pick it up.”
“I asked her about that. She swears she didn’t have anything to do with Olive’s death.”
“And you believed her?”
“I guess I did in a way.”
“Hey, you were the one who told me about the threat. She scared the life out of you and here she is again. If you won’t call Lieutenant Dolan, I will.”
I thought he would argue, but he sighed once. “All right. I know it’s the only thing that makes any sense. I’ve just been in such a fog.”
“Where’s she staying?”
“She didn’t say. She wants to meet at the bird refuge at six. Would you be willing to come? She asked for you by name.”
“Why me?”
“I don’t know. She said you flew to Texas to talk to her. I can’t believe you didn’t mention that when the subject came up.”
“Sorry. I guess I should have. That was early in the week. I was trying to get a line on Hugh Case, to see how his death fits in.”
“And?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’d be very surprised if it didn’t connect. I just can’t figure out how.”
Terry gave me a skeptical look. “It’s never been proven he was murdered, has it?”
“Well, that’s true,” I said. “It just seems highly unlikely that the lab work would disappear unless somebody meant to conceal the evidence. Maybe it’s the same person with a different motive this time.”
“What makes you say that? Carbon-monoxide poisoning is about as far away from bombs as you can get. Wouldn’t the guy use the same method if it worked so well the first time?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. If it were me, I’d do whatever was expedient. The point is, this is not something we should fool around with on our own.”
I saw Terry’s gaze focus on something behind me. I turned to see Bass. He looked old. Everybody had aged in the wake of Olive’s death, but on Bass the lines of weariness were the least flattering ��� something puffy about the eyes, something pouty about the mouth. He had one of those boyish faces that didn’t lend itself to deep emotion. On him, sorrow looked like a form of petulance. “I’m taking Mother home,” he said.
“I’ll be right there,” Terry said. Bass moved away and Terry turned back to me. “Do you want to call Lieutenant Dolan or should I?”
“I’ll do it,” I said. “If there’s any problem, I’ll let you know. Otherwise, I’ll meet you down at the bird refuge at six.”
I was home by 3:35, but it took me almost an hour to track down the lieutenant, who was certainly interested in having a chat with Lyda Case. He said he’d be there at 5:00 in an unmarked car, on the off-chance that she was feeling truly skittish about contact with the police. I changed into jeans and a sweatshirt and pulled on my tennis shoes. I was tired, and the residual pain from my injuries was like a slow leak from a tire, depleting. Over the course of the day, I could feel myself go flat. In some ways I shared Terry’s sentiments. It was hard to believe Lyda was responsible for the package bomb, let alone her husband’s death two years before. In spite of her accusations and the veiled threat to Terry, she didn’t seem like the homicidal type, for whatever that’s worth. I’ve been surprised by killers again and again, and I try not to generalize, but there it was. Maybe she was just what she claimed to be… someone with information that might be of help.
By the time I reached the meeting place, the sun was almost down. The bird refuge is a landscaped preserve near the beach, established to protect geese, swans, and other fowl. The forty-three-acre property abuts the zoo and consists of an irregular-shaped freshwater lagoon, surrounded by a wide lane of clipped grass through which a bike trail runs. There’s a small parking lot at one end where parents bring little children with their plastic bags of old popcorn and stale bread. Male pigeons puff and posture in jerky pursuit of their inattentive female counterparts who manage to strut along just one step away from conception.
I pulled into the lot and parked. I got out of my car. Sea gulls swirled and settled in an oddly choreographed dance of their own. Geese honked along the shore in search of crumbs while the ducks paddled through the still waters, sending out ripples around them. The sky was a deepening gray, the ruffled silver surface of the lagoon reflecting the rising wind.
I was glad when Lieutenant Dolan’s car pulled in beside mine. We chatted idly until Terry appeared, and then the three of us waited. Lyda Case never showed. At 8:15, we finally gave it up. Terry took Dolan’s number and said he’d be in touch if he heard from her. It was a bit of a letdown, as all three of us had hoped for a break in the case. Terry seemed grateful for the activity and I had to guess that it was going to be hard for him to spend his first night alone. He’d been in the hospital Friday night and with his mother-in-law on Saturday while the bomb squad finished their crime-scene investigation and a work crew came in to board up the front wall of the house.
My own sense of melancholy had returned in full force. Funerals and the new year are a bad mix. The painkillers I’d been taking dulled my mental processes and left me feeling somewhat disconnected from reality. I needed companionship. I wanted lights and noise and a good dinner somewhere with a decent glass of wine and talk of anything except death. I fancied myself an independent soul, but I could see how easily my attachments could form.
I drove home hoping Daniel would appear again. With him, you never knew. The day he walked out of the marriage eight years before, he hadn’t even left a note. He didn’t like to deal with anger or recrimination. He said it bummed him out to be around people who were sad, depressed, or upset. His strategy was to let other people cope with unpleasantness. I’d seen him do it with his family, with old friends, with gigs that no longer interested him. One day he wasn’t there, and you might not see him for two years. By then, you couldn’t even remember why you’d been so pissed off.
Sometimes, as in my case, there’d be some residual rage, which Daniel usually found puzzling. Strong emotion is hard to sustain in the face of bafflement. You run out of things to say. Most of the time, in the old days, he was stoned anyway, so confronting him was about as productive as trying to discipline a cat for spraying on the drapes. He didn’t “get it.” Fury didn’t make any sense to him. He couldn’t see the connection between his behavior and the wrath that was generated as a consequence. What the man did really well was play. He was a free spirit, whimsical, inventive, tireless, sweet. Jazz piano, sex, travel, parties, he was wonderful at those… until he got bored, of course, or until reality surfaced, and then he was gone. I had never been taught how to play, so I learned a lot from him. I’m just not sure it was anything I really needed to know.
I found a parking spot six doors away. Daniel’s car was parked in front of my place. He was leaning against the fender. There was a paper bag with twine handles near his feet, a baguette of French bread sticking out of it like a baseball bat.
“I thought you might be gone by today,” I said.
“I talked to my friend. It looks like I’ll be here a couple days more.”
“You find a place to stay?”
“I hope so. There’s a little motel here in the neighborhood that will have a room free later. Some folks are checking out.”
“That’s nice. You can reclaim your stuff.”
“I’ll do that as soon as I know for sure.”
“What’s that?” I said, pointing at the baguette.
He looked down at the sack, his gaze following mine. “Picnic,” he said. “I thought I’d play the piano some, too.”
“How long have you been he
re?”
“Since six,” he said. “You feel all right? You look beat.”
“I am. Come on in. I hope you have wine. I could use some.”
He pushed away from the car, toting the bag as he followed me through the gate. We ended up at Henry’s, sitting on the floor in his living room. Daniel had bought twenty-five votive candles and he arranged those around the room until I felt like I was sitting in the middle of a birthday cake. We had wine, pate, cheeses, French bread, cold salads, fresh raspberries, and sugar cookies the size of Frisbees. I stretched out afterward in a food-induced reverie while Daniel played the piano. Daniel didn’t play music so much as he discovered it, calling up melodies, pursuing them across the keys, embroidering, embellishing. His background was in classical piano, so he warmed up with Chopin, Liszt, the intricacies of Bach, drifting over into improvisation without effort.
Daniel stopped abruptly.
I opened my eyes and looked at him.
His expression was pained. He touched at the keyboard carelessly, a sour chord. “It’s gone. I don’t have it anymore. I gave up drugs and the music went with “em.”
I sat up. “What are you talking about?”
“Just what I said. It was the choice I had to make, but it’s all bullshit. I can live without drugs, babe, but not without music. I’m not made that way.”
“It sounded fine. It was beautiful.”
“What do you know, Kinsey? You don’t know anything. That was all technique. Mechanics. I got no soul. The only time music works is when I’m burning with smack, flying. This is nothing. Half-life. The other is better… when I’m on fire like that and give it all away. You can’t hold back. It’s all or nothin’.”
I could feel my body grow still. “What are you saying?” Dumb question. I knew.
His eyes glowed and he pinched his thumb and index finger together near his lips, sucking in air. It was the gesture he always used when he was about to roll a joint. He looked down at the crook of his elbow and made a fist lovingly.
“Don’t do that,” I said.
“Why not?”
“It’ll kill you.”
He shrugged. “Why can’t I live the way I want? I’m the devil. I’m bad. You should know that by now. There isn’t anything I wouldn’t do just for the hell of it… just to stay awake. Fuck. I’d like to fly again, you know? I’d like to feel good. I’ll tell you something about being straight… it’s a goddamn drag. I don’t know how you put up with it. I don’t know how you keep from hangin’ yourself.”
I crumpled up paper napkins and stuffed them in the sack, gathered paper plates, plastic ware, the empty wine bottle, cardboard containers. He sat on the piano bench, his hands held loosely in his lap. I doubted he’d live to see forty-three.
“Is that why you came back?” I asked. “To lay this on me. What do you want, permission? Approval?”
“Yeah, I’d like that.”
I started blowing out candles, darkness gathering like smoke around the edges of the room. You can’t argue with people who fall in love with death. “Get out of my life, Daniel. Would you just do that?”
Chapter 20
*
I got up Monday morning at 6:00 and did a slow, agonizing five-mile jog. I was in bad shape and I had no business being out there at all, but I couldn’t help myself. This had to be the worst Christmas I’d ever spent and the new year wasn’t shaping up all that great as far as I could see. It was now January 3, and I wanted my life back the way it was. With luck, Rosie would reopen later in the day, and maybe Jonah would return from Idaho. Henry was flying home on Friday. I recited my blessings to myself as I ran, ignoring the fact that my body hurt, that I had no office at the moment, and a cloud of suspicion was still hanging over my head.
The sky was clear, a torpid breeze picking up. The day seemed unseasonably warm even at that hour, and I wondered if we were experiencing Santa Ana conditions, winds gusting in from the desert, hot drafts like the blast from an oven. It was the wrong time of year for it, but the air had that dry, dusty feel to it. The sweat on my face evaporated almost at once and my T-shirt was clinging to my back like a hot, soggy rag. By the time I got back to my neighborhood, I felt I’d blown some of the tension away. Kinsey Millhone, perpetual optimist. I jogged all the way to Henry’s gate and took a few minutes walking back and forth, catching my breath, cooling down. Daniel’s car was gone. In its place was a vehicle I hadn’t seen before ��� a compact, judging from the shape, anonymous under a pale-blue cotton car cover. Off-street parking in the area is restricted and garages are rare. If I ever got a new car, I’d have to invest in a cover myself. I leaned against the fence, stretching my hamstrings dutifully before I went in to shower.
Lance Wood called me at 8:00. The background noise was that hollow combination of traffic and enclosure that suggests a phone booth.
“Where are you?” I asked, as soon as he’d identified himself.
“On a street corner in Colgate. I think my phone at work is tapped,” he said.
“Have you had it checked?”
“Well, I’m not really sure how to go about it and I feel like a fool asking the phone company to come out.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “That’s like asking the fox to secure the henhouse. What makes you think you’ve got a tap?”
“Odd stuff. I’ll have a conversation and the next thing I know, something I’ve said is all over the place. I’m not talking about office gossip. It’s something more insidious than that, like comments I’ve made to out-of-state customers that people here would have no way of knowing.”
“Could it be a simple case of someone listening in? A lot of employees have access to the phones out there.”
“Not my private line. It isn’t like anything we do is top secret, but we all say things we’d rather not have spread around. Someone’s making me look very bad. Is there some way you can check it out?”
“I can try,” I said. “What about the phone itself? Have you tried unscrewing the mouthpiece?”
“Sure, but I don’t know what the inside of a receiver’s supposed to look like. I’m not picking up any odd noises or clicks, I will say that.”
“You wouldn’t if the tap is set up properly. It’d be virtually undetectable. Of course, it might not be that at all,” I said. “Maybe the office itself is bugged.”
“In which case, what? Is that something you can spot?”
“Sometimes, with luck. It’s also possible to buy an electronic device that will scan for bugs. I’ll see if I can locate one before I come out. Give me a couple of hours and I’ll meet you at the plant. I’ve got some other things I probably ought to take care of first.”
“Right. Thanks.”
I took the next hour to type up my notes, clipping the newspaper article about the explosion to include with my files. I tried Lyda Case’s telephone number in Texas on the off chance that her roommate had heard from her. It would help if I knew how to find her here in Santa Teresa.
At 9:10, my phone rang. It was Darcy calling from California Fidelity and talking as if she had a hand cupped over the mouthpiece. “Big trouble,” she said.
I could feel my heart sink. “Now what?”
“If I change the subject abruptly, you’ll know Mac walked in,” she murmured. “I overheard a conversation between him and Jewel. He says someone tipped the cops about the warehouse inventory. It looks like Lance Wood moved all the merchandise to another location before his warehouse burned down. The inventory he claimed reimbursement for was all worthless junk.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said. “I saw some of it myself. I must have gone through five or six boxes when I inspected the place.”
“Well, I guess he had a few real boxes seeded in among the fake. He’s going to be charged, Kinsey. Arson and fraud, and you’re being named as co-conspirator. Mac turned everything over to the D.A. this morning. I thought you’d like to know in case you need to talk to an attorney.”
“What’s the tim
etable? Do you know?”
“Mr. Motycka isn’t in today, but I can leave a message on his desk,” she said.
“Is that Mac?”
“He didn’t say exactly, but we’re expecting him some time today. Uh-hun. Yes, I’ll do that. All right, thanks,” she said and hung up.
I put a call through to Lonnie Kingman and alerted him. He said he’d check with the D.A.‘s office and find out if a warrant was being issued. His advice was to surrender voluntarily, thus avoiding the ignominy and uncertainty of a public arrest.
“Jesus, I can’t believe this is happening,” I said.
“Well, it hasn’t yet. Don’t worry about it until I tell you to,” he said.
I grabbed my handbag and car keys and headed out the door. I had disconnected my emotions again. There was no point in letting anxiety get in my way. I hopped in my car and drove over to an electrical-supply place on Granita. My knowledge of electronic surveillance was bound to be out-of-date, limited to information picked up in a crash course at the Police Academy nearly ten years before. The advances in miniaturization since then had probably revolutionized the field, but I suspected the basics were always going to be the same. Microphone, transmitter, recorder of some type, probably voice-activated these days. The planting can be done by a technician disguised as any commonly seen service person: telephone lineman, meter reader, cable-television installer. Electronic surveillance is expensive, illegal unless authorized by the court, and looks a lot easier on television than it is in real life. Bug detection is another matter altogether. It was always possible, of course, that Lance Wood was imagining the whole thing, but I doubted it.
The small all-band receiver I bought was about the size of a portable radio. While not truly all-band, it was sufficient to cover most bugging frequencies-30-50 MHz and 88-108 MHz. If the bug in his office was wired, I was going to have to find the wire myself, but if the bug was wireless, the receiver would start emitting a high-pitched squeal when it was within range.