M is for MALICE

by Sue Grafton

  I said, “Dietz?”

  No response.

  I left my handbag and the briefcase on the counter and crossed the patio to Henry’s, where I peered in the kitchen window. Dietz was sitting in Henry’s rocking chair, his pant leg pulled up to expose his injured knee. The swelling had visibly diminished and from various gestures he was making, it seemed safe to guess he’d had the fluid drained out of it. Even his pantomime of a hypodermic needle being stuck into his flesh made my palms start to sweat. At first he didn’t see me. It was like watching a silent movie, the two men earnestly engrossed in medical matters. Henry, at eighty-five, was so familiar to me ��� handsome, good-hearted, lean, intelligent. Dietz was constructed along sturdier lines ��� solid, tough, stubborn, impulsive, just as smart as Henry, but more streetwise ��� than intellectual. I found myself smiling at the two of them. Where Henry was mild, Dietz was restless and rough, without artifice. I valued his honesty, distrusted his concern, resented his wanderlust, and yearned for definition in our relationship. In the midst of all the heaviness I felt, Dietz was leavening.

  He glanced up, spotting me. He raised a hand in greeting without rising from the chair.

  Henry crossed to the door and let me in. Dietz lowered his pant leg with a brief aside to me about a walk-in medical clinic up in Santa Cruz. Henry offered coffee, but Dietz declined. I don’t even remember now what the three of us talked about. In the course of idle chitchat, Dietz put his hand on my elbow, setting off a surge of heat. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught his quizzical look. Whatever I was feeling must have been transmitted through the wires to him. I must have been buzzing like a power line because even Henry’s easy flow of conversation seemed to falter and fade. Dietz glanced at his watch, making a startled sound as if late for an appointment. We made our hasty excuses, moving out of Henry’s backdoor and across to my place without exchanging a word.

  The door closed behind us. The apartment felt cool. Pale sunlight filtered through the shuttered windows in a series of horizontal lines. The interior had the look and the feel of a sailboat: compact, simple, with royal blue canvas chairs, walls of polished teak and oak. Dietz undid the bed in the window bay, easing out of his shoes. I slipped my clothes off, aware of flickering desire as each garment was removed. Dietz’s clothes joined mine in a heap on the floor. We sank together, in a rolling motion. The sheets were chill at first, as blue as the sea, warming at contact with our bare limbs. His skin was luminous, as polished as the surface of an abalone shell. Something about the play of shadows infused the air with a watery element, bathing us both in its transparent glow. It felt as if we were swimming in the shallows, as smooth and graceful as a pair of sea otters tumbling through the surf. Our lovemaking played out in silence, except for a humming in his throat now and then. I don’t often think of sex as an antidote to pain, but that’s what this was and I fully confess ��� I used intimacy with the one man to offset the loss of the other. It was the only means I could think of to console myself. Even in the moment, what seemed odd to me was the flicker of confusion about which man I betrayed.

  Later, I said to Dietz, “Are you hungry? I’m starving.”

  “I am, too,” he said. Gentleman that he was, he’d padded over to the refrigerator where he stood buck naked in a shaft of hot light, contemplating the interior. “How could we be out of food? Don’t you eat when I’m gone?”

  “There’s food,” I said defensively.

  “A jar of bread-and-butter pickles.”

  “I can make sandwiches. There’s bread in the freezer and half a jar of peanut butter in the cupboard up there.”

  He gave me a look like I’d suggested cooking up a mess of garden slugs. He closed the refrigerator door and opened the freezer compartment, poking through some cellophane wrapped packages of meat products covered in ice crystals and suffering from freezer burn. He closed the freezer, returned to the sofa bed, and got under the sheets. “I’m not going to last long. We have to eat,” he said.

  “I couldn’t believe you came back. I thought you were taking the boys off on a trip.”

  “Turns out they had plans to go camping with friends in Yosemite and didn’t know how to tell me. When I read about the murder in the Santa Cruz papers, I told them I needed to drive back. I felt guilty as hell, but they were thrilled to death. Given the perversity of human nature, it pissed me off somehow. They could hardly get me in the car fast enough. I pull away and I’m looking in the rearview mirror. They don’t even stop to wave. They’re galloping up the outside stairs to grab their sleeping bags.”

  “You had a few days together.”

  “And that was good. I enjoyed them,” he said. “So tell me about you and what’s been happening down here.”

  Having been through the drill with Lonnie, I laid out events with remarkable efficiency, faltering only slightly in my account of Guy. Even the sound of his name touched a well of sorrow in me.

  “You need a game plan,” he said, briskly.

  I waggled my hand, maybe-so-maybe-not. “Jack will probably be arraigned tomorrow if he hasn’t been already.”

  “Will Lonnie waive time?”

  “I have no idea. Probably not.”

  “Which means he’ll insist on a prelim within ten court days. That doesn’t give us much time. What about this business of Max Outhwaite? We could try chasing that down.”

  I noted the “we,” but let it sit there unacknowledged. Was he seriously proposing help? “What’s to chase?” I asked. “I tried the hall of records and voter registration. Also the city directories. The name’s as phony as the address.”

  “What about the crisscross?”

  “I did that.”

  “Old telephone books?”

  “Yeah, I did that, too.”

  “How far back?”

  “Six years.”

  “Why six? Why not take it all the way back to the year Guy Malek left? Even before that. Max Outhwaite, could be the victim of a rip-off during his teen crime years.”

  “If the name’s a fake, it’s not going to matter how far back I go.”

  “In other words, you were too lazy,” he said, mildly. “Right,” I said, without taking offense.

  “What about the letters themselves?”

  “One’s a fax. The other’s typed, on ordinary white bond. No distinguishing marks. I could have dusted for prints, but there didn’t seem to be much point. We’ve got no way to run them and nothing for comparison even if a latent turned up. I did put the one letter in a plastic sleeve to protect it to some extent. Then I made copies of both letters. I left one set at the office, locked away in my desk. I get paranoid about these things.”

  “You have the other set here?”

  “In my briefcase.”

  “Let’s take a look.”

  I pushed the sheet back and got up. I retrieved my briefcase from the kitchen counter and sorted through the contents, returning to the sofa bed with my pack of index cards and the two letters. I slid between the sheets again and handed him the paperwork, turning over on my side so I could watch him work. He put his glasses on. “This is really romantic, you know that, Dietz?”

  “We can’t screw around all day. I’m fifty. I’m old. I have to save my strength.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  We propped up the pillows and settled in side by side while Dietz read the two letters and thumbed through my index cards. “What do you think?” I asked.

  “I think Outhwaite’s a good bet. Seems like the object of the exercise is to find another candidate, divert attention from Jack if nothing else.”

  “Lonnie said the same thing. The evidence looks damning, but it’s all circumstantial. Lonnie’s hoping we can find someone else to point a finger at. I think he favors Donovan or Bennet.”

  “The more the merrier. If the cops think Jack’s motivation was Guy’s share of the inheritance, then the same case could be made for the other two. It would have been just as easy for one of them to slip int
o Guy’s room.” He was thumbing through the index cards. He held a card up. “What’s this mean? What kind of scam are you referring to?”

  I took the card and studied it. The note said: widow cheated out of nest egg. “Oh. I’m not sure. I wrote down everything I could remember from my first interview with Donovan. He was talking about the scrapes Guy’d been in over the years. Most sounded petty acts of vandalism, joyriding, stuff like that ��� but he was also involved in a swindle of some kind. I didn’t ask at the time because I was just starting my search and I was focusing on ways to track him down. I didn’t care what he’d done unless it somehow pertained.”

  “Might be worth it to take a good hard look at his past. People knew he was back. Maybe somebody had a score to settle.”

  “That crossed my mind, too. I mean, why else would Max Outhwaite notify the paper?” I said. “I’ve also toyed with the idea that one of Guy’s brothers might have written the letters.”

  “Why?”

  “To make it look like he had enemies, someone outside the family who might have wanted him dead. By the way, Bader kept a file of newspaper clippings, detailing Guy’s escapades.”

  Dietz turned and looked at me. “Anything of interest?”

  “Well, nothing jumps right out. I’ve got it at the office, if you want to see for yourself. Christie offered to let me take it when I was at the house.”

  “Let’s do that. It sounds good. It might help us develop another lead.” He went back to the two letters, analyzing them closely. “What about the third one? What did Guy’s letter say?”

  “I have no idea. Lieutenant Bower wouldn’t tell me and I couldn’t get much out of her. But I’d bet money it’s the same person in all three cases.”

  “Cops probably have their forensic experts doing comparisons.”

  “Maybe. They may not care about Max Outhwaite now that Jack’s in custody. If they’re convinced he’s good for it, why worry about someone else?”

  “You want some help with the grunt work?”

  “I’d love it.”

  Chapter 18

  *

  I dropped Dietz at the public library while I drove out the freeway to Malek Construction. I hadn’t expected to be gone long, but as I turned into the parking lot, I spotted Donovan getting into a company truck. I called his name and gave a quick wave, pulling into a visitor’s space two spots away from his. He waited while I approached and then leaned over and rolled down the window on the passenger side.

  Donovan’s face creased with a smile, his dark eyes all but invisible behind dark sunglasses. “How are you?” he asked. He slid his glasses up on top of his head.

  “Fine. I can see I caught you on your way out. Will you be gone long? I have some questions.”

  “I’ve got some business at the quarry. I’ll only be gone about an hour if you want to come along with me.”

  I thought about it briefly. “Might as well,” I said.

  He moved his hard hat from the passenger seat to the floor, then opened the truck door for me. I hopped in. He wore blue jeans and a jean vest over a blue plaid sport shirt with the sleeves rolled up. His feet were shod in heavy-duty work boots with soles as waffled as tire treads.

  “Where’s the quarry?”

  “Up the pass.” He fired up the pickup and pulled out of the parking lot. “What’s the latest word from Jack?”

  “I haven’t talked to him, but Lonnie Kingman had a meeting with him before they took him off to jail. You talked to Christie?”

  “I took a late lunch,” he said. “I must have gotten home about ten minutes after you left. I had no idea this stuff was going on. How’s it looking at this point?”

  “Hard to say. Lonnie’s in the process of working out his strategy. I’ll probably take a run over to the country club later to start canvassing members who were there on Tuesday. We’d love to find someone who could place Jack at the club between nine-thirty and eleven-thirty.”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

  “You’d be surprised,” I said.

  I’m about as perky as an infant when it comes to riding in trucks. Before we’d even reached the narrow highway that snaked up the pass, I could feel the tension seeping out of me. There’s something lulling being a passenger in a moving vehicle. In Donovan’s pickup, the combination of low grinding sound and gentle bumping nearly put me to sleep. I was tired of thinking about murder, though I’d have to bring the subject around to it eventually. In the meantime, I asked him about the business and took inordinate pleasure in the length of his reply. Donovan steered with one hand, talking over the rattle of the truck.

  “We’ve gotten into recycle crushing where we take broken concrete and asphalt. We have a yard in Colgate where we collect it and we have a portable plant ��� well, we have two portable plants now ��� one in Monterey and one in Stockton. I think we were one of the first in this area to do that. We’re able to crush the materials into road base that meets the specifications. It costs more to haul the materials here than it does the material itself, so you have a cost advantage in the haul.”’

  He went on in this vein while I wondered idly if it might be worthwhile to verify his claims about the company’s solvency. When I turned back in, he was saying, “Right now, we produce about the same quantity out at the rock quarry as we do out at the sand and gravel mine. By far the majority of the sand and gravel operation goes into the production of asphalt concrete. We’re the closest asphalt concrete plant to Santa Teresa. We used to have one in Santa Teresa where we hauled in the sand and the gravel and the liquid asphalt and we made it there, but again, it was more economical to make the product here and haul it into Santa Teresa. I’m probably the only man alive who rhapsodizes about road base and Portland Cement. You want to talk about Jack.”

  “I’d rather talk about Guy.”

  “Well, I can tell you Jack didn’t kill him because it makes no sense. The first thing the cops are going to look at is the three of us. I’m surprised Bennet and I aren’t under scrutiny.”

  “You probably are, though at the moment, all the evidence seems to point to Jack.” I told him about the running shoes and the baseball bat. “You have any idea where the Harley-Davidson was that night?”

  “Home in the garage, I’d guess. The Harley’s Jack’s baby, not mine. I really didn’t have occasion to see it that night. I was upstairs watching TV.”

  We headed up the pass on a winding road bordered by chaparral. The air was still, lying across the mountains in a hush of hot sun. The woody shrubs were as dry as tinder. Farther up the rocky slopes, weeds and ornamental grassesripgut and woodland brome, foxtail fescue and ryegrass had spread across the landscape in a golden haze that softened the stony ridges. Scarcely a breeze stirred outside, but late in the day, the warm descending air would begin to blow down the mountainside. Relative humidity would drop. The wind, squeezing through the canyons, would start picking up speed. Any tiny flame from a campfire, burning cigarette, or the inadvertent spark from weed abatement equipment, might be whipped up in minutes to a major burn. The big fires usually struck in August and September after months under high-pressure areas. However, lately the weather had been moody and unpredictable and there was no way to calculate the course it might take. Below us and at a distance, the Pacific Ocean stretched away to the horizon in a haze of blue. I could see the irregularities of the coastline as it curved to the north.

  Donovan was saying, “I didn’t see Jack that night once he left for the club so I can’t help you there. Aside from his whereabouts, I guess I’m not really sure what you’re looking for.”

  “We can either prove Jack didn’t do it or suggest someone else who did. Where was Bennet that night? Can he account for his time?”

  “You’d have to ask him. He wasn’t home, I know that much. He didn’t come in until late.”

  “The first time we met you told me about some of Guy’s bouts with the law. Couldn’t someone have a grudge?”

  “
You want to go back as far as his days in juvenile Hall?”

  “Maybe. And later, too. You mentioned a ‘widder’ woman he cheated out of money.”

  Donovan shook his head. “Forget it. That’s a dead end.”

  “How so?”

  “Because the whole family’s gone.”

  “They left town?”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “The widow was a Mrs. Maddison. Guy was gone by then and when the old man heard what Guy’d done, he refused to make good. It was one of the few times he got tough. I guess he’d finally gotten sick of cleaning up after him. He told the woman to file charges, but I’m sure she never got around to it. Some people are like that. They don’t take action even when they should.”

  “So what’s the story?”

  We reached the summit and the road opened out to a view I love, a caramel-colored valley dotted with dark green mounds of live oak. Ranches and campgrounds were woven into the land, but most were invisible from up here. The two-lane highway widened into four and we sped across the span of the Cold Spring Bridge. “Guy got involved with a girl named Patty Maddison. That’s two d’s in Maddison. She had an older sister named Claire.”

  I heard a dim clang of recognition, but couldn’t place the name. I must have made some kind of sound because Donovan turned and gave me a quick look. “You know her?” he asked.

  “The name’s familiar. Go on with the story. It’ll come to me.”

  “Their old man never had a dime, but he’d somehow acquired some rare documents ��� letters of some kind ��� worth a big chunk of change. He’d been sick and the deal was, when he died the mother was supposed to sell ‘em to pay for the girls’ educations. The older sister had graduated from a college back East and she was waiting around to go to medical school. Some of the money was earmarked for her and some for Patty’s college.