L Is for Lawless

by Sue Grafton

  I turned the card over and studied the black-and-white photograph pasted on the front. The photo showed the faded image of a graveyard in snow. I picked at the loose edge, peering at the card stock under it. The print had been glued or pasted over a standard commercial picture of the ocean at sunset. I peeled it off and checked the back, hoping for some kind of handwritten note. The print itself was four inches by six, processed on regular Kodak paper, matte finish, no border. Aside from the word Kodak marching across the back, the rest was blank. "You think this is a new photograph reprinted from an old neg? Or maybe a new photo reproduced from an old one?"

  "What difference does it make?"

  I shrugged. "Well, I don't think a picture of the ocean at sunset tells us anything. Maybe the keys aren't related. Maybe the photo is the message and the keys are a diversionary tactic."

  He took the card and moved to the table, holding it to the light as I had, examining the photograph. I peeked over his shoulder. All the headstones looked old, the ornate lettering softened by rain and sanded by harsh winter snows. There were five shorter headstones and three larger monuments of the lamb and angel school. Even the smaller markers, probably granite or marble, were carved with bas-relief leaves and scrolls, crosses, doves. The dominant monument was a white marble obelisk probably twelve feet tall, mounted on a granite pedestal with the name PELISSARO visible. All of the surrounding trees were mature, though barren of leaves. A thin layer of snow covered the ground. One cluster of headstones was enclosed with iron fencing, and I could see a section of stone wall to the right.

  "I don't suppose you recognize the place," I said.

  Ray shook his head. "Could be a private graveyard, like a family plot on somebody's property."

  "Looks too spread out for that. Seems like a private graveyard would be more compact and countrified. More homogeneous. Look at the headstones, the variation in sizes and styles."

  "So what's this have to do with two keys? He didn't have time to dig up a coffin and bury the stash. It was the dead of winter. The ground was froze hard."

  I looked at Ray with interest. "Really. It was winter? So this might have been taken at the time?"

  "Possible, I guess, but if he buried the money, he'd have needed grave-digging machinery, which I guess he could have got hold of somehow. Seems like he told me once he'd been a groundskeeper in a cemetery. He could have put the money in a mausoleum, I suppose. Anyway, what's your thinking?"

  "But why a picture of this? Maybe it's the name Pelissaro. I'm just spitballing here. He might have left the money with someone by that name. In a building or business in the general vicinity of the cemetery. The Pelissaro Building, Pelissaro Farms. The old Pelissaro estate," I said, wiggling my brows.

  Ray shook his head. "You're barkin' up the wrong tree."

  "Well. Maybe it's something visible from here. A water tower, an outbuilding, a stone quarry. Where's the phone book? Let's look. Let's dare to be stupid. We might hit pay dirt."

  "Look for what?"

  "The name Pelissaro. Maybe he had a confederate."

  I glanced around the kitchen and spotted the residential pages sitting on the chair where he'd left them. I pulled out a chair and sat down, flipping through the White Pages to the P's. There was no Pelissaro listed. Nothing even close. I said, "Shit. Ummn. Well, maybe there was a Pelissaro back in the 1940s. We'll try the library in the morning. It can't hurt."

  "We better do something fast. Gilbert's going to call any minute, and I'm not going to tell him we're off to the public library. I'd like to tell him we're on to something instead of sitting here daring to be stupid. That's the same as dead in his book."

  "You're a pain, you know that? Here, try this." I reached for the Yellow Pages and looked up "Cemeteries." Approximately twenty were listed. "Take a look and tell me where these are located," I said. "If we got out a map and drew a big circle, we could probably narrow down the area. At the very least, we could check out all the cemeteries within a radius of the spot where Johnny was apprehended. Wouldn't that make sense? There couldn't be that many. Judging by the photograph, this cemetery is well established. Those graves are old. They haven't gone anywhere."

  "You don't know that. Around here, they move graves when they dam up a river to make a lake," he said.

  "Yeah, well, if the money's underwater, we've had it," I said. "Let's operate on the assumption it's still aboveground someplace. You have a map of Louisville? You can show me what's where."

  Ray went out to the car and came back with the big map of the southeastern United States, along with a set of strip maps and a map of Louisville. "Compliments of Triple A. Car I borrowed was well equipped," he said.

  "You're too thoughtful," I said as I opened the city map. "Let's start with this first one. Where's Dixie Highway?"

  One by one, we worked through the cemeteries listed in the Yellow Pages, marking their locations on the map of Louisville. There were four, possibly five, within reasonable driving distance of the place where Johnny Lee had been apprehended by the police. I listed each cemetery along with the address and telephone number on a separate piece of paper.

  "So now what?" he asked.

  "So now, first thing tomorrow morning, we'll call each of these cemeteries and find out if they have a Pelissaro buried there."

  "Assuming the cemetery's in Louisville."

  "Would you quit being such a butt?" I said. "We have to assume this is relevant or Johnny wouldn't have sent you the picture. His object was to give you information, not to fool you."

  "Yeah, well, let's hope he didn't do too good a job. We might never decipher it."

  By nine o'clock, I was exhausted and began to make mewling noises about turning in. Ray seemed restless and jumpy, worried because Gilbert hadn't been in touch.

  "What are you going to tell him if he calls?" I asked.

  "Don't know. I'll tell him something. I'd like to get him and Laura over here first thing tomorrow morning so I can see she's okay. In the meantime, let's get you settled. You look beat."

  He found a couple of blankets and a pillow in the top of his mother's closet. "You better make a potty stop first. There isn't a bathroom up there."

  I spent a few minutes in the bathroom and then followed Ray up. As it turned out, there wasn't much of anything else up there, either: a single bed with a wood frame and a sagging spring, a bed table with one short leg, and a lamp with a forty-watt bulb and a yellowing shade. I worried briefly about bugs and then realized it was too cold up here for anything to survive.

  "You got everything you need?"

  "This is fine," I said.

  I sat gingerly on the bed while he clumped downstairs again. I couldn't sit up straight because the eaves of the house slanted so sharply above the bed. It was bitterly cold, and the room smelled of soot. As a form of insulation, someone had layered sheets of newspaper between the mattress and the springs, and I could hear them crackle every time I moved. I lifted one corner of the mattress and did a quick check of the date: August 5, 1962.

  I slept in my clothes, wrapping myself in as many layers of blanket as I could manage. By curling myself into a fetal position, I conserved whatever body heat I had left. I turned out the lamp, though I was reluctant to surrender the meager warmth thrown off by the bulb. The pillow was flat and felt faintly damp. For some time, I was aware of light coming up the stairwell. I could hear noises – Ray pacing, a chair scraping back, an occasional fragment of laughter from the TV set. I'm not sure how I managed to fall asleep under the circumstances, but I must have. I woke once and turned the light on to check my watch: 2:00 a.m., and the lights downstairs were still on. I couldn't hear the television set, but the nighttime quiet was broken by occasional unidentifiable sounds. I wakened some time later to find the house dark and completely quiet. I was acutely aware of my bladder, but there was nothing for it except mind control.

  I really don't know which is worse when you sleep in someone else's house – being cold with no access to addition
al blankets or having to pee with no access to the indoor plumbing. I suppose I could have tiptoed downstairs on both counts, but I was afraid Helen would think I was a burglar and Ray would think I was coming on to him, trying to creep into his bed.

  I woke again at first light and lay there, feeling miserable. I closed my eyes for a while. The minute I heard someone stirring, I rolled out of bed and made a beeline for the stairs. Ray and his mother were both up. I made a detour to the bathroom, where, among other things, I brushed my teeth.

  When I returned to the kitchen, Ray was reading the morning paper. He hadn't had a chance to shave, and his chin was prickly with white stubble and probably felt as rough as a sidewalk. I was so accustomed to his various facial bruises, I hardly noticed them. He'd covered his habitual white T-shirt with a denim workshirt that he wore loose. Despite his age he was in good shape, the definition in his upper body probably the result of hours lifting weights in prison.

  "Have we heard from Gilbert?"

  He shook his head.

  I sat down at the kitchen table, which Helen had set at some point the night before. Ray passed me a section of the Courier-Journal One more day together and we'd have our routines down pat, like an old married couple living with his mother. Helen, for her part, limped around the kitchen, using the bat as a cane.

  "Is your foot bothering you?" I asked.

  "My hip. I got a bruise goes from here to here," she said with satisfaction.

  "Let me know if I can help."

  Coffee was soon perking, and Helen began to busy herself frying sausage. This time she outdid herself, fixing each of us a dish she called a one-eyed jack, in which an egg is fried in a hole cut in the middle of a piece of fried bread. Ray put ketchup on his, but I didn't have the nerve.

  After breakfast I hit the phone, making a quick call to the five cemeteries we'd put on our list. Each time I claimed I was an amateur genealogist, tracking my family history in the area. Not that anybody cared. All were nondenominational facilities with burial plots available for purchase. On the fourth call, the woman in the sales office checked her records and found a Pelissaro. I got directions to the place and then tried the last cemetery on the off chance a second Pelissaro was buried in the area. There was only the one.

  Ray and I exchanged a look. He said, "I hope you're right about this."

  "Look at it this way. What else do we have?"

  "Yeah."

  I excused myself and headed for the shower. The phone rang while I was in the process of rinsing my hair. I could hear it through the wall, a shrill counterpoint to the drumming of the water, the last of the shampoo bubbles streaming down my frame. In the bedroom, Ray answered the phone and his voice rumbled briefly. I cut my routine short, turned the water off, dried myself, and threw my clothes on. At least I had no problems deciding what to wear. By the time I reached the kitchen, Ray was in motion, putting together an assortment of tools, some of which he brought in from a small shed in the backyard. He'd found a couple of shovels, a length of rope, a pair of tin snips, pliers, a bolt cutter, a hammer, a hasp, an ancient-looking hand drill, and two wrenches. "Gilbert's on his way over with Laura. I don't know what we're up against. We may have to dig up a coffin, so I thought we'd better be prepared." The Colt was sitting on the tin pull-out counter of the Eastlake. Ray picked it up in passing and tucked it in the waistband of his pants again. "What's that for?"

  "He's not going to catch me off guard again." I wanted to protest, but I could see his point. My anxiety was rising. My chest felt tight and something in my stomach seemed to squeeze and release, sending little ripples of fear up and down my frame. I teetered precariously between the urge to flee and an inordinate curiosity about what would happen next. What was I thinking? That I could affect the end result? Perhaps. Mostly, having come this far, I had to see it through.

  Chapter 20

  * * *

  Gilbert and Laura arrived within the hour with the canvas duffel in tow, probably packed with the eight thousand dollars in cash. Gilbert was wearing his Stetson again, perhaps hoping to enhance his tough-guy image now that he'd been bested by an eighty-five-year-old blind woman. Laura was clearly exhausted. Her skin looked bleached, residual bruises casting pale green-and-yellow shadows along her jaw. Against the pallor of her complexion, her dark auburn hair seemed harsh and artificial, too stark a contrast to the drained look of her cheeks. I could see now that her eyes were the same hazel as Ray's, the dimple in her chin a match for his. Her clothes looked slept in. She was back in the outfit I'd first seen her wearing: oversize pale blue denim dress with short sleeves, a long-sleeved white T-shirt worn under it, red-and-white-striped tights, and high-topped red tennis shoes. The belly harness was gone and the effect was odd, as if she'd suddenly dropped weight in the wake of some devastating illness. Gilbert seemed tense. His face was still pock-marked with spots where Helen's birdshot had nicked him, and he wore a piece of adhesive tape across his earlobe. Aside from the evidence of first aid, his blue jeans looked pressed, his boots polished. He wore a clean white western-cut shirt with a leather vest and a bolo tie. The outfit was an affectation, as I guessed he'd been west of the Mississippi only once and that not much more than a week ago. At the sight of her grandmother, Laura started to cross the room, but Gilbert snapped his fingers and, like a dog, she heeled. He put his left hand on the back of her neck and murmured something in her ear. Laura looked miserable but offered no resistance. Gilbert's attention was diverted by the sight of his gun in the waistband of Ray's pants. "Hey, Ray. You want to give that back?"

  "I want the keys first," Ray said.

  "Let's don't get into any bullshit argument," Gilbert said.

  His right hand came up to Laura's throat, and with a flick, the blade jutted out of the knife he'd palmed. The point pierced her skin, and the gasp she emitted was filled with surprise and pain. "Daddy?"

  Ray saw the trickle of blood and the absolute stillness with which she stood. He glanced down at his waistband where the Colt was tucked. He took the gun out and held it toward Gilbert, butt first. "Here. Take the fuckin' thing. Get the blade off her neck."

  Gilbert studied him, easing the point back almost imperceptibly. Laura didn't move. I could see the blood begin to saturate the neck of her T-shirt. Tears trickled down her cheeks.

  Ray motioned impatiently. "Come on, take the gun. Just get the knife away from her throat."

  Gilbert pressed a button on the knife handle, retracting the blade. Laura put her hand against the wound and looked at her bloody fingertips. She moved to a kitchen chair and sat down, her face drained of any remaining color. Gilbert switched the knife to his left hand and reached over to take the gun with his right. He checked the magazine, which was fully loaded, and then tucked the gun in his waistband, hammer cocked and safety on. He seemed to relax once the gun was back in his possession. "We gotta trust each other, right? Soon as I have my share of the money, she goes with you and we're done."

  "That's the deal," Ray said. It was clear he was fuming, a response not lost on Gilbert.

  "Bygones be bygones. We can shake on it," Gilbert said. He held his hand out.

  Ray looked at it briefly, and then the two shook hands. "Let's get on with this, and no funny business."

  Gilbert's smile was bland. "I don't need funny business as long as I have her."

  Laura had watched the exchange with a mixture of horror and disbelief. "What are you doing? Why'd you give him the gun?" she said to Ray. "You really think he'll keep his word?"

  Gilbert's expression never changed. "Stay out of this, babe."

  Her tone was tinged with outrage, her eyes filled with betrayal. "He's not going to split the money. Are you crazy? Just tell him where it is and let's get out of here before he kills me."

  "Hey!" Ray said. "This is business, okay? I spent forty years in the joint for this money, and I'm not backing off because you got problems with the guy. Where were you all these years? I know where I was. Where were you? You come along expecti
ng me to bail you out. Well, I'm bailing, okay? So why don't you back off and let me do it my way."

  "Daddy, help me. You have to help."

  "I am. I'm buying your life, and it don't come cheap. My deal is with him, so butt out of this."

  Laura's face took on a stony cast and she stared down at the ground, her jaw set. Gilbert seemed to enjoy the fact that she'd been rebuffed. He moved as if to touch her, but she batted his hand away. Gilbert smiled to himself and sent a wink in my direction. I didn't trust any of them, and it was making my stomach hurt.

  I looked on while Ray laid out the game plan, filling Gilbert in on the calls we'd made and the reasoning behind them. I noticed he'd left out a few pertinent facts, like the name of the cemetery and the name on the monument. "We haven't found the money yet, but we're getting close. You expect to benefit, you might as well pitch in here and help," Ray said, his eyes dead with loathing. A chilly smile passed between them, full of promises. I looked from one to the other, hoping fervently I wouldn't be around if the two of them ever got into a pissing contest.

  Ray said, "I assume you got the keys with you."

  Gilbert pulled them from his pocket, displayed them briefly, hooked together on a ring, and then tucked them away again.

  Without another word, Ray began to gather up some of the equipment he'd assembled: the rope, the two shovels, the bolt cutters. "Everybody grab something and let's go," he said. "We can stick all this stuff in the trunk."

  Gilbert picked up the hand drill, taking his time about it so it wouldn't look like he was obeying orders. "One more thing. I want the old lady with us."

  "I'm not going anywhere with you, bub," Helen snapped. She sat down in her chair and leaned stubbornly on her bat.

  Ray paused. "What's she got to do with it?"

  "We leave anyone behind, how do I know they aren't dialing the old 911?" Gilbert said to Ray, ignoring the old woman.

  Ray said, "Come on. She wouldn't do that."

  "Oh, yes I would," she said promptly.