by Sue Grafton
I moved around some Cape Cod-style garbage bins and went up a set of outside stairs to the second floor of building number 18. The landing of the apartment next door to Andy's was attractively furnished with shoulder-high ficus and assorted potted plants. Andy's porchlet was bare. Not even a doormat. The drapes were open, and there were no interior lights on. No sound of a television set, stereo, or toilets flushing. I rang the bell. I waited a decent interval, easing back slightly so I could check for tenants on either side. No signs of activity. It looked like I had the building to myself.
The front-door lock was a Weiss. I sorted through my key picks and tried one or two without luck. Picking a lock is time-consuming shit and I didn't feel I could stand out there indefinitely. Someone might pass and wonder why I was jiggling that length of thin metal in the keyhole and cursing mildly to myself. On an impulse I raised my hand and felt along the top of the doorjamb. Andy'd left me his key. I let myself in.
I dearly love being in places I'm not supposed to be. I can empathize with cat burglars, housebreakers, and second-story men, experiencing, as I've heard some do, adrenaline raised to a nearly sexual pitch. My heart was thudding and I felt extraordinarily alert.
I did a quick walking survey, eyeballing the two bedrooms, walk-in closets and both bathrooms, just to determine that no one was tossing the apartment but me. In the master bedroom, I opened the sliding glass door and the screen. I went out on the balcony that connected the two bedrooms and devised an escape route in case Andy came home unexpectedly. Against the side wall, around the corner to the right, was an ornamental trellis with a newly planted bougainvillea at its base. In a pinch, I could scamper down like an orangutan and disappear.
I eased back into the apartment and began my search. Andy's bedroom floor was densely matted with dirty clothes, through which a narrow path had been cleared. I picked my way past socks, dress shirts, and boxer shorts in a variety of vulgar prints. In lieu of a chest of drawers, he kept his clean clothes in four dark-blue plastic stacking crates. His newfound bachelorhood must be taking him back to his college days. None of the bins contained anything of interest. I spent fifteen minutes sliding my hand into all the coat pockets on his hanging rod, but all I came up with were some woofies, a handkerchief full of old boogers, and a ticket for a batch of cleaning he hadn't yet retrieved. The second bedroom was smaller. Andy's bicycle was propped against one wall, the back tire flat. He had a rowing machine, eight cardboard moving boxes, unlabeled and still taped shut. I wondered how long he'd been separated.
I'd met Andy's wife, Janice, at a couple of California Fidelity office parties and hadn't thought much of her until I saw what she'd left him with. The lady had really done a thorough shakedown. Andy had always complained about her extravagance, making sure we all knew she shopped at the best stores in town. It was a measure of his success, of course, that she could charge with impunity. What was clear now was that she played for keeps. Andy'd been granted a card table, four aluminum lawn chairs with webbed seats, a mattress, and some flatware with what must have been his mother's monogram. It looked like Janice had been sticking it in the dishwasher for years because the finish was dull and the silver plate was worn off the handles.
The kitchen cabinets held paper plates and insulated cups, along with a sorry assortment of canned goods. This guy ate worse than I did. Since the condos were brand-new, the appliances were up-to-date and immaculate: self-cleaning oven, big refrigerator (empty except for two six-packs of no-brand beer) with an icemaker clattering away, dishwasher, microwave, disposal, trash compactor. The freezer was stacked with cartons of Lean Cuisine. He favored Spaghetti and Chicken Cacciatore. A bottle of aquavit lay on its side and he had a bag of frozen rock-hard Milky Way bars that were just an invitation to break off a tooth.
The dining area was actually a simple extension of the small living room, the kitchen separated by a pass-through with bi-fold shutters painted white. There was very little in the way of furnishings. The card table seemed to double as dining-room table and home office. The telephone sat there, plugged into the answering machine, which showed no messages. The surface was littered with typing supplies, but there was no typewriter in sight. His bottle of white-out was getting as sluggish as old nail polish. The wastebasket was empty.
I went back into the kitchen and slid open the compactor, which was loosely packed, but full. Gingerly, I rooted through, spotting crumpled sheets of paper about three layers down. I removed the liner and inserted a fresh one. I doubted Andy would remember whether he'd emptied his trash or not. He'd probably spent most of his married life being waited on hand and foot, and my guess was he took household chores for granted, as if the elves and fairies crept in at night and cleaned pee off the rim of the toilet bowl whenever he missed. I glanced at my watch. I'd been in the place thirty-five minutes and I didn't want to press my luck.
I closed and locked the sliding glass door again, made a final pass to see if I'd overlooked anything, and then let myself out the front, taking his trash bag with me.
By noon, I was home again, sitting on Henry's back patio with Andy's garbage spread around me like a beggar's picnic. Actually, the debris was fairly benign and didn't make me feel I needed a tetanus booster just to sort through. He was heavy into pickles, olives, anchovies, jalapeno peppers, and other foodstuffs in which no germs could live. There were no coffee grounds or orange peels. No evidence whatever that he ate anything fresh. Lots of beer cans. There were six plastic Lean Cuisine pouches, layers of junk mail, six dunning notices rimmed in red or pink, a notice of a Toastmaster's roast of a local businessman, a flyer from a carwash, and a letter from Janice that must have left him incensed, as he had crumpled it into a tiny ball and bitten down on it. I could see the perfect impression of his teeth in the wadded paper. She was bugging him about a temporary support check that was late again, said she, underlined twice and bracketed with exclamation points.
At the bottom of the bag was the back end of a pad of checks, deposit slips still attached, with the name of Andy's bank and his checking-account number neatly printed thereon. I saved that for future reference. I had set aside the crumpled papers that were shoved into the bag halfway down. I smoothed them out now – six versions of a letter to someone he referred to variously as "angel," "beloved,"
"light of my life,"
"my darling," and "dearest one." He seemed to remember her anatomy in loving detail without much attention to her intellect. Her sexual enthusiasms still had him all aflame and had thus, apparently, impaired his typing skills – lots of strikeovers in the lines where he reviewed their "time together," which I gathered was on or about Christmas Eve. In recalling the experience, he seemed to struggle with a paucity of adjectives, but the verbs were clear enough.
"Well, Andy, you old devil," I murmured to myself.
He said he longed to have her suckle the something – something from his xxxxxxxx... all crossed out. My guess was that it was related to flower parts and that his botanical knowledge had failed him. Either that or the very idea had caused emotional dyslexia. Also, he couldn't quite decide what tone to take. He vacillated somewhere between groveling and reverential. He said several things about her breasts that made me wonder if she might benefit from surgical reduction. It was embarrassing reading, but I tried not to shrink from my responsibilities.
Having finished, I made a neat packet of all the papers. I'd make a separate holding file for them until I could decide if any might be of use. I shoved the trash back in the bag and tossed it in Henry's garbage can. I let myself into my apartment and checked my answering machine. There was one message.
"Hi, Kinsey. This is Ash. Listen, I talked to my mother yesterday about this business with Lance and she'd like to meet with you, if that's okay. Give me a call when you get in and we'll set something up. Maybe this afternoon sometime if that works for you. Thanks. Talk to you soon. Bye."
I tried the number at the house, but the line was busy. I changed into my jeans and made myself
some lunch.
By the time I got through to Ash, her mother was resting and couldn't be disturbed, but I was invited to tea at 4:00.
I decided to drive up the pass to the gun club and practice target shooting with the little .32 I keep locked in my top desk drawer in an old sock. I shoved the gun, clip, and a box of fifty cartridges into a small canvas duffel and tucked it in the trunk of my car. I stopped for gas and then headed north on 101 to the junction of 154, following the steep road that zigzags up the mountainside. The day was chilly. We'd had several days of unexpected rain and the vegetation was a dark green, blending in the distance to an intense navy blue. The clouds overhead were a cottony white with ragged underpinnings, like the torn lining on the underside of an old box spring. As the road ascended, fog began to mass and dissipate, traffic slowing to accommodate the fluctuating visibility. I downshifted twice and pulled the heater on.
At the summit, I turned left onto a secondary road barely two lanes wide, which angled upward, twisting half a mile into back country. Massive boulders, mantled in dark-green moss, lined the road, where the overhanging trees blocked out the sun. The trunks of the live oaks were frosted with fungus the color of a greened-out copper roof. I could smell heather and bay laurel and the frail scent of woodsmoke drifting from the cabins tucked in along the ridge. Where the roadside dropped away, the canyons were blank with fog. The wide gate to the gun club was open and I drove the last several hundred yards, pulling into the gravel parking lot, deserted except for a lone station wagon. Aside from the man in charge, I was the only person there.
I paid my four bucks and followed him down to the cinderblock shed that housed the restrooms. He opened the padlock to the storage room and extracted an oblong of cardboard mounted on a piece of lathing, with a target stapled to it.
"Visibility might be tough now in this fog," he warned.
"I'll chance it," I said.
He eyed me with misgivings, but finally handed over the target, a staple gun, and two additional targets.
I hadn't been up to the practice range for months, and it was nice to have the whole place to myself. The wind had picked up and mist was being blown across concrete bunkers like something in a horror movie. I set up the target at a range of twenty-five yards. I inserted soft plastic earplugs and then put on hearing protectors over that. All outside noises were damped down to a mild hush, my breathing audible in my own head as though I were swimming. I loaded eight cartridges into the clip of my .32 and began to fire. Each round sounded like a balloon popping somewhere close by, followed by the characteristic whiff of gunpowder I so love.
I moved up to the target and checked to see where I was hitting. High and left. I circled the first eight holes with a Magic Marker, went back to the bench rest and loaded the gun again. A sign just behind me read: "Guns as we use them here are a source of pleasure and entertainment, but one moment of carelessness or foolishness can bring it all to an end forever." Amen, I thought.
The hard-packed dirt just in front of me was as littered with shells as a battlefield. I saved my brass, collecting the casings after each firing, tucking them neatly back into the Styrofoam brick that cradled the live rounds.
By 3:15 I was cold, and most of my ammunition was gone. I can't claim that my little semiautomatic is wildly accurate at twenty-five yards, but at least I was feeling connected to the process again.
Chapter 8
* * *
At 3:55, I was turning into the circular drive to the Wood family home, located on seven acres of land that sat on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific. Their fortunes on the rise, they'd moved since I'd last visited. This house was enormous, done in a French Baroque style – a two-story central structure flanked by two prominent tower wings. The stucco exterior was as smooth and white as frosting on a wedding cake, roofline and windows edged with plaster garlands, rosettes, and shell motifs that might have been piped out of a pastry tube. A brick walk led from the driveway around to the seaward-facing front of the house and up two steps to a wide uncovered brick porch. A series of arched French doors spanned the facade, which curved outward around a conservatory on one end and a gazebo on the other. A heavy black woman in a white uniform admitted me. I followed her, like a stray pup, across a foyer tiled in black and white marble squares.
"Mrs. Wood asked if you'd wait in the morning room," the maid said, without pausing for a reply. She departed on thick crepe soles that made no sound on the polished parquet floors.
Oh, sure, I thought, that's where I usually hang out at my place... the morning room, where else?
The walls were apricot, the ceiling a high dome of white. Large Boston ferns were arranged on stands between high curving windows through which light streamed. The furniture was French Provincial; round table, six chairs with cane backs. The circle of Persian carpeting was a pale blend of peach and green. I stood at one of the windows, looking out at the rolling sweep of the grounds (which is what rich people call their yards). The C-shape of the room cupped a view of the ocean in its lower curve and a view of the mountains in its hook so that the windows formed a cyclorama. Sky and sea, pines, a pie wedge of city, clouds spilling down the distant mountainside... all of it was perfectly framed, wheeling gulls picked out in white against the dark hills to the north.
What I love about the rich is the silence they live in – the sheer magnitude of space. Money buys light and high ceilings, six windows where one might actually do. There was no dust, no streaks on the glass, no scuff marks on the slender bowed legs of the matching French Provincial chairs. I heard a whisper of sound, and the maid returned with a rolling serving cart, loaded with a silver tea service, a plate of assorted tea sandwiches, and pastries the cook had probably whipped up that day.
"Mrs. Wood will be right with you," she said to me.
"Thanks," I said. "Uh, is there a lavatory close by?"
"Bathroom" seemed like too crude a term.
"Yes, ma'am. Turn left into the foyer. Then it's the first door on the left."
I tiptoed to the loo and locked myself in, staring at my reflection in the mirror with despair. Of course, I was dressed wrong. I never could guess right when it came to clothes. I'd gone to the Edgewater Hotel in my all-purpose dress to eat lunch with Ashley, who'd worn an outfit suitable for bagging game. Now I had down-dressed to the point where I looked like a bum. I didn't know what I'd been thinking of. I knew the Woods had money. I'd just forgotten how much. The trouble with me is I have no class. I was raised in a two-bedroom stucco bungalow, maybe eight hundred and fifty square feet of space, if you counted the little screened-in utility porch. The yard was a tatty fringe of crabgrass surrounded by the kind of white picket fence you bought in sections and stuck in the ground where you would. My aunt's notion of "day-core" was a pink plastic flamingo standing on one foot, which I'd thought was pretty classy shit until I was twelve.
I blocked the bathroom out of my visual field, but not before I got a glimpse of marble, pale-blue porcelain, and gold-plated hardware. A shallow dish held six robin's-egg-sized ovals of soap that had never been touched before by human hands. I peed and then just ran my hands under the water and shook them off, not wanting to soil anything. The terry hand towels looked as though they'd just had the price tags removed from the rims. There were four guest towels laid out beside the basin like big decorative paper napkins, but I was way too smart to fall for that trick. Where would I put a used one afterward – in the trash? These people didn't make trash. I finished drying my hands on the backside of my jeans and returned to the morning room feeling damp around the rear. I didn't dare sit down.
Presently, Ash appeared with Mrs. Wood holding on to her arm. The woman walked slowly, with a halting gait, as if she'd been forced to ambulate with a pair of swim fins for shoes. I was startled to realize she must be in her early seventies, which meant that she'd had her children rather late. Seventy isn't that old out here. People in California seem to age at a different rate than the rest of the country. Maybe it's the p
assion for diet and exercise, maybe the popularity of cosmetic surgery. Or maybe we're afflicted with such a horror of aging that we've halted the process psychically. Mrs. Wood apparently hadn't developed the knack. The years had knocked her flat, leaving her knees weak and her hands atremble, a phenomenon that seemed to cause her bitter amusement. She appeared to watch her own progress as if she were having an out-of-body experience.
"Hello, Kinsey. It's been a long time," she said. She lifted her face to mine at that point, her gaze dark and snappish. Whatever energy had been drained from her limbs was being concentrated now in her eyes. She had high cheekbones and a strong chin. The skin hung from her face like tissue-thin kid leather, lined and seamed, yellowing with the years like a pair of cotillion gloves. Like Ashley, she was big: wide through the shoulders, thick through the waist. Like Ash, too, she might have been a redhead in her youth. Now her hair was a soft puff of white, gathered on top and secured by a series of tortoiseshell combs. Her clothes were beautifully made – a softly draped kimono of navy silk over a dark red silk wrap-around dress. Ashley helped her into a chair, pulling the tea cart within range so her mother could supervise the pouring of tea.
Ash glanced over at me. "Would you prefer sherry? The tea is Earl Grey."
"Tea's fine."
Ash poured three cups of tea while Helen selected a little plate of cookies and finger sandwiches for each of us. White bread spread with butter, sprigs of watercress peeping out. Wheat bread with curried chicken salad. Rye layered with herbed cream cheese and lox. There was something about the ritual attention to detail that made me realize neither of them cared what I was wearing or whether my social status was equivalent to theirs.
Ashley flashed me a smile when she handed me my tea. "Mother and I live for this," she said, dimples appearing.
"Oh, yes," Helen said, with a smile. "Food is my last great vice and I intend to sin incessantly as long as my palate holds out."