Kinsey and Me (7 page)

I
T WAS NEARLY
noon by the time I got back to the travel agency next door to the place where Lucy
Ackerman had worked. It didn’t take any time at all to unearth the reservations she’d
made two weeks before. Buenos Aires, first class on Pan Am. For one. She’d picked
up the ticket Friday afternoon just before the agency closed for the weekend.

The travel agent rested his elbows on the counter and looked at me with interest,
hoping to hear all the gory details, I’m sure. “I heard about that business next door,”
he said. He was young, maybe twenty-four, with a pug nose, auburn hair, and a gap
between his teeth. He’d make the perfect costar on a wholesome family TV show.

“How’d she pay for the ticket?”

“Cash,” he said. “I mean, who’d have thunk?”

“Did she say anything in particular at the time?”

“Not really. She seemed jazzed and we joked some about Montezuma’s revenge and stuff
like that. I knew she was married and I was asking her all about who was keeping the
kids and what her old man was going to do while she was gone. God, I never in a million
years
guessed she was pulling off a scam like that, you know?”

“Did you ask why she was going to Argentina by herself?”

“Well, yeah, and she said it was a surprise.” He shrugged. “It didn’t really make
sense, but she was laughing like a kid, and I thought I just didn’t get the joke.”

I asked for a copy of the itinerary, such as it was. She had paid for a round-trip
ticket, but there were no reservations coming back. Maybe she intended to cash in
the return ticket once she got down there. I tucked the travel docs onto my clipboard
along with the copy of her medical forms. Something about this whole deal had begun
to chafe, but I couldn’t figure out quite why.

“Thanks for your help,” I said, heading toward the door.

“No problem. I guess the other guy didn’t get it either,” he remarked.

I paused, mid-stride, turning back. “Get what?”

“The joke. I heard ’em next door and they were fighting like cats and dogs. He was
pissed.”

“Really,” I said. I stared at him. “What time was this?”

“Five-fifteen. Something like that. They were closed and so were we, but Dad wanted
me to stick around for a while until the cleaning crew got here. He owns this place,
which is how I got in the business myself. These new guys were starting and he wanted
me to make sure they understood what to do.”

“Are you going to be here for a while?”

“Sure.”

“Good. The police may want to hear about this.”

I went back into the escrow office with mental alarm bells clanging away like crazy.
Both Barbara Hemdahl and Mrs. Merriman had opted to eat lunch in. Or maybe the cops
had ordered them to stay where they were. The bookkeeper sat at her desk with a sandwich,
apple, and a carton of milk neatly arranged in front of her, while Mrs. Merriman picked
at something in a plastic container she must have brought in from a fast-food place.

“How’s it going?” I asked.

Barbara Hemdahl spoke up from her side of the room. “The detectives went off for a
search warrant so they can get in all the lockers back there, collecting evidence.”

“Only one of ’em is locked,” I pointed out.

She shrugged. “I guess they can’t even peek without the paperwork.”

Mrs. Merriman spoke up then, her expression tinged with guilt. “Actually, they asked
the rest of us if we’d open our lockers voluntarily, so of course we did.”

Mrs. Merriman and Barbara Hemdahl exchanged a look.

“And?”

Mrs. Merriman colored slightly. “There was an overnight case in Mr. Sotherland’s locker
and I guess the things in it were hers.”

“Is it still back there?”

“Well, yes, but they left a uniformed officer on guard so nobody’d walk off with it.
They’ve got everything spread out on the copy machine.”

I went through the rear of the office, peering into the storage room. I knew the guy
on duty and he didn’t object to my doing a visual survey of the items, as long as
I didn’t touch anything. The overnight case had been packed with all the personal
belongings women like to keep on hand in case the rest of the luggage gets sent to
Mexicali by mistake. I spotted a toothbrush and toothpaste, slippers, a filmy nightie,
prescription drugs, hairbrush, extra eyeglasses in a case. I spotted a round plastic
container, slightly convex, about the size of a compact, tucked under a change of
underwear.

Gavin Sotherland was still sitting at his desk when I stopped by his office. His skin
tone was gray and his shirt was hanging out, a big ring of sweat under each arm. He
was smoking a cigarette with the air of a man who’s quit the habit and has taken it
up again under duress. A second uniformed officer was standing just inside the door
to my right.

I leaned against the frame, but Gavin scarcely looked up.

I said, “You knew what she was doing, but you thought she’d take you with her when
she left.”

His smile was bitter. “Life is full of surprises,” he said.

I
WAS GOING TO
have to tell Robert Ackerman what I’d discovered, and I dreaded it. As a stalling
maneuver, just to demonstrate what a good girl I was, I drove over to the police station
first and dropped off the data I’d collected, filling them in on the theory I’d come
up with. They didn’t exactly pin a medal on me, but they weren’t as pissed off as
I thought they’d be, given the number of penal codes I’d violated in the process.
They were even moderately courteous, which is unusual in their treatment of me. Unfortunately,
none of it took that long and before I knew it, I was standing at the Ackermans’ front
door again.

I rang the bell and waited, bad jokes running through my head. Well, there’s good
news and bad news, Robert. The good news is we’ve wrapped it up with hours to spare
so you won’t have to pay me the full three hundred dollars we agreed to. The bad news
is your wife’s a thief, she’s probably dead, and we’re just getting out a warrant
now, because we think we know where the body’s stashed.

The door opened and Robert was standing there with a finger to his lips. “The kids
are down for their naps,” he whispered.

I nodded elaborately, pantomiming my understanding, as though the silence he’d imposed
required this special behavior on my part.

He motioned me in and together we tiptoed through the house and out to the backyard,
where we continued to talk in low tones. I wasn’t sure which bedroom the little rug
rats slept in, and I didn’t want to be responsible for waking them.

Half a day of playing papa to the boys had left Robert looking disheveled and sorely
in need of relief.

“I didn’t expect you back this soon,” he whispered.

I found myself whispering too, feeling anxious at the sense of secrecy. It reminded
me of grade school somehow, the smell of autumn hanging in the air, the two of us
perched on the edge of the sandbox like little kids, conspiring. I didn’t want to
break his heart, but what was I to do?

“I think we’ve got it wrapped up,” I said.

He looked at me for a moment, apparently guessing from my expression that the news
wasn’t good. “Is she okay?”

“We don’t think so,” I said. And then I told him what I’d learned, starting with the
embezzlement and the relationship with Gavin, taking it right through to the quarrel
the travel agent had heard. Robert was way ahead of me.

“She’s dead, isn’t she?”

“We don’t know it for a fact, but we suspect as much.”

He nodded, tears welling up. He wrapped his arms around his knees and propped his
chin on his fists. He looked so young. I wanted to reach out and touch him. “She was
really having an affair?” he asked plaintively.

“You must have suspected as much,” I said. “You said she was restless and excited
for months. Didn’t that give you a clue?”

He shrugged one shoulder, using the sleeve of his T-shirt to dash at the tears trickling
down his cheeks. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess.”

“And then you stopped by the office Friday afternoon and found her getting ready to
leave the country. That’s when you killed her, isn’t it?”

He froze, staring at me. At first, I thought he’d deny it, but maybe he realized there
wasn’t any point. He nodded mutely.

“And then you hired me to make it look good, right?”

He made a kind of squeaking sound in the back of his throat, and sobbed once, his
voice reduced to a whisper again. “She shouldn’t have done it—betrayed us like that.
We loved her so much.”

“Have you got the money here?”

He nodded, looking miserable. “I wasn’t going to pay your fee out of that,” he said
incongruously. “We really did have a little fund so we could go to San Diego one day.”

“I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” I said.

“I didn’t do so bad, though, did I? I mean, I could have gotten away with it, don’t
you think?”

I’d been talking about the trip to the zoo. He thought I was referring to his murdering
his wife. Talk about poor communication. God.

“Well, you nearly pulled it off,” I said. Shit, I was sitting there trying to make
the guy feel good.

He looked at me piteously, eyes red and flooded, his mouth trembling. “But where did
I slip up? What did I do wrong?”

“You put her diaphragm in the overnight case you packed. You thought you’d shift suspicion
onto Gavin Sotherland, but you didn’t realize she’d had her tubes tied.”

A momentary rage flashed through his eyes and then flickered out. I suspected that
her voluntary sterilization was more insulting to him than the affair with her boss.

“Jesus, I don’t know what she saw in him,” he breathed. “He’s such a pig.”

“Well,” I said, “if it’s any comfort to you, she wasn’t going to take
him
either. She just wanted freedom, you know?”

He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, trying to compose himself. He mopped
his eyes, shivering with tension. “How can you prove it, though, without a body? Do
you know where she is?”

“I think we do,” I said softly. “The sandbox, Robert. Right under us.”

He seemed to shrink. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, God, don’t turn me in. I’ll give
you the money, I don’t give a damn. Just let me stay here with my kids. The little
guys need me. I did it for them. I swear I did. You don’t have to tell the cops, do
you?”

I shook my head and opened my shirt collar, showing him the mike. “I don’t have to
tell a soul,” I said, and then I looked over toward the side yard.

For once, I was glad to see Lieutenant Dolan amble into view.

the parker shotgun

T
HE
C
HRISTMAS HOLIDAYS
had come and gone, and the new year was under way. January, in California, is as good
as it gets—cool, clear, and green, with a sky the color of wisteria and a surf that
thunders like a volley of gunfire in a distant field. My name is Kinsey Millhone.
I’m a private investigator, licensed, bonded, insured; white, female, age thirty-two,
unmarried, and physically fit. That Monday morning, I was sitting in my office with
my feet up, wondering what life would bring, when a woman walked in and tossed a photograph
on my desk. My introduction to the Parker shotgun began with a graphic view of its
apparent effect when fired at a formerly nice-looking man at close range. His face
was still largely intact, but he had no use now for a pocket comb. With effort, I
kept my expression neutral as I glanced up at her.

“Somebody killed my husband.”

“I can see that,” I said.

She snatched the picture back and stared at it as though she might have missed some
telling detail. Her face suffused with pink, and she blinked back tears. “Jesus. Rudd
was killed five months ago, and the cops have done shit. I’m so sick of getting the
runaround I could scream.”

She sat down abruptly and pressed a hand to her mouth, trying to compose herself.
She was in her late twenties, with a gaudy prettiness. Her hair was an odd shade of
brown, like Cherry Coke, worn shoulder length and straight. Her eyes were large, a
lush mink brown; her mouth was full. Her complexion was all warm tones, tanned, and
clear. She didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but she was still as vivid as a magazine
illustration, a good four-color run on slick paper. She was seven months pregnant
by the look of her; not voluminous yet, but rotund. When she was calmer, she identified
herself as Lisa Osterling.

“That’s a crime lab photo. How’d you come by it?” I said when the preliminaries were
disposed of.

She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. “I have my little ways,”
she said morosely. “Actually I know the photographer and I stole a print. I’m going
to have it blown up and hung on the wall just so I won’t forget. The police are hoping
I’ll drop the whole thing, but I got news for
them
.” Her mouth was starting to tremble again, and a tear splashed onto her skirt as
though my ceiling had a leak.

“What’s the story?” I said. “The cops in this town are usually pretty good.” I got
up and filled a paper cup with water from my Sparkletts dispenser, passing it over
to her.

She murmured a thank-you and drank it down, staring into the bottom of the cup as
she spoke. “Rudd was a cocaine dealer until a month or so before he died. They haven’t
said as much, but I know they’ve written him off as some kind of small-time punk.
What do they care? They’d like to think he was killed in a drug deal—a double cross
or something like that. He wasn’t, though. He’d given it all up because of this.”

She glanced down at the swell of her belly. She was wearing a kelly green T-shirt
with an arrow down the front. The word
OOPS!
was written across her breasts in machine embroidery.

“What’s your theory?” I asked. Already I was leaning toward the official police version
of events. Drug dealing isn’t synonymous with longevity. There’s too much money involved
and too many amateurs getting into the act. This was Santa Teresa—ninety-five miles
north of the big time in L.A
.
, but there are still standards to maintain. A shotgun blast is the underworld equivalent
of a bad annual review.

“I don’t have a theory. I just don’t like theirs. I want you to look into it so I
can clear Rudd’s name before the baby comes.”

I shrugged. “I’ll do what I can, but I can’t guarantee the results. How are you going
to feel if the cops are right?”

She stood up, giving me a flat look. “I don’t know why Rudd died, but it had nothing
to do with drugs,” she said. She opened her handbag and extracted a roll of bills
the size of a wad of socks. “What do you charge?”

“Thirty bucks an hour plus expenses.”

She peeled off several hundred-dollar bills and laid them on the desk.

I got out a contract.

M
Y SECOND ENCOUNTER
with the Parker shotgun came in the form of a dealer’s appraisal slip that I discovered
when I was nosing through Rudd Osterling’s private possessions an hour later at the
house. The address she’d given me was on the Bluffs, a residential area on the west
side of town, overlooking the Pacific. It should have been an elegant neighborhood,
but the ocean generated too much fog and too much corrosive salt air. The houses were
small and had a temporary feel to them, as though the occupants intended to move on
when the month was up. No one seemed to get around to painting the trim, and the yards
looked like they were kept by people who spent all day at the beach. I followed her
in my car, reviewing the information she’d given me as I urged my ancient VW up Capilla
Hill and took a right on Presipio.

The late Rudd Osterling had been in Santa Teresa since the sixties, when he migrated
to the West Coast in search of sunshine, good surf, good dope, and casual sex. Lisa
told me he’d lived in vans and communes, working variously as a roofer, tree trimmer,
bean picker, fry cook, and forklift operator—never with any noticeable ambition or
success. He’d started dealing cocaine two years earlier, apparently netting more money
than he was accustomed to. Then he’d met and married Lisa, and she’d been determined
to see him clean up his act. According to her, he’d retired from the drug trade and
was just in the process of setting himself up in a landscape maintenance business
when someone blew the top of his head off.

I pulled into the driveway behind her, glancing at the frame-and-stucco bungalow with
its patchy grass and dilapidated fence. It looked like one of those households where
there’s always something under construction, probably without permits and not up to
code. In this case, a foundation had been laid for an addition to the garage, but
the weeds were already growing up through cracks in the concrete. A wooden outbuilding
had been dismantled, the old lumber tossed in an unsightly pile. Closer to the house,
there were stacks of cheap pecan wood paneling, sun-bleached in places and warped
along one edge. It was all hapless and depressing, but she scarcely looked at it.

I followed her into the house.

“We were just getting the house fixed up when he died,” she remarked.

“When did you buy the place?” I was manufacturing small talk, trying to cover my distaste
at the sight of the old linoleum counter, where a line of ants stretched from a crust
of toast and jelly all the way out the back door.

“We didn’t really. This was my mother’s. She and my stepdad moved back to the Midwest
last year.”

“What about Rudd? Did he have any family out here?”

“They’re all in Connecticut, I think, real la-di-da. His parents are dead, and his
sisters wouldn’t even come out to the funeral.”

“Did he have a lot of friends?”

“All cocaine dealers have friends.”

“Enemies?”

“Not that I ever heard about.”

“Who was his supplier?”

“I don’t know that.”

“No disputes? Suits pending? Quarrels with the neighbors? Family arguments about the
inheritance?”

She gave me a no on all four counts.

I had told her I wanted to go through his personal belongings, so she showed me into
the tiny back bedroom, where he’d set up a card table and some cardboard file boxes.
A real entrepreneur. I began to search while she leaned against the door frame, watching.

I said, “Tell me about what was going on the week he died.” I was sorting through
canceled checks in a Nike shoe box. Most were written to the neighborhood supermarket,
utilities, telephone company.

She moved to the desk chair and sat down. “I can’t tell you much because I was at
work. I do alterations and repairs at a dry cleaner’s up at Presipio Mall. Rudd would
stop in now and then when he was out running around. He’d picked up a few jobs already,
but he really wasn’t doing the gardening full-time. He was trying to get all his old
business squared away. Some kid owed him money. I remember that.”

“He sold cocaine on
credit
?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it was grass or pills. Somehow the kid owed him a bundle. That’s
all I know.”

“I don’t suppose he kept any records.”

“Un-uhn. It was all in his head. He was too paranoid to put anything down in black
and white.”

The file boxes were jammed with old letters, tax returns, receipts. It all looked
like junk to me.

“What about the day he was killed? Were you at work then?”

She shook her head. “It was a Saturday. I was off work, but I’d gone to the market.
I was out maybe an hour and a half, and when I got home, police cars were parked in
front, and the paramedics were here. Neighbors were standing out on the street.” She
stopped talking, and I was left to imagine the rest.

“Had he been expecting anyone?”

“If he was, he never said anything to me. He was in the garage, doing I don’t know
what. Chauncey, next door, heard the shotgun go off, but by the time he got here to
investigate, whoever did it was gone.”

I got up and moved toward the hallway. “Is this the bedroom down here?”

“Right. I haven’t gotten rid of his stuff yet. I guess I’ll have to eventually. I’m
going to use his office for the nursery.”

I moved into the master bedroom and went through his hanging clothes. “Did the police
find anything?”

“They didn’t look. Well, one guy came through and poked around some. About five minutes’
worth.”

I began to check through the drawers she indicated were his. Nothing remarkable came
to light. On top of the chest was one of those brass-and-walnut caddies, where Rudd
apparently kept his watch, keys, loose change. Almost idly, I picked it up. Under
it there was a folded slip of paper. It was a partially completed appraisal form from
a gun shop out in Colgate, a township to the north of us. “What’s a Parker?” I said
when I’d glanced at it. She peered over the slip.

“Oh. That’s probably the appraisal on the shotgun he got.”

“The one he was killed with?”

“Well, I don’t know. They never found the weapon, but the homicide detective said
they couldn’t run it through ballistics, anyway—or whatever it is they do.”

“Why’d he have it appraised in the first place?”

“He was taking it in trade for a big drug debt, and he needed to know if it was worth
it.”

“Was this the kid you mentioned before or someone else?”

“The same one, I think. At first, Rudd intended to turn around and sell the gun, but
then he found out it was a collector’s item so he decided to keep it. The gun dealer
called a couple of times after Rudd died, but it was gone by then.”

“And you told the cops all this stuff?”

“Sure. They couldn’t have cared less.”

I doubted that, but I tucked the slip in my pocket anyway. I’d check it out and then
talk to Dolan in Homicide.