“Actually, I do,” I said. “Want me to demonstrate?”
“It’s your show.”
I took Althea by the hand and returned to Emily’s apartment, the whole group trooping after us into Althea’s room. I was beginning to feel a bit like Hercule Poirot, but I had to talk my way through this one. I waited until everyone was assembled, including the apartment hunters, who lurked at the rear, peering around surreptitiously. Maybe she’d be arrested and they could have dibs on this place.
“Let’s go back to the beginning,” I said. “Emily was convinced that Gerald was killed in Althea’s bed, but when I got here, the body was gone and there wasn’t any sign that a murder had been committed.
“I went to Pat’s apartment to use the phone and that’s when Althea showed up with her father. Emily had let David take her overnight and she was just being returned. Or so they led us to believe. The truth is, David had brought her back earlier. He found Gerald’s body and realized how bad things looked for Emily—”
“Wait a minute,” Dolan said. “What makes you so sure the body was here in the first place? You only have Mrs. Culpepper’s word for it, right?”
“Well, yes, but it turns out to be true.”
“Where’s your proof?” Dolan asked. I could see that he was interested, but unconvinced.
My heart did a flip-flop, but I proceeded as if I were sure of myself. Secretly, I thought, Shit, why didn’t I verify this first? I didn’t need to make a fool of myself publicly.
I stripped the bed. As before, the sheets were clean as a whistle and the mattress looked like it had never been touched, let alone used as target practice by someone with a grudge. David flexed his fingers nervously. Emily reached down protectively and pulled Althea close.
I said, “Now, let’s turn the mattress over.”
The two uniformed officers gave the mattress a tug, lifting and turning it in one smooth motion. On the flip side, down in the lower right quadrant was a puncture in the ticking and a smear of dark red. “I think if you dig down in there, you’ll find the .22 slug that killed him.”
“But what about the soap powder and the cut in the telephone line?” Pat asked.
“That was all embellishment,” I said. “David was doing what he could to divert suspicion from his ex-wife, so he went through the whole routine. Moved the body, turned the mattress, changed the sheets.”
“Him?” Emily said with surprise, as if she’d never known him to change a sheet in his life.
“Oh sure. I noticed a set was missing from the linen closet and I also knew that Althea was feeling anxious about something. He’d sent her next door to play, but she’d seen him stripping off the sheets. She was worried she’d be accused of wetting the bed.”
Althea was looking from face to face. She must have sensed her daddy was still in trouble somehow.
I went on. “David cautioned her not to tell anyone they’d been here and that’s just what she did. She told me they hadn’t been here. I thought it was an odd thing to say until I realized she’d taken him literally.” I paused, looking at her. “You tried to do what your daddy told you, didn’t you?”
Althea nodded, her mouth beginning to pucker, eyes filling with tears. David swooped her up in his arms and hugged her. “You did fine, sweetie. It’s all right.”
“I’d like to hear the rest of this,” Dolan said.
“Well, after he moved the body, he started setting up false clues. He bought detergent and spilled it on the rug. He took Gerald’s finger and wrote in the soap, all of this because he hoped to persuade us the man was killed by someone else. David must have borrowed all those corny devices from old Hawaii Five-O reruns.”
“Up yours!” he snapped. “You can’t prove a word of this.”
“I think I can,” I said equably.
“David killed Gerald?” Emily said, blinking those big innocent eyes.
I shook my head. “It was Pat,” I replied. “Patricia.”
Everyone turned simultaneously and stared, except for the couple in the rear.
“Who?” the hubby asked the wife.
“Me?!” Pat said. “Well, that’s ridiculous. Why would I do such a thing?”
“You’ll have to tell us that yourself,” I said. “I suspect you fell in love with him years ago, when you played the Haig and Haig Mixed Team Tournament back in ’sixty-six. You told me yourself you were on the LPGA circuit back then. You still have the photograph of the two of you taken at the tournament, which he inscribed ‘To My Darling Trish, with All the Love in My Heart, Gerry.’ I spotted it the first time I used your phone, but of course at that point I hadn’t seen Gerald yet. When I went back again, I recognized him and I also remembered what Emily had said about an ex-girlfriend of his named Trish.”
Dolan looked over at her. “You want an attorney present before you make a response?”
“Oh, what difference does it make,” she said impatiently. “The son of a bitch is dead and that’s all I care about. I’d hoped to push the blame off on someone else, but then David came along and made a mess of it. ‘Mafia!’ I couldn’t believe my eyes.”
“Serves you right,” David said. “You tried to frame Emily.”
“Oh, poo. She could have pleaded temporary insanity. No jury’s going to want to hang a little thing like her,” she said.
“But why did you kill him?” Emily said, aghast. “I don’t understand.”
“To save fools like you, if nothing else,” Pat said. “You have no idea what he did to me. I was twenty-two and as green as they come. That bastard took me for every dime I had and then ran off with some tart with a lower handicap. He broke my heart, ruined my backswing, and wrecked my career. And then, to have him come waltzing into my life again after all these years! It was too much! The worst of it was that he didn’t even recognize me! Hadn’t the faintest idea who I was. After everything I’d suffered, I was nothing to him. Not even a fond memory. I knew right then I’d get even with him if it was the last thing I ever did.”
The hubby in the back said, “Hear! Hear!” and clapped until his wife gave him a nudge.
The party broke up after that. Pat was handcuffed and taken away and everybody else spent a good fifteen minutes reliving events. Emily asked David to stay for a while, touched that he’d tried to save her. Belatedly, I noticed that my head was starting to pound all over again, so I excused myself. Althea trailed after me, watching every move I made. She planted herself on the sidewalk while I got in my car and then rolled the window down on the passenger side, beckoning to her. She sidled over to the car.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
She nodded and then spoke up, her tone shy. “When I grow up, I want to be like you.”
“Good plan,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. You come around to my office twenty years from now and we’ll form a partnership.”
“Okay,” she said gravely and we sealed it with a handshake.
long gone
SEPTEMBER IN SANTA TERESA. I’ve never known anyone yet who doesn’t suffer a certain restlessness when autumn rolls around. It’s the season of new school clothes, fresh notebooks, and finely sharpened pencils without any teeth marks in the wood. We’re all eight years old again and anything is possible. The new year should never begin on January 1. It begins in the fall and continues as long as our saddle oxfords remain unscuffed and our lunch boxes have no dents.
My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m female, thirty-two, twice divorced, “doing business as” Kinsey Millhone Investigations in a little town ninety-five miles north of Los Angeles. Mine isn’t a walk-in trade like a beauty salon. Most of my clients find themselves in a bind and then seek my services, hoping I can offer a solution for a mere thirty bucks an hour, plus expenses. Robert Ackerman’s message was waiting on my answering machine that Monday morning at nine when I got in.
“Hello. My name is Robert Ackerman and I wonder if you could give me a call. My wife is missing and I’m worried sick. I was hoping you could help
me out.” In the background, I could hear whiny children, my favorite kind. He repeated his name and gave me a telephone number. I made a pot of coffee before I called him back.
A little person answered the phone. There was a murmured child-sized hello and then I heard a lot of heavy breathing close to the mouthpiece.
“Hi,” I said. “Can I speak to your daddy?”
“Yes.” Long silence.
“Today?” I added.
The receiver was clunked down on a tabletop and I could hear the clatter of footsteps in a room that sounded as if it didn’t have any carpeting. In due course, Robert Ackerman picked up the phone.
“Lucy?”
“It’s Kinsey Millhone, Mr. Ackerman. I just got your message on my answering machine. Can you tell me what’s going on?”
“Oh wow, yeah—”
He was interrupted by a piercing shriek that sounded like one of those policeman’s whistles you use to discourage obscene phone callers. I didn’t jerk back quite in time. Shit, that hurt.
I listened patiently while he dealt with the errant child.
“Sorry,” he said when he came back on the line. “Look, is there any way you could come out to the house? I’ve got my hands full and I just can’t get away.”
I took his address and brief directions, then headed out to my car.
ROBERT AND THE MISSING Mrs. Ackerman lived in a housing tract that looked like it was built in the forties, before anyone ever dreamed up the notion of family rooms, country kitchens, and his- ’n’-hers solar spas. What we had here was a basic drywall box, cramped living room with a dining L, a kitchen, and one bathroom sandwiched between two nine-by-twelve-foot bedrooms. When Robert answered the door I could just about see the whole place at a glance. The only thing the builders had been lavish with was the hardwood floors, which, in this case, was unfortunate. Little children had banged and scraped these floors and had brought in some kind of foot grit that I sensed before I was even asked to step inside.
Robert, though harried, had a boyish appeal—a man in his early thirties perhaps, lean and handsome, with dark eyes and dark hair that came to a pixie point in the middle of his forehead. He was wearing chinos and a plain white T-shirt. He had a baby, maybe eight months old, propped on his hip like a grocery bag. Another child clung to his right leg, while a third rode his tricycle at various walls and doorways, making quite loud sounds with his mouth.
“Hi, come on in,” Robert said. “We can talk out in the backyard while the kids play.” His smile was sweet.
I followed him through the tiny disorganized house and out to the backyard, where he set the baby down in a sandpile framed with two-by-fours. The second child held on to Robert’s belt loops and stuck a thumb in its mouth, staring at me while the tricycle child tried to ride off the edge of the porch. I’m not fond of children. I’m really not. Especially the kind who wear hard brown shoes. Like dogs, these infants sensed my distaste and kept their distance, eyeing me with a mixture of rancor and disdain.
The backyard was scruffy, fenced in, and littered with the fifty-pound sacks the sand had come in. Robert gave the children homemade-style cookies out of a cardboard box and shooed them away. In fifteen minutes the sugar would probably turn them into lunatics. I gave my watch a quick glance, hoping to be gone by then.
“You want a lawn chair?”
“No, this is fine,” I said and settled on the grass. There wasn’t a lawn chair in sight, but the offer was nice anyway.
He perched on the edge of the sandbox and ran a distracted hand across his head. “God, I’m sorry everything is such a mess, but Lucy hasn’t been here for two days. She didn’t come home from work on Friday and I’ve been a wreck ever since.”
“I take it you notified the police.”
“Sure. Friday night. She never showed up at the babysitter’s house to pick the kids up. I finally got a call here at seven asking where she was. I figured she’d just stopped off at the grocery store or something, so I went ahead and picked ’em up and brought ’em home. By ten o’clock when I hadn’t heard from her, I knew something was wrong. I called her boss at home and he said as far as he knew she’d left work at five as usual, so that’s when I called the police.”
“You filed a missing persons report?”
“I can do that today. With an adult, you have to wait seventy-two hours, and even then, there’s not much they can do.”
“What else did they suggest?”
“The usual stuff, I guess. I mean, I called everyone we know. I talked to her mom in Bakersfield and this friend of hers at work. Nobody has any idea where she is. I’m scared something’s happened to her.”
“You’ve checked with hospitals in the area, I take it.”
“Sure. That’s the first thing I did.”
“Did she give you any indication that anything was wrong?”
“Not a word.”
“Was she depressed or behaving oddly?”
“Well, she was kind of restless the past couple of months. She always seemed to get excited around this time of year. She said it reminded her of her old elementary school days.” He shrugged. “I hated mine.”
“But she’s never disappeared like this before.”
“Oh, heck no. I just mentioned her mood because you asked. I don’t think it amounted to anything.”
“Does she have any problems with alcohol or drugs?”
“Lucy isn’t really like that,” he said. “She’s petite and kind of quiet. A homebody, I guess you’d say.”
“What about your relationship? Do the two of you get along okay?”
“As far as I’m concerned, we do. I mean, once in a while we get into it, but never anything serious.”
“What are your disagreements about?”
He smiled ruefully. “Money, mostly. With three kids, we never seem to have enough. I mean, I’m crazy about big families, but it’s tough financially. I always wanted four or five, but she says three is plenty, especially with the oldest not in school yet. We fight about that some—having more kids.”
“You both work?”
“We have to. Just to make ends meet. She has a job in an escrow company downtown, and I work for the phone company.”
“Doing what?”
“Installer,” he said.
“Has there been any hint of someone else in her life?”
He sighed, plucking at the grass between his feet. “In a way, I wish I could say yes. I’d like to think maybe she just got fed up or something and checked into a motel for the weekend. Something like that.”
“But you don’t think she did.”
“Un-uhn, and I’m going crazy with anxiety. Somebody’s got to find out where she is.”
“Mr. Ackerman—”
“You can call me Rob,” he said.
Clients always say that. I mean, unless their names are something else.
“Rob,” I said, “the police are truly your best bet in a situation like this. I’m just one person. They’ve got a vast machinery they can put to work and it won’t cost you a cent.”
“You charge a lot, huh?”
“Thirty bucks an hour plus expenses.”
He thought about that for a moment, then gave me a searching look. “Could you maybe put in ten hours? I got three hundred bucks we were saving for a trip to the San Diego Zoo.”
I pretended to think about it, but the truth was, I knew I couldn’t say no to that boyish face. Anyway, the kids were starting to whine and I wanted to get out of there. I waived the retainer and said I’d send him an itemized bill when the ten hours were up. I figured I could put a contract in the mail and reduce my contact with the short persons who were crowding around him now, begging for more sweets. I asked for a recent photograph of Lucy, but all he could come up with was a two-year-old snapshot of her with the two older kids. She looked beleaguered even then, and that was before the third baby came along. I thought about quiet little Lucy Ackerman, whose three strapping sons had legs the size of my
arms. If I were she, I know where I’d be. Long gone.
LUCY ACKERMAN WAS employed as an escrow officer for a small company on State Street not far from my office. It was a modest establishment of white walls, rust-and-brown-plaid furniture, with burnt-orange carpets. There were Gauguin reproductions all around, and a live plant on every desk. I introduced myself first to the office manager, a Mrs. Merriman, who was in her sixties, had tall hair, and wore lace-up boots with stiletto heels. She looked like a woman who’d trade all her pension monies for a head-to-toe body tuck.
I said, “Robert Ackerman has asked me to see if I can locate his wife.”
“Well, the poor man. I heard about that,” she said with her mouth. Her eyes said, “Fat chance!”
“Do you have any idea where she might be?”
“I think you’d better talk to Mr. Sotherland.” She had turned all prim and officious, but my guess was she knew something and was just dying to be asked. I intended to accommodate her as soon as I’d talked to him. The protocol in small offices, I’ve found, is ironclad.
Gavin Sotherland got up from his swivel chair and stretched a big hand across the desk to shake mine. The other member of the office force, Barbara Hemdahl, the bookkeeper, got up from her chair simultaneously and excused herself. Mr. Sotherland watched her depart and then motioned me into the same seat. I sank into leather still hot from Barbara Hemdahl’s backside, a curiously intimate effect. I made a mental note to find out what she knew, and then I looked, with interest, at the company vice president. I picked up all these names and job titles because his was cast in stand-up bronze letters on his desk, and the two women both had white plastic name tags affixed to their breasts, like nurses. As nearly as I could tell, there were only four of them in the office, including Lucy Ackerman, and I couldn’t understand how they could fail to identify each other on sight. Maybe all the badges were for customers who couldn’t be trusted to tell one from the other without the proper IDs.
Gavin Sotherland was large, an ex-jock to all appearances, maybe forty-five years old, with a heavy head of blond hair thinning slightly at the crown. He had a slight paunch, a slight stoop to his shoulders, and a grip that was damp with sweat. He had his coat off, and his once-starched white shirt was limp and wrinkled, his beige gabardine pants heavily creased across the lap. Altogether, he looked like a man who’d just crossed a continent by rail. Still, I was forced to credit him with good looks, even if he had let himself go to seed.