B is for BURGLAR Page 10

  “Why only twenty-five for the house? I thought that place was worth over a hundred grand? He won’t have enough money to do the repairs, will he?”

  “When he bought the place in 1962, it was worth twenty-five thousand and that’s what he insured it for. He never increased the coverage and he hasn’t taken out any other policies. Personally, I don’t see how he can do anything with the house. It’s a complete loss, which I think is what’s broken him.”

  Now that she’d told me, I felt guilty for all the macho bullshit I’d laid on her.

  “Thanks. That’s a big help,” I said. “Uh… by the way, Vera wanted me to ask if you’d be interested in meeting an unattached aerospace engineer with bucks.”

  A wonderful look of uncertainty crossed her face: suspicion, sexual hunger, greed. Was I offering her a cookie or a flat brown turd on a plate? I knew what was going through her head. In Santa Teresa, a single man is on the market maybe ten days before someone snaps him up.

  She shot me a worried look. “What’s wrong with him? Why didn’t you take him first?”

  “I just came off a relationship,” I said, “I’m in retreat.” Which was true.

  “Maybe I’ll give Vera a buzz,” she said faintly.

  “Great. Thanks again for the information,” I said and I gave her a little wave as I moved away from her desk. With my luck, she’d fall in love with the guy and want me to be a bridesmaid. Then I’d be stuck with one of those dumb dresses with a hunk of flounce on the hip. When I glanced back at her, she seemed to have shrunk and I felt a twinge. She wasn’t so bad.

  Chapter 11

  *

  I ate dinner that night at Rosie’s, a little place half a block down from my apartment. It’s a cross between a neighborhood bar and an old-fashioned beanery, sandwiched between a Laundromat on the corner and an appliance repair shop that a man named McPherson operates out of his house. All three of these businesses have been in operation for over twenty-five years and are now, in theory, illegal, representing zoning violations of a profound and offensive sort, at least to people who live somewhere else. Every other year, some overzealous citizen gets a bug up his butt and goes before the city council denouncing the outrage of this breach of residential integrity. In the off years, I think money changes hands.

  Rosie herself is probably sixty-five, Hungarian, short, and top-heavy, a creature of muumuus and hennaed hair growing low on her forehead. She wears lipstick in a burnt-orange shade that usually exceeds the actual shape of her mouth, giving the impression that she once had a much larger set of lips. She uses a brown eyebrow pencil lavishly, making her eyes look stern and reproachful. The tip of her nose comes close to meeting her upper lip.

  I sat down in my usual booth near the back. There was a mimeographed menu sheet slipped into a clear plastic cover stuck between the ketchup bottle and the napkin box. The selections were typed in pale purple like those notices they used to send home with us when we were in grade school. Most of the items were written in Hungarian; words with lots of accent marks and z’s and double dots, suggesting that the dishes would be fierce and emphatic.

  Rosie marched over, pad and pencil poised, her manner withdrawn. She was feeling offended about something, but I wasn’t sure yet what I’d done. She snatched the menu out of my hand and put it back, writing out the order without consulting me. If you don’t like the way the place is run, you go somewhere else. She finished writing and squinted at the pad, checking the results. She wouldn’t quite meet my eyes.

  “You didn’t come in for a week so I figured you was mad at me,” she said. “I bet you been eating junk, right? Don’t answer that. I don’t want to hear. You don’t owe me an apology. You just lucky I give you something decent. Here’s what you gonna get.”

  She consulted the pad again with a critical eye, reading the order to me then with interest as though it were news to her too.

  “Green pepper salad. Fantastic. The best. I made it myself so I know it’s done right. Olive oil, vinegar, little pinch of sugar. Forget the bread, I’m out. Henry didn’t bring fresh today so what do I know? He could be mad at me too. How do I know what I did? Nobody tells me these things. Then I give you sour oxtail stew.”

  She crossed that off. “Too much grease. Is no good for you. Instead I give you tejfeles suit ponty, some nice pike I bake in cream, and if you clean your plate, I could give you deep-fried cherries if I think you deserve it, which you don’t. The wine I’m gonna bring with the flatware. Is Austrian, but okay.”

  She marched away then, her back straight, her hair the color of dried tangerine peels. Her rudeness sometimes has an eccentric charm to it, but it’s just as often simply irritating, something you have to endure if you want to eat Rosie’s meals. Some nights I can’t tolerate verbal abuse at the end of the day, preferring instead the impersonal mechanics of a drive-in restaurant or the peace and quiet of a peanut butter and dill pickle sandwich at home.

  That night Rosie’s was deserted, looking drab and not quite clean. The walls are paneled in construction-grade plywood sheets, stained dark, with a matte finish of cooking fumes and cigarette smoke. The lighting is wrong ��� too pale, too generalized ��� so that the few patrons who do wander in look sallow and unwell. A television set on the bar usually flashes colored images with no sound, and a marlin arched above it looks like it’s fashioned of plaster of Paris and dusted with soot. I’m embarrassed to say how much I like the place. It will never be a tourist attraction. It will never be a singles bar. No one will ever “discover” it or award it even half a star. It will always smell like spilled beer, paprika, and hot grease. It’s a place where I can eat by myself and not even have to take a book along in order to avoid unwelcome company. A man would have to worry about any woman he could pick up in a dive like this.

  The front door opened and the old crone who lives across the street came in, followed by Jonah Robb, whom I’d talked to that morning in Missing Persons. I almost didn’t recognize him at first in his civilian clothes. He wore jeans, a gray tweed jacket, and brown desert boots. His shirt looked new, the package folds still evident, the collar tightly starched and stiff. He carried himself like a man with a shoulder holster tucked up under his left arm. He had apparently come in to look for me because he headed straight for my table and sat down.

  I said, “Hello. Have a seat.”

  “I heard you hung out in here,” he said. He glanced around and his brows gave a little lift as though the rumor were true but hard to believe. “Does the Health Department know about this place?”

  I laughed.

  Rosie, coming out of the kitchen, caught sight of Jonah and stopped dead in her tracks, retreating as though she’d been yanked backward by a rope.

  He looked over his shoulder to see if he’d missed something.

  “What’s the matter? Could she tell I was a cop? Has she got a problem with that?”

  “She’s checking her makeup. There’s a mirror just inside the kitchen door,” I said.

  Rosie appeared again, simpering coquettishly as she brought my silverware and plunked it down on the table tightly bound in a paper napkin.

  “You never said you was entertaining,” she murmured. “Does you friend intend to have a little bite to eat? Some liquid refreshment perhaps? Beer, wine, a mixed drink?”

  “Beer sounds good,” he said. “What do you have on tap?”

  Rosie folded her hands and regarded me with interest. She never deals directly with a stranger so we were forced to go through this little playlet in which I interpreted as though suddenly employed by the U.N.

  “You still have Mich on tap?” I asked.

  “Of course. Why would I have anything else?”

  I looked at Jonah and he nodded assent. “I think we’ll have a Mich then. Are you eating? The food’s great.”

  “Fine with me,” he said. “What do you recommend?”

  “Why don’t you just double the order, Rosie? Could you do that for us?”

  “Of
course.” She glanced at him with sly approval. “I had no idea,” she said. I could feel her mentally nudge me with one elbow. I knew what her appraisal consisted of. She favored weight in men. She favored dark hair and easygoing attitudes. She moved away from the table then, artfully leaving us alone. She isn’t nearly as gracious when I come in with women friends.

  “What brings you here?” I said.

  “Idleness. Curiosity. I did a background check on you to save us talking about all the stupid stuff.”

  “So we could get right down to what?” I asked.

  “You think I’m on the make or something?”

  “Sure,” I said. “New shirt. No wedding ring. I bet your wife left you week before last and you shaved less than an hour ago. The cologne isn’t even dry on the side of your neck.”

  He laughed. He had a harmless face and good teeth. He leaned forward on his elbows. “Hers’s how it went,” he said. “I met her when I was thirteen and I was with her from that time to this. I think she grew up and I never could, at least not with her. I don’t know what to do with myself. Actually she’s been gone for a year. It just feels like a week. You’re the first woman I’ve looked at since she went off.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “Idaho. She took the kids. Two,” he said as though he knew I’d ask that next. “One girl ten, another one eight. Courtney and Ashley. I’d have named ‘em something else. Sara and Diane, Patti and Jill, something like that. I don’t even understand girls. I don’t even know what they think about. I really love my kids, but from the day they were born it was like they were in this exclusive little club with my wife. I couldn’t seem to get a membership no matter what I did.”

  “What was your wife’s name?”

  “Camilla. Shit. She ripped my heart out by the roots. I put on thirty pounds this year.”

  “Time to take it off,” I said.

  “Time to do a lot of things.”

  Rosie came back to the table with a beer for him and a glass of white table wine for me. Did I know this story or what? Men just out of marriages are a mess and I was a mess myself. I already knew all the pain, uncertainty and mismanaged emotions. Even Rosie sensed it wasn’t going to fly. She looked at me like she couldn’t figure out how I’d blown it so fast. When she left, I got back to the subject at hand.

  “I’m not doing all that well myself,” I said.

  “So I heard. I thought we could help each other out.”

  “That’s not how it works.”

  “You want to go up to the pistol range and shoot sometime?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. He was all over the place. “Sure. We could do that. What kind of gun do you have?”

  “Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. It’ll take a .38 or a .357 magnum cartridge. Usually I just wear a Trooper MK HI but I had a chance to pick up the Python and I couldn’t pass it up. Four hundred bucks. You’ve been married twice? I don’t see how you could bring yourself to do that. I mean, Jesus. I thought marriage was a real commitment. Like souls, you know, fused all through eternity and shit like that.”

  “Four hundred bucks is a steal. How’d you pull that off?” I squinted at him. “What is it, are you Catholic or something?”

  “No, just dumb I guess. I got my notions of romance out of ladies’ magazines in the beauty shop my mother ran when I was growing up. The gun I got from Dave Whitaker’s estate. His widow hates guns and never liked it that he got into ‘em so she unloaded his collection first chance she got. I’d have paid the going rate, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Do you know her? Bess Whitaker?”

  I shook my head.

  He glanced up then as Rosie put a plate down in front of each of us. I could tell by his look that he hadn’t expected green peppers with a vinaigrette, even with little curlicues of parsley tucked here and there.

  Usually Rosie waited until I tasted a dish and gave elaborate restaurant-reviewer-type raves, but this time she seemed to think better of it. As soon as she left, Jonah leaned forward.

  “What is this shit?”

  “Just eat.”

  “Kinsey, for the last ten years I been eating with kids who sit and pick all the onions and mushrooms out. I don’t know how to eat if it’s not made with Hamburger Helper.”

  “You’re in for a big surprise,” I said. “What have you been eating for the year since your wife left?”

  “She put up all these dinners in the deep freeze. Every night I thaw one and stick it in the oven at three-fifty for an hour. I guess she went to a garage sale and bought up a bunch of those TV dinner tins with the little compartments. She wanted me to eat well-balanced meals even though she was fucking me over financially.”

  I lowered my fork and looked at him, trying to picture someone freezing up 365 dinners so she could bug out. This was the woman he apparently imagined mating with for life, like owls.

  He was eating his first bite of pepper salad, his eyes turning inward. His facial expression suggested that the pepper was sitting in the middle of his tongue while he made chewing motions around it. I do that myself with those mashed candied sweet potatoes people insist on at Thanksgiving time. Why would anyone put a marshmallow on a vegetable? Would I put licorice on asparagus, or jelly beans on Brussels sprouts? The very idea makes my mouth purse.

  Jonah nodded philosophically to himself and began to fork up the pepper salad with gusto. It must have been at least as tasty as the shit Camilla cooked for him. I pictured tray after tray of frozen tuna casserole with crushed potato chips, with maybe frozen peas in one compartment, carrot coins in the next. I bet she left him six-packs of canned fruit cocktail for dessert. He was looking at me.

  He said, “What’s the matter? Why do you have that look on your face?”

  I shrugged. “Marriage is a mystery.”

  “I’ll second that,” he said. “By the way, how’s your case shaping up?”

  “Well, I’m still nosing around,” I said. “Right now, I’m making a little side investigation into an unsolved murder. Her next-door neighbor was killed the same week she left.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. What’s the connection?”

  “I don’t know yet. Maybe none. It just struck me as an interesting sequence of events that Marty Grice was murdered and Elaine Boldt disappeared within days of it.”

  “Was there a positive I.D.?”

  “On Marty? I have no idea. Dolan’s getting really anal-retentive about that stuff. He won’t tell me a thing.”

  “Why not take a look at the files?”

  “Oh come on. He’s not going to let me see the files.”

  “So don’t ask him. Ask me. I can make copies if you tell me what you want.”

  “Jonah, he would fire your ass. You would never work again. You’d have to sell shoes for the rest of your life.”

  “Why would he have to know?”

  “How could you get away with it? He knows everything.”

  “Bullshit. The files are kept over in Identification and Records. I’ll bet he’s got a second set in his office so he probably never even looks at the originals. I’ll just wait ‘til he’s out and Xerox whatever you need. Then I’ll put it back.”

  “Don’t you have to sign ‘em out?”

  He gave me a look then like I was probably the kind of person who never parked in a red zone. Actually, for someone to whom lying comes so easily, I get anxious about vehicle codes and overdue library books. Violations of the public trust. Oh hey, once in a while I might pick a lock illegally, but not if I think there’s a chance I’ll get caught. The idea of sneaking official documents out of the police station made my stomach squeeze down like I was on the verge of getting a tetanus shot.

  “Oh wow, don’t do that,” I said. “You can’t.”

  “What do you mean, I ‘can’t.’ Of course I can. What do you want to see? Autopsy? Incident report? Follow-up interviews? Lab reports?”

  “That’d be great. That would really help.”

  I looked up
guiltily. Rosie was standing there waiting to pick up our salad plates. I leaned back in the booth and waited until both had been removed. “Look, I’d never ask you to do such a thing ���”

  “You didn’t ask. I volunteered. Quit being such a candy ass. You can turn around and do me a favor sometime.”

  “But Jonah, he really is a nut about department leaks. You know how he gets. Please don’t put yourself in jeopardy.”

  “Don’t sweat it. Homicide detectives are full of crap sometimes. You’re not going to blow his case for him. He probably doesn’t even have a case, so what’s to worry about?”

  After dinner, he walked me back over to my place. It was only 8:15, but I had work to do and he really seemed a bit relieved that the contact between us wasn’t going to be prolonged or intimate. As soon as I heard his footsteps retreat, I turned the outside lights off, sat down at my desk with some index cards and caught up with my notes.

  I checked back through the cards I’d filled out before and tacked them up on the big bulletin board above my desk. I stood there for a long time, reading card after card, hoping for a flash of enlightenment. Only one curious note emerged. I’d been very meticulous about writing down every single item I remembered from my first search of Elaine’s apartment. I do that routinely almost like a little game I play with myself to test my memory. In the kitchen cabinet, she’d had some cans of cat food. 9-Lives Beef and Liver Platter, said the note. Now it seemed out of place to me. What cat?

  Chapter 12

  *

  At nine the next morning, I drove over to Via Madrina. Tillie didn’t answer my buzz so I stood for a minute, surveying the list of tenants’ names on the directory. There was a Wm. Hoover in apartment 10, right next door to Elaine’s. I gave him a buzz.

  The intercom came to life. “Yes?”

  “Mr. Hoover? This is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private detective here in town and I’m looking for Elaine Boldt. Would you mind if I asked you a couple of questions?”