Q is for QUARRY Page 14

  On our way across town, Dolan told me he’d gone through the murder book again. Early reports had made reference to three stolen vehicles, one of which was the red 1967 Chevrolet in which Frankie’d been stopped. Melvin Galloway had been asked to follow up on the other two, but gauging from the paperwork, it was impossible to tell what he’d actually done. Miracle was a fugitive and his arrest was a feather in Galloway’s cap. Given his reputation for laziness, the routine aspects of the investigation probably didn’t have much appeal. It was possible he’d simply claimed he’d handled the query when he’d let the matter slide. The red convertible C. K. Vogel had seen turned out to be a 1966 Ford Mustang, owned by a man named Gant in Mesquite, Arizona, just across the California line. Stacey had asked Joe Mandel to run the VIN and license plate to see where the vehicle was now. If Mandel could determine the current whereabouts, it might be worthwhile to track it down and take a look.

  The room Frankie rented was located in the rear of a frame house on Guardia Street. We picked our way down the drive, avoiding a cornucopia of spilled garbage from an overturned can. Surrounding orange and red hibiscus shrubs had grown so tall that the narrow wooden porch was cold with shade. Dolan knocked on the door while I stood to one side, as though worried I’d be fired on through the lathe-and-plaster wall. Dolan waited a decent interval and knocked again. We were on the verge of departing when Frankie opened the door. At forty-four, he was baby-faced and clean-shaven. He wore a T-shirt and loose shorts, with a sleep mask pushed up on the top of his head. His feet were bare. He said, “What.”

  “Mr. Miracle?”

  “That’s right.”

  Dolan moved his windbreaker aside, exposing the badge on his belt. “Lieutenant Dolan, Santa Teresa Police Department. This is Kinsey Millhone.”

  “Okay.” Frankie had mild brown wavy hair and brown eyes. His gaze was direct and tainted with annoyance. I was surprised to see he had no visible tattoos. He’d been in prison for the past seventeen years and I expected him to look as though he’d been rolling naked and wet across the Sunday funnies. He wasn’t overweight by any means, but he looked soft, which was another surprise. I picture prison inmates all bulked up from lifting weights. His eyes caught mine. “I suit you okay?”

  I declined a response. Dolan said, “You have a late night? You seem cross.”

  “I work nights, if it’s any of your business.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Janitorial. The Granger Building on the graveyard shift. I’d give you my boss’s name, but you already have that.”

  Dolan smiled slightly. “Matter of fact I do. Your parole officer gave it to me when I talked to him.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “May we come in?”

  Frankie glanced back across his shoulder. “Sure, why not?” He stepped away from the door and we crossed the threshold. His entire living quarters consisted of one room with a linoleum floor, a hot plate, an ancient refrigerator, an iron bedstead, and little else. In lieu of a closet, he had a rack made of cast iron pipe on which he’d draped his clothes, both dirty and clean. I could see a cramped bathroom through a door that opened off the rear wall. In addition to an ashtray full of butts, there was a tumble of paperback books on the floor by his bed, a mix of mystery and science fiction. The room smelled of ripe sheets and stale cigarette smoke. I’d have killed myself if I were forced to live in a place like this. On the other hand, Frankie was used to prison, so this was probably an improvement.

  There was no place to sit so the two of us stood while Frankie crawled back in bed and pulled the sheet across his lap. The ensuing conversation seemed bizarre, like a visit with Stacey in his hospital room. I’d never seen anyone other than the chronically ill opt to be interviewed prone. It suggested a wary sort of self-confidence. He straightened the sheet and folded the top over once. “You can skip the small talk. I’m working again tonight and I need my sleep.”

  “We’d like to ask you about the time you spent in Lompoc before you got picked up.”

  “What about it?”

  “How you got there, what you were doing before your arrest?”

  “Don’t remember. I was stoned. I had shit for brains back then.”

  “When the officers pulled you over, you were six miles from the spot where a young girl’s body was found.”

  “Wonderful. And where was that?”

  “Near Grayson Quarry. You know the place?”

  “Everybody knows Grayson. It’s been there for years.”

  “It seems like quite a coincidence.”

  “That I was six miles away? Bullshit. I have family in the area. My dad’s lived in the same house forty-four years. I was on my way to visit.”

  “After killing Cathy Lee.”

  “I hope you aren’t here coughing up that old hair ball. I’ll tell you one thing, they never should have nailed me for murder one. That was strictly self-defense. She came at me with a pair of scissors – not that I need to justify myself to you.”

  “Why’d you run? Hardly the actions of an innocent man.”

  “I never said I was innocent. I said – oh hell, why should I tell you? I was in a panic, if you want to know the truth. You do meth, you don’t think straight. Temper runs hot and you think everybody’s after you.”

  “No need to be defensive,” Dolan said.

  “Please forgive me. I beseech you. People wake me up, I get cranky sometimes.”

  Dolan smiled. “You get cranky, you fly off the handle, is that it?”

  “You know what? I’ve done my time. Not a mark on my record in seventeen years. Credit for time served, good behavior, the whole shootin’ match. Now I’m out, I’m clean, and I’m gainfully employed so you can go fuck yourself. No offense.”

  “Prison did you some good.”

  “Yes, it did. See that? Rehabilitation works. I’m living proof. Went from bad to good and now I’m free as a bird.”

  “Not quite. You’re still on parole.”

  “You think I don’t know that? All the fuckin’ rules they lay down? Tell you something, you won’t catch me in violation. I’m way too smart. I’m willing to play fair because I don’t intend to go back in. And I mean, ever.”

  “You know the problem with you, Frankie?”

  “What’s that, Lieutenant? I’m sure you’ll spell it out in great detail.”

  “You may be righteous today, but back then you didn’t know enough to keep your big mouth shut.”

  “Come on. What is this?”

  “I told you. We have an unsolved homicide with circumstances similar to Cathy Lee’s.”

  “Yeah, well, I can’t help you there. I don’t know jack about that. You want anything else, you can talk to my attorney.”

  “And who’s that?”

  “Haven’t hired one yet, but I’ll let you know. Where’s this horseshit coming from, or is that classified?”

  “We got somebody willing to put the ju-ju on you.”

  “Ju-ju, my ass. What have you got, some ex-con having lunch on my expense account? I didn’t kill the chick. You’re full of shit.”

  “That’s not what our witness says. He says you bragged about it afterward.”

  “You’re blowin’ smoke and you know it. You had anything on me, you’d’ve showed up with a warrant instead of this hokey song-and-dance routine.”

  Dolan shook his head. “I don’t know, Frankie. I figure you had a hard-on for the girl and when she wouldn’t put out, you lost control of yourself.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Frankie made a gesture like he was whacking off.

  “Why don’t you own up to it? You could really help us out. Show your heart’s in the right place now that you’ve turned over this new leaf.”

  Frankie smiled, shaking his head in disbelief. “You think I’d be dumb enough to sit here and confess? To what? You got nothing on me. I don’t even know who the fuck you’re talking about.”

  “I’m not here to hassle you.”

  “Goo
d, because I’m trying not to lose my cool. You want a urine sample, I’ll piss in a cup. You want to search the place, have at it. Whatever it is, just be quick about it. Otherwise we’re done. Pull the door shut behind you on your way out.” He slid the mask down over his eyes and turned his back to us.

  “Well, that was unproductive,” I said when the two of us were back in the car again.

  “I wanted you to have a look at him. It’s always best if you know the players firsthand. Besides, it’s good to let him sweat a bit, wondering what we have.”

  “That won’t take long. We don’t have anything, do we?”

  “No, but he doesn’t know that.”

  Dolan was going to go back over to St. Terry’s as soon as he dropped me at the office, but when we pulled onto Caballeria Lane, we caught sight of Stacey sitting on the curb in front of my place, a brown paper bag at his feet. He wore his red knit watch cap, short-sleeve shirt, chinos, and shoes with no socks. His perforated plastic hospital bracelet still encircled his wrist. His arms were bone thin, his skin translucent, like the pale tissue overlay on a wedding invitation. Dolan parked two cars away. While we walked back to Stacey, Dolan took out a pack of cigarettes and his matches and paused to light up. He tossed the match aside and drew deeply, sucking smoke down as though he were using an asthma inhaler. “How’d you get here?”

  Stacey shaded his eyes, looking sideways at him. “Called a cab. They do that. Pay ‘em money, those guys’ll take you anyplace you want.”

  “I didn’t think you’d be released until they ran more tests.” Stacey waved that notion aside. “Hell with ‘em. I got tired of waiting for the doc to pull a thumb out. I packed my things and took a hike. I don’t have time for nonsense. It won’t change anything. Meantime, I got a call from Mandel and he says come on out. He’s pulled the Jane Doe evidence and we can take a look. Speaking of which, what’d our friend Frankie have to say for himself?”

  “Don’t change the subject. How’d the biopsy go?”

  “Piece of cake. They’ve stuck me so often, it’s like a bug bite.”

  “How soon do you get the results?”

  Stacey’s hand was so small he managed to ease his bracelet off without breaking it. “Day or so. Who cares? We got work to do. Now give me a hand here. My age, you get down, you can’t get up again. Tell me about Frankie.”

  “He’s completely innocent.”

  “Of course. We should have known.”

  Dolan extended a hand and pulled Stacey to his feet. He seemed to totter fleetingly and then he regained his balance. Dolan and I exchanged one of those looks, which Stacey caught.

  “Quit that. I’m fine. I’m tired is all. I’ve been in bed too long.”

  The Santa Teresa County Sheriffs Department is located near Colgate off El Solano Road in the same general vicinity as the county dump. I guess land out there is cheap and there’s room to expand. Behind the building, I could see rows of black-and-whites, county cars, and assorted personal vehicles belonging to the Sheriffs Department personnel. The one-story structure is a creamy beige and white stucco, with a series of arches across the front. The main jail is just across the road. We parked and went in the front entrance, letting Stacey lead the way. I could tell he missed working. Just the sight of the facility seemed to give him strength.

  To the left, in the tiny lobby, was a counter with a glass partition, probably bulletproof, though it was impossible to tell. The civilian clerk, a woman, looked up when we came in. Stacey said, “We’re here to see Sergeant Detective Joe Mandel.”

  She pushed a clipboard across the counter. “He said he’d be right out.”

  All three of us signed in and she gave us each a visitor’s badge, which we fastened onto our shirts. There were three chairs available, but we elected to stand. Through the locked glass door, I could already see someone approaching from the far end of the corridor. He pushed the door open from his side and let us in. There were the usual introductions and a round of handshakes. From the flicker in his eyes, I could tell he recognized me from our meeting in his kitchen, but if he thought it odd, he never let on. He knew Stacey well, but I gathered he hadn’t seen Dolan for many years. They exchanged pleasantries as he held the door open and let us into the corridor.

  We turned left and followed him down a long hallway, a dogrun of beige carpeting and beige walls, with offices opening up on either side. Joe introduced us to Sergeant Steve Rhineberger, in the Sheriffs forensics unit. He unlocked a door and showed us into a room that looked like a tract-housing kitchen without the stove. There were counters on three sides and some sort of ventilation apparatus at the rear. A large battered-looking brown paper bag sat on the table in the center of the room.

  Sergeant Rhineberger opened a lower cabinet door, tore off a length of white paper from a wide roll inside, and took out a pair of disposable latex gloves. “I asked the coroner’s office to send over the mandible and maxilla. I thought you might want to look at those, too.”

  He placed the sheet of protective paper on the table, pulled on the gloves, and then broke the seal on the evidence bag. He removed the folded tarp and various articles of clothing, which he spread on the paper. Mandel removed a handful of disposable gloves from the cardboard dispenser on the counter. He passed a pair to Stacey, a pair to Dolan, and a pair to me. The guys had been chatting about department business, but we all fell into a respectful silence. Eighteen years after the violence of her death, there was only the crackle of white paper and the snap of gloves.

  It was strange to look at items I’d only seen before in faded photographs. The shirt and daisy-print pants had been cut from the body and the garments seemed sprawling and misshapen laid out across the tabletop. The fabric was soiled and moist, as though permeated with damp sand. The bloodstains resembled nothing so much as smudges of rust. Her sandals were leather, decorated with brass buckles linked with leather bands. A narrow thong would have separated her big toe from the remaining toes on each foot. The sandals looked new except for faint stains on the sole where her heel and the ball of her bare foot had left indelible marks.

  Rhineberger opened a container and removed Jane Doe’s upper and lower jawbones. Her teeth showed extensive dental work, sixteen to eighteen amalgam fillings. When he set the maxilla on the mandible, matching the grooves and worn surfaces where they met, we could see the extent of her overbite and the crooked eyetooth on the left. “Can’t believe nobody recognized her by the description of the teeth. Charlie says it was all probably done a year or two before she died. You can see the wisdom teeth haven’t erupted yet. He says she probably wasn’t eighteen.” He placed the bones back in the container, leaving the lid off.

  Her personal effects scarcely covered the tabletop. This was all that was left of her, the entire sum. I experienced a sense of puzzlement that any life could be reduced to such humble remnants. Surely, she’d expected far more from the world-love, marriage, children, perhaps at the very least a valued presence among her friends and family. Her remains were buried now in a grave without a headstone, its location marked by lot number in the cemetery ledger. In spite of that, she seemed curiously real, given the sparse data we had. I’d seen the black-and-white photograph of her where she lay on the August-dry grass, her face obscured by the angle of her body and the intervening shrubs. Her midriff, a portion of her forearm, and a section of her calf were all that were visible from the camera’s perspective, her flesh swollen, mottled by decomposition as though bruised.

  I picked up the plastic bag that contained a lock of her hair, which looked clean and silky, a muted shade of blond. A second plastic bag held two delicate earrings, simple loops of gold wire. The only remaining evidence of the murder itself was the length of thin cable, encased in white plastic, with which her wrists had been bound. The tarp was made of a medium-weight canvas, the seams stitched in red, with metal grommets inserted at regular intervals. It looked like standard-issue – painter’s drop cloth, or a cover used to shield a cord of firewood from
rain. In one corner, there was a red speck that looked like a ladybug or a spot of blood, but on closer inspection I realized it was simply a small square of red stitches, where the thread had been secured at the end of the row. From these few tokens, we were hoping to reconstruct not only her identity but that of her killer. How could she be so compelling that eighteen years later the five of us would assemble like this in her behalf?

  Belatedly, I tuned into the conversation. Stacey was laying out our progress to date. Apparently, Mandel had gone back and reviewed the file himself. Like Stacey and Dolan, who’d actually discovered the body, he’d been involved from the first. He was saying, “Too bad Crouse is gone. There aren’t many of us left.”

  Dolan said, “What happened to Crouse?”

  “He sold his house and moved his family to Oregon. Now he’s chief of police in some little podunk town up there. Last I heard he was bored to tears, but he can’t afford to come back with housing prices here. Keith Baldwin and Oscar Wallen are both retired and Mel Galloway’s dead. Nonetheless, it’s nice to have a chance to revisit this case. You have to think after all these years, we might shake something loose.”

  Stacey said, “What’s your take on it? You see anything we missed?”

  Mandel thought about that briefly. “I guess the only thing I’d be curious about is this Iona Mathis, the gal Frankie Miracle was married to. She might know something if you can track her down. I hear she came back and sat through the trial with him. She damn near married the guy again she felt so sorry for him.”

  Stacey made a pained face. “I don’t get the appeal. I can’t even manage to get married once, and I’m a law-abiding citizen. You have an address on her?”

  “No, but I can get you one.”

  Chapter 11

  *

  Dolan dropped me off at the office before he took Stacey home. Stacey’s energy was flagging and, in truth, mine was, too. As I un; locked the door, I noticed a Mercedes station wagon parked in the narrow driveway that separated my bungalow from the next in line. The woman in the driver’s seat was working on a piece of needlepoint, the roll of canvas resting awkwardly against the steering wheel. She looked up at me and waved, then set her canvas on the seat beside her.