A Is for Alibi Read online

  “Fat is beautiful, Kinsey,” she said to me confidentially as I filled out the registration card. “Looka here.”

  I looked. She was holding out her arm so that I could admire the hefty downhang of excess flesh.

  “I don’t know, Arlette,” I said dubiously. “I keep trying to avoid it myself.”

  “And look at all the time and energy it takes,” she said. “The problem is that our society shuns tubbos. Fat people are heavily discriminated against. Worse than the handicapped. Why, they got it easy compared to us. Everywhere you go now, there are signs out for them. Handicapped parking. Handicapped johns. You’ve seen those little stick figures in wheelchairs. Show me the international sign for the grossly overweight. We got rights.”

  Her face was moon-shaped, surrounded by a girlish cap of wispy blonde hair. Her cheeks were permanently flushed as though vital supply lines were being dangerously squeezed.

  “But it’s so unhealthy, Arlette,” I said. “I mean, don’t you have to worry about high blood pressure, heart attacks . . .”

  “Well there’s hazards to everything. All the more reason we should be treated decently.”

  I gave her my credit card and after she made the imprint she handed me the key to room #2. “That’s right up here close,” she said. “I know how you hate being stuck out back.”

  “Thanks.”

  I’ve been in room #2 about twenty times and it is always dreary in a comforting sort of way. A double bed. Threadbare wall-to-wall carpeting in a squirrel gray. A chair upholstered in orange plastic with one gimpy leg. On the desk, there is a lamp shaped like a football helmet with “UCLA” printed on the side. The bathroom is small and the shower mat is paper. It is the sort of place where you are likely to find someone else’s underpanties beneath the bed. It costs me $11.95 plus room tax in the off-season and includes a “Continental” breakfast—instant coffee and jelly doughnuts, most of which Arlette eats herself. Once, at midnight, a drunk sat on my front step and yelled for an hour and a half until the cops came and took him away. I stay there because I’m cheap.

  I set my suitcase on the bed and took out my jogging clothes. I did a fast walk from Wilshire to San Vicente and then headed west at a trot as far as Twenty-sixth Street, where I tagged a stop sign and turned around, jogging back up to Westgate and across to Wilshire again. The first mile is the one that hurts. I was panting hard when I got back. Given the exhaust fumes I’d taken in from passing motorists on San Vicente, I figured I was about neck-and-neck with toxic wastes. Back in room #2 again, I showered and dressed and then checked back through my notes. Then I made some phone calls. The first was to Lyle Abernathy’s last-known work address, the Wonder Bread Company, down on Santa Monica. Not surprisingly, he had left and the personnel office had no idea where he was. A quick check in the phone book showed no listing for him locally, but a Raymond Glass still lived in Sherman Oaks and I verified the street number I had noted from the police files up in Santa Teresa. I placed another call to my friend in Vegas. He had a lead on Sharon Napier but said it would take him probably half a day to pin it down. I alerted Arlette that he might be calling and cautioned her to make sure the information, if she took it, was exact. She acted a little injured that I didn’t trust her to take phone messages for me, but she’d been negligent before and it had cost me plenty last time around.

  I called Nikki in Santa Teresa and told her where I was and what I was up to. Then I checked my answering service. Charlie Scorsoni had called but left no number. I figured if it was important he’d call back. I gave my service the number where I could be reached. Having tagged all those bases, I went next door to a restaurant that seems to change nationalities every time I’m there. Last time I was in town, it was Mexican fare, which is to say very hot plates of pale brown goo. This time it was Greek: turdlike lumps wrapped in leaves. I’d seen things in roadside parks that looked about that good but I washed them down with a glass of wine that tasted like lighter fluid and who knew the difference? It was now 7:15 and I didn’t have anything to do. The television set in my room was on the fritz so I wandered down to the office and watched TV with Arlette while she ate a box of caramel Ayds.

  In the morning, I drove over the mountain into the San Fernando Valley. At the crest of the hill, where the San Diego Freeway tips over into Sherman Oaks, I could see a layer of smog spread out like a mirage, a shimmering mist of pale yellow smoke through which a few tall buildings yearned as though for fresh air. Libby’s parents lived in a four-unit apartment building set into the crook of the San Diego and Ventura freeways, a cumbersome structure of stucco and frame with bay windows bulging out along the front. There was an open corridor dividing the building in half, with the front doors to the two downstairs apartments opening up just inside. On the right, a stairway led to the second-floor landing. The building itself affected no particular style and I guessed that it had gone up in the thirties before anybody figured out that California architecture should imitate southern mansions and Italian villas. There was a pale lawn of crab and Bermuda grasses intermixed. A short driveway along the left extended back to a row of frame garages, with four green plastic garbage cans chained to a wooden fence. The juniper bushes growing along the front of the building were tall enough to obscure the ground-floor windows and seemed to be suffering from some peculiar molting process that made some of the branches turn brown and the rest go bald. They looked like cut-rate Christmas trees with the bad side facing out. The season to be jolly, in this neighborhood, was long past.

  Apartment #1 was on my left. When I rang the bell, it sounded like the br-r-r-r of an alarm clock running down. The door was opened by a woman with a row of pins in her mouth that bobbed up and down when she spoke. I worried she would swallow one.

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Glass?”

  “That’s right.”

  “My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator. I work up in Santa Teresa. Could I talk to you?”

  She took the pins out of her mouth one by one and stuck them into a pin cushion that she wore on her wrist like a bristling corsage. I handed her my identification and she studied it with care, turning it over as though there might be tricky messages written in fine print on the back. While she did that, I studied her. She was in her early fifties. Her silky brown hair was cut short, a careless style with strands anchored behind her ears. Brown eyes, no makeup, bare-legged. She wore a wraparound denim skirt, a washed-out Madras blouse in bleeding shades of blue, and the kind of cotton slippers I’ve seen in cellophane packs in grocery stores.

  “It’s about Elizabeth,” she said, finally returning my I.D.

  “Yes. It is.”

  She hesitated and then moved back into the living room, making way for me. I picked my way across the living-room floor and took the one chair that wasn’t covered with lengths of fabric or patterns. The ironing board was set up near the bay window, the iron plugged in and ticking as it heated. There were finished garments hanging on a rack near the sewing machine on the far wall. The air smelled of fabric sizing and hot metal.

  In the archway to the dining room, a heavyset man in his sixties sat in a wheelchair, his expression blank, his pants undone in front, heavy paunch protruding. She crossed the room and turned his chair around so that it faced the television set. She put headphones on him and then plugged the jack into the TV, which she flipped on. He watched a game show whether he liked it or not. A couple were dressed up like a boy and girl chicken but I couldn’t tell if they were winning anything.

  “I’m Grace,” she said. “That’s her father. He was in an automobile accident three years ago last spring. He doesn’t talk but he can hear and any mention of Elizabeth upsets him. Help yourself to coffee if you like.”

  There was a ceramic percolator on the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran back under the couch. It looked as if all the other appliances in the room were radiating from the same power source. Grace eased down onto her knees. She had about four ya
rds of dark green silk spread out on the hardwood floor and she was pinning a handmade pattern into place. She held a magazine out to me, opened to a page that showed a designer dress with a deep slit up one side and narrow sleeves. I poured myself a cup of coffee and watched her work.

  “I’m running this up for a woman married to a television star,” she said mildly. “Somebody’s sidekick. He got famous overnight and she says he’s recognized even in the car wash now. People asking for his autograph. Has facials. Him, not her. He was poor, I hear, for the last fifteen years and now they go to all these parties in Bel Air. I do her clothes. He buys his on Rodeo Drive. She could, too, on the money he makes but it makes her feel insecure, she says. She’s much nicer than he is. I already read in the Hollywood Reporter, ‘New Two You,’ him and somebody else ‘pulling up steaks at Stellini’s.’ She’d be smart to put an expensive wardrobe together before he leaves her if you ask me.”

  Grace seemed to be talking to herself, her tone distracted, a smile warming her face now and then. She picked up a pair of pinking shears and began to cut along the straight edge, the scissors making a crunching sound against the wood floor. For a while I didn’t say anything. There was something hypnotic about the work and there seemed to be no compulsion to converse. The television flickered, and from an angle I could see the girl chicken jumping up and down, hands to her face. I knew the audience was urging her to do something—choose, pass, change boxes, take what was behind the curtain, give back the envelope, all of it taking place in silence while Libby’s father looked on from his wheelchair incuriously. I thought she should consult her boy-chicken mate but he just stood there self-consciously like a kid who knew he was too old to be out in costume on Halloween. The tissue-paper pattern rustled as Grace removed it, folding it carefully before she laid it aside.

  “I sewed for Elizabeth when she was young,” she said. “Once she left home, of course, she only wanted store-bought. Sixty dollars for a skirt that only had twelve dollars’ worth of wool at most, but she did have a good eye for color and she could afford to do as she pleased. Would you like to see a picture of her?” Grace’s eyes strayed up to mine and her smile was wistful.

  “Yes. I’d appreciate that.”

  She took the silk first and placed it on the ironing board, testing the iron with a wet index finger as she passed. The iron spat back and she turned the lever down to “wool.” There were two snapshots of Libby in a double frame on the windowsill and she studied them herself before she handed them to me. In one, Libby was facing the camera but her head was bent, her right hand upraised as though she were hiding her face. Her blonde hair was sun-streaked, cut short like her mother’s but feathered back across her ears. Her blue eyes were amused, her grin wide, embarrassed to be caught, I couldn’t think why. I’d never seen a twenty-four-year-old look quite so young or quite so fresh. In the second snapshot, the smile was only partially formed, lips parted over a flash of white teeth, a dimple showing near the corner of her mouth. Her complexion was clear, tinted with gold, lashes dark so that her eyes were delicately outlined.

  “She’s lovely,” I said. “Really.”

  Grace was standing at the ironing board, touching up folds of silk with the tip of the iron, which sailed across the asbestos board like a boat on a flat sea of dark green. She turned the iron off and wiped her hands briefly down along her skirt, then took the pieces of silk and began to pin them together.

  “I named her after Queen Elizabeth,” she said and then she laughed shyly. “She was born on November 14, the same day Prince Charles was born. I’d have named her Charles if she’d been a boy. Raymond thought it was silly but I didn’t care.”

  “You never called her Libby?”

  “Oh no. She did that herself in grade school. She always had such a sense of who she was and how her life should be. Even as a child. She was very tidy—not prissy, but neat. She would line her dresser drawers with pretty floral wrapping papers and everything would be arranged just so. She liked accounting for the same reason. Mathematics was orderly and it made sense. The answers were always there if you worked carefully enough, or that’s what she said.” Grace moved over to the rocking chair and sat down, laying the silk across her lap. She began to baste darts.

  “I understand she worked as an accountant for Haycraft and McNiece. How long was she there?”

  “About a year and a half. She had done the accounts for her father’s company—he did small-appliance repair—but it really didn’t interest her, working for him. She was ambitious. She passed her CPA exam when she was twenty-two. She took a couple of computer courses, too, in night school, after that. She made very good grades. She had two junior accountants working under her, you know.”

  “Was she happy there?”

  “I’m sure she was,” Grace said. “She spoke of going to law school at one point. She enjoyed business management and finance. She liked working with figures and I know she was impressed because that company represented very wealthy people. She said you could learn a lot about someone’s character by the way they spent money, what they bought and where—whether they lived within their means, that kind of thing. She said it was a study of human nature.” Grace’s voice was tinged with pride. It was hard for me to reconcile the idea of this prim-sounding CPA with the girl in the photographs who looked pretty, animated, bashful, and rather sweet, hardly a woman with a hard-driving purpose in life.

  “What about her old boyfriend? Do you have any idea where he is now?”

  “Who, Lyle? Oh, he’ll be around in a bit.”

  “Here?”

  “Oh my, yes. He stops by every day at noon to help me with Raymond. He’s a lovely boy but of course you probably knew she broke off her engagement with him a few months before . . . she passed on. She went with Lyle all through high school and they both attended Santa Monica City College together until he dropped out.”

  “Is that when he went to work for Wonder Bread?”

  “Oh no, Lyle’s had many jobs. At the time Lyle left school, Elizabeth was in her own apartment and she didn’t confide much in me but I feel she was disappointed in him. He was going to be a lawyer and then he simply changed his mind. He said law was too dull and he didn’t like details.”

  “Did they live together?”

  Grace’s cheeks tinted slightly. “No, they didn’t. It may sound odd and Raymond thought it was very wrong of me, but I encouraged them to move in together. I sensed that they were drifting apart and I thought it would help. Raymond was like Elizabeth, disenchanted with Lyle for quitting school. He told her she could do much better for herself. But Lyle adored her. I thought that should count for something. He would have found himself. He had a restless nature, like many boys that age. He would have come to his senses and I told her so. He needed responsibility. She could have been a very good influence because she was so responsible herself. But Elizabeth said she didn’t want to live with him and that was that. She was strong-willed when she wanted to be. And I don’t mean that as criticism. She was as nearly perfect as a daughter could be. Naturally I wanted whatever she wanted but I couldn’t bear to see Lyle hurt. He’s very dear. You’ll see when you meet him.”

  “And you have no idea what actually caused the breakup between them? I mean, could she possibly have been involved with someone else?”

  “You’re talking about that attorney up in Santa Teresa,” she said.

  “It’s his death I’m looking into,” I said. “Did she ever talk to you about him?”

  “I never knew anything about him until the police came down from Santa Teresa to talk to us. Elizabeth didn’t like to confide her personal affairs, but I don’t believe Elizabeth would fall in love with a married man,” Grace said. She began to fuss with the silk, her manner agitated. She closed her eyes and then pressed a hand to her forehead as though checking to see if she’d contracted a sudden fever. “I’m sorry. Sometimes I forget. Sometimes I pretend she got sick. The other makes me cringe, that someone might have done
that to her, that someone could have hated her that much. The police here don’t do anything. It isn’t solved but no one cares anymore so I just . . . I simply tell myself she got sick and was taken. How could someone have done that to her?” Her eyes welled with tears. Her grief rolled across the space between us like a wash of salt water and I could feel tears form in my own eyes in response. I reached out and took her hand. For a moment, she clutched my fingers hard and then she seemed to catch herself, pulling back.

  “It’s been like a weight pressing on my heart. I will never recover from it. Never.”

  I phrased my next question with care. “Could it have been an accident?” I said. “The other man—Laurence Fife—died from oleander, which someone put in an allergy capsule. Suppose they’d been doing business together, going over accounts or something. Maybe she was sneezing or complaining about a stuffy nose and he just volunteered his own medication. People do that all the time.”

  She considered that for a moment uneasily. “I thought the police said the attorney died before she did. Days before.”

  “Maybe she didn’t take the pill right away,” I said, shrugging. “With something like that, you never know when someone will take a doctored capsule. Maybe she put it in her purse and swallowed it later without even realizing there was any jeopardy. Did she have allergies? Could she have been coming down with a cold?”

  Grace began to weep, a small mewing sound. “I don’t remember. I don’t think so. She didn’t have hay fever or anything like that. I don’t even know who’d remember after all these years.”