"Be pointless anyway after all these years."
"That's what Clyde says. What's the deal on Rochelle Messinger?"
Dietz pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. "I got her number in North Hollywood. Dolan didn't want to give it to me, but I finally talked him into it. He says if we get a line on the guy, we're to stay strictly the hell away."
"Of course," I said. "What now?"
He looked over at me with his lopsided smile. "How about a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"
I laughed. "Done."
We got back to the apartment at one o'clock, fully carbed up, our fat tanks on overload. I could feel my arteries hardening, plaques piling up in my veins like a logjam in a river, blood pressure going up from all the sodium.
Dietz tried calling Rochelle Messinger. When he got no answer after fifteen rings, he turned the phone over to me. I was aching for a nap, but I thought I'd better find out if Dr. Palchak had seen the slides yet. I didn't like the idea of cruising the neighborhood around the nursing home, bumping all those doors again. With luck, I wouldn't have to.
I put a call through to the pathology department at St. Terry's and had Laura Palchak paged. I had Irene's cardboard box on my lap, using it as an armrest. For ten cents, I would have put my head down and gone to sleep right there. Sometimes I long for the simplicity of kindergarten, which is where I learned to nap on command.
She picked up the phone on her end.
"Hi, Laura. Kinsey Millhone," I said. "I was wondering if you'd had a chance to examine the tissue slides."
"You bet," she said. There was a grim satisfaction in her voice.
"I take it your hunch turned out to be right on the money."
"Sure did. This is one I've never run across myself, but I remembered an abstract on the subject from a few years back. The hospital librarian tracked down the journal, which is on my desk somewhere. Hang on."
"What subject?"
"I'm getting to that. This is an article on 'Human stress cardiomyopathy' written by a couple of doctors in Ohio. Here we go. Catch this," she said. "Mrs. Grey suffered a characteristic damage to her heart – a cell death called myofibrillar degeneration brought on by fear-generated stress."
"Can you translate?"
"Sure, it's simple. When the body gets flooded with intolerable levels of adrenaline, heart cells are killed. The pockets of dead cells interfere with the normal electrical network that regulates the heart. When the nerve fibers are disrupted, the heart starts beating erratically and, in this case, that led to cardiac failure."
"Okay," I said cautiously. I had the feeling there was more. "So what's the punch line here?"
"This little old lady was quite literally scared to death."
"What?"
"It's just what it sounds like. Whatever happened to her in those hours she was gone, she was so badly frightened it killed her."
"Are you talking about her being lost or something more than that?"
"I suspect something more. The theory is that, under certain circumstances, the cumulative burden of psychological stress and pain can generate lethal charges in cardiac tissue."
"Like what?"
"Well, take a little kid. Her father beats her with a belt, ties her up, and leaves her bound in a vacant room overnight. Next morning, she's dead. The actual physical injuries aren't sufficient to cause death. I'm not talking about the stress levels most of us experience in the ordinary course of events. Without getting graphic about it, it's analogous to certain animal experiments relating focal myocardial necrosis to stress."
"You're telling me this is a homicide."
"In essence, yes. I don't think Dolan would consider it such, but that's my guess."
I sat for a moment while the information sank in. "I don't like this."
"I didn't think you would," she replied. "In the meantime, if you haven't figured out yet where she was, you might want to try again."
"Yes." I felt a heaviness in my chest, some ancient dread activated by the proximity to murder. I'd done my job efficiently. I'd tracked the woman down. I'd helped facilitate the plan to move her to Santa Teresa, despite her fears, despite her pleadings. Now she was dead. Was I inadvertently responsible for that, too?
After I hung up, I sat there so long I found Dietz staring at me with puzzlement. I was picking at the flaps of the cardboard box, peeling the first layer of paper away from the corrugation. I tried to imagine Agnes Grey's last day. Had she been abducted? If so, to what end? There'd been no demand for money. As far as I knew, there hadn't been contact of any kind. Who had reason to kill her? The only people she knew in this town were Irene and Clyde. Not beyond the possible, I thought to myself. Most homicides are personal crimes – victims killed by close relatives, friends, and acquaintances... which is why I limit mine.
Blindly, I looked down. The paper was coming loose from around the cup I'd rewrapped. The broken halves lay in a torn half-sheet of newsprint that was yellow with age. I blinked, focusing on the banner partially visible across the top. I tilted my head so I could read the newsprint. It was the business section of the Santa Teresa Morning Press, a precursor of the current Santa Teresa Dispatch. Puzzled, I removed the paper from the box and smoothed it across my lap. January 8, 1940.I checked the exterior of the box, but there were no postmarks and no shipping labels. Curious. Had Agnes been in Santa Teresa? I could have sworn Irene told me her mother had never been here.
I looked up. Dietz was standing right in front of me, hands on his knees, face level with mine. "Are you all right?"
"Look at this." I handed him the paper.
He turned it over in his hands, checking both sides. He noted the date as I had and his mouth pulled down in speculation. He wagged his head back and forth.
"What do you make of it?" I asked.
"Probably the same thing you do. It looks like the box was packed in Santa Teresa in January of nineteen forty."
"January eighth," I said, correcting him.
"Not necessarily. A lot of people save newspapers for a time at any rate. This might have been sitting in a stack somewhere. You know how it is. You need to wrap up some dishes and you grab a section from the pile."
"Well, that's true," I said. "Do you think Agnes did it? Was she actually in this town at that point?" It was a question we couldn't answer of course, but I needed to ask it anyway.
"You're sure the box was hers? She might have been holding it for someone else."
"Irene recognized the teacup. I could see it in her face for the half second before she started screaming."
"Let's see what else we've got here," Dietz said. "Maybe there's more."
We spent a few minutes carefully unpacking the box. Every piece of china – cups, saucers, creamer, sugar bowl, teapot with its rose-sprigged lid, some fifteen pieces in all – was wrapped in the same edition of the paper. There was nothing else of significance in the carton and the news itself didn't reveal anything of note.
I said, "I think we ought to get Irene out of bed and find out what's going on."
Dietz picked up his car keys and we were out the door.
We rang the Gershes' bell, waiting impatiently while Jermaine came to the door and admitted us. I had pictured her tidying things in our absence, but the living room looked exactly as it had when we'd left it, a little more than an hour ago. The couch cushions were still askew where Irene's thrashing had displaced them, the birth certificate, death certificate, and the "Vital Documents" file still strewn haphazardly across the coffee table. I caught a whiff of drying urine. The characteristic silence had descended again, as if life itself here were muffled and indistinct.
When I asked to see Clyde or Irene, Jermaine's dark face became stony. She crossed her arms, body language echoing her manner, which was clearly uncooperative. She said Mrs. Gersh was sleeping and she refused to wake her. Mr. Gersh was having "a little lay-down" and she refused to disturb him, too.
"This is really important," I said. "All I need is five minut
es."
I could see her face set with stubbornness. "No, ma'am. I'm not about to bother them poor peoples. You leave them lay."
I glanced at Dietz. The shrug was written in his face. I looked back at Jermaine and indicated the coffee table with a nod. "Can I pick up the papers I left here earlier?"
"What papers? I don't know nothin' about that."
"For now all I need are the forms Irene and I were working on," I said. "I can come back later for a chat with her."
Her gaze was pinned on me with suspicion. I kept my expression bland. "Go on, then," she said. "If that's all you want."
"Thanks." Casually, I crossed to the coffee table and picked up the birth certificate and the entire document file. Thirty seconds later, we were out on the porch.
"What'd you do that for?" Dietz said as we headed down the steps.
"It just seemed like a good idea, I said.
Chapter 22
* * *
I asked him to pull around the corner and park in an alleyway. We sat there in the dappled shade of an overhanging oak while I sorted through the contents of the Gershes' "Vital Documents" file. Nothing looked that vital to me. There was a copy of the will, which I handed to Dietz. "See if this tells us anything astonishing."
He took the stapled pages, reaching automatically toward his shirt pocket. I thought he was looking for a cigarette, but it turned out to be a pair of reading glasses with half-rims that he'd tucked there instead. He put them on and then looked over at me.
"What?" he said.
I nodded judiciously. "The glasses are good. Make you look like a serious adult."
"You think so?" He craned so he could see himself in the rearview mirror. He crossed his eyes and stuck his tongue out, just to show how adult he could look.
He began leafing through the will while I glanced at insurance policies, the title to the house, a copy of the emission inspection information for a vehicle they owned, an American Express flight insurance policy. "God, this is boring," I said.
"So's this."
I looked over at him. I could see his gaze skimming down the lines of print. I returned to my pile of papers. I picked up Irene's birth certificate and squinted at it in the light.
"What's that?"
"Irene's birth certificate." I told him the story she'd told me about the autobiography for her senior English class. "Something about it bothers me, but I can't figure out what it is."
"It's a photocopy," he said.
"Yeah, but what's the big whoopee-do about that?"
"Let me take a look." He placed it up against the windshield, letting the light shine through. The heading read: state of california department of health VITAL STATISTICS, STANDARD CERTIFICATE OF BIRTH. The form thereafter was comprised of a series of two-line boxes into which the data had been typed. He held it close to his face, like a man whose eyesight is failing rapidly. "Lot of these lines are broken and the type itself isn't very crisp. We ought to check with Sacramento and track down the original."
"You think it's been tampered with?"
"It's possible. Dab some kind of correction fluid on the original. Type over the blanks and then make a copy. It couldn't be used for much, but it'd be sufficient for a school project. Maybe that's why it took Agnes a day to produce the damn thing. The point of certified copies is that they're certified, right?" He gave me that crooked smile, gray eyes clear.
"Wow, what a concept," I said. "Wonder what she had to hide?"
Dietz shrugged. "Maybe Irene was illegitimate."
"Right," I said. "Can you think of anyone we can contact in Sacramento?"
"Department of Health? Not right offhand. Why not check with the county recorder here and have them call?"
"You think they'd do that?"
"Sure, why not?"
"Well, it's worth a try," I said. "Besides, if we do the research now, Irene will pay for it. Wait two weeks and she'll forget she ever gave a damn."
"Let's give it a shot, then," he said. "You want me to look at any other documents?"
"Nope. That's it."
"Great." He handed me the will and the birth certificate, both of which I tucked back into the file. He started the car and headed out to the street.
"Where to?" I asked.
"Let's hit the office first and call Rochelle Messinger."
We parked in the back lot and went up the exterior stairs. Dietz was, as usual, paranoid about everyone within range. He kept a hand on my elbow, his gaze scanning the area, until we were safely in the building. The second-floor corridor was empty. As we passed the rest rooms, I said, "I need to pop into the ladies' room. You want the office keys?"
"Sure. I'll see you in a few minutes." Dietz started to check out the ladies' room and was greeted by a shriek of outrage. He moved on down the corridor while I went into the John.
Darcy was standing at one of the sinks, splashing water on her face. From her pasty complexion and the eyes pinched with pain, I gathered she was still hung over from the banquet the night before. She stared at herself in the mirror, hair mashed flat in two places. "You know you're really in trouble when your hair goes out on you," she remarked, more to herself than to me.
"What time did you get in?" I asked.
"It wasn't that late, but I'd been drinking anisette and I was wrecked. I started upchucking about midnight and haven't stopped yet," she said. She rubbed her face and then pulled her lower lids down so she could inspect the conjunctivas. "Nothing like a hangover to make you long for death..."
A toilet flushed and Vera emerged from one of the four stalls. She was buttoning up an olive and khaki camouflage outfit, a jumpsuit with big shoulder pads and epaulettes, looking like she was moments away from a landing on Anzio Beach. The glance she gave me was not friendly. "What happened to you last night?" she said waspishly. I was exhausted and my nerves were on edge, so her tone didn't sit well and neither did her attitude.
I said, "Well, jump right in, Vera. Agnes Grey died, among other things. I didn't get to bed till after three a.m. How about you?"
Vera crossed to the sinks, her high heels snapping against the ceramic tiles. She turned the water on way too hard and splashed herself. She jumped back. "Shit!" she said.
"Agnes Grey?" Darcy said. She was watching our reflections in the mirror, her expression wary.
"My client's mother," I said. "She dropped dead of a heart attack."
Darcy frowned. "That's weird."
"Actually it was weird, but how did you know?"
"Do you mind?" Vera said to Darcy pointedly. Apparently, she wanted to talk to me alone. It occurred to me belatedly that she and Vera had been discussing me just before I came in. Oh boy.
Darcy shot me an apologetic look. She dried her hands hastily under the wall-mounted blower, blotting the residual water on the back of her skirt. "See you later, gang," she said. She took her purse and departed with a decided air of relief.
The door hadn't closed behind her when Vera turned and looked at me. "I don't appreciate the crap you told Neil last night," she said. Her face was tense, her gaze fiery.
I felt a rush of heat go through me. I needed to pee, but it seemed inappropriate. "Really," I said. "Like what?"
"I am not smitten with him. We're strictly friends and that's all it is. Get it?"
"What are you in such a snit about?"
She leaned against the sink, a hand on her hip. "I introduced you to the man because I thought you'd get along with him, not to have you turn around and... manipulate the circumstances."
"How did I do that?"
"You know how! You told him I had a crush on him and now he's behaving like an idiot."
"What'd he do, break it off?"
"Of course he didn't break it off! He proposed to me last night!"
"He did? Well, that's great! Congratulations. I hope you said yes."
Vera's mouth turned down at the corners and she burst into tears. I was taken aback. For a sophisticated woman, she was bawling like a little kid.
I found myself with my arms around her, patting her awkwardly. It's not easy to comfort someone twice your size. She had to hunch down slightly while I raised up on tiptoe. It was not the full California body hug of longtime friends. Contact was limited to the upper portions of our torsos where we were linked like the two bowed wings of a wishbone.
"What am I gonna doooo?" she wailed into my right ear.
"You might think about getting married," I suggested helpfully.
"I caaaan't."
"Of course you can, Vera. People do it every day."
"I'm too old and too tall and he says he wants kids."
I could feel a laugh bubble up, but I resisted the urge to make a flip remark. I said mothering-type things, "There, there" and "It's all right." Remarkably, it seemed to work. Within a minute, she calmed down to a series of hiccups and sniffs. She let out a big sigh and then blew her nose noisily on a piece of shriveled Kleenex she found in her jumpsuit. She pressed the tissue to her eyes and then she did a quick burbling laugh while she checked her makeup. "When I saw you and Neil with your heads bent together last night I wanted to kill you."
"Yeah, I caught the look. I just wasn't sure what it meant," I said.
"And right about then, Mac started making his speech and next thing I knew you were gone. What was that about?"
I filled her in on (some, but not all of) my night's activities and then quizzed her on hers.
She spent the next few minutes detailing the portion of the banquet I'd missed. Neil had slipped over into Dietz's chair while Mac finished his speech. After-dinner drinks arrived. She was so upset with Neil because of his apparent interest in me, she started tossing down brandies and the next thing she knew, the two of them were back in her room making love. She started laughing again. "We didn't even make it to the bed. The maid came in to turn the sheets down and there we were grappling on the floor. We never even heard her knock. It turned out she was a patient of his at the clinic where he works. You know how you do when the phone rings and you're on the pot? He sort of scrambled to his feet and hobbled off to the bathroom with his trousers down around his knees."