Half a day of playing papa to the boys had left Robert looking disheveled and sorely in need of relief.
“I didn’t expect you back this soon,” he whispered.
I found myself whispering too, feeling anxious at the sense of secrecy. It reminded me of grade school somehow, the smell of autumn hanging in the air, the two of us perched on the edge of the sandbox like little kids, conspiring. I didn’t want to break his heart, but what was I to do?
“I think we’ve got it wrapped up,” I said.
He looked at me for a moment, apparently guessing from my expression that the news wasn’t good. “Is she okay?”
“We don’t think so,” I said. And then I told him what I’d learned, starting with the embezzlement and the relationship with Gavin, taking it right through to the quarrel the travel agent had heard. Robert was way ahead of me.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?”
“We don’t know it for a fact, but we suspect as much.”
He nodded, tears welling up. He wrapped his arms around his knees and propped his chin on his fists. He looked so young. I wanted to reach out and touch him. “She was really having an affair?” he asked plaintively.
“You must have suspected as much,” I said. “You said she was restless and excited for months. Didn’t that give you a clue?”
He shrugged one shoulder, using the sleeve of his T-shirt to dash at the tears trickling down his cheeks. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess.”
“And then you stopped by the office Friday afternoon and found her getting ready to leave the country. That’s when you killed her, isn’t it?”
He froze, staring at me. At first, I thought he’d deny it, but maybe he realized there wasn’t any point. He nodded mutely.
“And then you hired me to make it look good, right?”
He made a kind of squeaking sound in the back of his throat, and sobbed once, his voice reduced to a whisper again. “She shouldn’t have done it—betrayed us like that. We loved her so much.”
“Have you got the money here?”
He nodded, looking miserable. “I wasn’t going to pay your fee out of that,” he said incongruously. “We really did have a little fund so we could go to San Diego one day.”
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” I said.
“I didn’t do so bad, though, did I? I mean, I could have gotten away with it, don’t you think?”
I’d been talking about the trip to the zoo. He thought I was referring to his murdering his wife. Talk about poor communication. God.
“Well, you nearly pulled it off,” I said. Shit, I was sitting there trying to make the guy feel good.
He looked at me piteously, eyes red and flooded, his mouth trembling. “But where did I slip up? What did I do wrong?”
“You put her diaphragm in the overnight case you packed. You thought you’d shift suspicion onto Gavin Sotherland, but you didn’t realize she’d had her tubes tied.”
A momentary rage flashed through his eyes and then flickered out. I suspected that her voluntary sterilization was more insulting to him than the affair with her boss.
“Jesus, I don’t know what she saw in him,” he breathed. “He’s such a pig.”
“Well,” I said, “if it’s any comfort to you, she wasn’t going to take him either. She just wanted freedom, you know?”
He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose, trying to compose himself. He mopped his eyes, shivering with tension. “How can you prove it, though, without a body? Do you know where she is?”
“I think we do,” I said softly. “The sandbox, Robert. Right under us.”
He seemed to shrink. “Oh, God,” he whispered. “Oh, God, don’t turn me in. I’ll give you the money, I don’t give a damn. Just let me stay here with my kids. The little guys need me. I did it for them. I swear I did. You don’t have to tell the cops, do you?”
I shook my head and opened my shirt collar, showing him the mike. “I don’t have to tell a soul,” I said, and then I looked over toward the side yard.
For once, I was glad to see Lieutenant Dolan amble into view.
the parker shotgun
THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS had come and gone, and the new year was under way. January, in California, is as good as it gets—cool, clear, and green, with a sky the color of wisteria and a surf that thunders like a volley of gunfire in a distant field. My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator, licensed, bonded, insured; white, female, age thirty-two, unmarried, and physically fit. That Monday morning, I was sitting in my office with my feet up, wondering what life would bring, when a woman walked in and tossed a photograph on my desk. My introduction to the Parker shotgun began with a graphic view of its apparent effect when fired at a formerly nice-looking man at close range. His face was still largely intact, but he had no use now for a pocket comb. With effort, I kept my expression neutral as I glanced up at her.
“Somebody killed my husband.”
“I can see that,” I said.
She snatched the picture back and stared at it as though she might have missed some telling detail. Her face suffused with pink, and she blinked back tears. “Jesus. Rudd was killed five months ago, and the cops have done shit. I’m so sick of getting the runaround I could scream.”
She sat down abruptly and pressed a hand to her mouth, trying to compose herself. She was in her late twenties, with a gaudy prettiness. Her hair was an odd shade of brown, like Cherry Coke, worn shoulder length and straight. Her eyes were large, a lush mink brown; her mouth was full. Her complexion was all warm tones, tanned, and clear. She didn’t seem to be wearing makeup, but she was still as vivid as a magazine illustration, a good four-color run on slick paper. She was seven months pregnant by the look of her; not voluminous yet, but rotund. When she was calmer, she identified herself as Lisa Osterling.
“That’s a crime lab photo. How’d you come by it?” I said when the preliminaries were disposed of.
She fumbled in her handbag for a tissue and blew her nose. “I have my little ways,” she said morosely. “Actually I know the photographer and I stole a print. I’m going to have it blown up and hung on the wall just so I won’t forget. The police are hoping I’ll drop the whole thing, but I got news for them.” Her mouth was starting to tremble again, and a tear splashed onto her skirt as though my ceiling had a leak.
“What’s the story?” I said. “The cops in this town are usually pretty good.” I got up and filled a paper cup with water from my Sparkletts dispenser, passing it over to her.
She murmured a thank-you and drank it down, staring into the bottom of the cup as she spoke. “Rudd was a cocaine dealer until a month or so before he died. They haven’t said as much, but I know they’ve written him off as some kind of small-time punk. What do they care? They’d like to think he was killed in a drug deal—a double cross or something like that. He wasn’t, though. He’d given it all up because of this.”
She glanced down at the swell of her belly. She was wearing a kelly green T-shirt with an arrow down the front. The word OOPS! was written across her breasts in machine embroidery.
“What’s your theory?” I asked. Already I was leaning toward the official police version of events. Drug dealing isn’t synonymous with longevity. There’s too much money involved and too many amateurs getting into the act. This was Santa Teresa—ninety-five miles north of the big time in L.A., but there are still standards to maintain. A shotgun blast is the underworld equivalent of a bad annual review.
“I don’t have a theory. I just don’t like theirs. I want you to look into it so I can clear Rudd’s name before the baby comes.”
I shrugged. “I’ll do what I can, but I can’t guarantee the results. How are you going to feel if the cops are right?”
She stood up, giving me a flat look. “I don’t know why Rudd died, but it had nothing to do with drugs,” she said. She opened her handbag and extracted a roll of bills the size of a wad of socks. “What do you charge?”
“Thirty bucks an hour plus expenses.”
She peeled off several hundred-dollar bills and laid them on the desk.
I got out a contract.
MY SECOND ENCOUNTER with the Parker shotgun came in the form of a dealer’s appraisal slip that I discovered when I was nosing through Rudd Osterling’s private possessions an hour later at the house. The address she’d given me was on the Bluffs, a residential area on the west side of town, overlooking the Pacific. It should have been an elegant neighborhood, but the ocean generated too much fog and too much corrosive salt air. The houses were small and had a temporary feel to them, as though the occupants intended to move on when the month was up. No one seemed to get around to painting the trim, and the yards looked like they were kept by people who spent all day at the beach. I followed her in my car, reviewing the information she’d given me as I urged my ancient VW up Capilla Hill and took a right on Presipio.
The late Rudd Osterling had been in Santa Teresa since the sixties, when he migrated to the West Coast in search of sunshine, good surf, good dope, and casual sex. Lisa told me he’d lived in vans and communes, working variously as a roofer, tree trimmer, bean picker, fry cook, and forklift operator—never with any noticeable ambition or success. He’d started dealing cocaine two years earlier, apparently netting more money than he was accustomed to. Then he’d met and married Lisa, and she’d been determined to see him clean up his act. According to her, he’d retired from the drug trade and was just in the process of setting himself up in a landscape maintenance business when someone blew the top of his head off.
I pulled into the driveway behind her, glancing at the frame-and-stucco bungalow with its patchy grass and dilapidated fence. It looked like one of those households where there’s always something under construction, probably without permits and not up to code. In this case, a foundation had been laid for an addition to the garage, but the weeds were already growing up through cracks in the concrete. A wooden outbuilding had been dismantled, the old lumber tossed in an unsightly pile. Closer to the house, there were stacks of cheap pecan wood paneling, sun-bleached in places and warped along one edge. It was all hapless and depressing, but she scarcely looked at it.
I followed her into the house.
“We were just getting the house fixed up when he died,” she remarked.
“When did you buy the place?” I was manufacturing small talk, trying to cover my distaste at the sight of the old linoleum counter, where a line of ants stretched from a crust of toast and jelly all the way out the back door.
“We didn’t really. This was my mother’s. She and my stepdad moved back to the Midwest last year.”
“What about Rudd? Did he have any family out here?”
“They’re all in Connecticut, I think, real la-di-da. His parents are dead, and his sisters wouldn’t even come out to the funeral.”
“Did he have a lot of friends?”
“All cocaine dealers have friends.”
“Enemies?”
“Not that I ever heard about.”
“Who was his supplier?”
“I don’t know that.”
“No disputes? Suits pending? Quarrels with the neighbors? Family arguments about the inheritance?”
She gave me a no on all four counts.
I had told her I wanted to go through his personal belongings, so she showed me into the tiny back bedroom, where he’d set up a card table and some cardboard file boxes. A real entrepreneur. I began to search while she leaned against the door frame, watching.
I said, “Tell me about what was going on the week he died.” I was sorting through canceled checks in a Nike shoe box. Most were written to the neighborhood supermarket, utilities, telephone company.
She moved to the desk chair and sat down. “I can’t tell you much because I was at work. I do alterations and repairs at a dry cleaner’s up at Presipio Mall. Rudd would stop in now and then when he was out running around. He’d picked up a few jobs already, but he really wasn’t doing the gardening full-time. He was trying to get all his old business squared away. Some kid owed him money. I remember that.”
“He sold cocaine on credit?”
She shrugged. “Maybe it was grass or pills. Somehow the kid owed him a bundle. That’s all I know.”
“I don’t suppose he kept any records.”
“Un-uhn. It was all in his head. He was too paranoid to put anything down in black and white.”
The file boxes were jammed with old letters, tax returns, receipts. It all looked like junk to me.
“What about the day he was killed? Were you at work then?”
She shook her head. “It was a Saturday. I was off work, but I’d gone to the market. I was out maybe an hour and a half, and when I got home, police cars were parked in front, and the paramedics were here. Neighbors were standing out on the street.” She stopped talking, and I was left to imagine the rest.
“Had he been expecting anyone?”
“If he was, he never said anything to me. He was in the garage, doing I don’t know what. Chauncey, next door, heard the shotgun go off, but by the time he got here to investigate, whoever did it was gone.”
I got up and moved toward the hallway. “Is this the bedroom down here?”
“Right. I haven’t gotten rid of his stuff yet. I guess I’ll have to eventually. I’m going to use his office for the nursery.”
I moved into the master bedroom and went through his hanging clothes. “Did the police find anything?”
“They didn’t look. Well, one guy came through and poked around some. About five minutes’ worth.”
I began to check through the drawers she indicated were his. Nothing remarkable came to light. On top of the chest was one of those brass-and-walnut caddies, where Rudd apparently kept his watch, keys, loose change. Almost idly, I picked it up. Under it there was a folded slip of paper. It was a partially completed appraisal form from a gun shop out in Colgate, a township to the north of us. “What’s a Parker?” I said when I’d glanced at it. She peered over the slip.
“Oh. That’s probably the appraisal on the shotgun he got.”
“The one he was killed with?”
“Well, I don’t know. They never found the weapon, but the homicide detective said they couldn’t run it through ballistics, anyway—or whatever it is they do.”
“Why’d he have it appraised in the first place?”
“He was taking it in trade for a big drug debt, and he needed to know if it was worth it.”
“Was this the kid you mentioned before or someone else?”
“The same one, I think. At first, Rudd intended to turn around and sell the gun, but then he found out it was a collector’s item so he decided to keep it. The gun dealer called a couple of times after Rudd died, but it was gone by then.”
“And you told the cops all this stuff?”
“Sure. They couldn’t have cared less.”
I doubted that, but I tucked the slip in my pocket anyway. I’d check it out and then talk to Dolan in Homicide.
THE GUN SHOP was located on a narrow side street in Colgate, just off the main thoroughfare. Colgate looks like it’s made up of hardware stores, U-Haul rentals, and plant nurseries—places that seem to have half their merchandise outside, surrounded by chain-link fence. The gun shop had been set up in someone’s front parlor in a dinky white frame house. There were some glass counters filled with gun paraphernalia, but no guns in sight.
The man who came out of the back room was in his fifties, with a narrow face and graying hair, gray eyes made luminous by rimless glasses. He wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a long gray apron tied around his waist. He had perfect teeth, but when he talked I could see the rim of pink where his upper plate was fit, and it spoiled the effect. Still, I had to give him credit for a certain level of good looks, maybe a seven on a scale of ten. Not bad for a man his age. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. He had a trace of an accent, Virginia, I thought.
“A
re you Avery Lamb?”
“That’s right. What can I help you with?”
“I’m not sure. I’m wondering what you can tell me about this appraisal you did.” I handed him the slip.
He glanced down and then looked up at me. “Where did you get this?”
“Rudd Osterling’s widow,” I said.
“She told me she didn’t have the gun.”
“That’s right.”
His manner was a combination of confusion and wariness. “What’s your connection to the matter?”
I took out a business card and gave it to him. “She hired me to look into Rudd’s death. I thought the shotgun might be relevant since he was killed with one.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know what’s going on. This is the second time it’s disappeared.”
“Meaning what?”
“Some woman brought it in to have it appraised back in June. I made an offer on it then, but before we could work out a deal, she claimed the gun was stolen.”
“I take it you had some doubts about that.”
“Sure I did. I don’t think she ever filed a police report, and I suspect she knew damn well who took it but didn’t intend to pursue it. Next thing I knew, this Osterling fellow brought the same gun in. It had a beavertail forend and an English grip. There was no mistaking it.”
“Wasn’t that a bit of a coincidence? His bringing the gun in to you?”
“Not really. I’m one of the few master gunsmiths in this area. All he had to do was ask around the same way she did.”
“Did you tell her the gun had showed up?”
He shrugged with his mouth and a lift of his brows. “Before I could talk to her, he was dead and the Parker was gone again.”
I checked the date on the slip. “That was in August?”
“That’s right, and I haven’t seen the gun since.”
“Did he tell you how he acquired it?”
“Said he took it in trade. I told him this other woman showed up with it first, but he didn’t seem to care about that.”