I is for INNOCENT

  I locked the door behind me and went through my usual nighttime routine, securing all the doors and windows. I turned on my little black-and-white TV for company while I tidied my apartment. Since I'm usually gone during the day, I find myself doing personal chores at night. I've been known to vacuum at midnight and grocery shop at 2:00 a.m. Since I live alone, it isn't hard to keep the place picked up, but every three or four months I do a systematic cleaning, tackling one small section at a time on a rotating basis. That night, even taking time to scrub the kitchen, I was in bed by 1:00.

  Tuesday, I woke at 6:00. I pulled on my sweats and tied the laces of my Nikes in a double spit knot. I brushed my teeth, splashed some water on my face, and ran wet fingers through my sleep-flattened hair. My run was perfunctory, more form than content, but at the end of it I was at least in touch with some energy. I used the time to tune into the day, a moving meditation meant to focus my mind as well as coordinate my limbs. I was dimly aware that I hadn't been taking very good care of myself of late... a combination of stress, irregular sleep, and too much junk food. Time to clean up my act.

  I showered and dressed, ate a bowl of cereal with skim milk, and headed back to the office.

  As I passed Ida Ruth's desk, I paused for a quick chat about her weekend, leisure she usually fills with backpacking, horse trails, and hair-raising rock climbs. She's thirty-five and unmarried, a robust vegetarian, with windswept blond hair and brows bleached by the sun. Her cheekbones are wide, her ruddy complexion unsoftened by makeup. While she's always dressed well, she looks like she'd prefer wearing flannel shirts, chinos, and hiking boots. "If you want to talk to Lonnie, you better scoot on in. He's got a court appearance coming up in ten minutes."

  "Thanks. I'll do that."

  I found him at his desk. He'd shed his coat and had his shirtsleeves rolled up. His tie was askew and his shaggy hair stood out around his head like wheat in need of threshing. Through the windows behind him, I could see clear blue skies with a scrim of mauve-and-gray mountains in the background. It was a gorgeous day. A thick tumble of vivid magenta bougainvillea camouflaged a white brick wall two buildings away.

  "How's it going?" he asked.

  "All right, I guess. I haven't finished going through the boxes yet, but it seems pretty disorganized."

  "Yeah, well, filing was never Morley's strong suit."

  "Girls just naturally do that so much better," I said dryly.

  Lonnie smiled as he jotted a note to himself, presumably concerning the case he was working on. "We ought to talk fees. What's your hourly rate?"

  "What was Morley charging?"

  "The usual fifty," he said idly.

  He had opened a drawer and was sorting through his files so he couldn't see my face. Morley was getting fifty? I couldn't believe it. Either men are outrageous or women are fools. Guess which, I thought. My standard fee has always been thirty bucks an hour plus mileage. I only missed half a beat. "Bump it up five bucks and I won't charge you mileage."

  "Sure," he said.

  "What about instructions?"

  "That's up to you. Carte blanche."

  "Are you serious?"

  "Of course. You can do anything you want. As long as you keep your nose clean," he added in haste. "Barney's attorney would love nothing better than to catch us with our pants down, so no dirty tricks."

  "That's no fun."

  "But it allows you to testify without being thrown out of court and that's critical."

  He glanced at his watch. "I gotta fun." He grabbed his suit coat from a hanger and shrugged back into it. He straightened his tie and snapped his briefcase shut and was halfway out the door.

  "Lonnie, wait a minute. Where do you want me to start?"

  He smiled. "Find me a witness who can put the guy at the murder scene."

  "Oh, right," I said to the empty room.

  I sat down and read another five pounds of garbled information. Maybe I could sweet-talk Ida Ruth into helping me reconstruct the files. The first box seemed immaculate by comparison to the second. My first chore was going to be to stop by Morley Shine's house to see what files he had there. Before I left the office, I made a few preliminary calls. I had a pretty good sense of who I wanted to talk to and it was then a matter of setting up some appointments. I got through to Isabelle's sister, Simone, who agreed to talk to me around noon at her place. I also had a quick chat with a woman named Yolanda Weidmann, who was married to Isabelle's former boss. He was tied up in his home office and would be until three, so she suggested I stop by later in the afternoon. The third call I placed was to Isabelle's longtime best friend. Rhe Parsons wasn't in, but I left a message on her machine, giving her my name and telephone number, indicating that I'd try again.

  Chapter 3

  * * *

  Since the police station was only a block away, I decided to start with Lieutenant Dolan in Homicide. He was out with the flu, but Sergeant Cordero was there. I spotted Lieutenant Becker in the corner deep in conversation with someone I took to be a suspect, a white guy in his twenties, looking sullen and uncooperative. I knew Becker better than Cordero, but if I waited until he was free, he'd end up quizzing me about my relationship with Jonah Robb in Missing Persons. I hadn't seen Jonah in six or eight months and I didn't want to generate any contact at this point.

  Sheri Cordero was an oddity in the department. Being a female and Hispanic, she managed to fill two minority slots simultaneously. She was twenty-nine, short, buxom, smart, tough, somewhat abrasive in ways that I could never quite define. She never said anything offensive, but the guys in the department were not entirely at ease with her. I understood what she was up against. The Santa Teresa Police Department is better than most, but it's never easy being a woman and a cop. If Sheri erred on the side of being humorless, it was no surprise. She was in the middle of a phone conversation, which she converted to Spanish the minute I arrived. I sat down in the Leatherette-and-metal chair beside her desk. She held up a finger, indicating she'd be with me momentarily. She had a little artificial Christmas tree on her desk. It was decorated with candy canes and I helped myself to one. The nice thing about being in the presence of someone on the telephone is that you can study the person at your leisure without being thought rude. I unwrapped the candy cane and tossed the cellophane in the trash. She was clearly engaged in the subject at hand, gesturing vigorously to make her point. She had a good face, rather plain, and she wore little makeup. One of her two front teeth had a corner clipped off and it added a whimsical note to an otherwise stern expression. While I watched, she began to doodle on a legal pad – a cowboy stabbed in the chest with a cartoon knife.

  She finished her conversation and turned her attention to me without any visible transition. "Yes?"

  "I was looking for Lieutenant Dolan, but Emerald tells me he's out sick."

  "He's got that bug that's been going around. Have you had that thing? I was out for a week. It's the pits."

  "So far I've been spared," I said. "How long's he been out?"

  "Just two days. He'll come dragging back in looking like death. Is there something I can help you with?"

  "Probably. I've been hired by Lonnie Kingman in a wrongful death suit. The defendant is David Barney. I was curious about the scuttlebutt. Were you here back then?"

  "I was still a dispatcher, but I've heard 'em talk. Man, they were pissed when he walked. He looked good for the shooting, but the jury wasn't buying. Talk about frustrated. Lieutenant Dolan was mad enough to bite through nails."

  "From what I hear, David Barney's former cellmate claims he as good as confessed once the verdict came down."

  "You're talking about Curtis McIntyre. Guy's in the county jail, and if you want him, you better make it quick. He gets out this week after doing ninety days on a battery," she said. "Did you hear about Morley Shine?"

  "Lonnie mentioned that last night, but I didn't hear the details. How'd it happen?"

  "What I heard he just keeled over dead. He'd been in bed with
the same damn flu, but I guess he was feeling better. He was having dinner Sunday night? You know Morley. He hated to miss a meal. Got up from the table and dropped in his tracks."

  "He had heart trouble?"

  "For years, but he never took it serious. I mean, he was under doctor's care, but it never seemed to faze him. He was always joking about his ticker."

  "That's too bad," I said. "I'm really sorry to see him go."

  "Me, too. I can't believe how terrible I feel. Roll call somebody told me Morley Shine died? I busted out crying. I swear to God, I surprised myself. It's not like we were close. We used to talk over at the courthouse if I was waiting to testify on a case. He was always hanging around there, chain-smoking Camels, munching Fritos or something from the vending machine. It bums me out all those old guys are dropping dead. How come they didn't take better care of themselves?"

  Her phone rang and she was quickly caught up in another matter. I gave her a quick wave and moved away from her desk. In essence, she'd told me what I'd wanted to know. The cops were convinced David Barney was guilty. That didn't make it true, but it was another precinct heard from.

  I stopped off in Records and asked Emerald if I could borrow the phone. I called Ida Ruth and had a quick chat with her, asking her to set up an interview for me with Curtis McIntyre at the jail later in the morning. Visiting hours are ordinarily limited to Saturday afternoons, 1:00 to 3:00, but since I was working as Lonnie Kingman's representative, I could talk to him at my convenience. Oh, the joys of the legitimate endeavor. I'd spent so many years skulking through the bushes, I could hardly get used to it.

  With that taken care of, I asked her for Morley Shine's home address. Morley had lived in Colgate, the township bordering Santa Teresa on the north. Colgate consists largely of "lite" industry and tract housing with assorted businesses lined up along the main street. Where the area was once farmland and citrus groves, the uninhabited countryside has now given way to service stations, bowling alleys, funeral homes, drive-in theaters, motels, fast-food restaurants, carpet outlets, and supermarkets, with no visible attention paid to aesthetics or architectural unity.

  Morley and his wife, Dorothy, owned a modest three-bedroom home off South Peterson in one of the older housing developments between the highway and the mountains. My guess was the house had gone up in the fifties before the builders really got clever about differentiating exteriors. Here, the Swiss-chalet-style trim was painted either dirt brown or blue, the two-car garages designed so they stuck out in front, overpowering the entrances. Wooden shutters matched the wooden flower boxes planted with drooping pansies, which on closer inspection turned out to be entirely fake. The whole neighborhood seemed dispirited, from the patchy lawns to the cracked concrete driveways where every second house had a car up on blocks. Somehow the Christmas decorations only made things worse. Most of the houses were trimmed now in multicolored lights. One of Morley's neighbors seemed to be in competition with the house across the street. Both had covered every available stretch of yard with seasonal items, ranging from plastic Santas to plastic wise men.

  This was now Tuesday morning. Morley had died on Sunday night, and while I was uneasy about intruding, it seemed important to retrieve what I could of the paperwork before some well-meaning relative went through and trashed everything he had. I knocked at the front door and waited. Morley had never cared much for detail and I noticed his house had the same slapdash quality. The blue paint on the porch rail, uneven to begin with, had begun to peel with age. I had the depressing sensation of having been here before. I could picture the shoddy interior: cracked tile on the kitchen counters, buckling vinyl tile on the floors, wall-to-wall carpeting trampled into traffic patterns that could never be cleaned of soil. The aluminum window frames would be warped, the bathroom fixtures corroded. A battered green four-door Mercury had been pulled off onto the side grass. I pegged it as Morley's, though I wasn't sure why. It was just the sort of clunker that he'd have found appealing. He had probably purchased it new in the year oughty-ought and would have driven it resolutely until the engine died. A new red Ford compact was parked in the driveway, the frame on the license plate advertising a local car rental company; probably someone from out of town....

  "Yes?" The woman was small, in her midsixties, looking energetic and competent. She wore a pink floral-print blouse with long sleeves, a tweed skirt, hose, and penny loafers. Her gray hair was honest and her makeup was light. She was in the process of drying her hands on a dish towel, her expression inquiring.

  "Hi. My name is Kinsey Millhone. Are you Mrs. Shine?"

  "I'm Dorothy's sister, Louise Mendelberg. Mr. Shine just passed away."

  "That's what I heard and I'm sorry to disturb you. He was in the middle of some work for an attorney named Lonnie Kingman. I've been asked to take over his caseload. Did I come at a bad time?"

  "There's never going to be a good time when someone's just died," she replied tartly. This was a woman who didn't take death seriously. In its aftermath, she'd come along to do the dishes and tidy up the living room, but she probably wouldn't devote a lot of time to the hymn selection for the funeral service.

  "I don't want to be more of a bother than I have to. I was sorry to hear about Morley. He was a nice man and I liked him."

  She shook her head. "I've known Morley since he and Dorothy met in college back in the Depression. We all adored him, of course, but he was such a fool. The cigarettes and his weight and all the drinking he did. You can get away with a certain amount of that when you're young, but at his age? No, ma'am. We warned him and warned him, but would he listen? Of course not. You should have seen him on Sunday. His color was awful. The doctor thinks the heart attack was aggravated by the flu he had. His electrolyte balance or something of the sort." She shook her head again, breaking off.

  "How's she doing?"

  "Not that well, to tell you the truth, which is why I came down from Fresno in the first place. My intention was to help out for a couple of weeks just to give him some relief. You know she's been sick for months."

  "I didn't know that," I said.

  "Oh, my, yes. She's a mess. She was diagnosed with stomach cancer this last June. She had extensive surgery and she's been taking chemotherapy off and on ever since. She's just skin and bone and can't keep a thing down. It's all Morley talked about and here he up and went first."

  "Will they do an autopsy?"

  "I don't know what she's decided about that. He just saw the doctor a week ago. Dorothy wanted him on a diet and he finally agreed. An autopsy's not required under the circumstances, but you know how they are. Doctors like to get in there and poke and pry. I feel so sorry for her."

  I made some sympathetic sounds.

  She gestured briskly. "Anyway, enough said. I suppose you came to take a look at his study. Why don't you step on in here and let me show you where it is. You just take what you want, and if you need to come back, you can help yourself."

  "Thanks. I can leave you a list of any files I take."

  She waved off the suggestion. "No need to do that. We've known Mr. Kingman for years."

  I moved into the foyer. She proceeded down a short hallway with me following. There was no sign of Christmas. With Mrs. Shine's illness and now Morley's death, there might have been a sense of relief that no such effort would be required this year. The house smelled of chicken soup. "Does Morley still have an office here in Colgate?" I asked.

  "Yes, but with Dorothy so sick, he did most of his work here. I believe he still went in most mornings to pick up his mail. Did you want to look there as well?" She opened a door to what had clearly once been a bedroom, converted now to office space by the addition of a desk and file cabinets. The walls were painted beige and the beige shag carpeting was just as shabby as I'd imagined it.

  "That's what I was thinking. If I can't find the files here, it probably just means he had them out at the office. Is there some way I could get a key?"

  "I'm not sure where he kept them, but I'
ll check with Dorothy. My goodness," she said then as she looked around. "No wonder Morley didn't want anyone in here."

  The room was faintly chilly, the disorder that of a man who operates his affairs according to no known system. If he'd realized he was going to drop dead, would he have straightened up his desk? Unlikely, I thought. "I'll Xerox what I need and bring the files back as soon as possible. Will someone be here in the morning?"

  "What's tomorrow, Wednesday? As far as I know. And if not, just go around to the back and set them on the dryer in the service porch. We usually leave that door open for the cleaning woman and the visiting nurse. I'm going to find you a key to Morley's office. Dorothy probably knows where it is."

  "Thanks."

  While I waited for the woman to return, I did one circuit of the room, trying to get a feel for Morley's methods of paper management. He must have tried to get himself under control at intervals because he'd made up files labeled "Action,"

  "Pending," and "Current." There were two marked "To Do," one marked "Urgent," and an accordion folder he'd designated as his "Tickler" file. The paperwork in each seemed outdated, mismatched, as disorderly as the room itself.

  Louise stepped back into the study from the hall with a ring of keys in hand. "You better take this whole batch," she said. "Lord only knows which is which."

  "You won't need these?"

  "I can't think why we would. You can drop them off tomorrow if you'd be so kind. Oh. And I brought you a grocery bag in case you need to load things up."

  "Will there be a service?"

  "The funeral's Friday morning at the Wynington-Blake here in Colgate. I don't know if Dorothy will be able to manage it or not. We held off on it because Morley's brother is flying in from South Korea. He's a project engineer with the Army Corps of Engineers at Camp Casey. He can't get to Santa Teresa until late Thursday. We scheduled the service on Friday for ten o'clock. I know Frank will be jet-lagged, but we just couldn't delay it any longer than that."

  "I'd like to be there," I said.