X

  I decided to steer off that subject. The pair had been in counseling off and on for years at Camilla’s insistence and look where it had gotten them. “How old are the girls now?”

  “Courtney’s seventeen. Ashley’s fifteen.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. That’s them over there.”

  Astonished, I turned and stared. These were the two young women in consultation with Anna Dace. All three of them were gorgeous, which I’m sure wasn’t true of me at that age. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Trust me.”

  “Hey, no offense intended, but I remember snaggled teeth, tangled hair, weak chins, and bodies shaped like sausages. What happened?”

  “All it took was countless beauty products and seven thousand dollars in braces.”

  “Not Dr. Staehlings, by any chance?”

  “Dr. White,” he said.

  “Well, they look fantastic,” I said. “They must be happy to have Camilla home.”

  “Ha! They hate it. She’s all over them. No phone calls after six P.M. No boys coming to the house. Curfew’s at nine.”

  “Doesn’t sound bad to me. So what’s your parental game plan?”

  “I don’t need a game plan. I treat ’em like adults. All it takes is common sense. She doesn’t have a clue what they’re about.”

  I checked my watch and made a face. “Wow. Eight forty-five. With a nine o’clock curfew, shouldn’t they be heading home?”

  “This is my night out with them. She’s got Banner.”

  I said, “Fun. Just like being divorced. Which of you pays child support?”

  “Don’t make jokes.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be flippant,” I said. “So what happens now?”

  “I expect we’ll work it out. Change is tough.” The glum expression was back after the few brief moments of animation.

  “Jonah, how long has this been going on? Five years? Ten? As long as you buy into the program, why would anything change?”

  “You’re missing the point. My parents were divorced. I wouldn’t wish that on any kid.”

  I didn’t think I’d missed the point at all, but there was no arguing with the man. I glanced at the door just as Henry came in. “Henry’s here. I’ll catch you later. Good luck.”

  “Good seeing you,” he said.

  “You too.”

  I eased out of the booth, relieved at the excuse. There’s nothing as aggravating as watching someone else make a hash of life. Jonah had all the cards and he refused to play the hand. What was Camilla’s hold on him? I hadn’t seen her for years, and then only at a distance. The woman had to be a bombshell. Why had he put up with her? He was good-hearted, handsome, steady, responsible, even-tempered. I’d dallied with the man myself on a couple of the occasions when Camilla had gone off to “find herself.” It hadn’t taken me long to figure out that Jonah was never going to set himself free. He knew better, but unhappiness was apparently preferable to taking risks.

  I crossed to Henry’s table, taking my wineglass with me. “How was class?” I asked as I sat down.

  He made a face; tongue out, eyes crossed. “I left early. It’s not that gray water’s boring, but the subject does have its limits. How are things with you?”

  “Nothing much to report.”

  “There’s your friend Ruthie.”

  I followed his gaze and spotted Ruthie coming in the door. I waved and she wound her way among the empty tables. Ruthie was in her midsixties, tall and thin, with a lean face, a high forehead, and gray-brown hair she wore in a braid down her back. Her jeans, sweatshirt, and running shoes seemed incongruous on someone who seemed innately elegant.

  When she reached us, I said, “Good. You got my message.”

  She looked at me blankly. “What message?”

  “The one I left an hour ago.”

  “I just stopped by the house and there wasn’t anything on my machine. What was the message?”

  “That I’d be here and if you were up for it, I’d buy you a drink. Isn’t that why you came?”

  Henry stood and pulled out a chair for her.

  She said thanks and sat down. “I came looking for you. I thought you were always here. When I drove past your place and saw the lights were out, I made a beeline.”

  “Why were you looking for me?”

  “Being alone in that house has been giving me the creeps.” She turned in her chair, looking around with interest. “Has this place changed hands? I remember beefy guys in baseball uniforms, spilling beer and smoking cigarettes. The quiet is lovely.”

  “The sports enthusiasts have moved on and now we have off-duty cops, which is better from my perspective.”

  Henry said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Vodka martini. Three olives. Thanks for asking.”

  “What about you, Kinsey?”

  “I’m fine for now.”

  “I’ll be right back,” he said. Ruthie watched him cross to the bar.

  “How old is he?”

  “Eighty-nine.”

  She studied him. “He’s cute. Really, he doesn’t seem old to me. Does he seem old to you?”

  “Knock it off, Ruthie. I got dibs on him.”

  We chatted about nothing in particular, and it wasn’t until Henry returned carrying her martini and a Black Jack for himself that she brought up the subject of the box.

  “So how’d it go?” she asked.

  “The search was a bust, which was also part of the message you missed.”

  “You didn’t find anything?”

  “Nope.”

  “Too bad. I was hoping you’d provide me with ammunition.”

  Henry sat down and carefully placed Ruthie’s martini in front of her. “Ammunition for what?”

  “Hang on,” she said. She held up an index finger, and I watched her lift the icy vodka to her lips and take a sip. She made that sound that only a vodka martini seems to inspire among connoisseurs. “That is so fine.”

  I answered on her behalf while she savored the alcohol. “She has an appointment with the IRS tomorrow, trying to sidestep an audit. She was hoping I could provide documentation, but no such luck.”

  “Oh well,” she said. “What are they going to do, put me in jail?”

  I said, “Actually, I found something else. It probably won’t help, but it’s interesting.”

  I leaned to my right and plucked the piece of graph paper from the outside pocket in my shoulder bag. I unfolded the page and put it on the table in front of her, then pointed to the grid of numbers. “You have any idea what this is?”

  I watched her eyes take in the numbers on the page. “Looks like gibberish, but it’s Pete’s handwriting. No doubt about that,” she said. “He loved graph paper and he was a big fan of those technical pens. He kept dozens on hand.”

  Henry leaned forward with interest. “Code.”

  I turned to look at him. “You sure about that?”

  “Of course. It’s alphanumeric and not terribly sophisticated. If I’m correct, he assigned a number to each letter of the alphabet and then grouped the letters in fours to make it trickier to crack.”

  “How’d you come up with that?” Ruthie asked.

  “I play word games. Cryptograms, anagrams, word scrambles. You see ’em in the paper every day. Haven’t you ever done one?”

  “Not me. Pete loved that stuff. Most days I feel dumb enough as it is, which is why I don’t do crossword puzzles.” She pointed at the page. “So translate. I’d love to hear this.”

  “I can’t off the top of my head. I’d have to work with it. Let me take a look.” He picked up the paper and let his eye run down the columns from left to right. “This is actually a cipher as opposed to a code. In a true code, each word is replaced by a specific word, which means you hav
e to have a big awkward code book to accompany your secret messages. No respectable spy does that in this day and age.”

  “Plain English please. I’m not following,” Ruthie said.

  “It’s not difficult. In a cipher, each letter is replaced by a different letter or symbol. This looks like a simple number substitution. If he’d stuck to ordinary English, we could start breaking it down by looking for single letters, which are almost always ‘I’ or ‘A.’”

  “What else?” Ruthie asked, chin on her palm.

  Really, I could have done without her moony-eyed look at him.

  Henry tapped the paper. “A two-letter word usually has one vowel and one consonant: ‘of,’ ‘to,’ ‘in,’ ‘it,’ and so forth. Or you might start with short words: ‘was,’ ‘the,’ ‘for,’ and ‘and.’ ‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language, followed by ‘T,’ ‘A,’ and then ‘O.’”

  I said, “I figured the zeroes were placeholders.”

  “That would be my guess; rounding out the grid,” he said. “A block of numbers has an elegant look, as opposed to ragtag lines of different lengths.”

  “Wonder why he went to so much trouble?” I said.

  “He must have worried someone would read his notes,” he said. “Where did you find this?”

  “He’d slipped it between the pages of a document, a lawsuit dating back to the old Byrd-Shine days.”

  “You think the two are related?” Henry asked.

  “No clue,” I said. “Ruthie warned me about his habit of hiding papers, so I was turning files upside down, riffling pages when it fell out. If he hid this, the information must have been sensitive.”

  I took a few minutes to describe the compartment at the bottom of the box and then detailed what I’d found in the padded mailing pouch: the Mother’s Day card, the two photographs, the birthday card, the rosary, and the Bible embossed with Lenore Redfern’s name.

  “A regular treasure trove,” Henry remarked. “Wonder how it ended up in Pete’s possession.”

  “No telling. The pouch was mailed to a Father Xavier at St. Elizabeth’s Parish in Burning Oaks, California. This was in March of 1961.”

  Ruthie said, “I remember Pete’s driving to Burning Oaks, but that must have been sometime in March of last year. He never said a word about a Catholic priest.”

  “I also came across a wedding announcement he’d clipped from the Dispatch. This was the marriage of a young woman named April Lowe and a dentist named William Staehlings.”

  “What’s the relevance?” Henry asked.

  “April’s the daughter of the defendant in that same lawsuit, a man named Ned Lowe.”

  “Must have rung a bell,” he said.

  “Which would explain why he saved the announcement, but not why he made the trip to Burning Oaks,” Ruth replied.

  Henry pondered the point. “Might be part of an investigation. From what Kinsey’s told me, he was once a fine detective.”

  I couldn’t remember ever voicing such a claim, but I kept my mouth shut on the off chance he was simply being kind.

  Ruthie smiled. “He was a good detective. Ben used to say Pete had ‘a nose for iniquity.’ In his heyday, at any rate,” she amended.

  “I remember that,” I said. One of Ben’s rare compliments where Pete Wolinsky was concerned.

  “So perhaps he was persuaded to take a case,” Henry said.

  Ruth made a face. “I doubt it. He only had one paying client the whole of last year.”

  “Might have been pro bono work,” Henry said.

  Good, sweet Henry, I thought. Working so hard to make Pete look like a better guy than he was.

  “I appreciate your defense of him, but let’s be honest. We are what we are,” she said.

  “He could have had a crisis of conscience,” Henry said. “Just because he made one mistake doesn’t mean every choice he made was wrong. People change. Sometimes we have reason to stop and take stock.”

  Ruth regarded him with interest. “Actually, you might have a point. You knew he had Marfan syndrome.”

  “Kinsey mentioned it.”

  “One of the complications is an enlarged thoracic aorta. A ruptured aneurysm’s fatal in minutes, so Pete had an annual echocardiogram to monitor his condition. After his physical in February, his doctor told me he’d urged Pete to have surgery to make the repair. Pete never said a word to me and, knowing him, he blocked the idea entirely. What he didn’t want to deal with he put out of his mind and never thought about again.”

  Henry cleared his throat. “You’re saying if the shooting hadn’t killed him, he might be dead anyway.”

  Ruthie shrugged. “More or less. The point is Pete told the doctor he’d already lived more years than he had any reason to expect. On one hand, he was a fatalist—what will be, will be. On the other hand, why risk surgery?”

  “I don’t understand how this relates,” I said.

  Henry turned to me. “She’s saying I might be right. He knew all that stood between him and death was a roll of the dice. If he discovered something significant, he might have translated the information into code as a way of hiding it.”

  Ruthie closed her eyes. “You’re a nice man,” she said. “And don’t I wish that it were true.”

  9

  In the morning, I arrived at work at 8:00 on the dot, toting the banker’s box I’d retrieved from the trunk of my car. I sidestepped the pile of mail that had been shoved through the slot from the afternoon before and proceeded into my inner office. I dropped the banker’s box and my shoulder bag on the desk and walked down the hall to the kitchenette, where I put on a pot of coffee. While the coffee brewed, I picked up the mail and sorted through the accumulation of bills and junk. Most of it, I tossed. Once the coffee was done, I returned to the kitchenette and poured myself a mug.

  I set down the mug and took the lid off the box. I piled the files on my desk, removed the false cardboard “floor,” and took out the mailing pouch. I crossed to the near corner, pulled back a flap of carpeting, and opened my floor safe. I had to bend one end of the mailing pouch in order to make it fit, but it seemed like a better idea than leaving it where it was. I locked the safe, put the carpet back in place, and pressed it flat with my foot. I repacked the files and set the box on the floor near my office door.

  I’d just settled at my desk when I heard the door in the outer office open and close. “I’m in here,” I called.

  The man who appeared in the doorway looked familiar. Offhand, I couldn’t place him, but I pegged him as a cop of the plainclothes variety. Late thirties, nice-looking, with a long, narrow face and hazel eyes.

  “Detective Nash,” he said, introducing himself. He opened his coat to reveal his badge, but I confess I didn’t peer closely enough to commit the number to memory. This was because his badge was attached to his belt in close proximity to his fly, and I didn’t want to seem too interested. “Sorry to barge in unannounced,” he went on.

  “Not a problem,” I said. I stood and we shook hands across the desk. “Have we met before? You look familiar.”

  He handed me a business card that identified him as Sergeant Detective Spencer Nash, of the investigative division of the Santa Teresa Police Department. “Actually we have. Mind if I sit?”

  “Sorry. Of course. Be my guest.”

  Detective Nash took one of my two visitors’ chairs and gave the place a cursory assessment while I did the same with him. He wore dark slacks and a blue dress shirt with a tie, but no sport coat. “You used to be over on State Street. The nine hundred block.”

  “That was six years ago. I was working for California Fidelity Insurance in exchange for office space. Did our paths cross back then?”

  “Once, in passing. There was a homicide in the parking lot. I was a beat officer and first at the scene.”

  I felt a small fl
ash of recollection and an image of him popped up. I pointed. “A claims adjuster was shot to death. I’d just driven up from San Diego and stopped by the office to drop off some files. You were manning the crime scene tape when I asked for Lieutenant Dolan. I remember you had a little divot right here in your front tooth.”

  Dimples appeared as he ran his index finger across his front teeth. “I had it fixed the next week. I can’t believe you remember.”

  “A quirk of mine,” I said. “How’d you chip it?”

  “Bit down on a piece of floral wire. My wife was making a wreath with pine cones and one of those Styrofoam rings. You wouldn’t think a little nick would be so conspicuous, but I felt like a redneck every time I opened my mouth.”

  “That’s what you get for being helpful,” I remarked. “Bet your mom told you not to use your teeth for stuff like that.”

  “Yes, she did.”

  I glanced at his card. “You’ve moved up in the world.”

  “I work property crimes these days.”

  I half expected him to take out a pen and notebook, getting down to the business at hand, but he was apparently content to take his time. Meanwhile, I reviewed my behavior, doing a quick scan of present and past sins. While I’m occasionally guilty of violating municipal codes, I hadn’t done anything lately. “Was there a burglary in the neighborhood?”

  “I’m here about something else.”

  “Not something I did, I hope.”

  “Indirectly.”

  I thought, Shit, now what?

  He took his time, probably deciding how much he wanted to share. “A marked bill was passed in this area a week ago.”

  I watched him, waiting for the rest of it.

  “We believe it came from you.”

  “Me? I don’t think so,” I said.

  “Do you remember using cash for a transaction on the sixth?”