“Maybe?” said Petra.
“Maybe pork rinds?”
The Laundromat owner was a Chinese man who barely spoke English and smiled a lot. All Petra could get from him was “Yeah, mebbe wash.” She resisted the impulse to ask if Drummond had rinse-cycled a load of bloody duds, trudged back to her car, and returned to the station, where she decided to work Drummond’s pen names.
No chance Faithful Scriveners would be in the system, but she found plenty of felonious E. Murphys. Too late to deal with it at this hour, so she put it off for tomorrow.
Now, here she was all comfy and beddy-bye, working the phones.
Two hours later: none of the E. Murphys looked promising.
She located Henry Gilwhite, the transsexual-murdering husband of obnoxious Olive, the POB lady, and by 12:35 P.M. she knew that Gilwhite had begun his sentence at the state penitentiary at San Quentin only to be transferred to Chino within a year. A three-minute conversation with an assistant warden told her why.
She thanked the A. W., brewed coffee, ate a hollowed-out bagel, showered, dressed, drove to Hollywood.
She found a parking space in the strip-mall lot that afforded a clean view of the mail drop. A few scuzzy types entered and exited, then nothing for ten minutes. Petra made a smiling entrance and earned a brown-lidded glare from Olive.
“Hi, there, Mrs. Gilwhite. Heard from Henry, recently?”
Olive went scarlet, the splotches on her face knitting into a rosaceous mask. “You.”
Never had a pronoun sounded more hostile.
“Have you?” said Petra.
Olive mumbled something foul under her breath.
Petra put her hands in her pockets and stepped closer to the counter. Rolls of stamps sat at Olive’s dimpled elbow. She snatched them up and turned her back on Petra.
“Nice for you that Henry got transferred, Olive. Chino’s a lot closer than San Quentin, easier to visit. And you do get there regularly. Every two weeks, like clockwork. So how’s he doing? The old blood pressure under control?”
Olive half turned, revealing a flabby profile. Her lips bunched, as if gathering spit. “What’s it to you?”
“Chino’s a lot safer, too,” said Petra. “What with Armando Guzman, a cousin of Henry’s victim incarcerated at Quentin and being a big deal in the Vatos Locos gang. Turns out, there’s a large contingent of V.L.s in Quentin, but only a few at Chino, so it’s easier to segregate someone like Henry. What they tell me, though, is that Chino’s getting overcrowded. Situation like that, you can never tell when things are going to change.”
Olive wheeled around. Pale. “You can’t.” Hostility had been sucked from her voice, replaced by a nerve-scratching whine.
Petra smiled.
Olive Gilwhite’s cheeks fluttered. The peroxide thatch above her drinker’s face thrummed. Living with this harridan must’ve been fun for Henry. Then again, there were always trannies available for back-alley trysts.
Olive Gilwhite said, “You can’t.”
“The thing is,” said Petra, “Henry being a convicted murderer, even at his age, even with the hypertension, he’s not going to garner much sympathy from the prison administration. The fact that he’s refused any psychological counseling isn’t helping him in the brownie-points department, either. Stubborn fellow, your Henry.”
Olive picked at the platinum bird’s nest. “What do you want?”
“Box 248. What do you remember?”
“A loser,” said Olive. “Okay? Like all of them. What the hell kinda clientele you think I deal with? Movie stars?”
“Give me details on the loser,” said Petra. “What did he look like? How’d he pay for the box?”
“He looked like . . . young, skinny, tall. Big glasses. Bad skin. One of those what-they-call nerds. A nerd fag.”
“Gay?” said Petra.
“That’s what I said.”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t think it, I know it. He got fag stuff in the mail,” said Olive, sneering again.
“Gay magazines?”
“No, an invitation from the Pope. Yeah, magazines. What do you think these are for?” Gesticulating at the wall of boxes. “Not too many Bibles coming in.” Olive laughed, and even at this distance Petra could smell juniper berries on her breath. Midday gin.
“Did he give you his name?”
“Who remembers.”
“He did give you a name.”