In the morning, I drove over the mountain into the San Fernando Valley. At the crest of the hill, where the San Diego Freeway tips over into Sherman Oaks, I could see a layer of smog spread out like a mirage, a shimmering mist of pale yellow smoke through which a few tall buildings yearned as though for fresh air. Libby’s parents lived in a four-unit apartment building set into the crook of the San Diego and Ventura freeways, a cumbersome structure of stucco and frame with bay windows bulging out along the front. There was an open corridor dividing the building in half, with the front doors to the two downstairs apartments opening up just inside. On the right, a stairway led to the second-floor landing. The building itself affected no particular style and I guessed that it had gone up in the thirties before anybody figured out that California architecture should imitate southern mansions and Italian villas. There was a pale lawn of crab and Bermuda grasses intermixed. A short driveway along the left extended back to a row of frame garages, with four green plastic garbage cans chained to a wooden fence. The juniper bushes growing along the front of the building were tall enough to obscure the ground-floor windows and seemed to be suffering from some peculiar molting process that made some of the branches turn brown and the rest go bald. They looked like cut-rate Christmas trees with the bad side facing out. The season to be jolly, in this neighborhood, was long past.
Apartment #1 was on my left. When I rang the bell, it sounded like the br-r-r-r of an alarm clock running down. The door was opened by a woman with a row of pins in her mouth that bobbed up and down when she spoke. I worried she would swallow one.
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Glass?”
“That’s right.”
“My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private investigator. I work up in Santa Teresa. Could I talk to you?”
She took the pins out of her mouth one by one and stuck them into a pin cushion that she wore on her wrist like a bristling corsage. I handed her my identification and she studied it with care, turning it over as though there might be tricky messages written in fine print on the back. While she did that, I studied her. She was in her early fifties. Her silky brown hair was cut short, a careless style with strands anchored behind her ears. Brown eyes, no makeup, bare-legged. She wore a wraparound denim skirt, a washed-out Madras blouse in bleeding shades of blue, and the kind of cotton slippers I’ve seen in cellophane packs in grocery stores.
“It’s about Elizabeth,” she said, finally returning my I.D.
“Yes. It is.”
She hesitated and then moved back into the living room, making way for me. I picked my way across the living-room floor and took the one chair that wasn’t covered with lengths of fabric or patterns. The ironing board was set up near the bay window, the iron plugged in a ticking as it heated. There were finished garments hanging on a rack near the sewing machine on the far wall. The air smelled of fabric sizing and hot metal.
In the archway to the dining room, a heavyset man in his sixties sat in a wheelchair, his expression blank, his pants undone in front, heavy paunch protruding. She crossed the room and turned his chair around so that it faced the television set. She put headphones on him and then plugged the jack into the TV, which she flipped on. He watched a game show whether he liked it or not. A couple were dressed up like a boy and girl chicken but I couldn’t tell if they were winning anything.
“I’m Grace,” she said. “That’s her father. He was in an automobile accident three years ago last spring. He doesn’t talk but he can hear and any mention of Elizabeth upsets him. Help yourself to coffee if you like.”
There was a ceramic percolator on the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran back under the couch. It looked as if all the other appliances in the room were radiating from the same power source. Grace eased down onto her knees. She had about four yards of dark green silk spread out on the hardwood floor and she was pinning a handmade pattern into place. She held a magazine out to me, opened to a page that showed a designer dress with a deep slit up one side and narrow sleeves. I poured myself a cup of coffee and watched her work.
“I’m running this up for a woman married to a television star,” she said mildly. “Somebody’s sidekick. He got famous overnight and she says he’s recognized even in the car wash now. People asking for his autograph. Has facials. Him, not her. He was poor, I hear, for the last fifteen years and now they go to all these parties in Bel Air. I do her clothes. He buys his on Rodeo Drive. She could, too, on the money he makes but it makes her feel insecure, she says. She’s much nicer than he is. I already read in the Hollywood Reporter, ‘New Two You,’ him and somebody else ‘pulling up steaks at Stellini’s.’ She’d be smart to put an expensive wardrobe together before he leaves her if you ask me.”
Grace seemed to be talking to herself, her tone distracted, a smile warming her face now and then. She picked up a pair of pinking shears and began to cut along the straight edge, the scissors making a crunching sound against the wood floor. For a while I didn’t say anything. There was something hypnotic about the work and there seemed to be no compulsion to converse. The television flickered, and from an angle I could see the girl chicken jumping up and down, hands to her face. I knew the audience was urging her to do something — choose, pass, change boxes, take what was behind the curtain, give back the envelope, all of it taking place in silence while Libby’s father looked on from his wheelchair incuriously. I thought she should consult her boy-chicken mate but he just stood there selfconsciously like a kid who knew he was too old to be out in costume on Halloween. The tissue-paper pattern rustled as Grace removed it, folding it carefully before she laid it aside.
“I sewed for Elizabeth when she was young,” she said. “Once she left home, of course, she only wanted store-bought. Sixty dollars for a skirt that only had twelve dollars’ worth of wool at most, but she did have a good eye for color and she could afford to do as she pleased. Would you like to see a picture of her?” Grace’s eyes strayed up to mine and her smile was wistful.
“Yes. I’d appreciate that.”
She took the silk first and placed it on the ironing board, testing the iron with a wet index finger as she passed. The iron spat back and she turned the lever down to “wool.” There were two snapshots of Libby in a double frame on the windowsill and she studied them herself before she handed them to me. In one, Libby was facing the camera but her head was bent, her right hand upraised as though she were hiding her face. Her blonde hair was sun-streaked, cut short like her mother’s but feathered back across her ears. Her blue eyes were amused, her grin wide, embarrassed to be caught, I couldn’t think why. I’d never seen a twenty-four-year-old look quite so young or quite so fresh. In the second snapshot, the smile was only partially formed, lips parted over a flash of white teeth, a dimple showing near the comer of her mouth. Her complexion was clear, tinted with gold, lashes dark so that her eyes were delicately outlined.
“She’s lovely,” I said. “Really.”
Grace was standing at the ironing board, touching up folds of silk with the tip of the iron, which sailed across the asbestos board like a boat on a flat sea of dark green. She turned the iron off and wiped her hands briefly down along her skirt, then took the pieces of silk and began to pin them together.
“I named her after Queen Elizabeth,” she said and then she laughed shyly. “She was born on November 14, the same day Prince Charles was born. I’d have named her Charles if she’d been a boy. Raymond thought it was silly but I didn’t care.”
“You never called her Libby?”
“Oh no. She did that herself in grade school. She always had such a sense of who she was and how her life should be. Even as a child. She was very tidy-not prissy, but neat. She would line her dresser drawers with pretty floral wrapping papers and everything would be arranged just so. She liked accounting for the same reason. Mathematics was orderly and if made sense. The answers were always there if you worked carefully enough, or that’s what she said.” Grace moved over to the rocking chair and sat down, laying the silk across her lap. She began to baste darts.