“Oh, that’s you! I thought I’d dialed the number wrong. This is Julia Ochsner down in Florida. Did I wake you up?”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I thought I just saw you. What’s happening?”
“I’ve come across some information I thought you might like to have. It looks like that woman next door was telling the truth when she told you Elaine flew down here in January, at least as far as Miami.”
“Really?” I said, sitting up. “What makes you say that?”
“I found the plane ticket in the garbage,” she said with satisfaction. “You’ll never believe what I did. She was packing up to go and she’d set several boxes full of discards and trash out. I’d been down to the manager’s apartment and on my way back I spotted the ticket. It was right near the top, shoved down half out of sight, and I wanted to see whose it was. I didn’t think I could come right out and ask her so I waited until she made a trip down to the parking lot with a load of clothes and I just scampered out there and stole it.”
“You scampered?” I said, with disbelief.
“Well, it wasn’t ‘scampering’ exactly. More like a fast creep. I don’t think she even missed it.”
“Julia, what made you do that? Suppose she’d caught you!”
“What do I care? I’m having a ball. When I got back, I had to go lie down I was laughing so hard!”
“Yeah, well you’ll never guess what’s happened here,” I said. “I got fired.”
“Fired?”
“More or less. Elaine’s sister told me to lay off for the time being. She got nervous when I told her I thought we should file a missing persons report with the cops.”
“I don’t understand. Why would she object?”
“Beats me. When did Elaine leave Santa Teresa? Do you have the date?”
“It looks like January ninth. The return was left open.”
“Well, that helps some. Why don’t you drop that in the mail to me if it’s not too much trouble. Beverly may back down yet.”
“But that’s ridiculous! What if Elaine’s in trouble?”
“What can I do? I’m paid to follow instructions. I can’t just bop around doing anything I please.”
“What if I hired you myself?”
I hesitated, taken aback by the idea but not opposed to it.
“I don’t know. That could get sticky. I suppose I could terminate my relationship with her, but there’s no way I could release information to you that I’d uncovered for her. You and I would have to start from scratch.”
“But she couldn’t prevent me from hiring you, could she? I mean, once you’ve settled your account with her?”
“God, it’s too early in the morning for me to worry about this stuff, but I’ll mull it over and see what I can come up with. As far as I know, I could turn around and work for you as long as it doesn’t represent any conflict of interest. I’d have to advise her what’s going on, but I don’t see how she could interfere.”
“Good, then do it.”
“Are you sure you want to spend your money that way?”
“Of course I am. I have lots of it and I want to know what’s happened to Elaine. Besides, I’m having the time of my life! Just tell me what we do next.”
“All right. Let me nose around some and I’ll call you back. And Julia, in the meantime, would you watch out for yourself?” I said, but she just laughed.
Chapter 6
I stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out and then I got dressed, pulling on jeans and a cotton sweater, zipping boots up to my knees. I plopped on a soft leather hat with a wide brim and studied the effect in the bathroom mirror. It would do.
I headed for the office first and wrote a letter to Beverly Danziger, terminating our professional relationship. I was pretty sure she’d be thoroughly disconcerted by that and it gave me a nice feeling. I went next door to the offices of California Fidelity Insurance and made a photocopy of my itemized bill to her, marked it “final,” and tucked it in with the letter and a copy of my final report. Then I headed over to the police station on Floresta and talked to a Sergeant Jonah Robb about a missing persons report on Elaine Boldt, watching his fingers fly across the keys as he typed the information I gave him on the form.
He looked like he was in his late thirties, his body compact in his uniform. He was maybe twenty pounds overweight, not an unattractive amount, but something he’d have to cope with soon. Dark hair trimmed very short, smooth rounded face, a dent in his left ring finger where he’d recently worn a wedding ring. He shot a look at me at that point. Blue eyes flecked with green.
“Anything you want to add to this?”
“Her next-door neighbor down in Florida is sending me a plane ticket she apparently used. I’ll take a look at it and see if it tells us anything else. A friend of hers named Pat Usher swears up and down she spent a couple of days with Elaine Boldt before she went off to Sarasota, but I don’t believe much of what she says.”
“She’ll probably show up. They usually do.” He took a file folder out and inserted a clamp. “You used to be a cop, didn’t you?”
“Briefly,” I said. “But I couldn’t make it work. Too rebellious I guess. What about you? How long have you been on the force?”
“Eight years. I was a detail man before that. Sold drugs for Smith, Kline, and French. I got tired of driving around in a late-model car, hitting up on doctors. It was all hype anyway. Just like selling anything else. Sickness is big business.” He looked down at his hands, then back at me. “Well. Anyway, I hope you find your lady. We’ll do what we can.”
“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll give you a call later in the week.”
I picked up my bag and moved toward the door.
“Hey,” he said.
I looked back.
“I like the hat.”
I smiled.
As I passed the front counter on my way out, I caught sight of Lieutenant Dolan in Identification and Records, talking to a young black clerk in uniform. His glance slid past me and then came back with a look of recognition. He broke off his conversation with her and ambled over to the counter. Lieutenant Dolan is in his fifties, with a square, baggy face and a bald spot he tries to disguise with tricky arrangements of what hair remains. It’s the only evidence of any vanity on his part and it cheers me up somehow. I imagine him standing in front of his bathroom mirror every morning, trying to cope with the creeping expanse of naked scalp. He was wearing rimless bifocals, apparently new, because he couldn’t quite get me in range. He peered at me first from above the little half-moons and then from below. Finally, he slipped the glasses off and tucked them in the pocket of his rumpled gray suit.
“Hello, Kinsey. I haven’t see you since the shooting. How are you doing with that?”
I felt myself flush with discomfort. I’d killed someone in the course of an investigation two weeks before and I was studiously avoiding the subject. The moment he mentioned it I realized how completely I’d willed it away. It hadn’t even crossed my mind and his reference to it seemed as startling as that dream where you find yourself stark-naked in a public
“I’m fine,” I said briefly, breaking off eye contact. In a flash, I saw the beach at night, that slat of light when the big trash bin I was hiding in was opened and I looked up. My little semiautomatic had jumped in my hand like some kind of reflex test and I’d squeezed off more rounds than were really necessary for getting the job done. The blast in that confined space had been deafening and my ears had been ringing ever since, a high-pitched hiss like gas escaping from a faulty valve. In a flash, the image was gone again and Lieutenant Dolan was standing there, maybe wishing he’d kept his mouth shut judging from the look on his face.
My relationship to Con Dolan has always been adversarial, remote, based on grudging mutual respect. He doesn’t like private investigators as a rule. He feels we should mind our own business, whatever that is, and leave law enforcement to professionals like him. My fantasy has always been that one day we’ll sit down and exchange criminal gossip like little old ladies, but now that he’d introduced a personal note, I could feel myself withdraw, disconcerted by the shift. When I met his eyes again, his gaze was flat, his expression bland.