by Sue Grafton
Dietz caught one whiff and turned to me, his face twisted with distaste. “What is that? Good God…”
“This is my best dress,” I said. “I just need to throw it in the wash and it’ll be fine.”
I set it aside and worked my way through the remaining contents, removing tools and other odds and ends. In the bottom was the child’s tea set, still packed in the carton I’d pulled from under Agnes Grey’s trailer. “I should drop this off at Irene’s,” I remarked, placing the carton near the door. There were few, if any, personal items left to commemorate Agnes Grey’s eighty-three years on earth and I thought Irene might appreciate the articles.
Dietz looked up from his paper. “Which reminds me. Dr. Palchak called at seven thirty this morning with the autopsy results. She wanted you to call her whenever you got up.”
“That was fast.”
“That’s what I thought. She says she likes to get in at five when she’s got a post.”
I dialed the number for St. Terry’s and asked for pathology. I’d dealt with Laura Palchak maybe twice before. She’s short, plain, heavyset, competent, hardworking, thorough, and very smart, one of several pathologists under contract to the county, handling postmortem examinations for the coroner’s office. “Palchak,” she said when she came on the line. “Hi, Laura. Kinsey Millhone. Thanks for responding to my note. What’s the story on Agnes Grey?”
There was a brief pause. “The coroner’s office will be contacting Mrs. Gersh a little later this morning so this is just between us, okay?”
“Absolutely.”
“The autopsy was negative. We won’t have the toxi results back for weeks, but the gross came up blank.”
“So what’s the cause of death?”
“Essentially, it was cardiac arrest, but hell… everybody dies of cardiac or respiratory arrest if you want to get right down to it. The point is there was no demonstrable organic heart disease and no other natural findings that contributed to death. Technically, we have to list the cause of death as undetermined.”
“What’s that mean, ‘technically’? I don’t like the way you said that.”
She laughed. “Good question. You’re right. I have a hunch about this one, but I need to do some research. I’ve talked to the hospital librarian about tracking down an article I read a few years back. I don’t know what made me think of it, but something about this situation rang a little bell.”
“Like what? Can you fill me in?”
“Not yet. I’m having my assistant set up some tissue slides that I can probably take a look at by this afternoon. I have sixteen cases lined up before this one, but I’m curious.”
“Do you need anything from me?”
“I do have a suggestion if you’re open to this. I’m very interested in what happened to this woman during the hours she was missing. It would be a big help if you can find out where she was all that time.”
“Well, I can try,” I said, “but it may turn out to be a trick. Am I looking for anything in particular?”
“She had what looked like rope burns on her right wrist, torn and broken nails on her left –”
“Oh yeah, I saw that,” I said with sudden recollection. “The knuckles on her left hand were scraped, too.”
“Right. It’s possible she was held someplace against her will. You might see if anybody has a potting shed or a greenhouse. I took some soil traces from her fingernails and we might find a match. She also had superficial abrasions and contusions across her back. I saw a kid just last week with similar marks on his thighs and buttocks. He’d been beaten with a coat hanger… among other things.”
“Are you saying she was beaten?”
“Probably.”
“Does Lieutenant Dolan know about this?”
“He and the police photographer were both present for the post, so he saw the same things I did. The truth is, there was no internal trauma and the injuries were too minor to be considered the cause of death.”
“What’s your theory then?”
“Unh-unh. Not till I do a bit of checking first. Call me this afternoon, or better yet, let me call you when I’ve seen what we’ve got here. By then you may have something to report yourself.”
She hung up. I settled the receiver in the cradle and sat there, perplexed.
Dietz was watching me. From my end of the conversation, he could tell there’d been a shift. “What’s wrong?”
“Let’s pick up your car and go by Irene’s. I’d like to talk to Clyde.” I made a quick call to let them know we’d be stopping by and then called a cab.
I detailed the situation on the way over to the hotel, Irene’s carton in my lap. When we reached the Edgewater, Dietz took his time with the Porsche, inspecting the engine and the electrical system. This wasn’t the same car-park attendant we’d dealt with the night before and while the kid swore no one had been near the car, Dietz didn’t want to trust him.
“I doubt Messinger knows his ass from his elbow when it comes to bombs, but this is no time to be surprised,” he said. I waited while he stretched out on the driveway, inching partway under the car so he could scrutinize the underside. Evidently, there were no unidentified wires, no visible blasting caps, and no tidy bundles of dynamite. Satisfied, he got up and brushed himself off, then ushered me into the passenger seat. Dietz started the car and pulled out of the lot.
For once he drove slowly, his expression preoccupied.
“What are you chewing on?” I asked.
“I’ve been thinking about Messinger and I wonder if it wouldn’t be smart to talk to his ex-wife.”
“Down in Los Angeles?”
“Or get her up here. We know he’s got Eric with him, at least as of last night. She’d probably jump at the chance to get the kid back. Maybe we could help her and she could turn around and help us.”
“How?”
Dietz shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but it’s better than doing nothing.”
“You know how to get in touch with her?”
“I thought I’d drop you off and go talk to Dolan.”
“Sounds good. Let’s do that.”
We parked in front of the Gershes’. Dietz held the carton for me while I extricated myself from the low-slung seat. When we reached the front porch, he left the carton by the door while I rang the bell. Our agreement was that I would wait here until he came back to pick me up. “Make it fast,” I murmured. “I don’t want to be stuck with Irene all day.”
“Forty-five minutes max. Any longer, I’ll call. Be careful.” He backed me against the house with a kiss that made my toes curl, then gave a careless wave and moved off down the walk.
Jermaine opened the front door, stepping back to admit me as the Porsche ignition turned over and the car pulled away from the curb. I was still collecting myself, trying to look like a sober private investigator when, in truth, my drawers were wet. Jermaine and I made the proper mouth noises at one another. I could hear the telephone ring somewhere in the house. She heard it too and raised her voice, as if projecting to the rear of an auditorium. “I’ll get it!” She excused herself, waddling toward the kitchen with surprising grace.
The house was otherwise silent, the living room veiled in shadow from the junipers along the property line. I crossed to one of the end tables and snapped on a lamp. I leaned sideways, peering through an archway to my left. Irene was sitting at a little desk in the solarium just off the living room. A small portable radio was playing classical music and I assumed that’s why she hadn’t heard the front doorbell. She wore a bathrobe and slippers, looking worse than she had the night before. Her complexion, always pale, had taken on the tone of skin bleached by adhesive tape. It was clear she’d wept a good deal and my guess was that she hadn’t slept much. The false lashes were gone and her eyes seemed puffy and remote.
“Irene?”
Startled, she looked up, her gaze searching the room for the source of the sound. When she caught sight of me, she pushed herself to her feet, using the
desk for leverage. She came into the living room on shaky feet, hands held toward me like a toddler on a maiden voyage, making little mewing sounds as if every step hurt. She clung to me as she had before, but with an added note of desperation.
“Oh, Kinsey. Thank goodness. I’m so glad you’re here. Clyde had a meeting at the bank, but he said he’d be back as soon as he could make it.”
“Good. I was hoping to talk to him. How are you?”
“Awful. I can’t seem to get organized and I can’t bear to be alone.”
I guided her toward the couch, struck by the sheer force of her neediness. “You don’t look like you’ve slept much.”
She sank onto the couch, refusing to let go of my hands. She clutched at me like a drunk, sloppy with excess, grief perfuming her breath like alcohol. “I sat down here most of the night so I wouldn’t disturb Clyde. I don’t know what to do. I’ve been trying to fill out Mother’s death certificate and I discover I don’t know the first thing about her. I can’t remember anything. It’s inconceivable to me. So shameful somehow. My own mother…” She was beginning to weep again.
“Hey, it’s okay. This is something I can help you with.” I held a hand up, palm toward her. “Just sit. Relax. Is the form in there?”
She seemed to collect herself. She nodded mutely, eyes fixed on me with gratitude as I moved into the adjacent room. I gathered up a pen and the eight-by-eight-inch square form from the desk and returned to the couch, wondering how Clyde endured her dependency. Whatever compassion I felt was being overshadowed by the sense that I was shouldering a nearly impossible burden.
Chapter 20
*
“Treat this like a final exam,” I said. “We’ll do the easy questions first and then tackle the tough ones. Let’s start with ‘Name of Decedent.’ Did she have a middle name?”
Irene shook her head. “Not that I ever heard.”
I wrote in “Agnes… NMI… Grey.”
Irene and I sat with our heads bent together, meticulously filling in the meager information she had. This took a little over one minute and covered race (Caucasian), sex (female), military service (none), Social Security number (none), marital status (widowed), occupation (retired), and several subheadings under “Usual Residence.” What distressed Irene was that she didn’t know the year of her mother’s birth and she didn’t have a clue about where Agnes was born or the names of her parents, facts she felt anyone with an ounce of caring should have at her fingertips.
“Quit beating yourself, for God’s sake,” I said. “Let’s work backward and see how fat we get. Maybe you know more than you mink. For instance, everybody’s been saying she was eighty-three, right?”
Irene nodded with uncertainty, probably wishing the form had a few multiple-choice questions. I could tell she was still agitated at the notion of her own ignorance.
“Irene, you cannot flunk this test,” I said. “I mean, what are they going to do, refuse to bury her?” I hated to be flip, but I thought it might snap her out of the self-pity.
She said, “I just don’t want to get it wrong. It’s important to do it right. It’s the least I can do.”
“I can understand that, but the world will not end if you leave one slot blank. We know she was a U.S. citizen so let’s put that down…. The rest of the information we can pick up from your birth certificate. That would tell us your parents’ place of birth and their ages the year you were born. Can you lay your hands on it?”
She nodded, blowing her nose on a handkerchief, which she then tucked in her robe pocket. “I to almost sure it’s in the file cabinet in there,” she said. She indicated the solarium, which she’d set up as a home office. “There’s a folder in the top drawer labeled ‘Vital Documents.’ “
“Don’t get up. You stay here. I’ll find it.”
I went into the next room and pulled open one of the file drawers. “Vital Documents” was a thick manila folder right in the front. I brought the entire file back and let Irene sort through the contents. She extracted a birth certificate, which she handed to me. I glanced at it briefly, then squinted more closely. “This is a photocopy. What happened to the original?”
“I have no idea. That’s the only one I ever had.”
“What about when you applied for a passport? You must have had a certified copy then.”
“I don’t have a passport. I never needed one.”
I stared at her, amazed. “I thought I was the only person without a passport,” I remarked.
She seemed faintly defensive. “I don’t like to travel. I was always afraid of getting ill and not having proper medical help available. If Clyde had to travel overseas on business, he went by himself. Is that a problem?” My guess was that she and Clyde had argued about her position more than once.
“No, no. This will do, but it strikes me as odd. How’d you come by this one?”
She closed her mouth and her cheeks flooded with pink, like a sudden restoration to good health. At first, I thought she wouldn’t answer me, but finally she pursed her lips. “Mother gave it to me when I was in high school. One of the more humiliating moments in my life with her. We were writing our autobiographies for an honors English class and the teacher made us start with our birth certificates. I remember Mother had trouble finding mine and I had to turn my report in without it. The teacher gave me an ‘incomplete’… the only one I ever got… which just made Mother furious. It was awful. She brought it to school the next day and flung it in the teacher’s face. She was drunk, of course. All my classmates looking on. It was one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever been through.”
I studied her with curiosity. “What about your father? Where was he in all this?”
“I don’t remember him. He and Mother separated when I was three or four. He was killed in the war a few years later. Nineteen forty-three, I think.”
I glanced down at the birth certificate, getting back to the task at hand. We’d really hit pay dirt. Irene was born in Brawley, March 12, 1936, at 2:30 a.m. Her father was Herbert Grey, birthplace, Arizona, white, age thirty-two, who worked as a welder for an aircraft company. Agnes’s maiden name was Branwell, birthplace California, occupation housewife.
“This is great,” I said and then I read the next line. “Oh wait, this is weird. This says she was twenty-three when you were born, but that would make her… what, seventy now? That doesn’t seem right.”
“That has to be a typo,” she said, leaning closer. She reached for the document and peered at the line of print as I had. “This is off by years. If Mother’s eighty-three now, she would have been thirty-six when I was born, not twenty-three.”
“Maybe she’s much younger than we thought.”
“Not that much. She was nowhere near seventy. You saw her yourself.”
I thought about it briefly. “Well, it doesn’t make any difference as far as I can see.”
“Of course it does! One way or the other, we’d be off by thirteen years!”
I disconnected my temper. There was no point in being irritated. “We don’t have any way to verify the information,” I said. “At least that I can think of. Leave it blank.”
“I don’t want to do that,” she said stubbornly.
I’d seen her in this mood before and I knew how unyielding she could be. “Do whatever suits. It’s your business.”
I heard a key in the lock. The front door opened and Clyde came in, dressed in his usual three-piece suit. He was toting the cardboard carton I’d brought. He crossed to the couch, murmured a hello to me, and placed the box on the coffee table. Then he leaned over to kiss Irene’s cheek, a ritualistic gesture without visible warmth. “This was on the front porch –”
“That’s Irene’s,” I said. “I found it under Agnes’s trailer and had it shipped up. It arrived this morning.” I pulled the box closer and opened the top flaps, reaching down among the nesting cups, which were still swaddled in newspaper. “I wasn’t sure if this was a good time or not, but these were just
about the only things the squatters hadn’t ripped off.”
I unwrapped one of the teacups and passed it over to Irene. The porcelain handle had a hairline crack near the base, but otherwise it was perfect: pale pink roses, hand-painted, on a field of white, scaled down to child-size. Irene glanced at it without comprehension and then something flickered in her face. A sound seemed to rumble up from the depths of her being. With a sudden cry of revulsion, she flung it away from her. Fear shot through me in reaction to hers. Clyde and I both jumped and I uttered an automatic chirp of astonishment. Her scream tore through the air in a spiraling melody of terror. As if in slow motion, the cup bounced once against the edge of the coffee table and cracked as neatly in two as if it’d been cut with a knife.
Irene rose to her feet, her eyes enormous. She was hyperventilating: rapid, shallow breathing that couldn’t possibly be delivering enough oxygen to her system. I could see her begin to topple, eyes focused on my face. She clawed at me as she fell, pitching forward in a convulsion that rocked her from head to toe. Clyde grabbed her as she went down, moving faster than I thought possible. He eased her back onto the couch and elevated her feet.
Jermaine thundered into the living room, a dish towel in her hand. Her eyes were wide with alarm. “What’s the matter? What’s happening? Oh my God…”
Irene’s eyes had rolled back in her head and she jerked repeatedly, wracked by some personal earthquake that sent shock waves through her small frame. The acrid scent of urine permeated he air. Clyde peeled his jacket off and went down on his knees beside her, trying to restrain her so she wouldn’t hurt herself. Jermaine stood by spellbound, twisting the dish towel in her big dark hands, making anxious sounds at the back of her throat.
Gradually, the spasm passed. Irene began to cough, a tight unproductive sound that made me ache in response. The cough was followed by a high-pitched wheeze that helped to mobilize me again. I put a supporting hand under Irene’s right arm and shot Clyde a look. “Let’s sit her upright. It’ll make her breathing easier.”
