A is for ALIBI

by Sue Grafton

  Grace consulted Lyle with a quick look but his eyes were lowered to his plate. “I believe so. There are some boxes in the basement, aren’t there, Lyle? Elizabeth’s books and papers?”

  The old man made a sound at the mention of her name and Lyle wiped his mouth, tossing the napkin down as he got up. He wheeled Raymond down the hallway.

  “I’m sorry I shouldn’t have mentioned Libby,” I said.

  “Well that’s all right,” she said. “If you’ll call or come by when you get back to Los Angeles, I’m sure it’d be all right if you looked at Elizabeth’s belongings. There isn’t much.”

  “Lyle doesn’t seem to be in a very good mood,” I remarked. “I hope he doesn’t think I’m intruding.”

  “Oh no. He’s quiet around people he doesn’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I’d do without him. Raymond is too heavy for me to lift. I have a neighbor who stops by twice a day to help me get him in and out of his chair. His spine was crushed in the accident.”

  Her conversational tone gave me the willies. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” I said.

  “It’s down the hall. The second door on the right.”

  As I passed the bedroom, I could see that Lyle had already lifted Raymond into bed. There were two straight-backed wooden chairs pushed up against the side of the double bed to keep him from falling out. Lyle was standing between the two chairs, cleaning Raymond’s bare ass. I went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  I helped Grace clear the table and then I left, waiting in my car across the street. I made no attempt to conceal myself and no pretense at driving away. I could see Lyle’s pickup truck still parked in the driveway. I checked my watch. It was ten minutes to one and I figured he must be on a limited lunch hour. Sure enough, the side door opened and Lyle stepped out onto the narrow porch, pausing to lace his boots. He glanced over at the street, spotting my car, and seemed to smile to himself. Ass, I thought. He got into his truck and backed out of the driveway rapidly. I wondered for a moment if he intended to back straight across the street and into the side of my car, crushing me. He wheeled at the last minute, though, and flung the truck into gear, taking off with a chirp of rubber. I thought maybe we were going to have a little impromptu car chase but it turned out he didn’t have that far to go. He drove eight blocks and then pulled into the driveway of a modest-sized Sherman Oaks house that was being refaced with red brick. I guessed it was a status symbol of some sort because brick is very expensive on the West Coast. There probably aren’t six brick houses in the whole city of L.A.

  He got out of his truck and ambled around to the back, tucking in his shirt, his manner insolent. I parked on the street and locked my car, following him. I wondered idly if he intended to smash my head in with a brick and then mortar me into a wall. He was not pleased with my arrival on the scene and he made no bones about that. As I rounded the comer, I could see that the owner of the house was disguising his little cottage with a whole new facade. Instead of looking like a modest California bungalow, it would look like certain pet hospitals in the Midwest, real high-rent stuff. Lyle was already mixing up mortar in a wheelbarrow in the back. I picked my way across some two-by-fours with crooked rusty nails protruding. A little kid would have to have a lot of tetanus shots after falling on those.

  “Why don’t we start all over again, Lyle,” I said conversationally.

  He snorted, taking out a cigarette, which he tucked into the comer of his mouth. He lit it, cupping crusty hands around the match, and then blew out the first mouthful of smoke. His eyes were small and one of them squinted now as the smoke curled up across his face. He reminded me of early photographs of James Dean ��� that defensive hunched stance, the crooked smile, the pointed chin. I wondered if he was a secret admirer of East of Eden reruns, staying up late at night to watch on obscure channels piped in from Bakersfield.

  “Hey, come on. Why don’t you talk to me,” I said.

  “I don’t have nothin’ to say to you. Why stir up all that shit again?”

  “Aren’t you interested in who killed Libby?”

  He took his time about answering. He picked up a brick, holding it upright while he applied a thick layer of mortar to one end with a trowel, beveling the soft cement as if it were a gritty gray cheese. He laid the brick on the chest-high line of bricks where he’d been working and gave it a few taps with a hammer, bending down then to pick up the next brick.

  I cupped my right hand to my ear. “Hello?” I said, as if I might have gone temporarily deaf.

  He smirked, cigarette bobbing in his mouth. “You think you’re real hot shit, don’t you?”

  I smiled. “Listen, Lyle. There’s no point in this. You don’t have to tell me anything and you know what I can do? Spend about an hour and a half this afternoon finding out anything I want to know about you. I can do it in six phone calls from a motel room in West Los Angeles and I’ve even got someone paying me for my time, so it’s nothing to me. It’s fun, if you really want to know the truth. I can get your service records, credit rating. I can find out if you’ve ever been arrested for anything, job history, library books overdue.”

  “Go right ahead. I got nothin’ to hide.”

  “Why put us through all that stuff?” I said. “I mean, I can go check you out but I’ll just come back around here tomorrow and if you don’t like me now, you ain’t gonna like me any better then. I might be in a bad mood. Why don’t you just loosen up?”

  “Aw, I’m real loose,” he said.

  “What happened to your plans to go to law school?”

  “I dropped out,” he said sullenly.

  “Maybe the dope smoking got to you,” I suggested mildly.

  “Maybe you can go get fucked,” he snapped. “Do I look like a lawyer to you? I lost interest, okay? That’s no fuckin’ crime.”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just want to figure out what happened to Libby.”

  He flipped the ash off the cigarette and dropped it, chunking it into the dirt with the toe of his boot. I sat down on a pile of bricks that had been covered with a tarp. Lyle glanced over at me through lowered lids.

  “What makes you think I smoke dope anyway?” he asked abruptly.

  I tapped my nose, letting him know I’d smelled it on him. “Also laying brick doesn’t seem that interesting,” I said. “I figure if you’re smart, you gotta do something to keep from going nuts.”

  He looked at me, his body relaxing just a little bit. “What makes you think I’m smart?”

  I shrugged. “You went with Libby Glass for ten years.”

  He thought about that for a while.

  “I don’t know anything,” he said, almost gruffly.

  “You know more than I do at this point.”

  He was beginning to relent, though his shoulders were still tense. He shook his head, going back to his work. He took the trowel and moved the damp mass of mortar around like cake icing that has gone all granular. “She dumped me after she met that guy from up north. That attorney.”

  “Laurence Fife?”

  “Yeah, I guess it was. She wouldn’t tell me anything about him. At first, it was business ��� something about some accounts. His law firm had just hooked up with the place she worked and she had to get all this stuff on the computer, you know? Set up to run smoothly from month to month. It was all real complicated, calls goin’ back and forth, things like that. He came down a few times and she’d have drinks when they finished up, sometimes dinner. She fell in love. That’s all I know.”

  He took out a small metal brace at right angles and hammered it into the wooden siding on the house, placing a mortar-laden brick on top.

  “What’s that do?” I asked out of curiosity.

  “What? Oh. That keeps the brick wall from falling away from the rest,” he said.

  I nodded, halfway tempted to try laying brick myself. “And she broke up with you after that?” I asked, getting back to the point.

  “Pretty much. I’
d see her now and again, but it was over and I knew it.”

  He was beginning to drop the tension in his tone and he sounded more resigned than angry. Lyle buttered another brick with soft mortar and set it in place. The sun felt good on my back and I settled on my elbows, leaning back on the tarp.

  “What’s your theory?” I asked.

  He looked at me slyly. “Maybe she killed herself.”

  “Suicide?” The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind.

  “You asked. I’m just tellin’ you what I thought at the time. She sure was hung up on him.”

  “Yeah, but enough to kill herself when he died?”

  “Who knows?” He lifted one shoulder and let it drop.

  “How did she find out about his death?”

  “Someone called her and told her about it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because she called me up. At first she didn’t know what to make of it.”

  “She was grieving for him? Tears? Shock?”

  He seemed to think back. “She was just real confused and upset. I went over there. She asked me to come and then she changed her mind and said she didn’t want to talk about it. She was shaky, couldn’t concentrate. It kind of made me mad that she was jerking me around, so I left. Next thing I knew, she was dead.”

  “Who found her?”

  “The apartment manager where she lived. She didn’t show up for work for two days and didn’t call in, so her boss got worried and went over to her place. The manager tried peeping in the windows but the drapes were shut. They knocked some, front and back, and finally got in with a passkey. She was lying on the bathroom floor in her robe. She’d been dead for three days.”

  “What about her bed? Had it been slept in?”

  “I don’t know. The police didn’t give that out.”

  I thought about that for a minute. It sounded like she might have taken a capsule at night, just as Laurence Fife had. It still seemed to me it might have been the same medication ��� some kind of antihistamine capsule in which someone had substituted oleander.

  “Did she have allergies, Lyle? Was she complaining of a head cold or anything like that when you saw her last?”

  He shrugged. “She might have, I guess. I don’t remember anything like that. I saw her Thursday night. Wednesday or Thursday of that week when she heard that attorney was dead. She died on Saturday night late, they said. That much they put in the paper when it happened.”

  “What about this attorney she was involved with? Do you know if he kept anything at her place? Toothbrush? Razor? Things like that? Maybe she took medication that was meant for him.”

  “How do I know?” he said testily. “I don’t stick my nose where it doesn’t belong.”

  “Did she have a girl friend? Someone she might have confided in?”

  “Maybe from work. I don’t remember anyone in particular. She didn’t have ‘girl friends.”’

  I took out my notebook and jotted down the telephone number at my motel. “This is where I can be reached. Will you give me a call if you think of anything else?”

  He took the slip of paper and tucked it carelessly into the back pocket of his jeans. “What’s in Las Vegas?” he asked. “How does that tie in?”

  “I don’t know yet. There may be a woman down there who can fill in some blanks. I’ll be back through Los Angeles toward the end of the week. Maybe I’ll look you up again.”

  Lyle had already tuned me out, tapping the next brick into place, troweling away the excess mortar that had drooled out between the cracks. I glanced at my watch. I still had time to check out the place where Libby Glass had worked. I didn’t think Lyle was telling the whole truth, but I had no way to be sure. So I let it slide ��� for the time being anyway.

  Chapter 11

  *

  Haycraft and McNiece was located in the Avco Embassy building in Westwood, not far from my motel. I parked in an expensive lot adjacent to the Westwood Village Mortuary and went into the entranceway near the Wells Fargo Bank, taking the elevator up. The office itself was just to the right as I got off. I pushed through a solid teak door, lettered in brass. The interior was done with polished uneven red-tile flooring, mirrors floor to ceiling, and panels of raw gray wood, hung here and there with clusters of dried corn. A receptionist sat behind a corral to my left. A placard reading “Allison, Receptionist” sat on the corral post, the letters burned into the wood as though by some charred stick. I gave her my card.

  “I wonder if I might talk to a senior accountant,” I said. “I’m looking into the murder of a CPA who used to work here.”

  “Oh yeah. I heard about her,” Allison said. “Hang on.”

  She was in her twenties with long dark hair. She wore jeans and a string tie, her western-cut shirt looking like it had been stuffed with many handfuls of hay. Her belt buckle was shaped like a bucking mustang.

  “What is this? A theme park or something?” I asked.

  “Huh?”

  I shook my head, not willing to pursue the point, and she clopped away in her high-heeled boots through some swinging doors. After a moment, she returned.

  “Mr. McNiece isn’t in but the man you probably want to talk to is Garry Steinberg with two r’s.”

  “B-e-r-r-g?”

  “No, G-a-r-r-y.”

  “Oh, I see. Excuse me.”

  “That’s okay,” she said. “Everybody makes that mistake.”

  “Would it be possible to see Mr. Steinberg? Just briefly”

  “He’s in New York this week,” she said.

  “What about Mr. Haycraft?”

  “He’s dead. I mean, you know, he’s been dead for years,” she said. “So actually now it’s McNiece and McNiece but nobody wants to have all the stationery changed. The other McNiece is in a meeting.”

  “Is there anybody else who might remember her?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m sorry.”

  She handed me my card. I turned it over and jotted down my motel number and my answering service up in Santa Teresa.

  “Could you give this to Garry Steinberg when he gets back? I’d really appreciate a call. He can make it collect if I’m not at the motel here.”

  “Sure,” she said. She sat down and I could have sworn she eased the card straight into the trash. I watched her for a moment and she smiled at me sheepishly.

  “Maybe you could just leave that on his desk with a note,” I suggested.

  She leaned over slightly and came up again, card in hand. She speared it on a vicious-looking metal spike near the phone.

  I looked at her some more. She took the card off the spike and got up.

  “I’ll just put this on his desk,” she said and clopped off again.

  “Good plan,” I said.

  I went back to the motel and made some phone calls. Ruth, in Charlie Scorsoni’s office, said that he was still out of town but she gave me the number of his hotel in Denver. I called but he wasn’t in, so I left my number at the message desk. I called Nikki and brought her up to date and then I checked with my answering service. There were no messages. I put on my jogging clothes and drove down to the beach to run. Things did not seem to be falling into place very fast. So far, I felt like I had a lapful of confetti and the notion of piecing it all together to make a picture seemed very remote indeed. Time had shredded the facts like a big machine, leaving only slender paper threads with which to reconstruct reality. I felt clumsy and irritable and I needed to blow off steam.

  I parked near the Santa Monica pier and jogged south along the promenade, a stretch of asphalt walk that parallels the beach. I trotted past the old men bent over their chess games, past thin black boys roller-skating with incredible grace, boogeying to the secret music of their padded headphones, past guitar players, dopers, and loiterers whose eyes followed me with scorn. This stretch of pavement is the last remnant of the sixties’ drug culture ��� the barefoot, sag-eyed, and scruffy young, some looking thirty-seven now instead of s
eventeen, still mystical and remote. A dog took up company with me, running along beside me, his tongue hanging out, eyes rolling up at me now and then happily. His coat was thick and bristly, the color of caramel corn, and his tail curled up like a party favor. He was one of those mutant breeds with a large head, short body, and little bitty short legs, but he seemed quite selfpossessed. Together, we trotted beyond the promenade, past Ozone, Dudley, Paloma, Sunset, Thornton, and Park; by the time we reached Wave Crest, he’d lost interest, veering off to participate in a game of Frisbee out on the beach. The last I saw of him, he had made an incredible leap, catching a Frisbee midflight, mouth turned up in a grin. I smiled back. He was one of the few dogs I’d met in years that I really liked.

  At Venice Boulevard I turned back, running most of the way and then slowing to a walk as I reached the pier again. The ocean breeze served as a damper to my body heat. I found myself winded but not sweating much. My mouth felt dry and my cheeks were aflame. It hadn’t been a long run but I’d pushed myself a little harder than I normally did and my lungs were burning: liquid combustion in my chest. I run for the same reasons I learned to drive a car with a stick shift and drink my coffee black, imagining that a day might come when some amazing emergency would require such a test. This run was for “good measure,” too, since I’d already decided to take a day off for good behavior. Too much virtue has a corrupting effect. I got back in my car when I’d cooled down and I drove east on Wilshire, back to my motel.

  As I unlocked the door to my room, the phone began to ring. It was my Las Vegas buddy with Sharon Napier’s address.

  “Fantastic,” I said. “I really appreciate this. Let me know how to get in touch when I get down there and I’ll pay you for your time.”

  “General delivery is fine. I never know where I’ll be.”

  “You got it. How much?”

  “Fifty bucks. A discount. For you. She’s strictly unlisted and it wasn’t easy.”

  “Let me know when I can return the service,” I said, knowing full well that he would.