M is for MALICE

by Sue Grafton

  “We’d rather not discuss the content until we check it out.”

  “Who wrote it? Or would you rather not discuss that either?”

  “Right.”

  “Was it typed?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Because of the letter to the Dispatch that generated all the hype. If the papers hadn’t been tipped off, no one would have known he was back in town.”

  “I see what you’re saying. We’ll follow up.”

  “Can I ask about the autopsy?”

  “Dr. Yee hasn’t finished yet. Lieutenant Robb is there now. We’ll know more when he gets back.”

  “What about the murder weapon?”

  Her face went blank again. I was wasting my breath, but I couldn’t seem to let go. “You have a suspect?” I asked.

  “We’re pursuing some possibilities. We’re doing backgrounds on a number of people associated with the family. We’re also checking everybody’s whereabouts to see if all the stories add up.”

  “In other words, you won’t say.”

  Chilly smile. “That’s correct.”

  “Well. I’ll do what I can to help.”

  “We’d appreciate that.”

  She made no move to close, which was puzzling. From my perspective, we’d pretty much wound up our chat. She’d asked all her questions and I’d told her what I knew. In the unspoken structure of a police interview, Detective Bower was in charge and I’d have to dance to her tune. In the unexpected pause, I could see that it was suddenly her turn to stall.

  She said, “Rumor has it you’re involved with Lieutenant Robb.”

  I squinted at her in disbelief. “He told you that?”

  “Someone else. I’m afraid this is a small town, even smaller when it comes to law enforcement. So it’s not true?”

  “Well, I was involved, but I’m not now,” I said. “What makes you ask?”

  The look on her face underwent a remarkable alteration. The careful neutrality fell away and in one split second, she went from blank to blushing.

  I sat back in my chair, taking a new look at her. “Are you smitten with him?”

  “I’ve been out with him twice,” she said cautiously.

  “Ohhh, I see. Now I get it,” I said. “Listen, I’m fond of Jonah, but it’s strictly over between us. I’m the least of your worries. It’s the dread Camilla you’d better. be concerned about.”

  Detective Betsy Bower had abandoned any pose of professionalism. “But she’s living with some guy and she’s pregnant.”

  I raised a hand. “Trust me. In the continuing saga of Jonah and Camilla, the mere fact of this infant has no bearing on their relationship. He may act like he’s cured, but he isn’t, believe me. Camilla and Jonah are so enmeshed with each other I don’t know what it would take to split up their act. Actually, now that I think about it, you probably have as good a shot at it as any.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Why not? I was always too caught up in my own abandonment issues. I hated being a minor player in their little theater production. We’re talking seventh grade bonding. Junior high school romance. I couldn’t compete. I lack the emotional strength. You look like you could tackle it. You have self-esteem issues? Are you a nail biter? Bed wetter? Jealous or insecure?”

  She shook her head. “Not a bit.”

  “What about confrontation?”

  “I like a good fight,” she said.

  “Well, you better get ready then because in my experience, she’s indifferent to him until someone else comes along. And for God’s sake, don’t play fair. Camilla goes for broke.”

  “Thanks. I’ll remember. We’ll be in touch.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  On the street again, I felt as if I was emerging from a darkened tunnel. The sunlight was harsh and all the colors seemed too bright. Nine black-and-white patrol cars were lined up along the curb. Across the street, a row of small California bungalows were painted in discordant pastel shades. Flowering annuals in fuchsia, orange, and magenta stood out in bold relief against the vibrant green of new foliage. I left my car in the public parking lot and walked the remaining blocks to work.

  I entered Kingman and Ives by the unmarked side door. I unlocked my office and let myself in, glancing down at the floor. On the carpet, there was a plain white business-size envelope with my name and address typed across the front. The postmark was Santa Teresa, dated Monday P.M. Distracted, I set my bag on the desk, took out Bader’s file, and set it on top of the file cabinet. I went back to the letter and picked it up with care. I centered it on my desk, touching only the corners while I lifted the handset and dialed Alison in reception.

  “Hi, Alison. This is Kinsey. You know anything about this letter that was slipped under my door?”

  “It was delivered yesterday afternoon. I held on to it up here, thinking you’d be back, and finally decided it was better to go ahead and stick it under your door. Why, did I do something wrong?”

  “You did fine. I was just curious.”

  I put the phone down and stared at the envelope. I’d picked up a fingerprint kit at a trade show recently and for a moment I debated about dusting for latents. Seemed pointless to tell the truth. Alison had clearly handled it and even if I brought up a set of prints, what was I to do with them? I couldn’t picture the cops running them on the basis of my say-so. Still, I decided to be cautious. I took out a letter opener and slit the flap of the envelope, using the tip to slide the note onto my desk. The paper was cheap bond, folded twice, with no date and no signature. I used a pencil eraser to open the paper, anchoring opposite corners with the letter opener and the edge of my appointment book.

  Dear Miss Milhone,

  I thought I should take a moment to inlighten you on the subject of Guy Malek. I wonder if you rilly know who your dealing with. He is a liar and a theif. I find it sickning that he could get a second chance in life threw the acquisition of Sudden Riches, Why should he get the benefitt of five million dollars when he never urned one red cent? I don’t think we can count on him making amens for his passed crimes. You better be carefull your not tared with the same brush.

  I found a transparent plastic sleeve and slid the letter inside, then opened my desk drawer and took out the copy of the letter Max Outhwaite had written to Jeffrey Katzenbach, placing the two side by side for comparison. On superficial examination, the type font looked the same. As before, my name was misspelled. Thanks, it’s two l’s, please. The sender seemed to have a problem distinguishing your from you’re and consistently reversed the two. The use of threw for through was the same, but there were other oddities of note. My letter was less than half the length of the one to Katzenbach, yet it had more spelling mistakes. To my untutored eye, the two sets of errors were curiously inconsistent. If the writer were relying strictly on phonetics, why would words like acquisition, aforementioned, and besieges be spelled right? Certainly in my letter, there were far fewer commas, exclamation points, and Capitalizations! It was possible there was a certain level of carelessness at work, but I also had to wonder if the writer weren’t simply pretending to use language badly. There was something vaguely amusing about the use of the word amens instead of amends, especially in the context of a born-again.

  From another angle, why affix the name Max Outhwaite to the first letter, tacking on the embellishment of a phony address, and leave mine unsigned? I had to guess that Outhwaite imagined (quite correctly, as it turned out) that an unsigned letter to the Dispatch would get thrown in the trash. It was also likely the sender had no idea I’d end up with both. While I understood the reasoning behind the letter to the Dispatch, why this one to me? What was Outhwaite’s intent?

  I took out my magnifying glass and cranked up my three-way bulb to maximum illumination. Under magnification, other similarities became apparent. In both documents, the letter a was twisted on its axis, leaning slightly to the left, and on the lowercase i a portion of the serif was broken off along the bottom. Ad
ditionally, the lowercase e, o, a, and d were dirty and tended to print as filled dots instead of circles, suggestive of an old-fashioned fabric ribbon. On my portable Smith Corona, I’d been known to use a straight pin to clean the clogged typewriter keys.

  I left the letters on my desk and took a walk around the room. Then I sat down in my swivel chair, opened my pencil drawer, and pulled out a pack of index cards. It took me fifteen minutes to jot down the facts as I remembered them, one piece of information per card until I’d exhausted my store. I laid them out on my desk, rearranging the order, shuffling them into columns, looking for connections I hadn’t seen before. It didn’t amount to much from my perspective, but there’d soon be more information available. The autopsy was done by now and the medical examiner would have a concrete opinion about the manner and cause of death. We were all assuming Guy died from blunt-force trauma to the head, but there might be some underlying pathology. Maybe he’d died of a heart attack, maybe he’d been poisoned, expiring in his sleep before the first blow was struck. I couldn’t help but wonder what difference any of it made. Guy would be laid to rest, his body probably taken back to Marcella for burial up there. The various forensic experts would go on sifting through the evidence until the case was resolved. Eventually, the story would be told in its entirety and maybe I’d understand then how everything fit. In the meantime, I was left with all the unrelated fragments and a sick feeling in my stomach.

  I took the letters down the hall, the one still encased in its plastic sleeve. At the Xerox machine, I made a copy of each so that I now had two sets. The copies I placed in my briefcase, along with the notes I’d made on my index cards. The originals I locked away carefully in my bottom drawer. When the phone rang, I let the answering machine pick up. “Kinsey, this is Christie Malek. Listen, the police were just here with a warrant for Jack’s arrest ���”

  I snatched up the receiver. “Christie? It’s me. What’s going on?”

  “Oh, Kinsey. Thank God. I’m sorry to bother you, but I didn’t know what else to do. I put a call through to Donovan, but he’s out in the field. I don’t know where Bennet’s gone. He left about nine, without a word to anyone. Do you know the name of a good bail bondsman? Jack told me to get him one, but I’ve looked in the Yellow Pages and can’t tell one from the other.”

  “Are you sure he’s in custody? They didn’t just take him to the station for another interview?”

  “Kinsey, they put him in handcuffs. They read him his rights and took him off in the back of an unmarked car. We were both in shock. I don’t have any money ��� less than a hundred bucks in cash ��� but if I knew who to call…”

  “Forget about the bondsman. If Jack’s being charged with murder, it’s a no-bail warrant. What he needs is a good criminal attorney and the sooner the better.”

  “I don’t know any attorneys, except Tasha!” she shrieked. “What am I supposed to do, pick a name out of a hat?”

  “Wait a minute, Christie. Just calm down.”

  “I don’t want to calm down. I’m scared. I want help.”

  “I know that. I know. Just wait a minute,” I said. “I have a suggestion. Lonnie Kingman’s office is right next door to mine. You want me to go see if he’s in? You can’t do better than Lonnie. He’s a champ.”

  She was silent for an instant. “All right, yes. I’ve heard of him. That sounds good.”

  “Give me a few minutes and we’ll see what we can do.

  Chapter 16

  *

  I caught Lonnie’s secretary, Ida Ruth, on her way back from the kitchen with a coffeepot in hand. I hooked a thumb in the direction of Lonnie’s door. “Is he in there?”

  “He’s eating breakfast. Help yourself.”

  I tapped on the door and then opened it, peering in. Lonnie was sitting at his desk with an oversized plastic container of some kind of-chalky-looking protein drink. I could see bubbles of dried powder floating on the surface and the barest suggestion of a milky mustache on Lonnie’s upper lip. From assorted bottles, he’d emptied out a pile of vitamins and nutritional supplements, and he was popping down pills between sips of a shake so thick it might have been melted ice cream. One of the gel caps was the size and the color of a stone in a topaz dinner ring. He swallowed it as though he were doing a magic trick.

  Lonnie more nearly resembles a bouncer than an attorney. He’s short and stocky ��� five feet four, two hundred four pounds ��� bulging with muscles from his twenty years of power lifting. He’s got one of those revved-up metabolisms that burns calories like crazy and he radiates high energy along with body heat. His speech is staccato and he’s generally amped up on coffee, anxiety, or lack of sleep. I’ve heard people claim he’s on the sauce-shooting anabolic steroids in concert with all the iron he pumps. Personally, I doubt it. He’s been manic for the whole nine years of our acquaintance and I’ve never seen him exhibit any of the rage, or aggression allegedly generated by extended steroid use. He’s married to a woman with a black belt in karate and she’s never once complained about testicles shriveled to the size of raisins, another unhappy side effect of steroid abuse.

  His usually shaggy hair had. been trimmed and subdued. His dress shirt was pulled tightly across his shoulders and biceps. I don’t know his neck size, but he claims a tie makes him feel he’s on the brink of being hanged. The one he was wearing was pulled askew, his collar unbuttoned, and his suit jacket off. He’d hung it neatly from a hanger hooked through the handle of a file drawer. His shirt was spanking white, but badly wrinkled, and he had rolled up the sleeves. Sometimes he wears a vest to conceal his rumpled state, but not today. He swallowed the last of a palmful of pills, holding up a hand to indicate that he was aware of me. He chugged off the balance of his protein drink and shook his head with satisfaction. “Whew, that’s good.”

  “Are you tied up at the moment?”

  “Not at all. Come on in.”

  I entered the office and closed the door behind me. “I just got a call from Christie Malek. Have you been following that, story?”

  “The murder? Who hasn’t? Sit, sit, sit. I’m not due in court until two P.M. What’s up?”

  “Jack Malek’s been arrested and needs to talk to an attorney. I told Christie I’d see if you were interested.” I took a seat in one of two black leather client chairs.

  “When was he picked up?”

  “Fifteen or twenty minutes ago, I’d guess.”

  Lonnie began to screw the lids back on the motley collection of bottles sitting on his desk. “What’s the deal? Fill me in.”

  I brought him up to speed on the case as succinctly as possible. This was our first conversation about the murder and I wanted him to have as thorough an understanding as I could muster on short notice. As I spoke, I could see Lonnie’s gears engage and the wheels start to turn. I was saying, “Last I heard ��� this was from the housekeeper ��� Guy and Jack quarreled after hours of heavy drinking and Jack went off to a pairings’ party at the country club.”

  “I wonder how the cops are gonna bust that one. You’d think at least half a dozen people would have seen him there.” Lonnie shot a glance at his watch and began to roll his sleeves down. “I’ll pop on over to the station house and see what’s going on. I hope Jack has sense enough to keep his mouth shut until I get there.”

  He pushed away from his desk and took his suit jacket from the hanger. He shrugged himself into it, secured his collar button, and slid his tie into place. Now he looked more like a lawyer, albeit a short, beefy one. “By the way, where does Jack fit? He the oldest or the youngest?”

  “The youngest. Donovan’s the oldest. He runs the company. Bennet’s in the middle. I wouldn’t rule him out if you’re looking to divert suspicion. He was the most vocal in his opposition to Guy’s claim on the estate. You want me to do anything before you get back?”

  “Tell Christie I’ll be in touch as soon as I’ve talked to him. In the meantime, go on over to the house. Let’s put together
a list of witnesses who can confirm Tuesday night. The cops find the murder weapon?”

  “They must have. I know they did a grid search of the property because I saw ‘em doing it. And Christie says they carted off all kinds of things.”

  “Once I finish with Jack, I’ll have a chat with the cops and find out why they think he’s good for thins. It’d be nice to have some idea what we’re up against.”

  “Am I officially on the clock?”

  He looked at his watch. “Go.”

  “The usual rates?”

  “Sure. Unless you want to work for free. Of course, it’s always possible Jack won’t hire me.”

  “Don’t be silly. The man’s desperate,” I said. I caught Lonnie’s look and amended my claim. “Well, you know what I mean. He’s not hiring you because he’s desperate ���”

  “Get out of here,” Lonnie said, smiling.

  Briefcase in hand, I hiked back over to the public parking lot, where I retrieved my car. My attitude toward Jack Malek had already undergone a shift. Whether Jack was guilty or innocent, Lonnie would hustle up every shred of exculpatory evidence and plot, plan, maneuver, and strategize to establish his defense. I was no particular fan of Jack’s, but working for Lonnie Kingman I’d be kept in the loop.

  As I approached the Maleks’, I was relieved to see that the roadway on either side of the estate was virtually deserted. The shoulder was churned with tire prints, the ground strewn with cigarette stubs, empty cups, crumpled paper napkins, and fast-food containers. The area outside the gate had the look of abandonment, as if a traveling circus had packed up and crept away at first light. The press had all but disappeared, following the patrol car taking Jack to County Jail. For Jack, it was the beginning of a process in which he’d be photographed, frisked, booked, fingerprinted,, and placed in a holding cell. I’d been through the process myself about a year ago and the sense of contamination was still vivid. The facility itself is clean and freshly painted, but institutional nonetheless; no-frills linoleum and government-issue furniture built to endure hard wear. In my brush with them, the jail officers were civil, pleasant, and businesslike, but I’d felt diminished by every aspect of the procedure, from the surrender of my personal possessions to the subsequent confinement in the drunk tank. I can still remember the musky smell in the air, mixing with the odors of stale mattresses, dirty armpits, and bourbon fumes being exhaled. As far as I knew, Jack had never been arrested and I suspected he’d feel as demoralized as I had.