B is for Burglar (17 page)

I smiled. “I'm flattered.”

We detoured into the kitchen and he opened a bottle of white wine for me, pouring it into a wineglass that still had the price tag on the bottom. He grinned sheepishly when he saw it.

“All I had was plastic glasses the kids used to use in the backyard,” he said. “This is the kitchen.”

“I kind of figured that.”

It was a nice house. I don't know what I expected, but someone had made good choices. The whole place had a stripped-down feeling: bare, gleaming wood floors, furniture with simple lines, clean surfaces. Why had Camilla left this? What else was she looking for?

He showed me three bedrooms, two baths, a deck out back and a small yard enclosed by a vine-covered stucco wall.

“I'll tell you the truth,” he said. “When she walked out, I packed up all her stuff and had the Salvation Army come take it away. I wasn't going to sit around looking at her little artsy-fartsy geegaws. I kept the kids' rooms intact. Maybe she'll get tired of them like she got tired of me and send them back, but
her
stuff I don't need. She was royally irritated when she heard, but what was I supposed to do?” He shrugged, standing there holding the beer bottle by the neck.

His face was beginning to take form now that I'd seen him twice. Before, I'd only registered qualities like “bland” and “harmless.” I'd been aware of the extra weight he carried, a personality made up of something nice mixed with something droll. He was direct and I responded to that, but he also had a trait I'd noticed in certain cops before: bemused self-assurance, as if he were looking at the world from a long way back but it was all okay with him. Clearly, Camilla still loomed large in his life and he smiled every time he talked about her, not with affection, but to cover his wrath. I thought he needed to go through a few more women before he got down to me.

“What is that? What's that look?” he asked.

I smiled. “Beware of dog,” I said. I'm not sure if I was talking about him or me.

He smiled too, but he knew what I meant. “I got the stuff in here.”

He pointed toward the dining-room table in an alcove just off the living room.

I sat down in a hot circle of light, feeling like a glutton with a napkin tucked under my chin and a knife and fork upright in each fist. Along with the reports he'd Xeroxed, he'd also managed to slip me some duplicate photographs. I was going to see the aftermath of the crime with my own eyes and I could hardly wait.

 

 

 

 

I read through everything quickly, just to get an overview, and then I went back and noted the details that interested me. The official version of the story, as much as I knew it, and the interviews with Leonard Grice, his sister Lily, neighbors, the fire inspector, and the first police officer on the scene more or less spelled out events in the same way I'd been told. Leonard and Marty were scheduled to go out for their traditional Tuesday-night dinner with Leonard's widowed sister, Mrs. Howe. Marty wasn't feeling well and canceled out at the last minute. Leonard and Lily went out as planned and got back to the Howes' at about nine
P.M.
, at which point a call was put through to Marty to let her know they were home. Both Mr. Grice and his sister spoke to Marty and she finally terminated the call in order to respond to a knock at the door. According to both Lily and Leonard, they had a cup of coffee and chatted for a bit. He left at approximately ten o'clock, arriving at Via Madrina twenty-some minutes later to find that his house had burned. By then, the blaze had been
brought under control and his wife's body was being removed from the partially destroyed residence. He collapsed and was revived by paramedics at the scene. Tillie Ahlberg was the one who'd spotted the smoke and she'd turned in an alarm at 9:55. Two units had responded within minutes, but the blaze was such that entry couldn't be effected through the front door. Firemen had broken in through the rear, extinguishing the fire after thirty minutes or so. The body was discovered in the entryway and removed to the morgue.

Identification had been established by full-mouth X rays supplied by Marty's local dentist and through an examination of stomach contents. She'd apparently mentioned to Leonard on the phone that she'd fixed herself some canned tomato soup and a tuna sandwich. The empty cans were found in the kitchen wastebasket. The time of death had more or less been fixed in a narrow framework between the time of the telephone call and the time the fire alarm had been turned in.

I read through the autopsy report, mentally summing up a lot of technical details. The pathologist reported no carbon granules deposited in the bronchial passages or lungs and no carbon monoxide in the blood or other tissues. It was therefore determined that she had been dead when the fire broke out. Additional lab tests had revealed no alcohol, chloroform, drugs, or poisons in the system. The cause of death was attributed to multiple skull fractures apparently caused by repeated blows with a blunt instrument. Because of the nature of the wounds, the pathologist estimated the object to be some four to five inches in width, speculating that it might
have been a two-by-four wielded with great force, a baseball bat, or some kind of club, possibly metal. The murder weapon had never been found. Unless, of course, it was a big old board burned up in the fire, but there was no evidence to support that possibility.

The arson investigators didn't seem to have any doubts that the fire had been deliberately set. Lab tests showed traces of kerosene in the floorboards. Charring patterns throughout the house had borne this out. They'd seen the same blackened splash marks and the same liquid trails that I'd spotted when I went through the house earlier. They'd also used some sophisticated methods of verifying the point of origin and the course the fire had taken as it burned. Leonard Grice had been questioned about the kerosene and he said he'd been storing a quantity in the basement for use in two lamps and a cooking stove that he and Marty took on camping trips, which accounted for the intruder's having had access to a flammable liquid. It looked as if the burglar had come with a weapon in hand, but without any intention of burning the place down. The fire was apparently an afterthought, a hastily concocted plan to conceal the bludgeoning of Marty Grice. So far there was nothing to suggest that anybody knew she'd be there, so the cops were having a hard time imagining that the murder had been planned in advance.

There was no evidence that a time-delay device had been employed, which ruled out the possibility that Grice had rigged the fire before he left. Grice's nephew, Mike, had been questioned and cleared. He'd been seen by numerous impartial witnesses in a hangout called
The Clockworks in downtown Santa Teresa during the critical period when experts speculated that the fire had been set. There were no other suspects and no other witnesses. Any other hard evidence including fingerprints had been destroyed by the fire. Elaine Boldt's name was on a list of persons to be interviewed and there was a note that Lieutenant Dolan had contacted her by telephone on the fifth. He'd made an appointment to see her on January 10, but she'd never appeared. According to the information I had, she'd left for Florida the night before.

One entry, appearing in the middle of a typed report, interested me considerably. According to a deputy at the police department, a call had come in at 9:06 on the night of the murder that might well have been placed by Marty Grice. The caller had been female, in a panic, and had blurted out a cry for help before the phone went dead. Since the call was placed to the police station instead of 911, the deputy had no way of getting a fix on the address from which the call had originated. She'd made a note of it, however, and when the murder came to light, she'd reported it to Dolan, who had included it in his report. He'd questioned Grice about that too. If it
was
Marty, why would she have called the station instead of dialing 911? Leonard had pointed out that he and Marty had a telephone answering machine with a rapiddial function. She'd entered the telephone numbers of both the police department and the fire department. The answering machine was found, undamaged, on a table in the rear of the hallway with the numbers neatly printed on the index. It looked as if Marty had had some
warning of the attack and had been able to reach the telephone, calling out at least part of a distress signal before she'd been killed. If she'd actually placed the call, it pinpointed the time of death at 9:06 or soon afterward.

For a moment, I harbored the fleeting hope that Leonard Grice might still be implicated. After all, as nearly as I could tell, the police had only Lily's word for the fact that he was still at her place at that time. I was speculating that he might have come home early, killed Marty, started the fire, and then parked around the block until the appropriate moment to arrive. If he and his sister were in cahoots, they could both simply maintain afterward that he'd been with her. I was out of luck on that one. Three interviews down, there was a short paragraph detailing a conversation that Dolan had had with some of Lily's neighbors who'd stopped by unexpectedly at nine
P.M
. to drop off a birthday present. The husband and wife both reported independently that Leonard was there and hadn't left for home until approximately ten. The time was noted because they'd been trying to persuade him to stay for a television program that came on at ten. It turned out to be a rerun and since he was anxious to get home to his wife anyway, he'd left.

Well, shit, I thought.

Now, why was this making me feel so cross? Ah, well, because I wanted Leonard Grice to be guilty of something. Murder, conspiracy to murder, accessory to murder. I was fond of the idea for tidiness' sake—for statistical purposes, if nothing else. California has over three thousand homicide victims annually, and of those,
fully two-thirds are slain by friends, acquaintances, or relatives, which makes you wonder if you might be better off as a friendless orphan in this state. The point is, when a murder goes down, the chances are good that someone near and dear has had a hand in it.

I thought about that, reluctant to give it up. Could Grice have hired someone to kill his wife? It was always possible, of course, but it was hard to see what he might have gained. The police, not being ignorant buffoons, had pursued the line as well, but had come up with nothing. No moneys unaccounted for, no meetings with unsavory characters, no apparent motive, no visible benefit.

Which brought me back to Elaine Boldt. Could she have been involved in Marty Grice's death? Most of what I'd learned about her cried out a big resounding “no.” There really wasn't a hint that she'd been attached to Leonard romantically or any other way, except as an occasional bridge partner. I didn't think Marty Grice had been killed for messing up a small slam, but with bridge partners one can never tell. Wim Hoover had mentioned that Elaine and Beverly had quarreled about a man at Christmastime, but it was hard to picture the two of them in an arm wrestle over Leonard Grice. I kept coming back to the same suspicion—that Elaine knew something or had seen something related to Marty's murder and had left town to avoid the scrutiny of the Santa Teresa police.

I turned my attention to the photographs, neatly disconnecting my brain. I needed to know how things had looked and I couldn't afford to react emotionally. Violent
death is repellent. My first impulse, always, is to turn abruptly away, to shield my soul from the sight, but this was the only tangible record of that event and I had to see for myself. I turned a cold eye to the first black-and-white photograph. The color pictures would be worse and I thought I'd start with the “easy” ones.

Jonah cleared his throat. I looked up.

“I'm going to have to turn in,” he said. “I'm beat.”

“You are?” I glanced at my watch, startled. It was 10:45. I'd been sitting there for more than two hours without moving. “I'm sorry,” I said. “I had no idea I'd been here that long.”

“That's okay. I got up at five this morning to work out and I need some shut-eye. You can take that stuff if you like. Of course, if Dolan ever catches you with it, I'll deny everything and throw you to the wolves, but aside from that, I hope it helps.”

“Thanks. It's already helped.” I shoved the photographs and reports into a big manila envelope and tucked that, in turn, in my handbag.

I drove home, disturbed. Even now, there was an image of Marty's body graven behind my eyes: features blurred by charring, mouth open, lying in a circle of ash like a pile of gray confetti. The heat had caused the tendons in her arms to retract, pulling her fists up into a pugilistic pose. It was her last fight and she had lost, but I didn't think it was over yet.

I willed the image away, running back over what I'd learned to that point. One little detail still bothered me. Was it possible that May Snyder had been accurate when she talked about the bang-bang-bang of hammering
that night? If so, what in the world could it have been?

I was almost home again when I remembered the shed in the Grices' backyard. I slammed the brakes on and hung a hard left, heading across town.

Via Madrina was dark, heavily overhung by Italian stone pines. There wasn't much traffic at that hour. The night sky was hazy and though the moon was full, the light that filtered down was partially blocked by the condominium next door. I parked and got a little penlight out of the glove compartment. I pulled on a pair of rubber gloves and locked my car, heading up the Grices' front walk. I cut around the side of the house, my tennis shoes making no sound at all on the concrete.

In my jacket pocket I fingered the key pick, shaped like a flattened metal mandolin. I had a set of five picks with me on a key ring and a second more elaborate set at home in a nice leather case. They'd been given to me by a nonresidential burglar who was currently serving ten months in the county jail. Last time he'd been caught, he'd hired me to keep an eye on his wife, whom he believed was misbehaving with the guy next door. Actually, she hadn't been doing anything and he was so grateful for the good news that he gave me the key picks and taught me how to use them. He'd paid me some cash too, but then it turned out he'd stolen it and he had to ask for it back when the judge ordered him to make restitution.