J is for Judgment (18 page)

I left the porch and moved along the left side of the house. The garage was locked, probably protected by the alarm system as well. I checked the gate into the backyard; it didn’t seem to have a lock. I pulled a ring that had a length of string attached. The latch was released and I pushed my way in, holding my breath to see if the gate was tied to the security system. Dead silence, except for the squeaking of the gate as it swung on its hinges. I eased the gate shut behind me and moved down the narrow walkway between the garage and the fence. I could see the exhaust vent for a dryer, and I imagined the laundry room was located on the other side of the wall.

The deck was ablaze, two-hundred-watt floods creating a crazy daylight of sorts. I moved along the back of the house, peering in through the French doors. More views of the great room and the dining room next to that, with a slice of kitchen visible beyond. Oh, dear. I could see now that Renata had chosen the kind of wallpaper only decorators find attractive: a poisonous Chinese yellow with vines and puffballs exploding across the surface. There was expensive fabric to match, drapes and upholstery continuing the pattern. It was possible that a fungus had got loose in the room, replicating like a virus until every corner had been invaded. I’d seen pictures of something like this in a science magazine, mold spores blown up to nineteen hundred times their actual size.

I wandered across the deck and down the ramp to the darkened water in the marina. I turned and looked back at the house. There were no outside stairs and no visible way to reach the second-story bedrooms. I went back through the gate, letting the latch close behind me, making sure the street was clear of approaching cars. All I needed was Renata Huff returning home, headlights picking me out of the darkness as she turned into her driveway.

As I passed the mailbox at the curb, my bad angel tapped me on the shoulder and suggested a violation of U.S. postal regulations. “Would you quit that?” I said crossly. Of course, I’d already reached out and pulled the flap down, taking out the sheaf of mail that had been delivered that day. It was too dark on the street to sort out all the good stuff, so I was forced to shove the whole batch of envelopes in my handbag. God, I’m so rotten. Sometimes I can’t believe the kind of shit I pull. Here I was, lying to the neighbor, stealing Renata’s mail. Were there no depths to which I wouldn’t sink? Apparently not. Dimly, I wondered if the penalties for mail tampering were per incident or per piece. If the latter, I was racking up a lot of jail time.

Before I headed home again, I made a detour past Dana Jaffe’s house. I doused my headlights, cruising to a stop across the street from her place. I left my keys in the ignition, making my way silently across the street. All the ground-floor lights were on. Traffic at that hour was sparse to nonexistent. There were no neighbors in evidence, no dog walkers on the street. I angled my way across the grass through the darkness. Shrubs growing
at the side of the house provided sufficient cover to allow me to spy without interruption. I thought I might as well add trespass and prowling to my other sins.

Dana was watching television, her face turned toward the console between the windows in front. Shifting lights played across her face as the program continued. She lit a cigarette. She sipped white wine from a glass on the table beside her. There was no sign of Wendell and nothing to suggest she had company in the house. Occasionally she would smile, perhaps in response to the canned laughter I could hear vibrating in the wall. I realized I’d been entertaining a suspicion that she was in league with him, that she knew where he was now and where he’d been all these years. Seeing her alone, I found myself dismissing the idea. I simply couldn’t believe she’d collude in Wendell’s abandonment of her sons. Both boys had suffered in the last five years.

I went back to my car and fired up my engine, making an illegal U-turn before I flipped on my headlights. Once I reached Santa Teresa, I stopped off at the McDonald’s on Milagro and picked up a Quarter Pounder and an order of fries. For the remainder of the drive home, the air in the car was moist with the smell of steamed onions and hot pickles, meat patty nestled in melted cheese and condiments. I parked the car and toted my belated second supper with me through the squeaking back gate.

Henry’s lights were out. I let myself into my apartment. I removed the Styrofoam box and set it on the counter. I opened the lid and used the top half of the container as a receptacle for my fries, taking a few minutes to bite open the handful of ketchup packets,
which I squeezed over my shoestring potatoes. I perched on a bar stool, munching junk food while I sorted through the mail I’d stolen. It’s hard to give up chronic thievery when my crimes net me such a bonanza of information. Purely on instinct, I’d managed to snag Renata’s telephone bill with her unlisted number in a box at the top and a neatly ordered list of all the numbers from which she’d charged calls in the past thirty days. The Visa bill, a joint account, was like a little road map of places she and “Dean DeWitt Huff” had stayed. For a dead man, he was apparently having himself a fine old time. There were some nice samples of his handwritting on some of the credit card receipts. The charges from Viento Negro hadn’t surfaced yet, but I could track the two of them backward from La Paz, to Cabo San Lucas, to a hotel in San Diego. All port towns easily accessible from the boat, I noticed.

I went to bed at 10:30 and slept solidly, waking at six o’clock, half a second before my alarm was set to go off. I pushed the covers aside and reached for my sweats. After hasty ablutions, I tinked down my spiral staircase and out to the street.

There was an early morning chill, but the air was curiously muggy, residual heat held in by the lowering cloud cover overhead. The early morning light was pearly. The beach looked as fine and as supple as gray leather, wrinkled by the night winds, smoothed by the surf. My cold was rapidly fading, but I didn’t dare try jogging the full three miles yet. I alternated between walking and trotting, keeping track of my lungs and the creaking protests in my legs. At that hour, I tend to
keep an uneasy eye out for the unexpected. I see the occasional homeless person, sexless and anonymous, sleeping in the grass, an old woman with a shopping cart alone at a picnic table. I’m especially alert to the odd-looking men in scruffy suits, gesturing, laughing, chatting with invisible companions. I’m wary of being incorporated in those strange and fearful dramas. Who knows what part we play in other people’s dreams?

I showered, dressed, and ate a bowl of cereal while I scanned the paper. I drove into the office and spent a frustrating twenty minutes hunting for a parking space that wouldn’t generate a ticket. I nearly had to break down and try the public lot, but I was saved at the last minute by a woman in a pickup who vacated a spot just across the street.

I went through the mail from the day before. Nothing much of interest, except the notification that I’d won a million dollars. Well, either me or the two other people mentioned. In fine print, it said that Minnie and Steve were actually already collecting their millions in $40,000 installments. I got busy and tore out perforated stamps, which I licked and pasted in various squares. I studied the material, seriously worried I might win the third prize jet ski. What the hell was I going to do with that? Maybe I’d give it to Henry for his birthday. I went ahead and balanced my checkbook, just to clear the decks. While I was eliminating some of those pesky excess dollars, I picked up the receiver and tried Renata Huff’s unlisted number, without results.

Something was nagging at me, and it had nothing to
do with Wendell Jaffe or Renata Huff. It was Lena Irwin’s reference yesterday to the Burton Kinsey family up in Lompoc. Despite my denials, the name had set up a low hum in my memory, like the nearly inaudible buzz of power lines overhead. In many ways, my whole sense of myself was embedded in the fact of my parents’ death in an automobile wreck when I was five. I knew my father had lost control of the car when a rock tumbled down a steep hill and crashed into the windshield. I was on the backseat, flung against the front seat on impact, wedged there for hours while the fire department worked to extract me from the wreckage. I remember my mother’s hopeless crying and the silence that came afterward. I remember slipping a hand around the edge of the driver’s seat, slipping a finger into my father’s hand, not realizing he was dead. I remember going to live with the aunt who raised me after that, my mother’s sister, whose name was Virginia. I called her Gin Gin or Aunt Gin. She had told me little, if anything, about the family history before or after that event. I knew, because the fact was embedded in the tale, that my parents were on their way up to Lompoc the day they were killed, but I never thought about the reason for the trip. My aunt had never told me the nature of the journey, and I’d never asked. Given my insatiable curiosity and my natural inclination to poke my nose in where it doesn’t belong, it was odd to realize how little attention I’d paid to my own past. I’d simply accepted what I was told, constructing my personal mythology on the flimsiest of facts. Why had I never pushed aside that veil?

I thought about myself, about the kind of child I was when I was five and six, isolated, insular. After their deaths, I created a little world for myself in a cardboard box, filled with blankets and pillows, lighted by a table lamp with a sixty-watt bulb. I was very particular about what I ate. I would make sandwiches for myself, cheese and pickle, or Kraft olive pimento cheese, cut in four equal fingers, which I would arrange on a plate. I had to do everything myself, and it all had to be just so. Dimly, I remember my aunt hovering nearby. I wasn’t aware of her worry at the time, but now when I see the image, I know she must have been deeply concerned about me. I would take my food and crawl into my container, where I would look at picture books and nibble, stare at the cardboard ceiling, hum to myself, and sleep. For four months, maybe five, I withdrew into that ecosphere of artificial warmth, that cocoon of grief. I taught myself how to read. I drew pictures, made shadow creatures with my fingers against the walls of my den. I taught myself how to tie my shoes. Perhaps I thought they’d come back for me, that mother, that father, whose faces I could project, home cinema for the orphaned, a girl child who until lately had been safely ensconced in that little family. I can still remember how cold the trailer felt whenever I crawled out. My aunt never interfered with me. When school started in the fall, I emerged like a little animal coming out of its lair. Kindergarten was fearful. I wasn’t used to other children. I wasn’t accustomed to noise or to regimentation. I didn’t like Mrs. Bowman, the teacher, in whose eyes I could read both pity and disapproval, that judgment. I was an odd child. I was timid.
I was anxious all the time. Nothing I’ve faced since has even come close to the horrors of grade school. I can see now how the story, whatever it was, must have followed me like a specter from level to level: penned in my record, appended to my file, from teacher to teacher, through conferences with the principal…what shall we do with her? How shall we cope with her tears and her stoniness? So bright, so fragile, stubborn, introverted, asocial, easily upset…

When the phone rang I jumped, adrenaline washing through me like a blast of ice water. I snatched up the receiver, my heart thudding in my throat. “Kinsey Millhone Investigations.”

“Hello, Kinsey. This is Tommy down at the Perdido County Jail. Brian Jaffe’s attorney just notified our office that you can talk to him if you want. He didn’t sound too happy about it, but I guess Mrs. Jaffe insisted.”

“She did?” I said, unable to disguise my astonishment.

He laughed. “Maybe she thinks you’ll go to bat for him, clear up this misunderstanding about the jailbreak and the little gal who got shot to death.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “When should I come down?”

“Any time you want.”

“What’s the protocol on this? Shall I ask for you?”

“Ask for the senior deputy. Name’s Roger Tiller. He knew the Jaffe kid back when he was working truancy patrol. I thought you might like to pick his brain.”

“That’s great.”

Before I could thank him properly, the phone clicked in my ear. I was smiling to myself as I snagged my handbag and headed for the door. The nice thing
about cops—once they decide you’re okay, there’s nobody more generous.

D
eputy Tiller and I traversed the corridor, our footsteps out of synch, keys jingling as he walked. The camera up in the corner was keeping track of us. He was older than I’d expected, in his late fifties and heavyset, his uniform fitting snugly on a five-foot-eight frame. I had a quick vision of him at the end of a shift, stripping off his clothes with relief, like a woman peeling off a girdle. His body probably bore the permanent marks of all the buckles and apparatus. His sandy hair was receding, and he had a sandy mustache to match, green eyes, a pug nose, the kind of face that would have seemed appropriate on a kid of twenty-two. His heavy leather belt was making creaking sounds, and I noticed that his posture and his manner changed when he got in range of an inmate. A small group of them, five, were waiting to be buzzed through a metal door with a glass window embedded with chicken wire. Latinos, in their twenties, they wore jail blues and white T-shirts, rubber sandals. In accordance with regulations, they were silent, their hands clasped behind their backs. White wristbands indicated that they were GP, general population, incarcerated because of DUIs and crimes against property.

I said, “Sergeant Ryckman says you met Brian Jaffe when you were working truancy patrol. How long ago was that?”

“Five years. Kid was twelve, ornery as hell. I remember
one day I picked him up and took him back to school three different times. I can’t even tell you how many meetings we scheduled with the student study team. School psychologist finally threw her hands up. I felt sorry for his mother. We all knew what she was going through. He’s a bad apple. Smart, good-looking, had a mouth on him wouldn’t quit.” Deputy Tiller shook his head.