K is for Killer (9 page)

I followed J.D. down a chilly hallway, made darker by mahogany woodwork and wallpaper somber with age. I wondered if the art experts could brighten the finish by cleaning away the soot, restoring all the colors to their once clear tones like an old masterpiece. On the other hand, how colorful could pale brown cabbage roses get?

The kitchen was someone's depressing attempt to “modernize” what had probably been a utility porch to begin with. The countertops were covered with linoleum, rimmed with a band of metal where a line of dark gray grunge had collected. The wooden cabinets were thick with lime-green paint. The stove and refrigerator both appeared to be new, incongruous white appliances sticking out into the room. An oak table and two chairs had been tucked into an alcove, where a bay of windows with built-in benches looked
out onto a tangled yard. The room was at least warmer than the hall we'd passed through.

“Have a seat.”

“I'm fine. I can't stay long,” I said. Really, I was reluctant to park my rear end on seats that were sticky with little fingerprints. A short person, probably Jack, had made the rounds of the room, leaving a chair rail of grape jelly that extended as far as the back door, which opened onto a small glass-enclosed porch.

J.D. leaned toward the burner and turned the flame up under his skillet while I leaned against the doorjamb. His hair was a mild brown, thinning on top, slightly shaggy across his ears. He wore a blue denim work shirt, faded blue jeans, and dusty boots. A white paper packet marked with butcher's crayon sat on the counter, along with a pile of diced onions and garlic. He added olive oil to the skillet. I do love to watch men cook.

“J.D.?” A woman's voice reached us from the front of the house.

“Yeah?”

“Who's at the door?”

He looked toward the corridor behind me, and I turned as she approached. “This lady's a private investigator looking into Lorna's death. This is my wife, Leda. Sorry, but your name slipped right by me.” With the oil hot, he scooped up the onions and minced garlic and dropped them in the pan.

I turned and held my hand out. “Kinsey Millhone. Nice to meet you.”

We shook hands. Leda was exotic, a child-woman scarcely half Burke's height and probably half his age. She couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three,
small and frail with a dark pixie cut. Her proffered fingers were cold, and her handshake was passive.

Burke said, “Actually, you might know Leda's dad. He's a private investigator, too.”

“Really? What's his name?”

“Kurt Selkirk. He's semiretired now, but he's been around for years. Leda's his youngest. He's got five more just like her, a whole passel of girls.”

“Of course I know Kurt,” I said. “Next time you talk to him, tell him I said hi.” Kurt Selkirk had made his living for years doing electronic surveillance, and he had a reputation as a sleazebag. Since Public Law 90-351 was passed in June of 1968, “anyone who willfully uses, endeavors to use, or procures any other person to use or endeavor to use any electronic, mechanical, or other device to intercept any oral communication” was subject to fines of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years. I knew for a fact that Selkirk had risked both penalties on a regular basis. Most private investigators in his age range had made a living, once upon a time, eavesdropping on cheating spouses. Now the no-fault divorce laws had changed much of that. In his case, the decision to retire was probably the result of lawsuits and threats by the federal government. I was glad he'd left the business, but I didn't mention that. “What sort of work do you do?” I asked J.D.

“Electrician,” he said.

Meanwhile Leda, smiling faintly, moved past me in a cloud of musk cologne. Any oxen in the area would have been inflamed. Her eye makeup was elaborate: smoky eye shadow, black eyeliner, brows plucked into graceful arches. Her skin was very pale, her bones as delicate as a bird's.
The outfit she was wearing was a long, white sleeveless tunic, cut low on her bony chest, and gauzy white harem pants, through which her thin legs were clearly visible. I couldn't believe she wasn't freezing. Her sandals were the type that always drive me insane, with thin leather straps coming up between the toes.

She moved out onto the glassed-in porch, where she busied herself with a swaddled infant, which she lifted from a wicker carriage. She brought the infant to the kitchen table, sliding onto the bench seat. She bared her quite weensie left breast, deftly affixing the baby like some kind of milking apparatus. As far as I could tell, the child hadn't made a sound, but it may have emitted a signal audible only to its mother. Jack, the toddler, was probably off somewhere finger painting with the contents of his diaper.

“I was hoping to see Lorna's cabin, but I didn't know if you had tenants in there at this point.” I noticed Leda watched me carefully while I talked to him.

“Cabin's empty. You can go on back if you want. There hasn't been a way to rent it since the body was found. Word gets out and nobody wants to touch it, especially the shape she was in.” Burke held his nose with exaggerated distaste.

Embarrassed, Leda said, “J.D.!” as if he'd made a rude noise with his butt.

“It's the truth,” he said. He opened the butcher's packet and took out a pillow of raw ground beef, which he plunked into the skillet on top of the sautéed onions. He began to break up the bulk meat with his spatula. I could still see the densely packed noodles of beef where the meat had emerged from the grinder. Looked like worms to me. The hot skillet was turning the bottom of the bulk ground beef from pale pink to gray. I'm giving up meat. I swear to God I am.

“Can you remodel the place?”

“Right now I don't have the bucks, and it probably wouldn't help. It's just a shack.”

“What was she paying?”

“Three hundred a month. Might sound like a lot unless you compare it to other rentals in the area. It's really like a one-bedroom with a wood-burning stove I finally took out. People know a place is empty, and they'll steal you blind. They'll take all the lightbulbs if nothing else.”

I noticed that in typical landlord assessment, the “shack” had been elevated to a “one-bedroom apartment.” “Did someone live there before she did?”

“Nope. My parents used to own the property, and I inherited when Mom died, along with some other rentals on the far side of town. I met Lorna through some people at the plant where she worked. We got talking one afternoon, and she told me she was looking for a place with some privacy. She'd heard about the cabin and asked if she could see it. She fell in love with it. I told her, ‘Look, it's a mess, but if you want to fix it up, it'd be fine with me.' She moved in two weeks later without really doing much.”

“Was she a party person?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“What about friends? Did she have a lot of people back there?”

“I really couldn't say. It's way back in the back. There's like this little private dirt road going in off the side street. You want to see it, you probably ought to drive your car around and come in that way. Used to be a path between the two places, but we don't use it anymore, and it's overgrown by now. Most of the time, I didn't see if she had company or not because the foliage is so dense. Winters I might catch lights, but I never paid much attention.”

“Did you know she was hustling?”

He looked at me blankly.

“Turning tricks,” Leda said.

J.D. looked from her face to mine. “What she did was her business. I never considered it my concern.” If he was startled by the revelation, it didn't show on his face. His mouth curved down in a display of skepticism while he poked at the cooking beef. “Where'd you hear about that?” he asked me.

“From a vice detective. Apparently, a lot of hookers work the classy hotels where the high rollers hang out. Lorna had done outcall, but she upgraded to independent.”

“I guess I'll have to take your word for it.”

“So as far as you knew, she didn't bring clients here.”

“Why would she do that? You want to impress a fella, you'd hardly bring 'em back to some little shack in the woods. You'd be better off at the hotel. That way he'd get stuck for all the drinks and stuff.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “I gather she was careful to keep her private life private, so she probably didn't like to mix the two, anyway. Tell me about the day you found her.”

“Wasn't me. It was someone else,” he said. “I'd been out of town, up at Lake Nacimiento for a couple of weeks. I don't remember the exact timetable offhand. I got home, and I was taking care of some bills came in while I was gone and realized I didn't have her rent check. I tried calling a bunch of times and never got any answer. Anyway, couple days after that, this woman came to the door. She'd been trying to get in touch with Lorna herself, and she'd gone back there to leave her a note. Soon as she got close, she picked up the stink. She came and knocked on our door and asked us to call the police. She said she was pretty sure it was a dead body, but I felt like I ought to check it out first.”

“You hadn't noticed anything before?”

“I'd been aware of something smelling bad, but I didn't think much of it. I remember the guy across the street was complaining, but it wasn't like either one of us really thought it was
human
. Possum or something. Could have been a dog or a deer. There's a surprising amount of wildlife around here.”

“Did you see the body?”

“No, ma'am. Not me. I got as far as the porch and turned around and came back. I didn't even knock. Man, I knew something was
wrong
, and I didn't want to be the one to find out what it was. I called 911 and they sent a cop car. Even the officer had a hard time. Had to hold a handkerchief across his mouth.” J.D. crossed to the pantry, where he took out a couple of cans of tomato sauce. He took the crank-style can opener from a nearby drawer and began to remove the lid on the first can.

“You think she was murdered?”

“She was too young to die without some kind of help,” he said. He dumped the contents of the first can into the skillet and then cranked open the second. The warm, garlicky smell of tomato sauce wafted up from the pan, and I was already thinking maybe meat wasn't so bad. Other people's cooking always makes me faint with hunger. Must be the equivalent of lost mothering. “Any theories?”

“Not a one.”

I turned to Leda. “What about you?”

“I didn't know her that well. We put the vegetable garden back in that corner of the property, so I'd sometimes see her when I went back there to pick beans.”

“No friends in common?”

“Not really. J.D. knew Lorna's supervisor out at the water treatment plant. That's how she heard we had a cabin in
the first place. Other than that, we didn't socialize. J.D. doesn't like to get too chummy with the tenants.”

“Yeah. First thing you know they're giving you excuses instead of the rent check,” he said.

“What about Lorna? Did she pay on time?”

“She was good about that. At least until the last one. Otherwise, I wouldn't have let it ride,” he said. “I kept thinking she'd bring it by.”

“Did you ever meet any friends of hers?”

“Not that I remember.” He turned to look at Leda, who shook her head in the negative.

“Anything else you can think of that might help?”

I got murmured denials from both.

I took out a business card and jotted my home phone on the back. “If anything occurs to you, would you give me a buzz? You can call either number. I have machines on both. I'll take a look at the cabin and get back to you if there's a question.”

“Watch the bugs,” he said. “There's some biggies out there.”

I
nosed the VW down the narrow dirt road that cut into the property close to the rear lot line. The land had once been black-topped, but now the surface was cracked and graying, overgrown with crabgrass. My headlights swept along the two rows of live oaks that defined the rutted pathway. The branches, interlocking overhead, formed a tunnel of darkness through which I passed. Shrubbery that once might have been neatly trimmed and shaped now spilled in a tumble that made progress slow. Granted, my car may have seen better days, but I was reluctant to let branches snap against the pale blue paint. The potholes were already acting on my shock absorbers like a factory test.

I reached a clearing where a crude cabin loomed in the shadows. I did a three-point turn, positioning the car so I could avoid backing out. I doused the lights. The illusion of privacy was immediate and profound. I could hear crickets in the underbrush. Otherwise, there was silence. It was hard to believe there were other houses nearby, flanked by city streets. The dim illumination from streetlights didn't
penetrate this far, and the sound of traffic was reduced to the mild hush of a distant tide. The area felt like a wilderness, yet my office downtown couldn't have been more than ten minutes away.

Peering toward the main house, I could see nothing but the thick growth of saplings, ancient live oaks, and a few shaggy evergreens. Even with the limbs bare on the occasional deciduous tree, the distant lights were obscured. I popped open the glove compartment and took out a flashlight. I tested the beam and found that the batteries were strong. I tucked my handbag in the backseat and locked the car as I got out. About fifty feet away, between me and the main house, I could see the skeletal tepee constructions for the pole beans in the now abandoned garden. The air smelled densely of damp moss and eucalyptus.

I moved up the steps to the wooden porch that ran along the front of the cabin. The front door had been removed from its hinges and now leaned against the wall to one side of the opening. I flipped the light switch, relieved to note the electrical power was still connected. There was only one fixture overhead, with a forty-watt bulb that bathed the rooms in drab light. There was little, if any, insulation, and the place was dead cold. While all the windowpanes were intact, a fine soot had settled in every crevice and crack. Dead insects lined the sills. In one corner of the window frame, a spider had wrapped a fly in a white silken sleeping bag. The air smelled of mold, corroded metal, and spoiled water sitting fallow in the plumbing joints. A section of the wooden floor in the main room had been sawed away by the crime scene unit, the gaping hole covered over with a sheet of warped plywood. I picked my way carefully around that. Just above my head, something thumped and scampered through the attic. I imagined
squirrels squeezing into roof vents, building nests for their babies. The beam of my flashlight picked up countless artifacts of the ten months of neglect: rodent droppings, dead leaves, small pyramids of debris created by the termites.