B is for Burglar (13 page)

Pam hung up at long last and swiveled back, all the animation leaving her face. No point in wasting the whole show on me. “Something I can help you with, Kinsey?”

“I understand you wrote a couple of policies for Leonard and Marty Grice.”

“That's right.”

I smiled slightly. “Could you tell me the status of the paperwork at this point?”

Pam broke eye contact, going through another quick digital survey: earring, hair, lapel. She took up a loop of gold chain, running her index finger back and forth on it until I worried she'd saw right through the skin. She wanted to tell me Leonard Grice was none of my business, but she knew I did occasional work for California Fidelity.

“What's the problem?”

“No problem,” I said. “Vera Lipton's wondering about the claim on the fire loss and I need to know if there were any other policies in effect.”

“Now, wait a minute. Leonard Grice is a very dear man and he's been through a terrible six months. If California Fidelity intends to make trouble, Vera better deal directly with me.”

“Who said anything about trouble? Vera can't even process the claim until the proof of loss is in.”

“That goes without saying, Kinsey,” she said. “I still don't see what this has to do with you.”

I could feel my smile begin to set like a pan of fudge. I leaned forward, left hand flat on the desk, right hand resting on my hip. I thought it was time to clarify our relationship.

“Not that it's any of your business, Pam, but I'm in the middle of a big investigation adjunctive to this. You don't have to cooperate, but I'm just going to turn around and present a court order to the supervisor here and somebody's going to come down on you like a ton of bricks for all the trouble it'll cause. Now is that how you want to proceed on this or what?”

Under the pancake makeup, she began to show signs of sunburn. “I hope you don't think you can intimidate me,” she said.

“Absolutely not.” I shut my mouth then and let her assimilate the threat. I thought it sounded pretty good.

She took up a stack of papers and rapped them on the desk, aligning the edges. “Leonard Grice was insured through California Fidelity Life and California Fidelity Casualty Insurance. He collected twenty-five hundred dollars for the life insurance and he'll get twenty-five thousand for the structural damage to the house. The contents were uninsured.”

“Why only twenty-five for the house? I thought that place was worth over a hundred grand? He won't have enough money to do the repairs, will he?”

“When he bought the place in 1962, it was worth twenty-five thousand and that's what he insured it for. He never increased the coverage and he hasn't taken out any other policies. Personally, I don't see how he can do anything with the house. It's a complete loss, which I think is what's broken him.”

Now that she'd told me, I felt guilty for all the macho bullshit I'd laid on her.

“Thanks. That's a big help,” I said. “Uh . . . by the
way, Vera wanted me to ask if you'd be interested in meeting an unattached aerospace engineer with bucks.”

A wonderful look of uncertainty crossed her face: suspicion, sexual hunger, greed. Was I offering her a cookie or a flat brown turd on a plate? I knew what was going through her head. In Santa Teresa, a single man is on the market maybe ten days before someone snaps him up.

She shot me a worried look. “What's wrong with him? Why didn't you take him first?”

“I just came off a relationship,” I said, “I'm in retreat.” Which was true.

“Maybe I'll give Vera a buzz,” she said faintly.

“Great. Thanks again for the information,” I said and I gave her a little wave as I moved away from her desk. With my luck, she'd fall in love with the guy and want me to be a bridesmaid. Then I'd be stuck with one of those dumb dresses with a hunk of flounce on the hip. When I glanced back at her, she seemed to have shrunk and I felt a twinge. She wasn't so bad.

 

 

 

 

I ate dinner that night at Rosie's, a little place half a block, down from my apartment. It's a cross between a neighborhood bar and an old-fashioned beanery, sandwiched between a Laundromat on the corner and an appliance repair shop that a man named McPherson operates out of his house. All three of these businesses have been in operation for over twenty-five years and are now, in theory, illegal, representing zoning violations of a profound and offensive sort, at least to people who live somewhere else. Every other year, some overzealous citizen gets a bug up his butt and goes before the city council denouncing the outrage of this breach of residential integrity. In the off years, I think money changes hands.

Rosie herself is probably sixty-five, Hungarian, short, and top-heavy, a creature of muumuus and hennaed hair growing low on her forehead. She wears lipstick in a burnt-orange shade that usually exceeds the actual shape of her mouth, giving the impression that she once had a much larger set of lips. She uses a brown eyebrow
pencil lavishly, making her eyes look stern and reproachful. The tip of her nose comes close to meeting her upper lip.

I sat down in my usual booth near the back. There was a mimeographed menu sheet slipped into a clear plastic cover stuck between the ketchup bottle and the napkin box. The selections were typed in pale purple like those notices they used to send home with us when we were in grade school. Most of the items were written in Hungarian; words with lots of accent marks and
z
's and double dots, suggesting that the dishes would be fierce and emphatic.

Rosie marched over, pad and pencil poised, her manner withdrawn. She was feeling offended about something, but I wasn't sure yet what I'd done. She snatched the menu out of my hand and put it back, writing out the order without consulting me. If you don't like the way the place is run, you go somewhere else. She finished writing and squinted at the pad, checking the results. She wouldn't quite meet my eyes.

“You didn't come in for a week so I figured you was mad at me,” she said. “I bet you been eating junk, right? Don't answer that. I don't want to hear. You don't owe me an apology. You just lucky I give you something decent. Here's what you gonna get.”

She consulted the pad again with a critical eye, reading the order to me then with interest as though it were news to her too.

“Green pepper salad. Fantastic. The best. I made it myself so I know it's done right. Olive oil, vinegar, little pinch of sugar. Forget the bread, I'm out. Henry didn't
bring fresh today so what do I know? He could be mad at me too. How do I know what I did? Nobody tells me these things. Then I give you sour oxtail stew.”

She crossed that off. “Too much grease. Is no good for you. Instead I give you tejfeles sult ponty, some nice pike I bake in cream, and if you clean your plate, I could give you deep-fried cherries if I think you deserve it, which you don't. The wine I'm gonna bring with the flatware. Is Austrian, but okay.”

She marched away then, her back straight, her hair the color of dried tangerine peels. Her rudeness sometimes has an eccentric charm to it, but it's just as often simply irritating, something you have to endure if you want to eat Rosie's meals. Some nights I can't tolerate verbal abuse at the end of the day, preferring instead the impersonal mechanics of a drive-in restaurant or the peace and quiet of a peanut butter and dill pickle sandwich at home.

That night Rosie's was deserted, looking drab and not quite clean. The walls are paneled in construction-grade plywood sheets, stained dark, with a matte finish of cooking fumes and cigarette smoke. The lighting is wrong—too pale, too generalized—so that the few patrons who do wander in look sallow and unwell. A television set on the bar usually flashes colored images with no sound, and a marlin arched above it looks like it's fashioned of plaster of Paris and dusted with soot. I'm embarrassed to say how much I like the place. It will never be a tourist attraction. It will never be a singles bar. No one will ever “discover” it or award it even half a star. It will always smell like spilled beer, paprika, and
hot grease. It's a place where I can eat by myself and not even have to take a book along in order to avoid unwelcome company. A man would have to worry about any woman he could pick up in a dive like this.

The front door opened and the old crone who lives across the street came in, followed by Jonah Robb, whom I'd talked to that morning in Missing Persons. I almost didn't recognize him at first in his civilian clothes. He wore jeans, a gray tweed jacket, and brown desert boots. His shirt looked new, the package folds still evident, the collar tightly starched and stiff. He carried himself like a man with a shoulder holster tucked up under his left arm. He had apparently come in to look for me because he headed straight for my table and sat down.

I said, “Hello. Have a seat.”

“I heard you hung out in here,” he said. He glanced around and his brows gave a little lift as though the rumor were true but hard to believe. “Does the Health Department know about this place?”

I laughed.

Rosie, coming out of the kitchen, caught sight of Jonah and stopped dead in her tracks, retreating as though she'd been yanked backward by a rope.

He looked over his shoulder to see if he'd missed something.

“What's the matter? Could she tell I was a cop? Has she got a problem with that?”

“She's checking her makeup. There's a mirror just inside the kitchen door,” I said.

Rosie appeared again, simpering coquettishly as she
brought my silverware and plunked it down on the table tightly bound in a paper napkin.

“You never said you was entertaining,” she murmured. “Does you friend intend to have a little bite to eat? Some liquid refreshment perhaps? Beer, wine, a mixed drink?”

“Beer sounds good,” he said. “What do you have on tap?”

Rosie folded her hands and regarded me with interest. She never deals directly with a stranger so we were forced to go through this little playlet in which I interpreted as though suddenly employed by the U.N.

“You still have Mich on tap?” I asked.

“Of course. Why would I have anything else?”

I looked at Jonah and he nodded assent. “I think we'll have a Mich then. Are you eating? The food's great.”

“Fine with me,” he said. “What do you recommend?”

“Why don't you just double the order, Rosie? Could you do that for us?”

“Of course.” She glanced at him with sly approval. “I had no idea,” she said. I could feel her mentally nudge me with one elbow. I knew what her appraisal consisted of. She favored weight in men. She favored dark hair and easygoing attitudes. She moved away from the table then, artfully leaving us alone. She isn't nearly as gracious when I come in with women friends.

“What brings you here?” I said.

“Idleness. Curiosity. I did a background check on you to save us talking about all the stupid stuff.”

“So we could get right down to what?” I asked.

“You think I'm on the make or something?”

“Sure,” I said. “New shirt. No wedding ring. I bet your wife left you week before last and you shaved less than an hour ago. The cologne isn't even dry on the side of your neck.”

He laughed. He had a harmless face and good teeth. He leaned forward on his elbows. “Here's how it went,” he said. “I met her when I was thirteen and I was with her from that time to this. I think she grew up and I never could, at least not with her. I don't know what to do with myself. Actually she's been gone for a year. It just
feels
like a week. You're the first woman I've looked at since she went off.”

“Where'd she go?”

“Idaho. She took the kids. Two,” he said as though he knew I'd ask that next. “One girl ten, another one eight. Courtney and Ashley. I'd have named 'em something else. Sara and Diane, Patti and Jill, something like that. I don't even understand girls. I don't even know what they think about. I really love my kids, but from the day they were born it was like they were in this exclusive little club with my wife. I couldn't seem to get a membership no matter what I did.”

“What was your wife's name?”

“Camilla. Shit. She ripped my heart out by the roots. I put on thirty pounds this year.”

“Time to take it off,” I said.

“Time to do a lot of things.”

Rosie came back to the table with a beer for him and a glass of white table wine for me. Did I know this story or what? Men just out of marriages are a mess and I was a mess myself. I already knew all the pain, uncertainty
and mismanaged emotions. Even Rosie sensed it wasn't going to fly. She looked at me like she couldn't figure out how I'd blown it so fast. When she left, I got back to the subject at hand.

“I'm not doing all that well myself,” I said.

“So I heard. I thought we could help each other out.”

“That's not how it works.”

“You want to go up to the pistol range and shoot sometime?”

I laughed. I couldn't help myself. He was all over the place. “Sure. We could do that. What kind of gun do you have?”

“Colt Python with a six-inch barrel. It'll take a .38 or a .357 magnum cartridge. Usually I just wear a Trooper MK III but I had a chance to pick up the Python and I couldn't pass it up. Four hundred bucks. You've been married twice? I don't see how you could bring yourself to do that. I mean, Jesus. I thought marriage was a real commitment. Like souls, you know, fused all through eternity and shit like that.”

“Four hundred bucks is a steal. How'd you pull that off?” I squinted at him. “What is it, are you Catholic or something?”

“No, just dumb I guess. I got my notions of romance out of ladies' magazines in the beauty shop my mother ran when I was growing up. The gun I got from Dave Whitaker's estate. His widow hates guns and never liked it that he got into 'em so she unloaded his collection first chance she got. I'd have paid the going rate, but she wouldn't hear of it. Do you know her? Bess Whitaker?”