Kinsey and Me (20 page)

Vera watched me process the revelation. “You don’t seem all that upset. I thought
you’d be apoplectic, jumping up and down. Don’t you feel like an ass?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe not.”

She moved toward the door. “I gotta get back to work. Let me know when it hits. It’s
always entertaining to watch you blow your stack.”

I sat down at my desk and thought about the situation and then put a call through
to Harry Hovey at the prison.

“This is rare,” Harry said when he’d heard me out. “I think we got a winner with this
one. Holy shit.”

“I thought you’d see the possibilities,” I said.

“Holy shit!” he said again.

The rest of what I now refer to as my missionary work, I can only guess at until I
see Harry again. According to the newspapers, Kevin McCall and Karen Waterston were
arrested two days after they returned to Los Angeles. Allegedly (as they say), the
two entered a bank and tried to open an account with nine thousand dollars in counterfeit
tens and twenties. Amazingly, Harry Hovey saw God and had a crisis of conscience shortly
before this in his prison cell up in Lompoc. Recanting his claims of innocence, he
felt compelled to confess he’d been working for the two celebrities for years. In
return for immunity, he told the feds where to find the counterfeit plates, hidden
in a special zippered compartment at the bottom of a canvas tote, which turned up
in their possession just as he said it would.

the lying game

T
HIS IS MY DEFINITION
of misery. Pitch-black night. Cold. Hunger. Me in the wilderness . . . well, okay,
a California state park, but the effect is the same. I was crouched in the bushes,
peering at a campsite where identical twin brothers, alleged murderers, were rustling
up supper: biscuits and a skillet full of eggs fried in bacon grease. The only bright
note in all of this was my Lands’ End Squall Parka with its advanced Thermolite Micro
insulation. On a whim, I’d ordered the parka from a Lands’ End catalog, little knowing
that within weeks I’d be huddled in the woods, spying on fellows who cooked better
than I did.

The surveillance threatened to be a long one and I was wondering how close to the
temp rating of -10/-30°F the mountain air would get. My color choices had been Black,
Field Khaki, or True Red. I’d chosen the black on the theory that at night I’d be
rendered invisible, always a good thing in my line of work. I’m a skulker by nature
and I prefer to be inconspicuous while doing it.

Not that you asked, but just for the record, I’d like to state my name is Kinsey Millhone.
I’m a private investigator, female, thirty-seven years old, and twice divorced. I
never made it through college, but I’m smart as a whip.

The Puckett twins, my subjects (which is what I call people when I’m spying on them),
had been tried and convicted of whacking their wealthy parents, with an eye to inheriting
their considerable estate. By one of those infuriating loopholes in the legal system,
the verdict was overturned on appeal and “the boys” were now free. In two days, Doyle,
the older twin, would be returning to his Ivy League college, where women would doubtless
be fawning all over him. Before parting company, the two had retreated to this isolated
spot, where I hoped they were searching their consciences, assuming either of them
had one. In a tabloid tell-all, each lad had accused the other of masterminding the
murder and accidentally pulling the trigger two dozen times, including reloads. One
of the brothers had a reputation for truth-telling, while the other was a chronic
liar. I’d been hired to keep an eye on them and, if possible, to persuade one twin
to rat the other out, soliciting a confession, which would form the basis of a wrongful
death suit being mounted by their only sister.

I refocused my attention on the campfire, realizing belatedly the skillet had been
abandoned and neither twin was in sight.

“Can I help you?” someone asked. One of the two was standing right behind me, about
a foot away.

I jumped and my shriek was as piercing as the one I emit when a mouse jumps out of
my kitchen junk drawer. “You scared me!” I said, patting my chest to soothe my thundering
heart.

He said, “Sorry, but we spotted you earlier and my brother and I would like to know
what you’re up to. Nice jacket, by the way. It looks warm.”

“Thanks, it is. It’s also machine washable. Speaking of which, I guess I might as
well come clean. I know who you are. I’ve seen pictures of you and your brother plastered
in the news everywhere. As it happens, the three of us have something in common. I’m
a bit of a twisted sister, attracted to criminals of every size and kind. I also have
a passion for dissembling.”

“For doing what?”

“Fibbing. Telling lies. Of course, you don’t have to fess up, but I’ve been wondering
if you’re the brother who tells the truth or the one who lies.”

He hesitated and then said, “I’m the one who tells the truth.”

I stared at him. “But wouldn’t you say exactly the same thing if you were the twin
who perpetually lied?”

He reached in his pocket and pulled out a .357 Magnum Colt Python I knew would rip
right through my water-resistant Supplex nylon shell.

The other Puckett twin stepped out of the dark. He took the gun from his brother and
pointed it at me. “That’s right. Only one of us pulled the trigger when our parents
went down. Ask him, if you don’t believe me.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said as I looked from one to the other. “Just taking
a flier here, but which one of you did it?”

“You figure it out,” the second brother said. “Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll put this
loaded gun on the ground between us. If you come up with the right answer, the weapon
is yours and you can make a citizen’s arrest.”

“Guess wrong and you’re dead,” the first brother inserted for the sake of clarity.

“Seems a bit severe, but why not?” I said. I thought about the situation for a moment
and then turned to the first brother. “Let’s try this. If I asked your brother who
killed your mom and dad, what would he say?”

He shifted uneasily, avoiding his brother’s eyes. After a moment’s reflection he said,
“He’d tell you I did it.”

I said, “Ah. That’s all I need to know.” I leaned down and picked up the gun, pointing
it at the second brother. “You’re under arrest.”

“Why me?” he said, insulted.

I smiled. “Well, if he told the truth that would mean that you’re the brother who
lies. He’d know you’d lie about the murder and you’d tell me he was the shooter. If
he’s the liar, that means he knows you’d tell the truth, so he’d twist the facts and
reverse your answer. His claim would be that you’d admit to the shooting yourself
thinking I’d be fooled. Therefore, since he accused himself the answer he gave is
false, which is the only reason you’d agree. You killed them, right?”

The second brother smirked. “Sure, but what difference does it make? We can’t be tried
twice for the same crime. It’s double jeopardy.”

“But this time you won’t be tried for murder, you’ll be tried for perjury.”

“Only if you manage to get out of here alive. As it happens I also lied about the
weapon. That gun’s not loaded,” he said, indicating the .357 Magnum.

I tossed the .357 Magnum aside. “But mine is,” I said. I reached into my exterior
cargo pocket and removed my little semiautomatic and a pair of handcuffs that I snapped
on his wrist. “Don’t pull any funny business or I’ll shoot to kill. I’ve done it before
and that’s the truth.”

Later, I did wonder if the brother who lied had lied when he told me about the gun
being loaded, but I never figured that one out.

entr’acte

An Eye for an I:

Justice, Morality, the Nature of the Hard-boiled Private Investigator, and All That
Existential Stuff

I
WAS RAISED ON
a steady diet of mystery and detective fiction. During the forties, my father, C.
W. Grafton, was himself a part-time mystery writer and it was he who introduced me
to the wonders of the genre. In my early teens, on the occasions when my parents went
out for the evening, I’d be left alone in the house with its tall, narrow windows
and gloomy high ceilings. By day, surrounding maple trees kept the yard in shadow.
By night, overhanging branches blocked out the pale of the moon. Usually, I sat downstairs
in the living room in my mother’s small upholstered rocking chair, reading countless
mystery novels with a bone-handled butcher knife within easy reach. If I raised my
head to listen, I could always hear the nearly imperceptible footsteps of someone
coming up the basement stairs.

Mystery novels were the staple of every summer vacation when, released from the rigors
of school days and homework, I was free to read as much as I liked. I remember long
August nights when the darkness came slowly. Upstairs in my bedroom, I’d lie in a
shortie nightgown with the sheets flung back, reading. The bed lamp threw out a heat
of its own and humidity would press on the bed like a quilt. June bugs battled at
the window, an occasional victor forcing its way through the screen. It was in this
atmosphere of heightened awareness and beetle-induced suspense that I worked my way
from Nancy Drew through Agatha Christie and on to Mickey Spillane. I can still remember
the astonishment I felt the night I leapt from the familiarity of Miss Marple into
the pagan sensibilities of
I, the Jury
. From Mickey Spillane, I turned to James M. Cain, then to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell
Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Richard Prather, and John D. MacDonald, a baptism by immersion
in the dark poetry of murder. I think I sensed even then that a detective novel offered
the perfect blend of ingenuity and intellect, action and artifice.

During the thirties, hard-boiled private eyes seemed to be spontaneously generated
in pulp fiction like mice in a pile of old rags. After World War II, the country was
caught up in boom times, a bonanza of growth and cockeyed optimism. “Our boys” came
home from overseas and took up their positions on assembly lines. Women surrendered
their jobs at defense plants and (brainwashed by the media) returned to Home Sweet
Home. In that postwar era of ticky-tack housing and backyard barbecues, the hard-boiled
private eye was a cynical, wisecracking, two-fisted, gun-toting hero. We could identify
with his machismo, admire his ruthless principles and his reckless way with a .45.
He smoked too much, drank too much, screwed and punched his way through molls and
mobsters with devastating effect. In short, he kicked ass. In his own way, he was
a fictional extension of the jubilance of the times, a man who lived with excess and
without regard for consequence. He embodied the exhilaration of the faraway battlefield
brought back to home turf.

Through the forties and fifties, the hard-boiled private eye novel was escapist fare,
reassuring us by its assertion that there was still danger and excitement, a place
where treachery could threaten and heroism could emerge. Despite the mildly depressing
lull of the postwar peace, detective fiction proved that adventure was still possible.
The core of the hard-boiled private eye novel was a celebration of confrontation,
as exotic as the blazing guns of the old West, as familiar as the streets beyond our
white picket fences. In fictional terms, the hard-boiled private eye provided evidence
that the courage of the individual could still make a difference.

Crime in those days had a tabloid quality. Murder was fraught with sensationalism
and seemed to take place only in the big cities half a continent away. Justice was
tangible and revenge was sweet.

With his flat affect, the hard-boiled private eye was the perfect emissary from the
dark side of human nature. War had unleashed him. Peace had brought him home. Now
he was free to roam the shadowy elements of society. He carried our rage. He championed
matters of right and fair play while he violated the very rules the rest of us were
forced to embrace. Onto his blank and cynical face, we projected our own repressed
impulses, feeling both drawn to and repelled by his tough-guy stance.

There was something seductive about the primal power of the hard-boiled narrative,
something invigorating about its crude literary style. For all its tone of disdain,
the flat monotone of the narrator allowed us to “throw” our own voices with all the
skill of ventriloquists.
I
was Mike Hammer.
I
was Sam Spade, Shell Scott, Philip Marlowe, and Lew Archer, strengthened and empowered
by the writers’ rawboned prose. Little wonder, years later, in a desire to liberate
myself from the debilitating process of writing for television, I turned to the hard-boiled
private eye novel for deliverance.

Times have changed. In the years since Mike Hammer’s heyday, rage has broken loose
in the streets. We live in darker times, where the nightmare has been made manifest.
Violence is random, pointless, and pervasive. Passing motorists are gunned down for
the vehicles they drive; teens are killed for their jackets and their running shoes.
Homicide has erupted on every side of us in a wholesale slaughter of the innocent.
Even small-town America has been painted by its bloody brush. The handgun is no longer
a symbol of primitive law and order; it is the primogenitor of chaos. The bullet makes
its daily rampage, leaving carnage in its wake. We are at the mercy of the lawless.
While the cunning of fictional homicide continues to fascinate, its real-life counterpart
has been reduced to senseless butchery. Murder is the beast howling in the basement,
rustling unleashed in the faraway reaches of our souls.

In this atmosphere of anarchy, we are forced to revitalize and reinvent a mythology
from which we can draw the comforts once offered to us by the law. The fictional adventures
of the hard-boiled private eye are still escapist and reassuring, but from a topsy-turvy
point of view. The hard-boiled private eye in current fiction represents a clarity
and vigor, the immediacy of a justice no longer evident in the courts, an antidote
to our confusion and our fearfulness.

In a country where violence is out of control, the hard-boiled private eye exemplifies
containment, order, and hope, with the continuing, unspoken assertion that the individual
can still make a difference. Here, resourcefulness, persistence, and determination
prevail. The P.I. has been transformed from a projection of our vices to the mirror
of our virtues. The hard-boiled private eye has come to represent and reinforce not
our excess but our moderation. In the current hard-boiled private eye fiction, there
is less alcohol, fewer cigarettes, fewer weapons, greater emphasis on fitness, humor,
subtlety, maturity, and emotional restraint. It is no accident that women writers
have tumbled onto the playing field, infusing the genre with a pervasive social conscience.
Entering the game, too, are countless other private eye practitioners, writers representing
the gay, the African American, the Native American, the Asian, an uncommon variety
of voices now clamoring to be heard.

The hard-boiled private eye novel is still the classic struggle between good and evil
played out against the backdrop of our social interactions. But now we are championed
by the knight with a double gender, from talented writers who may be female, as well.

Women have moved from the role of “femme fatale” to that of prime mover, no longer
relegated to the part of temptress, betrayer, or loyal office help. The foe is just
as formidable, but the protagonist has become androgynous, multiracial, embracing
complex values of balance and compassion. I do not necessarily maintain that today’s
hard-boiled hero/ine is cast of finer mettle, only that s/he is more diverse, more
protean, a multifaceted arbiter of our desires in conflict. Because of this, the hard-boiled
private eye novel is once more rising to the literary forefront, gaining renewed recognition.
Now, as before, we are serving notice to the reading public that not only is the genre
alive and well, but that we, as its creators, are still adapting, still reacting,
and, with wit and perspicacity, we are still marching on.