B is for Burglar (Kinsey Millhone 2)

"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 HI 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?"

I shook my head.

He glanced up then as Rosie put a plate down in front of each of us. I could tell by his look that he hadn't expected green peppers with a vinaigrette, even with little curlicues of parsley tucked here and there.

Usually Rosie waited until I tasted a dish and gave elaborate restaurant-reviewer-type raves, but this time she seemed to think better of it. As soon as she left, Jonah leaned forward.

"What is this shit?"

"Just eat."

"Kinsey, for the last ten years I been eating with kids who sit and pick all the onions and mushrooms out. I don't know how to eat if it's not made with Hamburger Helper."

"You're in for a big surprise," I said. "What have you been eating for the year since your wife left?"

"She put up all these dinners in the deep freeze. Every night I thaw one and stick it in the oven at three-fifty for an hour. I guess she went to a garage sale and bought up a bunch of those TV dinner tins with the little compartments. She wanted me to eat well-balanced meals even though she was fucking me over financially."

I lowered my fork and looked at him, trying to picture someone freezing up 365 dinners so she could bug out. This was the woman he apparently imagined mating with for life, like owls.

He was eating his first bite of pepper salad, his eyes turning inward. His facial expression suggested that the pepper was sitting in the middle of his tongue while he made chewing motions around it. I do that myself with those mashed candied sweet potatoes people insist on at Thanksgiving time. Why would anyone put a marshmallow on a vegetable? Would I put licorice on asparagus, or jelly beans on Brussels sprouts? The very idea makes my mouth purse.

Jonah nodded philosophically to himself and began to fork up the pepper salad with gusto. It must have been at least as tasty as the shit Camilla cooked for him. I pictured tray after tray of frozen tuna casserole with crushed potato chips, with maybe frozen peas in one compartment, carrot coins in the next. I bet she left him six-packs of canned fruit cocktail for dessert. He was looking at me.

He said, "What's the matter? Why do you have that look on your face?"

I shrugged. "Marriage is a mystery."

"I'll second that," he said. "By the way, how's your case shaping up?"

"Well, I'm still nosing around," I said. "Right now, I'm making a little side investigation into an unsolved murder. Her next-door neighbor was killed the same week she left."

"That doesn't sound good. What's the connection?"

"I don't know yet. Maybe none. It just struck me as an interesting sequence of events that Marty Grice was murdered and Elaine Boldt disappeared within days of it."