E is for Evidence (Kinsey Millhone 5)

"I have no idea. Anyway, he's the claims manager. I don't know that he sold the policy in the first place."

"Oh. Somehow I thought he did. I thought I saw that somewhere on one of the forms we processed. Maybe it was his account before he got promoted to claims man-ager."

"Are you through asking questions?" she said snap-pishly.

"Uh, well, actually I'm not. Did Andy know any of the Woods personally? I don't think you told me that."

"How do I know who he knew?"

"Just thought I'd take a flyer," I said. "It puzzles me that you're not worried about him. The man's been gone, what, four days? I'd be frantic."

"I guess that's the difference between us," she said.

"Maybe I'll check out at his place again. You never know. He might have stopped back at the apartment to pick up his clothes and his mail."

She just stared at me. There didn't seem a lot left to say.

"Well, off I go," I said, cheerfully. "You've really been a peach."

Her goodbye was brief. Two words, one of which started with the letter "F." Her mama apparently hadn't taught her to be ladylike any more than mine had taught me. I decided to drive back out to Andy 's place because, frankly, I couldn't think what else to do.

23

I headed out to the condominium complex where Andy lived, thrilled that I wasn't going to have to type up a report on the day's events. The truth was, I had no plan afoot, no strategy whatever for wrapping this business up. I didn't have a clue to what was going on. I was driving randomly from one side of the city to the other, hoping that I could shake something loose. I was also avoiding my apartment, picturing the gendarmes at my door with a warrant for my arrest. Andy represented one of the miss-ing links. Someone had designed an elaborate scheme to discredit Lance and eliminate two key engineers at Wood/ Warren. Andy had facilitated the frame-up, but once Olive was blown to kingdom come, he must have decided to blow town himself. If I could pinpoint the connection be-tween Andy Motycka and the person who'd suckered him into it, then maybe I could figure out what the payoff was. The electronic gates at The Copse stood open, and I passed through without attracting armed guards or vicious dogs. A tall, fair-haired woman in a jumpsuit was walking an apricot poodle, but she scarcely looked at me. I parked my car in the slot Andy had left in the wake of his depar-ture. I trotted up to the second-floor landing and let myself in with the front-door key, which I knew from past experi-ence he kept hidden on the cornice above the front door. I confess I sniffed the air apprehensively as I let myself in, mindful that Andy might have ended up in the same state as Lyda Case. The apartment smelled benign and the dust that had settled on the empty bookshelves attested to the fact that no one had been here for days.

I did a quick pass through the apartment to make sure it was unoccupied. I opened the rear sliding-glass door, peered into each bedroom, then returned to the living room, where I drew the front drapes. I moved through the daylight gloom with curiosity. Andy lived on such spartan terms that his place had looked abandoned even when he was in residence. Now, however, the emptiness had the aura of a vacant lot, the wall-to-wall carpeting littered with paper scraps. In situations like this, I always long for the obvious-cryptic messages, motel receipts, annotated itin-eraries indicating where the missing might have gone. The various bits of paper on Andy 's floor were none of the above and I was no wiser for having crawled around on my hands and knees reading them. The business of private investigation is fraught with indignities.

The medicine cabinet in his bathroom had been cleared out. Shampoo, deodorant, and shaving gear were gone. Wherever he was, he'd be clean-shaven and smell good. In his bedroom, all of the dirty clothes were gone and the blue plastic crates had been emptied of their con-tents. One tatty pair of boxer shorts remained, wild with fuchsia exclamation marks. I'm always amazed by men's underwear. Who could guess such things by looking at their sober three-piece suits? He'd left behind his bicycle, rowing machine, and the remaining moving cartons. There were still a few poorly folded sheets in the linen closet, one package of pizza rolls in the freezer. He'd taken the bottle of aquavit and the Milky Way bars, perhaps anticipating his life on the road as an endless round of sugar and alcohol abuse.

The card table was still in place, the answering ma-chine on top, aluminum lawn chairs pulled up as if he'd had dinner guests for a banquet of Lean Cuisine. I sat down, propped my feet up on the adjacent chair and surveyed Andy 's makeshift office. There were still some pencils, a scratch pad, gummy white-out, unpaid bills. His answering machine turned out to be a duplicate of mine. I reached over and flipped open the side panel where the "oft-dialed" numbers were penned in. Of the sixteen spaces allotted, only six were filled. Andy was real imaginative. Fire, Police, California Fidelity, his ex-wife, a liquor store, and a pizza joint with free delivery.