J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone 10)

I unlocked my car door and slid onto the driver’s seat, where I busied myself. No one seemed to pay any attention to me, too busy loading furniture to notice what I was doing. Within an hour the truck had been packed with whatever furniture the couple was taking with them. Michael, Juliet, and the baby got into the VW and backed out of the driveway. When the van pulled away from the curb, Michael fell in behind it. I waited a few minutes and joined the motorcade myself, keeping several car lengths between us. Michael must have known a shortcut because I soon lost track of him. Fortunately, the van wasn’t hard to spot on the highway up ahead. We drove north on 101, passing two off ramps. The truck took the third, turning right, and then left on Calistoga Street, proceeding into a section of Perdido known as the Boulevards. The van finally slowed, pulling into the curb just as the VW appeared from the opposite direction.

The house they were moving into looked as if it had been built in the twenties: rosy-beige stucco exterior with a tiny porch and a patchy front yard. The window trim had been done in a darker shade of rose with a tiny rim of azure. I’d been in half a dozen houses just like it. The interior couldn’t have been much more than nine hundred square feet: two bedrooms, one bath, living room, kitchen, and a small utility room in the rear. There was a cracked concrete driveway to the right of the house, a two-car garage visible in the rear, with what looked like a bachelor apartment above.

The movers began to unload the truck. If they noticed my presence, they gave no indication of it. I made a note of the house number and the street before I fired up my engine and returned to Dana’s. I had no compelling reason to talk to her again, but I needed her cooperation, and I was hoping to establish a rapport of some kind. I caught her just as she was turning into her drive. She parked the car in the garage, assembling some parcels before she opened the car door. The minute she spotted me, I could see the color tint her cheeks. She slammed her car door, emerged from the garage, and crossed the grass in my direction. She was wearing tight jeans, an old T-shirt, and tennis shoes, her hair held back by a blue-and-white cotton scarf that she had tied around her head. The assorted paper bags in her arms seemed to crackle with her agitation. “What are you doing back here again? I consider this harassment.”

“Well, it’s not,” I said. “We’re trying to get a line on Wendell and you’re the logical place to start.”

Her voice had dropped, and her eyes were glittering with rage and determination. “I will call you if I see him. In the meantime, if you don’t stay away from me, I will notify my attorney.”

“Dana, I’m not your enemy. I’m just trying to do a job. Why don’t you help me? You’re going to have to deal with the issue sometime. Tell Michael what’s going on. Tell Brian, too. Otherwise I’m going to have to step in and tell them myself. We need your help on this.”

Her nose suddenly reddened and a fiery triangle formed around her mouth and chin. Tears leapt into her eyes and she pressed her lips together, sealing back her rage. “Don’t tell me what to do. I can handle this myself.”

“Look. Can we talk about this inside?”

I saw her glance at the houses across the street. Without a word she turned and proceeded toward the front door, pulling keys from her shoulder bag. I followed her through the entrance and closed the front door behind us.

“I have work to do.” She dumped her parcels and handbag on the bottom step and went up the stairs toward the second-floor bedrooms. I hesitated, watching her until she disappeared from view. She hadn’t said I couldn’t join her. I took the stairs two at a time, peering right at the landing until I located the empty master suite that Michael and his wife had apparently just vacated. There was a canister vacuum cleaner outside the door, cord neatly retracted, cleaning tools still attached. My guess was that Dana had left it there as a tangible suggestion, hoping someone would vacuum once the furniture had been moved. No one seemed to have taken her up on the offer. She was standing in the middle of the bedroom, surveying the premises, trying (I imagined) to figure out where to begin the cleanup. I eased into the doorway and leaned against the frame, trying not to disturb the fragile truce between us. She glanced over at me without any evidence of her earlier hostility. “Do you have children?”

I shook my head.

“This is what it looks like when they leave you,” she said.

The room was drab and empty. I could see a king-size square of clean carpet where the bed had been. There were stray coat hangers on the floor, and the wastebasket was jammed with last-minute discards. Nests of accumulated hair and fuzz rimmed the wall-to-wall carpeting. There was a broom leaning against the wall, a dustpan upright beside it. There was an ashtray on the windowsill, the brim filled with old cigarette butts, an empty, crumpled pack of Marlboro Lights balanced jauntily on top. Pictures were gone. I had to guess the young married couple was still at that stage of decorating where travel or rock posters were affixed to the walls with tape. I could see the patches left behind. The curtains were down. The windowpanes were lacquered with a gray film of cigarette smoke, and I guessed the glass hadn’t been washed since the “kids” moved in. Even from a distance, Juliet didn’t strike me as the sort who scrubbed the baseboards on her hands and knees.