Q is for Quarry (Kinsey Millhone 17)

“My aunt Gin taught me to do this when I was seven years old, primarily because she hated to do the ironing herself.” I licked an index finger and touched it to the hot iron. It made a spatting sound. “Watch this.” I took the dampened shirt by the yoke, holding it between my hands, and straightened the puckered seams with one efficient snap.

“That’s first?”

“Unless your shirt doesn’t have a yoke. Then you start with the collar.” I placed the shirt on the ironing board and explained the strategy: the yoke, followed by the collar, then the cuffs, the two sleeves, and finally the body of the garment.

He watched with care until I’d finished the shirt and buttoned it onto a wire hanger. I handed him a second shirt from the basket and had him try his hand. He was slow and a bit clumsy, but he did a credible job for his first time out. He seemed pleased with himself, and I had a brief vision of him whipping through the entire basket of ironing as the afternoon wore on. He turned off the iron, moved the basket aside, and gestured me into a chair.

As soon as we were seated, he said, “Now. What can I tell you about Frankie, aside from the fact he’s the biggest punk who ever lived?”

“How long did he work for you?”

“Six months. Drunk most days; incompetent the rest.”

“Did you hire him or did your business partner?”

“I don’t have a partner.”

“I thought your company was called R&R Painting. I figured it was your brother, your son, or your dad.”

“No, no. It’s just me. I put that other R in there to reassure the public. One-man painting company, people worry you don’t have the manpower to get the job done. This way I give the estimate and get the contract signed and then when it turns out it’s just me, well, what’s it to them. I’m fast, I’m thorough, and I’m meticulous.”

“How’d you end up hiring Frankie?”

“Did someone a favor. Biggest mistake I ever made. This fellow knew Frankie’s brother and he asked me if I’d give him a job. He’d just gotten out of jail and no one else would take a chance. I wasn’t all that crazy about the idea myself, but I’d just taken on a big project and I was desperate for help.”

“What year was this?”

“Between Christmas of ’68 and the summer of ’69. He claimed he had experience but that was a lie. Worst excuse for a helper you ever saw, him and that friend of his. It’s people like that give prison a bad name.”

“What friend?”

“Clifton. Big guy. Had a funny first name . . .”

“Pudgie.”

Lennie pointed at me. “Him.”

“I didn’t realize Frankie and Pudgie were such buddies back then.”

“Were when they worked for me.”

That was an unexpected nugget of information. I couldn’t wait to tell Stacey, though for the moment I wasn’t sure what it meant—if anything. “From what you said earlier, I gather Frankie filed some kind of worker’s comp claim. Was he injured on the job?”

“Said he was. Oh, sure. Said he fell off a scaffold, but he was working by himself and it was bull. I got notice of the claim and next thing I knew, he was back in jail, this time on a murder rap. Is that the homicide you mentioned?”

“This was a second murder—a young girl stabbed to death within days of the first. Her body was dumped in Lompoc, which is where he was arrested. You remember when he left your employment?”

“June. How I know is because Myra’s and my twenty-fifth wedding anniversary fell on the fifteenth and he was gone by then.”

“How’d he end up in Venice?”

“I heard he got a job in Blythe, doing landscape work—in other words, a grown man cutting grass for minimum wage. He met some sixteen-year-old girl and three weeks later, the two of them got married. He was fired from that job so they moved up to Venice, where he did some painting for a friend.”

“Got it.”

“That other homicide you mentioned, is he a suspect in that?”

“Let’s put it this way. The cops have been taking a long, hard look at him. Unfortunately, at this point, there’s no proof he even knew the victim and nothing to link him to the crime itself.”

“How’d you end up at my door?”

“A drop cloth at the scene was made by the Diamond Custom Canvas Company in Quorum. I was over there a while ago looking at their tarps when I remembered mention of a painting contractor on his arrest sheet. He listed you as his employer.”