W is for Wasted (Kinsey Millhone 23)

“We can’t give out information about our clients. The social worker might help, but she’s not here today.”

“What about Dandy or Pearl?”

His expression remained neutral, as though even acknowledging the existence of a client would violate protocol. “Can’t help. You’re welcome to come in and take a look.”

Surprised, I said, “Really? You don’t mind if I walk around?”

“This isn’t a private club. Anyone can join,” he said.

“Thanks.”

I circled the common room, which was spacious enough to accommodate the twenty-five people present without any suggestion of crowding. There was a big television set in one corner, but the screen was dark. There was a lone bookcase in evidence, the shelves lined side to side with an ancient-looking set of encyclopedias. One fellow had commandeered a couch for napping purposes, and he was curled up with a jacket over him. There were a few ongoing conversations, but in the main people weren’t doing much. An exception was the two women who sat at either end of a Naugahyde couch with knitting projects. One unraveled row after row of a pink sweater, which shrank in her hands, reduced to a lap full of kinked yarn. The other woman struggled with size-19 needles and a ball of thick green wool. The article she was knitting was impossible to identify, something with bumps and irregular edges and holes where stitches had gotten away from her. I don’t knit often these days, but I’m acquainted with the perils. The same aunt who browbeat me into memorizing the rivers of the world by length (the Nile, the Amazon, the Yangtze, the Mississippi-Missouri, the Yenisey, the Yellow, on and on) also taught me to knit and crochet—not for the pleasure of it, but with the intent to promote patience. This for me at age six when no child is content to sit for more than a minute at a time.

More to the point here: no Pearl, no Dandy, no Felix, and I’d gone as far as I could go. The dead man was dead. If he’d needed my help, it was already too late to be of service. First thing in the morning I’d call Aaron Blumberg and pass along what I’d learned. Armed with a first name and a description of the deceased, he might track down a doctor who could fill in the blanks. “A bum named Terrence with a bad limp” was hardly definitive, but it was a step in the right direction. Meanwhile, my participation was at an end.

3

Monday, I tried three times with no luck to reach Aaron Blumberg at the coroner’s office. I left messages, asking him to call me when he had a minute. I could have taken the opportunity to detail the scanty facts I’d picked up, but I was hoping for a pat on the head for my resourcefulness. I spent most of the day puttering around the office, feeling distracted and oddly out of sorts. I left early, arriving home at 4:15 instead of the usual 5:00 P.M. I passed Rosie’s twice in my search for a parking place and noted the building was now draped in enormous rectangular tarpaulins that were clipped together along the edges. The red, white, and turquoise stripes gave the place the look of a circus big top. I parked the car around the corner on Bay in the only semi-legal spot I could find.

When I reached the backyard, Henry was hard at work in shorts, a T-shirt, and bare feet, his flip-flops tossed aside on the flagstone walk. His face was smudged with dirt, his white hair dampened by sweat, and his shins flecked with mud. His nose and cheeks were rosy from the autumn sunshine. He’d apparently spent the past couple of hours aerating the lawn in preparation for overseeding the grass. Some sections he’d attacked with a rototiller, then leveled the ground with a weighted roller he’d rented for the occasion. A scoop of fine lawn mulch had been piled to one side with a shovel resting against the wall.

He’d recently acquired a cypress potting bench that was now attached to the garage. The unit boasted a zinc top and two drawers where he kept his gardening gloves and the smaller of his gardening tools. On the shelf below he’d placed his galvanized watering cans and a big bag of sphagnum moss. The adjacent wall was designated for the larger tools—his wood-handled garden forks, trowels, cultivators, and graduating sizes of pruning shears. Painted outlines assured that each piece would be returned to its proper place.

Along with his other fall projects, he was transplanting three dozen marigolds from the original plastic commercial nursery containers to terra-cotta pots. He’d already lined my modest porchlet with half a dozen of these rust-and-gold arrangements, which I thought quite festive.

“You’ve been busy,” I remarked.

“Getting the jump on winter. Another couple of weeks we’ll lose daylight savings time and it’ll be close to dark by this hour. How about you? What are you up to?”