W is for Wasted (Kinsey Millhone 23)

“I thought the other one was a 560SL.”

“It was. I was so crazy about the car I got a duplicate.”

He drove us out onto the wooden pier, the big timbers rumbling beneath his wheels. The restaurant was three blocks from my apartment but it wasn’t one I frequented. We ate at a table overlooking the harbor with its modest traffic in powerboats and fishing vessels. Not surprisingly, the restaurant was given over to a nautical theme: black-and-white photographs of sailboats, fish netting draped along the walls, distressed wood, buoys, and other maritime artifacts, including fiberglass fish reproductions—two marlins, three sharks, and a school of sailfish.

As we ate, I wondered idly if you could classify men according to their breakfast preferences. Cheney was a pancake kind of guy; crisp bacon, breakfast sausage, eggs over easy. He piled it all together, poured syrup over the top, and cut it into a big nasty pile that he devoured with enthusiasm. He wasn’t a big man but he never seemed to gain weight.

I ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, rye toast, and orange juice. When we finally pushed our plates aside and the waitress had refreshed our coffee cups, I said, “Are you going to volunteer the information or do I have to beg?”

“I’m happy to tell you the story, but I’m taking out the filler. You know how it is, you show up at a guy’s door asking about a gun, there’s all this preliminary bullshit while they decide if they should hire legal counsel before letting you set foot on the premises. Okay, so the nitty-gritty. He answers the door. We introduce ourselves and I ask if he has a forty-five-caliber Ruger semiautomatic registered to him. This is me and Jonah by the way. He says he does. We ask where the gun is. He says his bed table drawer. We say we’d like to see the weapon if he has no objections. He says, ‘None whatever.’

“So far this is going great, but just to be on the safe side, we clarify the request, letting him know he has the right to refuse. By now, he’s getting antsy. We reaffirm we have his consent to come in and take a look. He says, ‘What the hell is this?’ We tell him the Ruger might have been used in the commission of a crime, which he says is bullshit.”

“I thought you were skipping the filler.”

“This is important Fourth Amendment stuff. Something goes wrong, I don’t want him claiming we didn’t spell it out for him. So there’s more back-and-forth before he gets down to it.

“Okay, so after that little verbal skirmish, he decides not to argue the point. We all troop into the bedroom, where he opens the bed table drawer. Sure enough, there’s a gun. Obviously not the Ruger because Jonah’s holding that in an evidence bag. First thing Wray says is, ‘That’s not my gun.’

“So we ask if he recognizes the gun and he says of course not, he never saw it in his life. So then we go back and quiz him as to his whereabouts the night of August 25. Turns out he was on location in North Carolina, where his company’s shooting a film. We show him the Ruger, which he identifies as his. Now we’re making progress. We ask how he acquired it. He says he bought it two years ago after a rash of home invasions in Los Angeles where he was living. Both he and his wife had themselves safety-certified before he made the purchase. After that they took shooting lessons. Very conscientious, and we’re quick to compliment him for being such a good citizen. We ask him when’s the last time he or his wife handled the Ruger, and he names the occasion, which was maybe five months back. They went target shooting and he cleaned the gun afterward.”

I leaned forward. “He can prove he was out of town?”

“No question. And please remember, this is coming out of left field, so he’s had no time to prepare.”

“Okay, so the gun is his, but he was gone. Now what?”

“There’s a kicker.”

“I hope it’s good.”

“I don’t know how good it is, but it’s interesting. I take that back—it’s good and it’s interesting.”

I made that rolling-hand gesture hoping to speed him along.

“Once we tell him the semiautomatic in the drawer might be the one used in a shooting death, he’s practically begging us to get the damn thing out of his house. We bag and tag and go back to the station, where we run the serial numbers. And you know what we find?”

“The gun’s not registered.”

“It is registered. You want to guess who to?”

“Cheney, would you quit this? Either tell me or don’t tell me, but don’t play games. Whose gun was it?”

“Pete Wolinsky’s.”