A is for Alibi (Kinsey Millhone 1)

I called Nikki in Santa Teresa and told her where I was and what I was up to. Then I checked my answering service. Charlie Scorsoni had called but left no number. I figured if it was important he'd call back. I gave my service the number where I could be reached. Having tagged all those bases, I went next door to a restaurant that seems to change nationalities every time I'm there. Last time I was in town, it was Mexican fare, which is to say very hot plates of pale brown goo. This time it was Greek: turdlike lumps wrapped in leaves. I'd seen things in roadside parks that looked about that good but I washed them down with a glass of wine that tasted like lighter fluid and who knew the difference? It was now 7:15 and I didn't have anything to do. The television set in my room was on the fritz so I wandered down to the office and watched TV with Arlette while she ate a box of caramel Ayds.

In the morning, I drove over the mountain into the San Fernando Valley. At the crest of the hill, where the San Diego Freeway tips over into Sherman Oaks, I could see a layer of smog spread out like a mirage, a shimmering mist of pale yellow smoke through which a few tall buildings yearned as though for fresh air. Libby's parents lived in a four-unit apartment building set into the crook of the San Diego and Ventura freeways, a cumbersome structure of stucco and frame with bay windows bulging out along the front. There was an open corridor dividing the building in half, with the front doors to the two downstairs apartments opening up just inside. On the right, a stairway led to the second-floor landing. The building itself affected no particular style and I guessed that it had gone up in the thirties before anybody figured out that California architecture should imitate southern mansions and Italian villas. There was a pale lawn of crab and Bermuda grasses intermixed. A short driveway along the left extended back to a row of frame garages, with four green plastic garbage cans chained to a wooden fence. The juniper bushes growing along the front of the building were tall enough to obscure the ground-floor windows and seemed to be suffering from some peculiar molting process that made some of the branches turn brown and the rest go bald. They looked like cut-rate Christmas trees with the bad side facing out. The season to be jolly, in this neighborhood, was long past.

Apartment #1 was on my left. When I rang the bell, it sounded like the br-r-r-r of an alarm clock running down. The door was opened by a woman with a row of pins in her mouth that bobbed up and down when she spoke. I worried she would swallow one.

"Yes?”

"Mrs. Glass?”

"That's right.”

"My name is Kinsey Millhone. I'm a private investigator. I work up in Santa Teresa. Could I talk to you?”

She took the pins out of her mouth one by one and stuck them into a pin cushion that she wore on her wrist like a bristling corsage. I handed her my identification and she studied it with care, turning it over as though there might be tricky messages written in fine print on the back. While she did that, I studied her. She was in her early fifties. Her silky brown hair was cut short, a careless style with strands anchored behind her ears. Brown eyes, no makeup, bare-legged. She wore a wraparound denim skirt, a washed-out Madras blouse in bleeding shades of blue, and the kind of cotton slippers I've seen in cellophane packs in grocery stores.

"It's about Elizabeth," she said, finally returning my I.D.

"Yes. It is.”

She hesitated and then moved back into the living room, making way for me. I picked my way across the living-room floor and took the one chair that wasn't covered with lengths of fabric or patterns. The ironing board was set up near the bay window, the iron plugged in a ticking as it heated. There were finished garments hanging on a rack near the sewing machine on the far wall. The air smelled of fabric sizing and hot metal.

In the archway to the dining room, a heavyset man in his sixties sat in a wheelchair, his expression blank, his pants undone in front, heavy paunch protruding. She crossed the room and turned his chair around so that it faced the television set. She put headphones on him and then plugged the jack into the TV, which she flipped on. He watched a game show whether he liked it or not. A couple were dressed up like a boy and girl chicken but I couldn't tell if they were winning anything.

"I'm Grace," she said. "That's her father. He was in an automobile accident three years ago last spring. He doesn't talk but he can hear and any mention of Elizabeth upsets him. Help yourself to coffee if you like.”

There was a ceramic percolator on the coffee table, plugged into an extension cord that ran back under the couch. It looked as if all the other appliances in the room were radiating from the same power source. Grace eased down onto her knees. She had about four yards of dark green silk spread out on the hardwood floor and she was pinning a handmade pattern into place. She held a magazine out to me, opened to a page that showed a designer dress with a deep slit up one side and narrow sleeves. I poured myself a cup of coffee and watched her work.