J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone 10)

“Kinsey!”

I shaded my eyes against the late afternoon sun. She was on the little third-floor balcony outside John Ives’s office, blond hair hanging over the railing like a latter-day Rapunzel. “Lieutenant Whiteside’s on the line. You want me to take a message?”

“Yes, if you would, or he can call my machine and leave a message himself. I’m going off to class, but I’ll be home by seven-thirty. If he wants me to call back, ask him to leave me a number.”

She nodded and waved, disappearing from sight.

I retrieved my car and drove over to the adulted facility, which was two miles away. Vera Lipton pulled into the parking lot, arriving shortly after I did. She turned into the first half-empty aisle on her right. I’d eased into the second aisle on the left, parking closer to the classroom. Both of us were testing theories about how to make the quickest getaway once Spanish class ended. Most of the available classrooms had been pressed into service, and there were anywhere from a hundred and fifty to two hundred students piling into cars at the same time.

I grabbed my legal pad, my pile of papers, and my copy of 501 Spanish Verbs. I locked the car in haste and made a diagonal cut across the parking lot, intercepting Vera. We’d first met when I was still doing periodic investigations for California Fidelity Insurance, where she was employed as an adjuster, later promoted to claims manager. She’s probably as close to a best friend as I’ll ever have, though I don’t really know what such a relationship entails. Now that we no longer have adjacent offices, our contact has taken on a “catch as catch can” quality. This was one reason taking a class together seemed so appealing. During the break, we’d do a fast personal update. Sometimes she’d invite me over for supper after class, and we’d end up laughing and chatting into the night. After thirty-seven years of dedicated singlehood, she’d married a family practice physician named Neil Hess, whom she’d tried to fix me up with the year before. What amused me at the time was that I could tell she was smitten, though she’d decided he was inappropriate for reasons I thought bogus. Specifically, she seemed to object to the fact that she was nearly six inches taller. In the end, love won out. Or maybe Neil got lifts.

They’d been married now for nine months—since the previous Halloween—and I’d never seen her looking better. She’s a big gal to begin with: maybe five feet ten, a hundred and forty pounds on a good-size frame. She’d never been apologetic about her generous proportions. The truth was, men seemed to regard her as some sort of goddess, striking up conversations with her everywhere she went. Now that she and Neil were working out together—jogging and playing tennis—she’d dropped fifteen pounds. Her once dyed red hair had grown out to its natural color, a honeyed brown that she was wearing shoulder length. She still dressed like a flight instructor: jumpsuits with padded shoulders and tinted aviator glasses, sometimes with spike heels, tonight with boots.

When she caught sight of me, she whipped off her glasses and stuck them upright on her head like a prescription tiara. She waved enthusiastically. “¡Hola!” she called in merry Spanish tones. So far, this was the only word we’d really mastered, and we used it on each other as often as we could. Some guy clipping the hedges looked up expectantly, probably thinking that Vera was addressing him.

“¡Hola!” I replied. “¿Dónde están los gatos?” Still in search of those elusive black cats.

“En los árboles.”

“Muy bueno,” I said.

“God, doesn’t that sound great?”

“Yeah, I’m almost sure that guy over there thinks we’re Hispanic,” I said.

Vera grinned, flashing him a thumbs-up before she turned back to me. “You’re here early for a change. You usually come flying in fifteen minutes late.”

“I was doing some paperwork and couldn’t wait to quit. How are you? You look great.”

We strolled into class, absorbed in chitchat and idle gossip until the instructor arrived. Patty Abkin-Quiroga is petite and enthusiastic, amazingly tolerant of our clumsy lurches through the language. There’s nothing so humbling as being a dunce in a foreign tongue, and if it weren’t for her compassion, we’d have lost heart after two weeks. As usual, she started the class by regaling us with a long tale in Spanish, something to do with her activities that day. Either she ate a tostado or her little boy, Edwardo, flushed his baby bottle down the toilet and she had to have the plumber come out and take a look.

When I got home after class and let myself into my apartment, I could see the message light blinking on my answering machine. I pressed the button and listened as I moved around my tiny living room, turning on lights.