Q is for Quarry (Kinsey Millhone 17)

We took off on foot, walking to the corner, where we turned right and headed north on Santa Teresa Street. I thought we’d be going to the Del Mar or the Arcade, two restaurants where guys from the PD gravitated for lunch. Instead, we soldiered on for another three blocks and finally turned into a hole-in-the-wall known as “Sneaky Pete’s,” though the name on the entrance sign said something else. The place was largely empty: one couple at a table and a smattering of day drinkers sitting at the far end of the bar. Dolan took a seat at the near end and I settled myself on the stool to his left. The bartender laid her cigarette in an ashtray, reached for a bottle of Old Forrester, and poured him a drink before he opened his mouth. He paused to light a cigarette and then he caught my look. “What?”

“Well, gee, Lieutenant Dolan, I was just wondering if this was part of your cardiac rehabilitation.”

He turned to the bartender. “She thinks I don’t take very good care of myself.”

She placed the glass in front of him. “Wonder where she got that?”

I pegged her in her forties. She had dark hair that she wore pulled away from her face and secured by tortoiseshell combs. I could see a few strands of gray. Not a lot of makeup, but she looked like someone you could trust in a bartenderly sort of way. “What can I do for you?”

“I’ll have a Coke.”

Dolan cocked his thumb at me. “Kinsey Millhone. She’s a PI in town. We’re having lunch.”

“Tannie Ottweiler,” she said, introducing herself. “Nice to meet you.” We shook hands and then she reached down and came up with two sets of cutlery, encased in paper napkins, that she placed in front of us. “You sitting here?”

Dolan tilted his head. “We’ll take that table by the window.”

“I’ll be there momentarily.”

Dolan tucked his cigarette in his mouth, the smoke causing his right eye to squint as he picked up his whiskey and moved away from the bar. I followed, noting that he’d chosen a spot as far from the other drinkers as he could get. We sat down and I set my handbag on a nearby chair. “Is there a menu?”

He shed his raincoat and took a sip of whiskey. “The only thing worth ordering is the spicy salami on a kaiser roll with melted pepper jack. Damn thing’ll knock your socks off. Tannie puts a fried egg on top.”

“Sounds great.”

Tannie appeared with my Coke. There was a brief time-out while Dolan ordered our sandwiches.

As we waited for lunch, I said, “So what’s going on?”

He shifted in his seat, making a careful survey of the premises before his gaze returned to mine. “You remember Stacey Oliphant? He retired from the Sheriff’s Department maybe eight years back. You must have met him.”

“Don’t think so. I know who he is—everybody talks about Stacey—but he’d left the department by the time I connected up with Shine and Byrd.” Morley Shine had been a private investigator in partnership with another private eye named Benjamin Byrd. Both had been tight with the sheriff’s office. They’d hired me in 1974 and trained me in the business while I acquired the hours I needed to apply for my license. “He must be in his eighties.”

Dolan shook his head. “He’s actually seventy-three. As it turns out, being idle drove him out of his mind. He couldn’t handle the stress so he went back to the SO part-time, working cold cases for the criminal investigations division.”

“Nice.”

“That part, yes. What’s not nice is he’s been diagnosed with cancer—non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. This is the second time around for him. He was in remission for years, but the symptoms showed up again about seven months ago. By the time he found out, it’d progressed to stage four—five being death, just so you get the drift. His long-term prognosis stinks; twenty percent survival rate if the treatment works, which it might not. He did six rounds of chemo and a passel of experimental drugs. Guy’s been sick as a dog.”

“It sounds awful.”

“It is. He was pulling out of it some and then recently he started feeling punk. They put him back in the hospital a couple of days ago. Blood tests showed severe anemia so they decided to transfuse him. Then they decided while he was in, they might as well run more tests so they can see where he stands. He’s a pessimist, of course, but to my way of thinking, there’s always hope.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I am. I’ve known him close to forty years, longer than I knew my wife.” Dolan took a drag of his cigarette,reaching for a tin ashtray on the table next to us. He tapped off a fraction of an inch of ash.