U Is for Undertow (Kinsey Millhone 21)

The minute the limo turned out of the driveway, Jon felt relief wash over him. It was like getting out of prison. He loved having the big house to himself, though he spent most of his time in his rooms above the garage. The big house was pure Mona—her taste, her style, expensive and overdone. He went through all her drawers but didn’t learn much, except she used K-Y jelly.

Lionel had left him sufficient money to cover meals and gas for his motor scooter while the family was gone. In March, Jon had totaled the used car his dad had given him, and Mona was adamant about not replacing it. Fine with him. He went back to tootling around on the Vespa his dad had bought for him his freshman year. As the end of school approached, Jon asked if he could use his father’s old Olivetti typewriter for summer school, but Mona said she needed it for one of the girls. Jon had to suppress a smile. When it came to sheer predictability, the Amazing Mona was a champ.

He cruised garage sales that weekend until he came across a Smith-Corona portable electric typewriter with a manual carriage return. He paid fifteen bucks for that and then stopped at the hardware store and bought four gallons of paint. For the two years he’d been living in his aerie above the garage, he’d been content to leave it in its original bare and shabby state. Now he saw it differently. Three dormer windows looked out on the ocean and the sharply slanting eaves made the rooms feel garretlike, perfect for a writer in residence.

He painted the walls a dark charcoal gray, close to black, in part to annoy Mona, but more nearly because it soothed and quieted the chatter in his head. He went through the main house, scavenging items from linen closets and storage areas. For bedding, he’d been using a sleeping bag, flung on top of the bare mattress, but now he made up his bed with a set of Mona’s expensive cotton sheets and two quilted coverlets his mother had made. From the attic he brought down a secondhand chest of drawers and a hat rack, and he mounted a series of wooden pegs on the wall for hanging his clothes. He scrubbed his small bathroom until it was immaculate.

For the larger of the two rooms he’d found a deep, down-filled easy chair—another garage sale acquisition, this one for twenty-five dollars, with a reading lamp thrown in. He moved his desk under the middle window, placed his typewriter in the center, and laid in a supply of paper, carbons, typewriter ribbons, and white-out. Once everything was arranged, he sat there for four days, drinking coffee and staring at the view. During his preparations, he was brimming with ideas. Now that he was ready to go to work, his mind was blank.

He wrote the occasional paragraph, but he spent most of the time thinking about Walker. He couldn’t figure out why Walker was so successful with girls while he remained so out of it. Walker had had a string of girlfriends his senior year. Two of them Jon found attractive, but neither one would give him the time of day. It was always “Walker this, Walker that.” Their only purpose in talking to Jon was to ask how Walker felt about them. Having heard Walker trash both in private, Jon wondered if they’d lost their tiny minds. Walker treated girls badly. He ignored or snubbed or insulted them. He’d date them, screw them, and break up with them. Given the tears and upsets and phone calls and public scenes, they were totally smitten, absolutely gaga about him. Jon detached himself, mystified by the unspoken rules underlying love, flirtation, passion, and sex.

Just to feel like he was doing something, he went into his father’s study and pulled out a copy of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. He took it back to his desk and typed out the first two chapters. He liked the plain, choppy feel of the prose, but transcribing someone else’s work didn’t spark inspiration. While he liked the language, he wasn’t connected to the content. The words belonged to Hemingway and the images were his. For Jon, the subject matter carried no emotional energy. If he could write about anything, what would it be? He couldn’t think of a thing.

He had to laugh at himself. He hadn’t written a word and he was already suffering writer’s block. Just to shake himself loose, he closed up shop for the day and broke into a house four doors down. The owner was a Hollywood producer who spent the occasional weekend in Horton Ravine. Jon knew their habits because the couple had come to a number of dinner parties Mona had given and they talked nonstop about themselves. The guy had a son Jon’s age that Jon had no use for. Mona liked him, of course, because his manners were good and he wore a coat and tie and said sir and ma’am. It was therefore doubly amusing to discover the kid’s stash of dope and pornography. Farm animals? Come on.

In the master bedroom, at the back of a closet, Jon came across a wooden box. There was no lock on it and when Jon opened it, he found a handgun. It was a Mauser HSc .380 ACP. He took it out of the box and hefted it in his hand. Pasted in the lid of the box there was promotional material in German and English that he read with interest. The pistol was a double-action, all-steel small-frame automatic with checkered walnut grips. Very cool. According to the pamphlet, the gun had open, fixed recessed sights, a positive thumb safety, a magazine safety, and an exposed hammer for additional safety. Jon tucked the gun in his waistband and helped himself to a box of ammunition. Maybe he’d write about a crook who carried a gun just like it. He returned the empty wooden box to the back of the shelf where he’d found it. Chances were the guy wouldn’t pull the box out to check. He’d assume the gun was where he left it.