V is for Vengeance (Kinsey Millhone 22)

“Biscuits, but that’s it.”

“I’ll have to introduce you to my landlord, Henry. He’s William’s younger brother. I suspect the two of you would have lots to talk about.”

When I’d eaten, Marvin insisted that I sit while he washed the dishes and set them in the rack.

I filled him in on my visit to Audrey’s house in San Luis. “You could have made the trip yourself,” I said. “I know you were worried about the impact, but there were no surprises. The place was bare.”

“Was it nice?”

“Nice? No, it was a dump. Small wonder Audrey liked living with you.”

“What about an address book? Any sign of it?”

“There was nothing personal at all.”

“That seems odd,” he said. “Hang on a minute and I’ll go get the phone bills.”

He left the kitchen and returned moments later with a file folder that he placed on the table in front of me. “I hope you don’t mind but I went over them myself. This past month, she made two calls to Los Angeles; three to Corpus Christi, Texas; and one to Miami, Florida. Same thing in January and February. If there were other calls, they must have been in the 805 area code.”

“Too bad.” I ran an eye down the list of numbers. Marvin had put a checkmark beside calls he ascribed to her. “Have you tried calling these?” I asked.

“I thought I’d leave it to you. I’m not that good at thinking on my feet. I get rattled and no telling what I’d blurt out. You want to use my phone?”

“Sure. As long as I’m here.”

“Have at it,” he said, indicating the wall-mounted phone.

I stood and reached for the handset, tucking it between my shoulder and my ear. I held the phone bill with my thumb close to the first mark he’d made. I punched in the number in the 213 area code. After three rings, I was treated to an ear-splitting screech, followed by a mechanical voice telling me the number was a disconnect: “If you feel you have received this recording in error, please hang up, check the number, and dial again.”

“Disconnect,” I said.

I tried the number again with the same result. The second Los Angeles number was also no longer in service. I dutifully tried a second time to be sure I was dialing correctly. Same dead end. “This is informative,” I said. I zeroed in on the Miami call and punched in those numbers. When the screeching began again, I held out the handset so Marvin could hear. The number in Corpus Christi rang twenty-two times by my count but no one answered. I hung up and sat down again, putting my chin in my hand.

“So now what?” he asked.

“I’m not sure. Let me think about it for a minute.”

He shrugged. “The way I see it, we’ve got nothing.”

“Shhh!”

“Sorry.”

Marvin returned to his seat. He was on the verge of saying something else, but I held up a hand like an auditory traffic cop. In my mind, I was running through index cards in rapid succession. We still had no address book and no appointment calendar. The numbers she’d called in the past few months were useless at this point. If I’d had access to Polk directories for Corpus Christi or Miami, I might have been able to backtrack from the phone numbers to the relevant street addresses. Checking those addresses, even if I had them, would have meant making the trip myself or hiring private investigators in Texas and Florida to cover the job for me. Both options were expensive and might not have netted us anything. If the phones had been shut down, the target locations had probably been shut down as well.

This is what I knew: Audrey had reason to spend the night in San Luis Obispo on an average of twice a month. During her stays, she made use of a house in an isolated area where, with the exception of her neighbor, her privacy was guaranteed. What she did in that house entailed the use of a table big enough to seat ten, a pantry full of oversize canned goods, and skillets and saucepans sufficient to feed any number of visitors. Vivian Hewitt said she’d seen a van and a white panel truck pull into Audrey’s drive from time to time, but she’d never seen anyone going into Audrey’s house. This suggested that her visitors came and went by way of the back door, which wasn’t visible from her neighbor’s vantage point. Vivian had also told me that on nights when the lights were on late, Audrey made a point of closing her venetian blinds.

I’d thought at first Audrey was the one busy covering her tracks. The problem was she’d been dead since Sunday, and I didn’t see how she could have done such a thorough job in the brief period between her arrest and her going off the bridge. This was Thursday and the house in San Luis had been stripped of personal items and all of the surfaces wiped down. When had she found the time? Vivian Hewitt claimed someone had been there Sunday or Monday night. Clearly, it wasn’t Audrey.