Jonathan Kellerman - Guilt

My daily ride’s a ’79 Seville, Chesterfield Green with a tan vinyl top that matches her interior leather. She rolled out of Detroit the last year before GM bloated the model beyond recognition, is styled well enough to help you forget she’s Caddy froufrou over a Chevy II chassis. She loves her third engine, is dependable, cushy, and makes no unreasonable demands. I see no reason to get a divorce.

I said, “Bite your tongue. She thinks she’s still a hot number.”

He laughed. “So how many Duesenbergs were made?”

“I’d guess hundreds, not thousands. And chrome pipes means it was supercharged, which would narrow it down further.”

“So getting that subpoena might be worthwhile … but then I’d need to backtrack the history of every one I find and the most I can hope for is some guy who visited the woman who lived in the house maybe at the time the baby was buried.”

I said, “There could be a more direct way to identify her. If Father Eddie noticed the car, other neighbors probably did. Anyone who was an adult back then is likely to be deceased, but in nice neighborhoods like Cheviot, houses get passed down to heirs.”

“A kid who dug cars,” he said. “Okay, can’t postpone the legwork any longer. You have time?”

“Nothing but.”

We began with properties half a mile either way from the burial site, encountered lots of surprise but no wisdom. Returning to the Ruche house, Milo knocked on the door, rang the bell, checked windows. No one home.

I followed him to the backyard. The yellow tape was gone. The holes where air-sniffing tubes had been inserted were still open. The chair where Holly Ruche had sat yesterday had been moved closer to the felled tree sections and a woman’s sweater, black, size M, Loehmann’s label, was draped over one of the massive cylinders. A few errant blond hairs stood out on the shoulders. Beneath the chair, a paperback book sat on the dirt. What to expect during pregnancy.

I said, “She came back when everyone left, wanting to check out her dream.”

He said, “Location, location, location … okay, let’s ask around some more about the car. Haystacks and needles and all that.”

Expanding the canvass another quarter mile produced similar results, initially. But at a house well north, also Tudor but grander and more ornately trimmed than Holly and Matt’s acquisition, a small, mustachioed man in his sixties holding a crystal tumbler of scotch said, “A Duesie? Sure, ’38 SJ, blue over blue-navy over baby.”

His mustache was a too-black stripe above a thin upper lip. The few hairs on his head were white. He wore a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket, gray pin-striped slacks, black slippers with gold lions embroidered on the toes.

Milo said, “What else can you tell us about it, sir?”

“Gorgeous,” said the man. “True work of art. I saw it in … ’50, so we’re talking a twelve-year-old car. But you’d never know. Shiny, kept up beautifully. Those chrome supercharger pipes coming out the side were like pythons on the prowl. All that menace and power, I’m telling you, that was one magnificent beast.”

“Who owned it?” said Milo.

The man shook his head. “I tried to get her to tell me, she’d just smile and change the subject.”

“She?”

“Eleanor,” said the man. “Ellie Green. She lived there-that brick place pretending to be this place, that’s where the Duesie used to park. Right in the driveway. Not often, just once in a while. And always at night but there was a porch light so you could see it. Down to the color. Looking back, it had to be a boyfriend of hers, but I was a kid, five years old, it was the car that interested me, not her personal life. I’d never seen anything like it, asked my father about it. He knew everything about everything when it came to cars, raced at Muroc before the war.”

He grinned. “Then he married my mother and she civilized him and he went to work selling Packards downtown. He’s the one who filled me in on the Duesie. That’s how I know it was a true SJ. Because he told me it wasn’t one of those where someone retrofitted the pipes, this was the real deal.”

“He never mentioned whose it was?”

“Never asked him,” said the man. “Why, what’s up? I saw all the commotion yesterday. What happened at that place?”

“Something was found there. What can you tell us about Ellie Green, sir?”

“She babysat me. Back before I started school, I was always sick. My parents got tired of never going out, so they hired her to watch over me. Couldn’t have been fun for her, I was a runty piece of misery, had scarlet fever, bad case of the mumps, measles even worse, could throw up at will and believe me, I did when the devil told me to.” He laughed. “At one point they thought I had diphtheria but it was just some nasty flu. But Ellie was always patient.”

“How old was she?”

“Hmm … to a kid everyone looks old. Probably thirty, give or take? Why’re you asking about her? What was found over there? I asked one of your guys in uniform but all he said was an incident .”

Milo said, “Some bones were dug up in the backyard. It was on the news, Mr.-”

“Dave Helmholtz. I avoid the news. Back when I was a stockbroker I had to pay attention, now I don’t. Bones as in human?”

“Yes, sir. A complete human skeleton. A baby.”

“A baby? Buried in the backyard?”

Milo nodded.

Helmholtz whistled. “That’s pretty grotesque. You think Ellie had something to do with it? Why?”

“We don’t know much at all at this point, Mr. Helmholtz, but there’s indication the bones were buried during the early fifties. And the only information we picked up about that period was that a Duesenberg was sometimes parked at the house.”

“Early fifties,” said Helmholtz. “Yup, that could certainly fit when Ellie was here. But why in the world would she bury a baby? She didn’t have any kids.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. And I never saw her pregnant. Just the opposite, she was skinny. For back then, I mean. Today she’d be what’s expected of a woman.”

“How long did she live there?”

“She babysat me for close to a year.”

“Did she have a day job?”

“Sure,” said Helmholtz. “She was a nurse.” He smoked, tamped, smoked some more. “Mom made a big deal about that-‘a trained nurse.’ Because I pulled a snit about being left with a stranger. I was a cranky runt, mama’s boy, afraid of my own shadow. Trained nurse? What did I care? The first time Ellie came over, I hid under the covers, ignored her completely. She sat down, waited me out. Finally I stuck my head out and she was smiling at me. Bee -yoot iful smile, I’m talking movie-star caliber, the blond hair, the red lips, the smoky eyes. Not that I care much about that, I kept ignoring her. Finally I got hot and thirsty and came out and she fetched me something to drink. I had a fever, that year I always had a fever. She put a cold compress on my forehead. She hummed. It soothed me, she had a nice voice. She was a nice person. Never tried to force anything, real relaxed. And a looker, no question about that.”

I smiled. “You didn’t care about her looks, you were concentrating on the Duesenberg.”

Helmholtz stared at me. Broke into laughter. “Okay, you got me, I had a crush on her. Who wouldn’t? She was nice as they came, took care of me, I stopped being upset when my parents went out.”

“Obviously, someone else thought she was nice.”

“Who’s that?”

“The owner of the Duesenberg.”

“Oh,” said Helmholtz. “Yeah, Mr. Lucky Bastard.” He laughed some more. “That’s what Dad called him. Looking back it makes sense. Some rich guy wooed her, maybe that’s why she left.”