Sue Grafton - U Is For Undertow

Irritably I gathered the cards, secured them with a rubber band, and stuck them in a drawer. Enough of this. I needed Henry’s company and his counsel. I opened the front door and peered across to Henry’s kitchen. All his lights were out. I picked up my jacket and shoulder bag, locked my front door, and made a beeline for Rosie’s. I spotted him the moment I walked in. I pulled out a chair and sat down, peering at the plate Rosie had just put in front of him.

To her, he said, “Thank you, dear. It looks lovely.” He smiled, watching her depart.

“Is that the special of the day?”

He shook his head. “Oh no, you’ll want to steer clear of that.” He peered over his shoulder to make sure she wasn’t in eavesdropping range. By then she was at the bar chatting with William while she kept a close eye on us.

Henry put a hand to his mouth, in case she’d recently learned to read lips. “She’s serving calf’s-liver pudding with anchovy sauce. It comes with a cup of souse’s soup, made with sauerkraut.” He paused for a moment while he crossed his eyes and then pointed to his plate. “This dish is stuffed cabbage and it’s not half bad.”

“Got it,” I said.

He paused to study me. “How are you doing? I haven’t seen you for days.”

“Go on with your dinner. Let me grab a glass of wine and I’ll fill you in.”

“I can wait,” he said.

By the time I reached the bar, Rosie had disappeared and William had poured me a glass of bad wine. I said, “Thanks. Would you ask Rosie if I could have the stuffed cabbage? It looks fabulous.”

“Sure thing.”

I returned to the table, wineglass in hand. Moments later Rosie appeared with my dinner plate. Henry and I spent the next five minutes in companionable silence while we ate. When it comes to food, neither of us fools around. As a reward for cleaning our plates, Rosie brought us each a slice of chocolate-poppy seed torte that reduced us to a state of moaning satisfaction.

Henry said, “Now, tell me what’s going on. When you walked in, your expression was so dark I didn’t dare ask. Is the misery about family or work?”

“Work.”

“So skip that and bring me up to date on the family saga.”

“I can’t remember what was going on when we last spoke. Did I tell you I had dinner here with Tasha? This was a week ago.”

“News to me.”

“Wow, you really are behind.”

“Matters not,” he said mildly. “What’d she want?”

“Nothing. Surprise, surprise. She handed over a batch of letters she came across when she was cleaning out Grandfather Kinsey’s files. Some were letters Grand wrote to Aunt Gin and some she sent me. I haven’t read all of them. I mostly skipped around, but I picked up enough to know she was doing her best to maneuver Aunt Gin into surrendering custody. You can imagine how well that went down. Aunt Gin apparently read the first and sent the rest back unopened. Grand retaliated by hiring a private detective to spy on us.” I paused, correcting myself. “Well, ‘retaliated’ might be too strong a word. She wanted proof that Gin wasn’t a fit guardian.”

“By fair means or foul?”

“That’s about it. Her hunch was that Aunt Gin was gay and she figured if she could prove it, she’d have enough leverage to bring her to heel. Didn’t work out that way.”

“This was all in the letters? I can’t believe she’d spell it out.”

“She was too clever to do that. Among other things, Tasha came across invoices from the PI Grand hired. I drove to Lompoc yesterday and talked to him. He’s a nice guy though not inclined to confide. Dang. I had to pry the information out of him, but he finally told me what she was up to. He persuaded Grand that Aunt Gin was straight, which was always my perception. Grand dropped the matter and that was the end of that.” I lifted a finger. “I do harbor a tiny flicker of doubt. On a hunch, I asked him if he’d lie about it. I was curious if he was fudging for my sake, trying to make Aunt Gin sound better than she was. He deflected the question and responded with something else. I’m not saying he lied, but there was something he wasn’t saying. It may not mean anything, but I’m not a hundred percent convinced.”

“Not much in life is a hundred percent.”

“You have a point.”

“So now what? I’m assuming this precludes your going to the big family do at the end of May.”

“Probably. I haven’t decided yet.”

Rosie appeared at the table to collect our dessert plates, and we set the subject aside until she’d gone off to the kitchen with her tray.

“Now tell me about work. Last I heard, you were asking William for a bar rag to clean off a dog tag that smelled like dead rat.”

“Oh, man, you’re really out of date and I apologize. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to all intents and purposes, I’ve reached a dead end.”

I started with Diana and Ryan’s revelation about Michael Sutton’s birthday celebration at Disneyland and then went back in time and talked about my drive to Peephole and the conversation I’d had with P. F. Sanchez, who’d eventually given me the information about the veterinarian who’d put his dog down. I went into some detail about the shed at the rear of the clinic where euthanized animals were left for pickup by animal control. I also told Henry about Deborah Unruh and the four-year-old, Rain, who’d served as the “practice child.” I went on to fill him in on Greg and Shelly, and my interview with her son, Shawn, who’d assured me the two of them weren’t involved in the kidnapping scheme because they’d left the state by then and were working their way north to Canada. The recitation took the better part of fifteen minutes, but I felt I’d summed it up admirably, even if I do say so myself.

Listening to the story as I relayed it to him, I could still see a certain logic in play. My prime assumption had been wrong, but there were pieces that still intrigued me, even at this late date. Ulf, the wolfdog. The similarities between the two crimes. The ransom demands that totaled forty grand. I couldn’t see the links, but they had to be there.

Henry seemed to take it all in, though I have no idea how he managed to keep the players straight. Once in a while he’d stop me with a question, but in the main, he seemed to follow the narrative. When I finished he thought about it briefly and then said, “Let’s go back to the conversation you had with Stacey Oliphant. What makes him so sure the kidnappers were amateurs?”

“Because they asked for chump change, to use Dolan’s words. Both thought it was odd to ask for fifteen grand when they could have asked for more. Stacey figured if they’d been professionals, they’d have ramped up the demand.”

“Must not have been chump change to them. If they were rookies, fifteen thousand might have seemed like a fortune.”

“Not that the money did them any good. Patrick photocopied the bills and then marked them…”

Henry frowned. “How?”

“Some kind of fluorescent pen he used in the export side of his clothing business. Deborah says the marks would have popped out under a black light, which a lot of kids had back then. She also says none of the money ever surfaced, at least as far as she’s heard.”

“They must have figured it out.”

“That’d be my guess.”

“Which is probably why they tried again,” he said. “If they discovered the bills were marked, they couldn’t risk putting the cash in circulation so they got rid of what they had and tried again. Only this time they snatched Mary Claire instead of Rain.”

“Oh, shit. I hope that’s not true. That would mean Patrick set the second kidnap in motion. If the money had been clean, they might have been satisfied with what they netted the first time and let it go at that.”