Sue Grafton - F is For Fugitive

"Did she have any girlfriends?"

"Not that I ever saw."

"Did she have a rapport with any teacher in particular?"

"I doubt it. You can ask some of the faculty if you like."

"What about the promiscuity?" He shifted uncomfortably. "I heard rumors about that, but I never had any concrete information. Wouldn't surprise me. She had some problems with self-esteem."

"I talked with a classmate who implied that it was pretty steamy stuff."

Shales wagged his head reluctantly. "There wasn't much we could do. We referred her two or three times for professional counseling, but of course she never went."

"I take it the school counselors didn't make much progress."

"I'm afraid not. I don't think you could fault us for the sincerity of our concern, but we couldn't force her to do anything. And her mother didn't help. I wish I had a nickel for every note we sent home. The truth is, we liked Jean and thought she had a chance. At a certain point, Mrs. Timberlake seemed to throw up her hands. Maybe we did, too. I don't know. Looking back on the situation, I don't feel good, but I don't know how we could have done it any differently. She's just one of those kids who fell between the cracks. It's a pity, but there it is."

"How well do you know Mrs. Timberlake at this point?"

"What makes you ask?"

"I'm being paid to ask."

"She's a friend," he said, after the barest hesitancy.

I waited, but he didn't amplify. "What about the guy Jean was allegedly involved with?"

"You've got me on that. A lot of stories started circulating right after she died, but I never heard a name attached."

"Can you think of anything else that might help? Someone she might have taken into her confidence?"

"Not that I recall." A look crossed his face. "Well, actually, there was one thing that always struck me as odd. A couple times that fall, I saw her at church, which seemed out of character."

"Church?"

"Bob Haws's congregation. I forget who told me, but the word was she had the hots for the kid who headed up the youth group over there. Now what the hell was his name? Hang on." He got up and went to the door to the main office. "Kathy, what was the name of the boy who was treasurer of the senior class the year Jean Timberlake was killed? You remember him?"

There was a pause and a murmured response that I couldn't quite hear.

"Yeah, he's the one. Thanks." Dwight Shales turned back to me. "John Clemson. His dad's the attorney representing Fowler, isn't he?"

I parked in the little lot behind Jack Clemson's office, taking the flagstone path around the cottage to the front. The sun was out, but the breeze was cool and the pittosporum shading the side yard were being -hedged up by a man in a landscape company uniform. The Little Wonder electric trimmer in his hands made a chirping sound as he passed it across the face of the shrub, which was raining down leaves.

I went up on the porch, pausing for a moment before I let myself in. All the way over, I'd been rehearsing what I'd say, feeling not a little annoyed that he'd withheld information. Maybe it would turn out to be insignificant, but that was mine to decide. The door was ajar and I stepped into the foyer. The woman who glanced up must have been his regular secretary. She was in her forties, petite-nay, toy-sized-hair hennaed to an auburn shade, with piercing gray eyes and a silver bracelet, in a snake shape, coiled around her wrist.

"Is Mr. Clemson in?"

"Is he expecting you?"

"I stopped by to bring him up to date on a case," I said. "The name is Kinsey Millhone."

She took in my outfit, gaze traveling from turtleneck to jeans to boots with an almost imperceptible flicker of distaste. I probably looked like someone he might represent on a charge of welfare fraud. "Just a moment, I'll check." Her look said, Not bloody likely.

Instead of buzzing through, she got up from her desk and tippy-tapped her way down the hall to his office, flared skirt twitching on her little hips as she walked. She had the body of a ten-year-old. Idly, I surveyed her desk while she was gone, scanning the document that she was working from. Reading upside down is only one of several obscure talents I've developed working as a private eye. "… And he is enjoined and restrained from annoying, molesting, threatening, or harming petitioner…" Given the average marriage these days, this sounded like pre-nups.

"Kinsey? Hey, nice to see you! Come on back."

Clemson was standing in the door to his office. He had his suit jacket off, shirt collar unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, and tie askew. The gabardine pants looked like the same ones he'd had on two days ago, bunched up in the seat, pleated with wrinkles across the lap. I followed him into his office in the wake of cigarette smoke. His secretary tippy-tapped back to her desk out front, radiating disapproval.

Both chairs were crowded with law books, tongues of scrap paper hanging out where he'd marked passages. I stood while he cleared a space for me to sit down. He moved around to his side of the desk, breathing audibly. He stubbed out his cigarette with a shake of his head.

"Out of shape," he remarked. He sat down, tipping back in his swivel chair. "What are we going to do with that Bailey, huh? Guy's a fuckin' lunatic, taking off like that."

I filled him in on Bailey's late-night call, repeating his version of the escape while Jack Clemson pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head in despair. "What a jerk. No accounting for the way these guys see things."

He reached for a letter and gave it a contemptuous toss. "Look at this. Know what that is? Hate mail. Some guy got put away twenty-two years ago when I was a PD. He writes me every year from jail like it's something I did to him. Jesus. When I was in the AG's office, the AG did a survey of prisoners as to who they blamed for their conviction- you know, 'why are you in prison and whose fault is it?' Nobody ever says, 'It's my fault… for being a jerk.' The number-one guy who gets blamed is their own lawyer. 'If I'da had a real lawyer instead of a PD, I'da got off.' That's the number-one guy, okay? His own lawyer. The number-two guy that was blamed was the witness who testified against him. Number three-are you ready?-is the judge who sentenced him. 'If I'da had a fair judge, this woulda never happened.' Number four was the police who investigated the case, the investigating officer, whoever caught 'im. And way down there at the bottom was the prosecuting attorney. Less than ten percent of the people they surveyed could even remember the prosecutor's name. I'm in the wrong end of the business." He snorted and leaned forward on his elbows, shoving files around on his desk. "Anyway, skip that. How's it going from your end? You comin' up with anything?"

"I don't know yet," I said carefully. "I just talked to the principal at Central Coast High. He tells me he saw Jean at the Baptist church a couple of times in the months before she was killed. Word was she was infatuated with your son."

Dead silence. "Mine?" he said.

I shrugged noncommittally. "Kid named John

Clemson. I assume he's your son. Was he the student leader of the church youth group?"

"Well, yeah, John did that, but it's news to me about her."

"He never said anything to you?"

"No, but I'll ask."

"Why don't I?"

A pause. Jack Clemson was too much the professional to object. "Sure, why not?" He jotted an address and a telephone number on a scratch pad. "This is his business."

He tore the leaf off and passed it across the desk to me, locking eyes with me. "He's not involved in her death."

I stood up. "Let's hope not."

The business address I'd been given turned out to be a seven-hundred-square-foot pharmacy at one end of a medical facility half a block off Higuera. The complex itself bore an eerie resemblance to the padres' quarters of half the California missions I'd seen: thick adobe walls, complete with decorator cracks, a long colonnade of twenty-one arches, with a red tile roof, and what looked like an aqueduct tucked into the landscaping. Pigeons were misbehaving up among the eaves, managing to copulate on a perilously tiny ledge.