Sue Grafton - S is for Silence

Kathy watched Winston struggle with the request. She knew he wasn’t much for confrontation, especially with a woman like Violet. On the other hand, she knew her dad had given him explicit instructions: No test drive without a salesman. No leaving the floor unattended.

“What’s your commission on a sale like this?” Violet asked, as though the sale was a foregone conclusion.

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of four percent.”

“Enough to cover your tuition and books for the next two years, or am I wrong about that?”

“That seems about right,” he said.

Even Kathy was transfixed by the notion of all that money coming to him.

“So do you want the sale or not?”

Winston glanced at his watch. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Sullivan. Mr. Cramer’s due back any minute now…”

“Oh for Christ’s sake! Give me the keys and let’s get on with it. I’m just taking it around the block.”

Kathy closed the file drawer, rolling her eyes in disgust. Pushiness was unbecoming in a woman-everyone knew that-but blasphemy was inexcusable. She returned to her desk and took a seat. The woman was insane. There was no way Winston was going to let her drive away in that car. Without so much as a dollar changing hands? Very funny. Ha ha. Kathy picked up a stack of papers and tamped them against the desk, then opened and closed a drawer, pretending to be absorbed in her work.

Winston appeared at her desk. There were big damp circles under his shirt sleeves, and she could smell his sweat. “I got a problem.”

“I know. She is so full of herself, it makes me sick.”

“Can I have the keys to the Bel Air?”

She stared at him, blinking. “Why ask me?”

“Could you give them to me, please? She’s buying the car and she wants to see how it drives.”

“I don’t have them.”

“Yes, you do. I saw him give them to you.”

Kathy didn’t move because she’d suddenly had a thought. At dinner the night before, her dad told her mom he was top-heavy on inventory and light on cash. What if Violet really had the money and the sale got messed up? If Kathy made a fuss and then the deal fell through, she’d never live it down. She could feel her face burn.

Exasperated, Winston leaned over and opened her pencil drawer. There, big as life, were the keys on a ring with the Chevrolet logo, the make and model of the car inked on a round white tag. He helped himself to the set.

“You’ll be sorry,” she said, not looking at him.

“No doubt,” he said, and then returned to the floor. Violet was still sitting in the car.

Kathy’s dad would have a fit the minute he found out, but what was she supposed to do?

Winston held out the keys to Violet. She took them without a word and then started the car. She put the gear in reverse and began backing toward the wide steel door at the rear of the showroom. Kathy watched as Winston crossed to the door and gave the handle a yank. The door ascended on its track with a low rumbling sound. He leaned toward the driver’s-side window, probably to offer her advice, but Violet swung the car into the alley and took off without so much as a backward look.

Kathy saw Winston glance at his watch, and she felt a little thrill of fear because she knew exactly what was on his mind. Even if Violet took the long way around, the drive couldn’t take more than five minutes. Which meant he could have the car on the floor again before her dad returned from lunch.

I found Sergeant Timothy Schaefer in a workshop at the back of his property on Hart Drive in Santa Maria. The house itself was built in the 1950s by the look of it-a three-bedroom frame structure so uniformly white that it had been either freshly painted or recently covered in vinyl siding. His workshop must have been a toolshed at one time, enlarged by degrees until it was now half the size of a single-car garage. The interior walls were all raw wood and exposed studs. He’d used layers of newspaper as insulation, and I could probably read a year’s worth of local news items if I peered closely enough.

Schaefer had told me he’d retired from the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department in 1968 at the age of sixty-two, which made him eighty-one years old now. He was heavyset, his loose gray pants held up with tan suspenders. The brown and blue in his plaid flannel shirt had been washed to a blend of softly faded hues. His hair was a flyaway white, as fine as spun sugar, and he wore bifocals low on his nose, fixing me with an occasional sharp look over the rims.

In front of him, on a chunky wooden workbench that lined the shop on three sides, he’d set a newly refinished rocking chair, its seat in need of recaning. His tools were neatly lined up: a pair of needle-nose pliers, two ice picks, a knife, a ruler, a container of glycerin, and loops of cane held together with clothespins. On the chair he was currently caning, he’d used golf tees to hold the cane in place until he could tie them off underneath.

“My daughter got me into this,” he said idly. “After her mother died, she thought a hobby would keep me out of trouble. Weekends, we make the rounds of flea markets and yard sales, picking up old beat-up chairs like this. Turns out to be a money-making proposition.”

“How’d you learn?”

“Reading books and doing what they said. Took a while to get the hang of it. Glycerin helps the cane slide. Don’t soak it long enough and it’s hard to work with. Soak it too long and it’ll start to weaken and break. Hope you don’t mind if I keep on with this. I promised a fellow I’d have his rocker ready by the end of the week.”

“Be my guest.”

For a while, I was content to watch without saying a word. The mechanics of it reminded me of needlepoint or knitting, something close to a meditation. There was a certain hypnotic quality to the process, and I might have stood there observing for the better part of the day if time had permitted.

When I’d called the day before, I’d mentioned Stacey Oliphant by name, thus according myself instant credibility since the two had worked together for a number of years. Schaefer and I had spent a few minutes on the phone discussing the man. When I told him I was looking for information about Violet Sullivan, I’d asked if he needed to clear anything with the department before we spoke. “Nobody cares about that anymore,” he’d said. “Only a few of us remember the case. She’s still classified as a missing person, but I don’t think you’ll have much success after all these years.”

“It’s worth a try,” I’d said.

“Did you know her?” I asked now.

“Sure did. Everybody knew Violet. Feisty little thing with that fiery red hair. She was a beautiful girl with a defiant streak. If Foley blackened her eye, she made no attempt to hide it. She’d sport a bruise like a badge of honor. Damnedest thing you ever saw. Black and blue, she was still prettier than any other woman in town. I wasn’t smart enough to keep my trap shut, and my wife was so jealous I thought she’d spit nails. Violet was the kind of woman men fantasize about. A lot of wives ended up with their noses out of joint.”

“How well did you know Foley?”

“Better than I knew her, given his numerous contacts with law enforcement. That’s how I ended up dealing with him in the first place, because of his smacking her around. I probably went to the house half a dozen times. None of us liked going out on domestic calls. Dangerous for one thing, and for another, it made you wonder what the hell was wrong with folks. Violet and Foley were skating close to the edge. Bad situation. Her little girl was of an age where she’d end up standing in the line of fire. Abuse spills over. It might start with the spouse, but the kids aren’t far behind.”