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Three or four minutes of that, and the woman finally ended her conversation and turned her attention to me. “Yes, sir, how may I help you?”

“Are you Mrs. Thomas?”

“No, my name is Laura Vincent. Mr. and Mrs. Thomas are both out with clients. Is there something I can do?”

“Well, yes, I hope so. My name is Marlowe, Phil Marlowe — I’m a friend of one of your agency’s clients. John Klinghurst.”

“Mr. Klinghurst. I don’t... oh, yes, one of the buyers of the home in Los Ranchitos.”

“That’s right. Just recently.”

“Yes, it’s still in escrow.”

“Well, he’s pretty excited about it, been talking it up to everybody he knows. Raving is a better word. He really loves it.”

Ms. Vincent’s smile grew broader. “We’re always pleased to hear that about one of our clients.”

“He was so complimentary, in fact, that I thought I’d stop by and see if you had any other listings in that area. I live in the city, too, but I’m over here on business, so...”

“You’re interested in buying a new home, then?”

“My wife and I, yes. We’re tired of the rat race — city living grinds you down after a while.”

“It certainly can. Have a seat, Mr. Marlowe, and let’s see what we can do for you.”

Tap, tap, tap on her computer keyboard. They didn’t have any other Los Ranchitos listing, which made things a little easier for me. I asked what they had that was similar to the property Klinghurst had purchased, which prompted her to pull up his file to refamiliarize herself with the parcel. While she was doing that, I said casually, “How does it work when a man and his fiancée buy property together before they’re married? I mean, do they put it in both their names — her maiden name, I mean — or just his or what?”

“Well, that depends...”

“How did John and Helen do it?”

I didn’t have to prod her any more than that; she was curious enough herself to press the right button. Then she frowned and said, “Helen?”

“Helen Tolliver.”

“It is a joint purchase,” Ms. Vincent said, “but that isn’t the name of the other party.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “You mean it’s not Helen he’s marrying? That’s a shock, believe me. They’ve been going together off and on for years, and I just assumed... It’s not Ann Burns, is it? I sure hope not.”

“No. The name here is Jocelyn Dunn.”

“Well, well,” I said, “that’s a real surprise,” and I was no longer acting.

“Do you know her, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I’ve met her. Just once, but that was enough.”

At Redwood Village, last Saturday afternoon.

Jocelyn Dunn, the big blonde nurse with the D-cup chest — a woman with easy access to both prescription medicine and Captain Archie Todd.

19

On my way to Larkspur I called Tamara to tell her what I’d discovered on the Todd case. She had some news for me on the Hunter case in return.

“Crazybone Cotter is still alive,” she said, “still living in Billington, Illinois. But my guess is, his hunting days are over. As of Christmas Eve two years ago. Man had a stroke, left him mostly paralyzed.”

“Brain damage?”

“No word on that. Pretty much bedridden, though. Wife number three’s taking care of him. Ellen Coombs, a.k.a. Sheila Hunter, was number two. He divorced her a year after she split, grounds of desertion.”

“Any publicity on the bond theft or her running off with Pete Stoddard?”

“Not a whisper. Whole thing was covered up.”

“How about links between Cotter and organized crime?”

“Oh, yeah. He was brought up on money-laundering charges by the feds in ’96, tried and acquitted for lack of evidence the following year.”

“Strong mob ties?”

“Didn’t come out that way. His lawyer didn’t seem to be connected, either. Just a poor innocent victim of bad judgment, man claimed, and the jury believed him.”

“Uh-huh”

“Not long after the trial he sold his manufacturing company outright to some Chicago outfit, maybe controlled by the wiseguys, maybe not. No way I could find out for sure.” Wiseguys. Tamara tossed off slang terms like that as casually as a seasoned task-force vet. Working for me hadn’t educated her that way; her father was a Redwood City police lieutenant. “Also couldn’t turn up anything on whether Cotter’s still connected or if the feds are still investigating him.”

“My guess would be no on both counts,” I said. “The trial publicity would’ve made him useless as a laundryman, and without strong ties they’d have cut him loose in a hurry. Doesn’t matter in any case, as far as we’re concerned.”

“What about the Hunters?” she asked. “I mean, I got all of this stuff pretty much straight off the Net. They must’ve been keeping tabs on Cotter all along, right? Wouldn’t make any sense for them not to.”

“I figure they were, but what you and I read into the information and what they read into it are two different things. They may have relaxed some after Cotter’s stroke — Jack Hunter, at least. That’s probably why he let Twining talk him into taking out the life insurance policy. He was the smarter and more level-headed of the pair, the glue that held them together all those years. Without him she just couldn’t handle the pressure, and her fear and paranoia took over.”

“Suppose you don’t find her, alive or dead? Suppose nobody does? What happens to the kid then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Tamara, I just don’t know.”

At Redwood Village I parked in the visitors’ lot and walked over to the double-winged building that housed the rec center, dining hall, administration offices, and clinic. Before I went to tell Cybil the news about Jocelyn Dunn and John Klinghurst, I wanted to check with Dr. Lengel on a couple of things: whether Dunn had teen on duty the night Archie Todd died, and whether a supply of the pink, 0.10 digitoxin pills was kept on hand at the clinic. The more information I had when I talked to Evan Patterson and then to the local authorities, the more likely it would lead to an immediate official investigation.

But I didn’t get to talk to Lengel. Turned out this was one of his days off. And the physician on duty was out visiting a patient. The desk nurse was not Jocelyn Dunn, fortunately, though I learned Dunn was on the premises today. When I identified myself as a detective and the relative of a resident, the desk nurse consented to answer my question about the digitoxin. Affirmative. I didn’t ask the other question; there was not much chance she would check a past duty roster without permission. Let police investigators follow through on that one.

From the clinic I walked through the landscaped grounds to Cybil’s bungalow. The sun was out, but it was windy and cool; the only other people I saw were two elderly joggers in sweatsuits and a gardener making a lot of noise and fouling the air with a leaf-blower. Leaf blowers and back-up beepers are two of my pet peeves. Gross noise polluters, both, the intrusive kind that grate on your nerves after a while. If it were up to me, the inventors of both would be locked up in enclosed spaces with the things going nonstop until they either went deaf or admitted their sins and vowed to invent quieter replacements.

I walked faster, not that you can escape a racket like that on foot. And when I got to Cybil’s, I saw that the front door of her unit stood partway open. It gave me pause. The day was too chilly for open doors, and I happened to know that she had little tolerance for drafts or flies. I climbed the three steps, knocked and called out her name just as the leaf-blower went mercifully silent.