I shrugged. "I'll do what I can, but I can't guarantee the results. How are you going to feel if the cops are right?"
She stood up, giving me a flat look. "I don't know why Rudd died, but it had nothing to do with drugs," she said. She opened her handbag and extracted a roll of bills the size of a wad of socks. "What do you charge?"
"Thirty bucks an hour plus expenses."
She peeled off several hundred-dollar bills and laid them on the desk.
I got out a contract.
My second encounter with the Parker shotgun came in the form of a dealer's appraisal slip that I discovered when I was nosing through Rudd Osterling's private possessions an hour later at the house. The address she'd given me was on the Bluffs, a residential area on the west side of town, overlooking the Pacific. It should have been an elegant neighbourhood, but the ocean generated too much fog and too much corrosive salt air. The houses were small and had a temporary feel to them, as though the occupants intended to move on when the month was up. No one seemed to get around to painting the trim, and the yards looked like they were kept by people who spent all day at the beach. I followed her in my car, reviewing the information she'd given me as I urged my ancient VW up Capilla Hill and took a right on Presipio.
The late Rudd Osterling had been in Santa Teresa since the sixties, when he migrated to the West Coast in search of sunshine, good surf, good dope, and casual sex. Lisa told me he'd lived in vans and communes, working variously as a roofer, tree trimmer, bean picker, fry cook, and forklift operator-never with any noticeable ambition or success. He'd started dealing cocaine two years earlier, apparently netting more money than he was accustomed to. Then he'd met and married Lisa, and she'd been determined to see him clean up his act. According to her, he'd retired from the drug trade and was just in the process of setting himself up in a landscape maintenance business when someone blew the top of his head off.
I pulled into the driveway behind her, glancing at the frame and stucco bungalow with its patchy grass and dilapidated fence. It looked like one of those households where there's always something under construction, probably without permits and not up to code. In this case, a foundation had been laid for an addition to the garage, but the weeds were already growing up through cracks in the concrete. A wooden outbuilding had been dismantled, the old lumber tossed in an unsightly pile. Closer to the house, there were stacks of cheap pecan wood panelling, sun-bleached in places and warped along one edge. It was all hapless and depressing, but she scarcely looked at it.
I followed her into the house.
"We were just getting the house fixed up when he died," she remarked.
"When did you buy the place?" I was manufacturing small talk, trying to cover my distaste at the sight of the old linoleum counter, where a line of ants stretched from a crust of toast and jelly all the way out the back door.
"We didn't really. This was my mother's. She and my stepdad moved back to the Midwest last year."
"What about Rudd? Did he have any family out here?"
"They're all in Connecticut, I think, real la-di-dah. His parents are dead, and his sisters wouldn't even come out to the funeral."
"Did he have a lot of friends?"
"All cocaine dealers have friends."
"Enemies?"
"Not that I ever heard about."
"Who was his supplier?"
"I don't know that."
"No disputes? Suits pending? Quarrels with the neighbours? Family arguments about the inheritance?"
She gave me a no on all four counts.
I had told her I wanted to go through his personal belongings, so she showed me into the tiny back bedroom, where he'd set up a card table and some cardboard file boxes. A real entrepreneur. I began to search while she leaned against the doorframe, watching.
I said, "Tell me about what was going on the week he died?" I was sorting through cancelled checks in a Nike shoe box. Most were written to the neighbourhood supermarket, utilities, telephone company.
She moved to the desk chair and sat down. "I can't tell you much because I was at work. I do alterations and repairs at a dry cleaner's up at Presipio Mall. Rudd would stop in now and then when he was out running around. He'd picked up a few jobs already, but he really wasn't doing the gardening full time. He was trying to get all his old business squared away. Some kid owed him money. I remember that."
"He sold cocaine on credit?"
She shrugged. "Maybe ii was grass or pills. Somehow the kid owed him a bundle. That's all I know."
"I don't suppose he kept any records."
"Un-uhn. It was all in his head. He was too paranoid to put anything down in black and white."
The file boxes were jammed with old letters, tax returns, receipts. It all looked like junk to me.
"What about the day he was killed? Were you at work then?"
She shook her head. "It was a Saturday. I was off work, but I'd gone to the market. I was out maybe an hour and a half, and when I got home, police cars were parked in front, and the paramedics were here. Neighbours were standing out on the street." She stopped talking, and I was left to imagine the rest.
"Had he been expecting anyone?"
"If he was, he never said anything to me. He was in the garage, doing I don't know what. Chauncey, next door, heard the shotgun go off, but by the time he got here to investigate, whoever did it was gone."
I got up and moved toward the hallway. "Is this the bedroom down here?"
"Right. I haven't gotten rid of his stuff yet. I guess I'll have to eventually. I'm going to use his office for the nursery."
I moved into the master bedroom and went through his hanging clothes. "Did the police find anything?"
"They didn't look. Well, one guy came through and poked around some. About five minutes' worth."
I began to check through the drawers she indicated were his. Nothing remarkable came to light. On top of the chest was one of those brass and walnut caddies, where Rudd apparently kept his watch, keys, loose change. Almost idly, I picked it up. Under it there was a folded slip of paper. It was a partially completed appraisal form from a gun shop out in Colgate, a township to the north of us. "What's a Parker?" I said when I'd glanced at it. She peered over the slip.
"Oh. That's probably the appraisal on the shotgun he got."
"The one he was killed with?"
"Well, I don't know. They never found the weapon, but the homicide detective said they couldn't run it through ballistics, anyway-or whatever it is they do."
"Why'd he have it appraised in the first place?"
"He was taking it in trade for a big drug debt, and he needed to know if it was worth it."
"Was this the kid you mentioned before or someone else?"
"The same one, I think. At first, Rudd intended to turn around and sell the gun, but then he found out it was a collector's item so he decided to keep it. The gun dealer called a couple of times after Rudd died, but it was gone by then."
"And you told the cops all this stuff?"
"Sure. They couldn't have cared less."
I doubted that, but I tucked the slip in my pocket anyway. I'd check it out and then talk to Dolan in Homicide.
The gun shop was located on a narrow side street in Colgate, just off the main thoroughfare. Colgate looks like it's made up of hardware stores, U-Haul rentals, and plant nurseries; places that seem to have half their merchandise outside, surrounded by chain-link fence. The gun shop had been set up in someone's front parlour in a dinky white frame house. There were some glass counters filled with gun paraphernalia, but no guns in sight, The man who came out of the back room was in his fifties, with a narrow face and graying hair, gray eyes made luminous by rimless glasses. He wore a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a long gray apron tied around his waist. He had perfect teeth, but when he talked I could see the rim of pink where his upper plate was fit, and it spoiled the effect. Still, I had to give him credit for a certain level of good looks, maybe a seven on a scale of ten. Not bad for a man his age. "Yes, ma'am," he said. He had a trace of an accent, Virginia, I thought.