nodded. “Frankie was in prison then, though. No better than he ought to be, Frankie. I told her over and over, she oughta leave him, that one day he was gonna come to a sticky end, but instead of Frankie, it was Laura who died…”
She trailed off.
“I’ve looked at his prison record,” Grimaldi said, yanking the conversation back on track. “There was no question at all that he wasn’t the one who killed her.”
She hadn’t presented it as a question, but Mrs. Drimmel shook her head. “No. He wasn’t violent, Frankie. Never raised a hand to her, or to the kids. Just lazy and weak minded. Couldn’t be bothered to work for a living when taking other people’s stuff was easier. But he wasn’t violent.”
“Would you happen to know where I could find him these days?” Grimaldi asked. She obviously wasn’t convinced by Mrs. Drimmel’s description of Frankie. “He finished his parole from the last time he was in prison—he was living in Birmingham at the time—but that was two years ago, and there’s no record of him anywhere at the moment. I’ve looked, but I can’t find him.”
“We haven’t seen him in longer than that,” Mrs. Drimmel said, frowning. “Jacob—that’s my husband—warned him not to come around here no more, asking for handouts. That musta been five or more years ago.”
“And you haven’t seen him since?”
Mrs. Drimmel shook her head. “That’s when he went to Birmingham. I gave him a hundred dollars from my rainy day fund and told him he’d better not come back, or Jacob’d whop him.”
I guess Jacob didn’t share Frankie’s laziness and weakness, if he could whop his son-in-law when necessary.
“So Frankie went to Birmingham five years ago,” Grimaldi picked up the story.
Mrs. Drimmel nodded. “That’s the last we’ve seen of him. He don’t write and he don’t call.”
“No contact with his children?”
“Not less’n he wants something from them,” Mrs. Drimmel said. And added, “He never even tried to get’em back after Laura passed. Told us we could keep’em, and with his good wishes.”
She shook her head. “I don’t hold with a man who won’t step up and take care of what needs doing.”
“You were taking care of them when Laura Lee died,” Grimaldi nudged.
I got to my feet with a murmur and drifted toward the fireplace. Mrs. Drimmel gave me a distracted nod. “That I was. Frankie had finally gone too far and gotten himself caught and thrown in prison, and Laura had the hardest time making ends meet. We offered to help her, but after all the things we’d said about Frankie—”
She didn’t finish the sentence, but it wasn’t necessary. I could read between the lines, and I’m sure Grimaldi could, too. Mr. and Mrs. Drimmel had given Laura Lee a hard time about getting involved with Frankie, and when they turned out to be right, pride had made her refuse their help.
“So she took a second job at the truck stop at night,” Grimaldi said, to get Mrs. Drimmel going again.
The older woman nodded. “She was waiting tables, and maybe she did some other things, too, to pick up a little extra money…”
The bookshelves were full of what looked like old, leather-bound reference volumes, and issues of Car & Driver magazine for at least the past couple of decades. I ran my eyes over the photographs ranged on the fireplace mantel.
A black and white wedding picture of a young man and woman in what I guessed were the late nineteen-sixties garb must be Mr. and Mrs. Drimmel. Jacob was big and broad-shouldered in a suit and tie, while his petite wife tried to make up for the difference with a bouffant hairdo that probably owed some of its height to a pair of socks or the heel of a loaf of bread balanced on her head underneath the hair. Her shoes were slingbacks with skinny, two-inch heels and toes so pointy they could have served as deadly weapons. They both looked solemn and a little scared, like the future was a scary place. And seeing as how they probably got married during the worst of the Vietnam War, who could blame them?
A later photo of a brown-eyed girl with the big hair of the nineteen-eighties had to be Laura Lee; probably a high school graduation photo. She was more striking than pretty, with a slightly oversized nose she might have grown into before she died, but that rather dominated her face at the tender age of eighteen or so.
“Who told you about