about that.
“Can you tell?” he said.
“I don’t really know what to think about you,” she said.
“But that could be a good thing, right?” he said.
They both listened as “La Cucaracha” was played on the horn of a truck in the parking lot below. Jimmy went over to the window and spread the blinds. It was a lunch truck, chromed up, fancy. When you started your shift at five in the morning, you had lunch at ten-thirty. A Mexican man with a coin belt around his waist set up a folding table as the workers came out, all women as far as Jimmy could see. At least now she was talking to him like a person and not like a servant. Or a doctor. Or a priest. But he could tell she wanted this to be over, maybe was wishing she hadn’t even thought of this, had never had these questions about her father and murder and a time out of time, or at least had not given in to them.
“Why me? Why do you want me to do this?” he said.
“I asked a few people to recommend someone. I asked Joel—”
He turned away from the window and looked at her. “Joel said he didn’t put me up for this. He said you came to him, asking about me. Not about investigators. About me.”
She just stood there. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to say it.
He held out his hand. She gave him the file.
“Do you need a retainer or—”
“Kiss me on the cheek,” Jimmy said.
She just waited.
“At the party at Joel’s,” he said, “before you revealed your ulterior motive, I thought you liked me a little. It’d be nice if it all wasn’t just a smart girl’s trap.”
The phone buzzed. She didn’t look at it.
“I don’t see—”
“You have to kiss me,” Jimmy said.
She kissed him on the cheek. There was a kind of defiance in it, as if she’d made herself believe that it was her idea.
She didn’t recoil like the girl on Sunset.
Jimmy opened the file.
“One Ten Rivo Alto Canal,” he said aloud.
There was a gunshot stretched over a long second and the fla sh that came with it, flaring in the white bedroom like lightning from a little localized storm. Elaine Kantke, late twenties, as pretty as a model, fell back onto the satin sheets on a circular bed, blood already leaking from the hole in her jaw.
Her silk pajama top fell open. She wore nothing else.
In the same second, a meaty blue-collar man named Bill Danko crumpled where he stood beside the bed as the same bullet which had passed through her tore away his cheek. He wore baggy suit pants and a loud shirt. There was a hi-fi on the nightstand, playing an LP.
Elaine Kantke was already dead. A second shot finished Bill Danko off, caught him in the V just above the bridge of his nose.
Jimmy wondered if they had a name for that.
He stood in front of the microfiche machine in the library at the Long Beach Press-Telegram. The killings were played up big, a four-column story and two sidebars. There were pictures of the two-story Spanish style house on Rivo Alto Canal and interior shots of the bedroom, the covered bodies, the bed, the hi-fi. There were arrows and dotted lines and X’s and hyperventilated text in the cutlines, all of it under a thirty-six point headline full wide:
TWO SLAIN IN NAPLES
Jimmy put in a quarter, hit the button, pulled a copy.
On the inside slop-over page, beside the rest of the story, there was an ad for a VW bug at $1,995. He smiled as he looked at it, that old familiar shape. He pulled a copy of that, too. He rolled through another week of microfiche. Time whipped past like a dramatic effect in an old movie.
He stopped on:
D.A. ARRESTED, DENIES SLAYING WIFE, MAN
After a week or two, the evidence had been assembled. You took your time when your murderer was an assistant district attorney. The case they had against Jack Kantke was only sketchy at this point, at least what was in the papers, but it was enough to arrest, enough for another banner headline.
And enough for most people to make up their minds about Jack Kantke. There he was, if you needed something more, in a shot on the steps of the downtown Criminal Courts Building, his hands cuffed in front of him, an odd half smile on his face. One side of his mouth was grinning, the other wasn’t.