For forty years Edna had lived here. Last I’d heard, she had a live-in housekeeper or nurse taking care of her, something like that.
I climbed four warped treads to the front porch and came face to face with a recently written note on a three-by-five card that read: No solicitors, no interviews, no reporters. Do NOT Ring the Bell! This means you! It was thumbtacked to the wood above the doorbell.
Evidently the Sjorgen-Milliken saga had also reached this place and the occupants were fed up with it. I knew how they felt.
Roadblocks, decisions. I turned and looked back at the street, fifty feet away. What would a real gumshoe do at a time like this?
Ring the bell, of course, see who answers, try to strike up a conversation, apologize if necessary, wing it, backpedal if anyone pulled a gun, pretend to be a Mormon, hand out tracts.
Or maybe come back at two in the morning, climb in through a window and skulk around. A real gumshoe might do that.
I compromised. I knocked.
Waited half a minute, knocked again. Waited a full minute, then rang the damn bell. Nothing. I listened to the dead quiet of the house, stared at the blank, empty gaze of its windows.
So much for Plan A. Plan B, skulking in the wee hours of the morning, didn’t have much appeal. If a Plan C were in the works, I’d have to invent it.
I stepped off the porch, went around the side of the house and looked down toward the back. High above, the attic window still stood open, curtain across the sill as if a gust of wind had blown it there. A sound of jazz floated on the air, as faint as a memory.
Toward the back, a separate garage sat in the backyard, also in a state of disrepair, low and shadowy beneath the leafy elms. Along the outer wall of the main house, a phone line dangled from loose, rusty staples and disappeared through a badly puttied hole. I looked up. The siding was stained where water had leaked from a damaged gutter. Big discoveries, these.
Between the shrubbery, whatever foundation the house had was partly hidden by latticework, two-inch-wide cedar strips crisscrossing in diagonals, forming diamonds beyond which lay blackness, exuding a cool moist odor of dark earth and worms.
The first-story windows were eight feet off the ground, too high to peek inside, so I stepped between two bushes and crouched down, peered through the latticework into the darkness beneath the house. At first I saw concrete piers, supporting the house. Then I jerked my head back sharply. Inside, six inches from my eye, was a glistening black widow spider, fat as a plum. I’d never seen one so big, hanging there upside down in the gloom, waiting for meat, for flies that sought that rank, undisturbed coolness beneath the house.
Bright red hourglass, so shiny it looked freshly painted. My skin crawled. I don’t care for alien critters: spiders, scorpions, centipedes, earwigs, potato bugs, but there’s nothing worse than black widows. Things can move fast as hell. I was glad they didn’t have wings. I glanced to one side and saw another, then another. A dozen of them—
“Hey, you.”
I turned, looked up. Not four feet away stood a gorgeous girl with straight black hair hanging to the small of her back, pale-green nylon jogging shorts and an off-white crop top with a ragged lower edge, as if she’d hacked off a sleeveless T-shirt with scissors. She was a real beauty, twenty years old, maybe only eighteen. Hard to tell when they’re that young. The bottom edge of her top was cut off high, too high. The fabric stood well out from her body, riding the swell of her breasts. From that angle I could see two inches of sweet curving undersides, where a woman’s skin is softest.
The nudity was jarring. Pale rounded globes, as unexpected as ghosts. The thought darted through my mind that there’d been a lot of this kind of thing in my life lately. Greg’s fate notwithstanding, this PI gig was still right on track.
The girl’s feet were planted well apart. No shoes. Her stomach was flat. Cute little pierced bellybutton sporting a silver ring that held a green stone. She was slender, approaching skinny, ribs so prominent I could have counted them, if I’d been so inclined.
“You rang the bell,” she said accusingly.
“Guilty as charged.”
“Can’t you read?”
“Read what?” When in doubt, feign ignorance. For me, that’s never a stretch.
She frowned. “What’re you doin’ down there?”
“Pest control,” I stayed in a crouch and waved a hand toward the latticework, took another peek at her breasts even if she was way too young for an old codger like me.
She smiled, pushed her chest out another quarter inch and said, “So, sport, what d’you think?”
Any number of things, an entire murky galaxy of things, none of which seemed right for the moment, so what I chose to say was, “Be sure to get your oil changed every three thousand miles.”
She blinked. Finally she said, “You’re an idiot.”
Okay, she didn’t fool easily.
Another woman came up beside her. Older, but they looked enough alike to be sisters, or mother and daughter. “That’s no way to talk, Winter, honey,” she said.
Winter. A chilly name, but appropriate. I got slowly to my feet. The women were the same height, about five foot five. Winter had an incredibly tiny twenty-three inch waist. I guessed her weight at a hundred pounds, if that, but she looked wiry enough. Her stomach was flat, hard with muscle.
“John Wayne here is checking out bugs, Mom,” she said, still looking at me.
John Wayne? Swiftly—or maybe not so swiftly—I removed the hat.
“And here I thought you were a private investigator, Mr. Angel,” the older woman said. She was a looker, too, mid-thirties, wearing blue denim shorts and a yellow shirt with bits of redwood bark or mulch clinging to them. A two-way radio was attached to her
