did you ever hear of me saying an unkind thing about Allan?”
“Never. You were doing business here, and you needed Allan, and you were too smart to go around saying you didn’t like his style. But I’ve always sensed it. I even mentioned it to O’Connor.”
“O’Connor’s dead,” he said, getting into the car.
“Well, yes, Keene, I certainly know that O’Connor is dead. When you work with a man for over a dozen years, you notice such things. This is not something I said into a Ouija board. I talked about it with him when he was alive. You haven’t been in town for a few years now. This was before you left, before O’Connor died. He agreed with me-there was some kind of tension between you and Allan.”
He hesitated. “So your old friend talked about me, eh?”
“Yes. He liked you, Keene. Said you and Corbin and Ben were the only honest men in that bunch who had worked on redevelopment in the 1970s.”
Keene looked away for a moment, then turned back to me. “O’Connor was wrong,” he said, and closed the car door.
I thought he would drive of, but he rolled down the window. “Sorry, Irene, guess I’m rude after all. Hope you don’t take this personally. It’s not about you.”
I pulled out a business card.
“I sure as hell don’t want to take that thing from you,” he said. “I’ve got to get back home. Long drive. I’ll be making it again in a few days.”
“Why?”
“Ben’s funeral. You going?”
“Yes.”
He frowned. “Don’t come up to me and talk to me there, okay? I’ll send you a box of avocados.”
He drove off.
O’Connor was wrong, Keene said. About Keene’s dislike of Allan Moffett? Or about his honesty?
Frank wasn’t in the restaurant, so I burrowed into my coat and walked around to the parking lot in the back. The sky was darkening, but we had parked near one of the parking lot lampposts, and I could see Frank sitting in the Volvo. As I drew closer, I saw that he had his arms folded over the top of the steering wheel, his forehead resting on them. He didn’t look up when I got in the car.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“No,” he said.
It hit me, then. I reached over and placed my hand over his. “Thinking about your dad?”
I heard him let his breath out, a long sigh. He took my hand, held it tightly as he leaned back in his seat. His face gave me the answer before he said, “Yes.”
Frank’s father had a heart attack three or four years ago; Frank was with him shortly before he collapsed. Although Frank hurried back into the room and did CPR, his father had died.
For a long time, we just sat in that parking lot, holding hands, Frank looking out into the night. Rain began to fall. I watched the reflections of the rivulets on the windshield move across his face.
“You never finished telling me that story,” I said. “The one about the man who didn’t park in his garage.”
“No, I didn’t, did I?” he said, and then a look of mild amusement crossed his face. “We waited until the guy came out of his house, and my partner asked him, ‘Could we see the garage?’
“‘Sure,’ he says, ‘no problem.’ He opens the garage door, and the entire floor of the garage is red.”
“Blood?” I asked.
Frank shook his head. “Paint. The guy has painted the entire floor of the garage. The exterior of the house is cracked and peeling, but he’s painted his garage floor. When my partner comments on this, the guy says, ‘Yeah, well, I’m gonna paint the whole house, I just started here.’”
“Right.”
“That’s what we thought,” Frank said. “So while my partner is talking to him, I’m kind of snooping around. This is the cleanest garage on earth. Too clean. It’s been scrubbed. I look up, and I can see that even the light fixture has been cleaned. I wander over to the sink. There’s a shiny new trap under it. I start wondering if anything might be left under the rim of the drain. But then I look next to the sink, and I see a mop leaning against he wall. A good old-fashioned cotton mop. I move it around a little, and poke through the strands, and guess what I see?”
“Bloodstains.”
“Well, no. But I take it over to the guy. What I was showing him was rust from the metal clamp, but he didn’t know that. I made out like I was sure it was blood, and my partner kept his mouth shut. I asked the guy, ‘Why’d you go to all this time and trouble, and then forget to throw the mophead away with the sink trap?’ He started crying-to this day, I’m not sure if it was because we had caught him, or because he had done a lot of unnecessary cleaning. Anyway, he confessed.”
“Was there any blood on the mop?” I asked.
“Oh yeah, the lab guys found traces of it all over the place, even before they wrecked the paint job on the floor.” He smiled. “I got to tell the guy what we were doing to his paint job.”
“I think this is one of your best Bakersfield stories.”
“My dad was still working then. He loved the business with the mop-told it to the other guys so often, it’s a wonder I didn’t end up with a nickname out of it. I’d say, ‘Dad, we would have caught him without the mop.’ He wouldn’t hear a word of it.”
He started the car, turned on the windshield wipers.
“You okay to drive?” I asked.
“Yeah.” He leaned over and gave me a quick kiss. “I’m okay now.”
We were almost home when I remembered the cocktail napkin. Frank saw me pull it out and try to read it, and flipped on the dome light. “What’s that?”
“Keene Dage’s cocktail napkin.”
“What’s on it?”
“The letter
“Or just a doodle,” he said.
“Right,” I said glumly, which made him laugh.
That was okay.
8
ONFRIDAY MORNING,my time was whittled away on the phone, to no apparent purpose other than strengthening my dialing finger. I was trying to contact people who might know more about Allan Moffett’s resignation. Most of my time was spent talking to receptionists and secretaries whose bosses supposedly weren’t in. Not in now, not expected back in today, probably not in as long as I was the caller.
The people who were willing to talk to me were his political enemies, and although Moffett’s long tenure in a powerful position allowed him to gather quite a few adversaries, it was clear they were not knowledgeable on the subject of his sudden retirement. It was all well and good to allow a few of these frustrated souls to tell me how happy they were that Moffett was gone, but I wanted to do more than gather reactions to his departure.
I listened to their theories, hoping some useful lead might be found. There had been the disappointment around the convention center plans, they pointed out. The city and its developers had suffered a defeat at the hands of the Coastal Commission, which had recently denied approval of a waterfront convention center. But when I countered that Moffett had weathered far worse, no one disagreed.
There were budget shortfalls and an increasingly uncooperative city council. Budget shortfalls didn’t fit with sudden flight, though, or account for the guest list at the dinner meeting, although I kept that to myself. And even Moffett’s enemies couldn’t blame him for problems caused by cutbacks from the county and state. If anything, Moffett had relentlessly urged the city to budget more realistically when cutbacks occurred.
His priorities might not have been universally embraced by the city council, but even I knew that the council
