So who was she saving the money for?
I got a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“How about the Clarks?” I said.
“The who?”
“People next door.”
“What about them?”
“You’d think if she didn’t have any family she would’ve left something to her best friends.”
He thought about that for a minute and nodded.
“Or at least left it to her dog,” I said.
“There’s a dog?”
“Out back, gnawing on a bone.”
“What happens to it?”
“The pound.”
“Well, that’s pretty shitty.”
“Want a dog?”
“I got three kids, a goldfish, two canaries, and a dachshund who hates strangers. How about you?”
“I live alone, no pets allowed.”
“Too bad, so the dog goes to the pound. What do we do now?”
“Look, we don’t know a damn thing about this woman before she moved here in 1924,” I said. “The Clarks say she came from Texas somewhere. Her license says she’s forty-seven. She didn’t just hatch seventeen years ago. Where the hell was she for the first thirty years of her life?”
“Well there ain’t anything in this house that’ll tell us the answer to that question.”
“I want the house sealed. Nobody else in or out.”
“Aw, c’mon, Zeke.”
“Tomorrow I take the bank, find out where the checks came from, and get into her safe deposit box; maybe there’s a will in there. You take the job, see if somebody down there knows anything about her that might fill in her background. Maybe we can find a survivor. Then check Motor Vehicles, see if they have any further background on her.”
Ski shook his head and rolled his eyes.
“What’re you building, Zee?”
“Precaution.”
“Precaution,” he said dejectedly. “Precaution of what?”
“Just precaution. That’s our job, Ski. Got to be cautious.”
He growled under his breath and got up.
“I’ll post a man at the door.”
“Until after the autopsy.”
“Right.”
“This lady didn’t want anyone to know her before she was thirty-or apparently since. Let’s find out why. I’ll take everything we’ve got, go over the records when I get home, put together everything we know about her.”
“How about the people next door? Maybe we should take another crack at them.”
“They’re not going anywhere. Let’s see what we come up with. Maybe it’ll jog their memories. I’ll lock the place down. Take the box out to the car. I know how the smell gets to you.”
“You’re a jewel, Zee.”
“Fourteen carat.”
“Then can we stop and get something to eat? I’m starving.”
“You’re always starving, Ski.”
“I eat for three.”
I closed and locked the windows, then went to the back door and looked outside. When I opened it, Rosebud stared at me. A nub of the bone lay at his feet.
“He’s probably hungry,” Mrs. Clark said. She was on her back porch with another drink. Jimmy sat beside her on the porch swing, sucking on a beer. “His bowl’s under the stairs. She leaves it there during the day in case he wants a snack.”
“What are you, his guardian angel?”
“Somebody has to care.”
“You’re doing more than your share,” I said. “This dog eats better than I do. By the way, do you have any photos of Verna?”
“She was funny about that. Hated to have her picture taken.”
I got the bowl, went into the kitchen, opened a can of Ken-L-Ration, and gave it to him. It vanished. He sat down and licked his chops. Then he looked over at the door. On a hook beside it was his leash.
“Ah hell.” I sighed.
I leashed him up, got the rest of the bones from the refrigerator, stuck a couple of cans of dog food in my pockets, got the front door key from under the mat, locked the front door, and we went out to the car. I opened the door and the dog jumped in the backseat without being invited.
I got behind the wheel and laid the bones on the seat beside me. Agassi didn’t say anything until we were a block or two away.
“What’s that?” he asked, nodding toward the butcher-paper bundle.
“Dog bones.”
“I’m not that hungry.”
“I thought you’d eat anything, Agassi.”
“ ‘I save the bones for Henry Jones ’cause Henry don’t eat no meat,’ ” he sang the line. It was an old blues song.
“I know, he’s an egg man,” I said, finishing the line.
We drove another block. Agassi looked at the dog.
“I thought he was headed for the pound.”
“I’ll take him tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.”
Another block.
“What’s the hound’s name?”
“… Slugger,” I said.
CHAPTER 3
I lived on Barker Avenue, a quiet road off Sunset near La Mirado. They hadn’t paved the road in front of the house since the CCC came through in 1936, but I had learned to maneuver the potholes and ease over the six-inch ridge between the road and my driveway without breaking an axle. The driveway ended at the house. No garage. There was a weather-worn tin mailbox on an erect four-by-four beside a cement walk up to the front door, a couple of dusty oleanders under the windows, and a cyprus tree near the street. The front lawn was fairly respectable and was freshly mown. The kid three doors down made thirty cents every ten days cutting it for me.
All in all, a respectable family neighborhood without the desperate sense of community pride of Pacific Meadows. Nobody was trying to impress anybody. People minded their own business, and if you were a little on the eccentric side, and wanted to fill your yard with plastic purple doofus birds or cement over the grass and paint it chartreuse, nobody would give a damn.
I decided Rosebud needed a name change, so I was going to reprogram him simply by calling him Slugger from now on. When I was a kid, my first dog was a little white mutt with a black circle over one eye, kind of like the dog in the Our Gang comedies. I called him Skippy. My mother was always finding fault with him. “It’s sinful the way that dog goes around wetting on the trees,” or “It’s sinful the noise he makes when he drinks.” Everything Skippy did was sinful and ultimately he started answering to “Sinful” and ignoring “Skippy.” He lived until he was about thirteen and he was “Sinful” for most of his life.
I pulled up in the driveway, parked, got out, and went around to the other door and opened it.
“Okay, Slugger,” I said, “welcome home.”
He stared at me with his big tongue hanging out.
I stepped back, clapped my hands, and said, “Come on, Slugger, let’s go.”
Nothing.
“You Slugger, me Zeke,” I said. “Let’s go.”
He just looked at me.
“Damn it, Rosebud, I…”
He was out in a flash, walked straight to the mailbox and peed, then to the cyprus tree, then to a couple of the shrubs. Then he lay down in the middle of the lawn, rolled over, and began twisting to scratch his back. Then he got up, shook off with a great flapping of his big ears, walked to the front door, and sat down.
Reprogramming was going to take a while.
The house was a white bungalow with green trim that was built the year Calvin Coolidge was elected president. A nice living room, a kitchen with an alcove that protruded from the house and looked like it was an afterthought. It had a nice space under it where Slugger could get out of the sun or rain. The dining room could accommodate a table and about four people comfortably. Since I never had company anyway, I had turned it into an office, with a child’s blackboard and several different-colored chalk sticks, and two erasers so I could slap them together to clean them. The bedroom was large enough to fit a double bed, a dresser, two bedside lamps, and an easy chair and lamp for reading. The bathroom had a good-size tub and a stall shower.
My record player was the most expensive thing in the house. It was in the corner of the living room and had record shelves made of orange crates on both sides of it.