Ethan said, “Shit. Hang on a sec.”
He got up and crossed the room, disappearing through a doorway. I caught a glimpse of a run of upper kitchen cabinets with the doors ajar. One of the drawers under the kitchen counter extended by six inches as well. I’ve noticed there’s a whole class of people who can pass an open cabinet door or drawer without reaching out to close it. I am not one.
I took advantage of Ethan’s absence to do a survey. The wall-to-wall carpeting was beige. The walls were also beige except for the multicolored crayon marks. There was a corner fireplace constructed out of white-painted brick, and a big picture window looking out to the street. A bicycle was propped against the wall near the front door. The rest of the home furnishings consisted of two toy boxes, a stationary exercise bike, a high chair, a stroller, and a television set. Someone had assembled a series of bins for the children’s belongings, each neatly labeled. So far everything seemed to be strewn on the floor. The house smelled of doggie breath.
The pile of clothes to my right was a distraction. I’m a neatnik and it was hard to sit there without starting to fold little T-shirts and onesies and child-size blue jeans with elastic in the waist. This is not proper behavior for a hard-boiled private eye, especially on an occasion such as this, telling a perfect stranger he’d been disinherited. I was already anxious about the conversation coming up and I had to put my hands between my knees to keep from matching stray socks.
I could hear Ethan banging and thumping in the kitchen. Blackie and Smokie were currently on the floor having a pretend doggie wrestling match, mouths open while they worried at each other with their teeth. Scott flung himself into the fray, landing on one of the pair, which put them into an ecstasy of squirms and fake growls.
“Leave the dogs alone,” Ethan called idly from the other room.
Scott rolled off and returned to his seat at the little table. Moments later, Ethan appeared with two small plastic plates that each held half a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He put the plates down and Scott began to eat, holding the sandwich in his left hand so he could color with his right. There was a coffee can of marker pens he was using one by one. Most lay uncapped on the table in front of him.
“Hey, Binkers, you want lunch?”
The baby dropped to her hands and knees and made a beeline from the coffee table to the lunch plates, crawling with speed and assurance. She looked like a wind-up toy, hands and knees moving with mechanical efficiency. Scott pushed her plate closer to the edge of the table. She pulled herself up on fat baby legs, grabbed the half sandwich, and banged it on the table. Then she stuck it in her mouth.
“Sorry about that,” Ethan said as he returned to his seat. “Nice of you to drive all this way. Were you a friend of his?”
I shook my head. “A relative. Rebecca Dace was my grandmother. She was married to Quillen Millhone. I believe their son, Randy Millhone, was your father’s favorite uncle.”
His face was blank, unclouded by recognition. “You lost me there. Who’s this?”
“My father’s name was Randy Millhone. Uncle R.”
“Oh, sure, sure. Uncle R. I remember hearing about him.”
“I don’t know if my father was actually your father’s uncle. The title might have been used to simplify the blood tie.”
“So we’re related? The two of us?”
“It looks that way. My guess is we’re cousins, but I’m not sure what kind. First, second, once removed.”
He cracked his knuckles and his right knee jumped a couple of times. This was the first hint I’d had that he was anxious about the subject. I could see the neck of a guitar resting against the back of the couch behind him. He reached over, picked it up, and tucked it in against him as though prepared to play. His action had the same air as a man reaching for a pack of cigarettes.
“I like your guitar,” I remarked.
“It’s a 1968 Martin D-35. Guy let me take it out on loan to see if I like it. Three thousand bucks, I better like it,” he said. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Your dad grew up here, is that it?”
“That’s right. At some point, he moved to Santa Teresa. He and my mother married in 1935 and I was born fifteen years later.”
“That must have been a surprise.”
“A good one, I hope. When I was five, both were killed in a car wreck, so I was raised by a maiden aunt, my mother’s sister. I didn’t know anything about my father’s side of the family until recently.” I wanted to kick myself for babbling on and on. What was it to him?
I noticed we’d hopped right over the fact of his father’s death and I wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. At least we were having what passed for a conversation, though the small talk was making me tense. He seemed happy enough to have me sitting there with the subject matter wandering this way and that. Maybe he appreciated the company, being hemmed in all day with the little ones. He focused on his guitar, idly approximating various chords; not actually playing them, but positioning his fingers on the frets, his gaze fixed on his hands. The pads of his fingers made a faint metallic sound as he moved them across the strings. While he wasn’t being rude, it was like trying to have a conversation with someone filling in a crossword puzzle. He caught my look and smiled briefly. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off. You were talking about your father.”
“I was explaining why I knew so little about my Bakersfield kin.”
“How’d you hook up with my dad?”
“We never met. The first I heard of him he was in the morgue as a John Doe. My name and number were on a slip of paper in his pocket, and the coroner’s office called, thinking I might know who he was.”
“And you turn out to be related? That’s a hell of a coincidence, isn’t it?”
“Not really. I’m told he came to Santa Teresa to look for me.”
“Because of his prior relationship with your father,” he said, as though assembling the facts.
“Exactly.”
“Are you the only Millhone in Santa Teresa?”
“That’s right. I’m actually a private investigator, so he might have found me in the phone book.”
“No fooling. Well, ain’t that a kick in the pants. I never met a real private detective before.”
“This is me,” I said, raising my hand.
He turned his attention to his guitar, trying a chord or two. In a whispery falsetto, he put together two lines of a song he was apparently composing extemporaneously. “When your daddy dies, it should come as no surprise . . .” He stopped and tried the line again. “When your daddy dies, you have to realize . . .” He shook his head, holding the guitar against him like a shield.
I said, “When did you last see your father?”
“September. A year ago, I forget the date. I heard a knock at the door and nearly fell over when I saw who it was. You knew he went to prison?”
“Someone told me about it.”
“Man was a loser, big time. What’re you going to do?” The latter wasn’t meant as a question. It was verbal filler.
“I can see why you were shocked when he showed up. Did he tell you why he was released?”
“Said his new lawyer punched all kinds of holes in the case and insisted they submit blood and semen for DNA testing. No match on any of it, so they had to let him go.”
“He was a very lucky man finding someone who’d go to bat for him.”
“Yeah, right. Want my take on it?”
“Sure.”
“Just because they let him out doesn’t mean he was innocent.”
I blinked. The statement was the last thing in the world I expected to hear from him. “That’s an odd point of view.”