B Is for Burglar

oven at three-fifty for an hour. I guess she went to a garage sale and bought up a bunch of those TV dinner tins with the little compartments. She wanted me to eat well-balanced meals even though she was fucking me over financially."
    I lowered my fork and looked at him, trying to picture someone freezing up 365 dinners so she could bug out. This was the woman he apparently imagined mating with for life, like owls.
    He was eating his first bite of pepper salad, his eyes turning inward. His facial expression suggested that the pepper was sitting in the middle of his tongue while he made chewing motions around it. I do that myself with those mashed candied sweet potatoes people insist on at Thanksgiving time. Why would anyone put a marshmallow on a vegetable? Would I put licorice on asparagus, or jelly beans on Brussels sprouts? The very idea makes my mouth purse.
    Jonah nodded philosophically to himself and began to fork up the pepper salad with gusto. It must have been at least as tasty as the shit Camilla cooked for him. I pictured tray after tray of frozen tuna casserole with crushed potato chips, with maybe frozen peas in one compartment, carrot coins in the next. I bet she left him six-packs of canned fruit cocktail for dessert. He was looking at me.
    He said, "What's the matter? Why do you have that look on your face?"
    I shrugged. "Marriage is a mystery."
    "I'll second that," he said. "By the way, how's your case shaping up?"
    "Well, I'm still nosing around," I said. "Right now, I'm making a little side investigation into an unsolved murder. Her next-door neighbor was killed the same week she left."
    "That doesn't sound good. What's the connection?"
    "I don't know yet. Maybe none. It just struck me as an interesting sequence of events that Marty Grice was murdered and Elaine Boldt disappeared within days of it."
    "Was there a positive I.D.?"
    "On Marty? I have no idea. Dolan's getting really anal-retentive about that stuff. He won't tell me a thing."
    "Why not take a look at the files?"
    "Oh come on. He's not going to let me see the files."
    "So don't ask him. Ask me. I can make copies if you tell me what you want."
    "Jonah, he would fire your ass. You would never work again. You'd have to sell shoes for the rest of your life."
    "Why would he have to know?"
    "How could you get away with it? He knows everything."
    "Bullshit. The files are kept over in Identification and Records. I'll bet he's got a second set in his office so he probably never even looks at the originals. I'll just wait 'til he's out and Xerox whatever you need. Then I'll put it back."
    "Don't you have to sign 'em out?"
    He gave me a look then like I was probably the kind of person who never parked in a red zone. Actually, for someone to whom lying comes so easily, I get anxious about vehicle codes and overdue library books. Violations of the public trust. Oh hey, once in a while I might pick a lock illegally, but not if I think there's a chance I'll get caught. The idea of sneaking official documents out of the police station made my stomach squeeze down like I was on the verge of getting a tetanus shot.
    "Oh wow, don't do that," I said. "You can't."
    "What do you mean, I 'can't.' Of course I can. What do you want to see? Autopsy? Incident report? Follow-up interviews? Lab reports?"
    "That'd be great. That would really help."
    I looked up guiltily. Rosie was standing there waiting to pick up our salad plates. I leaned back in the booth and waited until both had been removed. "Look, I'd never ask you to do such a thing –"
    "You didn't ask. I volunteered. Quit being such a candy ass. You can turn around and do me a favor sometime."
    "But Jonah, he really is a nut about department leaks. You know how he gets. Please don't put yourself in jeopardy."
    "Don't sweat it. Homicide detectives are full of crap sometimes. You're not going to blow his case for him. He probably doesn't even have a case, so what's to worry about?"
    After dinner, he walked me back over to my place. It was only 8:15, but I had work to do and he really seemed a bit relieved that the contact between us wasn't going to be prolonged or intimate. As soon as I heard his footsteps retreat, I turned the outside lights off, sat down at my desk with some index cards and caught up with my notes.
    I checked back through the cards I'd filled out before and tacked them up on the big bulletin board above my desk. I stood there for a long time, reading card after card, hoping for a flash of