F Is for Fugitive

as she worked, wondering why she was suddenly so interested. I wasn't about to mention the $42,000 Tap claimed had disappeared. "Who called him here last night? Did you recognize the voice?"
    "Some man. Not anyone I knew right off. Might have been someone I'd talked to before, but I couldn't say for sure. There was something queer about the whole conversation," she remarked. "You think it was related to the shooting?"
    "It almost had to be."
    "That's what I think, too, the way he tore out of here. I'd be willing to swear it wasn't Bailey, though."
    "Probably not," I said. "He wouldn't have been permitted to use the jail phone at that hour and he couldn't have met with Tap in any event. What made the call seem so queer?"
    "Odd voice. Deep. And the speech was kind of drug out, like someone who'd had a stroke."
    "Like a speech impediment?"
    "Maybe. I'd have to think about that some. I can't quite put my finger on it." She was silent for a moment and then shook her head, shifting the subject. "Tap's wife, Joleen, is who I feel sorry for. Have you talked to her?"
    "Not yet. I guess I will at some point."
    "Four little kids. Another due any day."
    "Nasty business. I wish he'd used his head. There's no way he could have pulled it off. The deputies are always armed. He never had a chance," I said.
    "Maybe that's the way they wanted it."
    "Who?"
    "Whoever put him up to it. I knew Tap since he was ten years old. Believe me, he wasn't smart enough to come up with a scheme like that on his own.
    I looked at her with interest. "Good point," I said. Maybe Bailey was meant to get whacked at the same time, thus eliminating both of them. I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out the list of Jean Timberlake's classmates. "Any of these guys still around?"
    She took the list, pausing while she removed a pair of bifocals from her shirt pocket. She hooked the stems across her ears. She held the paper at arm's length and peered at the names, tilting her head back. "This one's dead. Ran his car off the road about ten years back. This fella moved up to Santa Cruz, last I heard. The rest are either here in Floral Beach or San Luis. You going to talk to every one of 'em?"
    "If I have to."
    "David Poletti's a dentist with an office on Marsh. You might want to start with him. Nice man. I've known his mother for years."
    "Was he a friend of Jean's?"
    "I doubt it, but he'd probably know who was."
    As it turned out, David Poletti was a children's dentist who spent Wednesday afternoons in the office, catching up on his paperwork. I waited briefly in a pastel-painted reception suite with scaled-down furniture and tattered issues of Highlights for Children stacked on low tables, along with Jack and Jill and Young Miss. Of special interest to me in the last was a column called "Was My Face Red!" in which young girls gushingly related embarrassing moments – most of which were things I'd done not that long ago. Knocking a full cup of Coke off a balcony railing was one. The people down below really yell, don't they?
    Dr. Poletti's office staff was composed of three women in their twenties, Alice-in-Wonderland types with big eyes, sweet smiles, long straight hair, and nothing threatening about them. Soothing music oozed out of the walls like whiffs of nitrous oxide. By the time I was ushered into his inner office, I would almost have been willing to sit in a tot-sized dental chaise and have my gums probed with one of those tiny stainless-steel pruning hooks.
    When I shook hands with Dr. Poletti, he was still wearing a white jacket with an alarming bloodstain on the front. He caught sight of it about the same time I did, and peeled his jacket off, tossing it across a chair with a soft, apologetic smile. Under the jacket he was wearing a dress shirt and a sweater vest. He indicated that I should take a seat while he shrugged into a brown tweed sport coat and adjusted his cuffs. He was maybe thirty-five, tall, with a narrow face. His hair frizzed in tight curls already turning gray along the sides. I knew, from his yearbook pictures, that he'd played high school basketball and I imagined sophomore girls gushing over him in the cafeteria. He wasn't technically handsome, but he had a certain appeal, a gentleness in his demeanor that must have been reassuring to women and little lads. His eyes were small and drooped slightly at the corners, the color a mild brown behind lightweight metallic frames.
    He sat down at his desk. A color studio portrait of his