L Is for Lawless

week and now Chester's suddenly got problems."
    "Come on. Hey. I was sitting in the bar last night, watching big-screen TV. You can ask anyone."
    "Mind if I sit?"
    "Sure, go ahead. Take the good one. I'll take this."
    There was one hard wooden chair and one upholstered chair. Ray steered me toward the latter and took the wood chair for himself. He placed his hands on his knees, rubbing the fabric as if his palms were sweating. "I'm probably the oldest and best friend Johnny ever had. I'd never do anything to mess with his son or his grandson or anything like that. You have to believe me."
    "I'm not accusing you, Ray."
    "Sure sounds like that to me."
    "If I thought you'd broken in, I probably wouldn't have come up here. I'd have gone to the cops and had 'em dust for prints."
    "They didn't do that?"
    "Chester can't be sure anything was taken, which means it wasn't even a burglary as far as the cops are concerned. The techs here only lift prints at the scene of a major crime. Felonies, not misdemeanors. Malicious mischief wouldn't qualify unless thousands of dollars' worth of damage had been done, which wasn't true in this case." What I didn't bother to say was the procedure is lengthy and the department is perpetually backed up. Three weeks is standard. In a rush situation, prints could be lifted, photographed, and traced, with the resultant tracings being faxed to CAL ID in Sacramento. The turnaround time could be a day or two. In this case, we didn't even have a suspect. Except maybe him, I thought. I watched him, acutely aware of the key in my pocket. I didn't want him to know about that just yet. He seemed like a man who had something on his mind, and I wanted to hear his tale before I told him mine. "What's in Ashland?" I asked.
    There was a millisecond's pause. "I got family back there."
    "Was Johnny really in the service?"
    "I have no idea. I already told you, I lost track of him for years."
    "How'd you connect up again?"
    "Johnny got in touch."
    "How'd he know where to find you?"
    Impatience flashed across his face as if his picture were being taken. "Because he had my address. What is this? I don't have to answer this stuff. It's none of your damn business."
    "I'm just trying to get to the bottom of this."
    "Well, try somewhere else."
    "Chester thinks Johnny was a spy during World War Two, some kind of double agent for the Japanese."
    Ray rolled his eyes briefly and then gave his head a quick shake. "Where'd he get that?"
    "It's too complicated to explain. He says the old man was very paranoid. He thinks that's part of it."
    Ray said, "The old guy
was
paranoid, but it didn't have anything to do with the Japs."
    "What, then?"
    "Why should I tell you? I have no reason to trust you any more than you trust me."
    "And here I thought we were such pals," I said.
    "Well, we're not," he said mildly.
    I eased the key out of my pocket and held it up to the light. "You know anything about this?"
    His gaze flicked to the key. "Where'd you get that?"
    "It was in a safe Bucky found in Johnny's apartment. Have you ever seen it before?"
    "No."
    "What about the safe? Did you know about that?"
    He shook his head slowly. This was like pulling teeth.
    "I don't understand what the deal is," I said.
    "There's no deal. It's nothing."
    "If it's nothing, why not tell? It can't do any harm."
    "Look, I might know who busted in. If it's who I think, then some guy might have followed me out here. That's all it is, and I could be wrong about that."
    "What was he after?"
    "Jeez. Don't you ever give up?"
    "You must have
some
idea."
    "Well, I don't."
    "Of course you do," I said. "Why else would you drive all the way out here from Ashland?"
    Agitated, he got up and crossed to the window, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Hey, come on. Enough. I'm getting tired of this. You can't force me to answer, so you might as well lay off."
    I got up and followed him to the window, leaning against the wall so I could watch his face. "Here's the way my mind works. This sounds like something criminal." I tapped my temple. "I'm thinking to myself, What if Johnny never went into the Air Force? I keep having trouble with that piece of it. If he wasn't in the service, then the whole picture shifts. Because then you have to wonder where he was all that time."
    Ray's gaze met mine. He started to say something, but he seemed to think better of it.
    "Want to hear my theory? I just came up with this," I said. "He might have been in prison. Maybe this business about