L Is for Lawless

and then spent an idle moment picking burrs from my socks. I pictured microscopic pollens swarming down my gullet like a cloud of gnats, and I could feel a primitive sneeze forming at the base of my brain. I tried to think about something else. Without even entering the front door, I could have predicted small rooms with rough stucco arches between, offset perhaps by ineffectual attempts to "modernize" the place. This was going to be pointless, but I rang the bell again anyway.
    The door was opened moments later by a kid I recognized. Bucky was in his early twenties. He was three or four inches taller than I am, which would have put him at five nine or five ten. He wasn't overweight, but he was as doughy as a beer pretzel. His hair was red gold, parted crookedly in the center and worn long. Most of it was pulled back and secured in some scraggly fashion at the nape of his neck. He was blue eyed, his ruddy complexion looking blotchy under a four-day growth of auburn beard. He wore blue jeans and a dark blue long-sleeved corduroy shirt with the tail hanging out. Hard to guess what he did for a living, if anything. He might have been a rock star with a six-figure bank account, but I doubted it.
    "Are you Bucky?"
    "Yeah."
    I held my hand out. "I'm Kinsey Millhone. I'm a friend of Henry Pitts. He says you're having problems with a VA claim."
    He shook my hand, but the way he was looking at me made me want to knock on his head and ask if anyone was home. I plowed on. "He thought maybe I could help. Mind if I come in?"
    "Oh, sorry. I got it now. You're the private detective. At first, I thought you were someone from the VA. What's your name again?"
    "Kinsey Millhone. Henry's tenant. You've probably seen me up at Rosie's. I'm there three or four nights a week."
    Recognition finally flickered. "You're the one sits in that back booth."
    "I'm the one."
    "Sure. I remember. Come on in." He stepped back and I moved into a small entrance hall with a hardwood floor that hadn't been buffed for years. I caught a glimpse of the kitchen at the rear of the house. "My dad's not home right now, and I think Babe's in the shower. I should let her know you're here. Hey,
Babe?"
    No reply.
    He tilted his head, listening.
"Hey, Babe!"
    I've never been a big fan of yelling from room to room. "You want to find her? I can wait."
    "Let me do that. I'll be right back. Have a seat," he said. He moved down the hall, his hard-soled shoes clumping. He opened a door on the right and stuck his head in. There was a muffled shriek of pipes in the wall, the plumbing shuddering and thumping as the shower was turned off.
    I went down a step into the living room, which was slightly bigger than the nine-by-twelve rug. At one end of the room there was a shallow brick fireplace, painted white, with a wooden mantelpiece that seemed to be littered with knickknacks. On either side of the fireplace there were built-in bookcases piled high with papers and magazines. I settled gingerly on a lumpy couch covered with a brown-and-yellow Afghan. I could smell house mold or wet dog. The coffee table was littered with empty fast-food containers, and all the seating was angled to face an ancient television set in an oversize console.
    Bucky returned. "She says go ahead. We gotta be somewhere shortly and she's just now getting dressed. My dad'll be back in a little while. He went down to Perdido to look at lighting fixtures. We're trying to get Pappy's apartment fixed up to rent." He paused in the doorway, apparently seeing the room as I did. "Looks like a dump, but Pappy was real tight with a buck."
    "How long have you lived here?"
    "Coming up on two years, ever since Babe and me got married," he said. "I thought the old bird'd give us a break on the rent, but he made a science out of being cheap."
    Being cheap myself, I was naturally curious. Maybe I could pick up some pointers, I thought. "Like what?"
    Bucky's mouth pulled down. "I don't know. He didn't like to pay for trash pickup, so he'd go out early on trash days and put his garbage in the neighbors' cans. And, you know, like somebody told him once when you pay utility bills? All you have to do is use a one-cent stamp, leave off the return address, and drop it in a remote mailbox. The post office will deliver it because the city wants their money, so you can save on postage."
    I said, "Hey, what a deal. What do you figure, ten bucks a year? That'd be hard to resist. He must have been quite a character."
    "You never met