O Is for Outlaw

weights three days a week, and there was still the suggestion of power in the way he carried himself.
    "Hello, Shack. How are you?" I said, when I could see that my identity had been noted. I didn't bother to smile. This was not a social visit, and I guessed his feelings for me were neither friendly nor warm.
    His tone when he spoke was surprisingly mild. "I always figured you'd show up."
    "Here I am," I said. "Mind if I come in?"
    "Why not?"
    He stepped aside, allowing me to enter the front hall ahead of him. Given the echoes of the past, the quiet seemed unnatural. "Might as well follow me out back. I don't spend a lot of time in this part of the house." Shack closed the door and moved down the hall toward the kitchen.
    Even the most cursory glance showed half the furniture was gone. In the living room, I spotted a coffee table, miscellaneous side tables, and a straightback wooden chair. The silver-dollar-sized circles of matted carpeting indicated where the couch and easy chairs had once been. The built-in bookcases, flanking the fireplace, were now bereft of books. In their place, twenty-five to thirty framed photographs showed a myriad of smiling faces: babies, children, and adults. Most were studio portraits, but there were several enlargements of snapshots from family gatherings.
    "Are you moving?"
    He shook his head. "Bundy died six months ago," he said. "Most of the furniture was hers anyway. I let the kids take what they wanted. There's plenty left for my purposes."
    "Is that them in the photographs?"
    "Them and their kids. We got thirteen grandchildren among the four of them."
    "Congratulations."
    "Thanks. The youngest, Jessie, you remember her?"
    "Dark curly hair?"
    "That's her. The wild one in the bunch. She hasn't married to date, but she adopted two Vietnamese children. "
    "What's she do for a living?"
    "Attorney in New York. She does corporate law."
    "Do any of the others live close?"
    "Scott's down in Sherman Oaks. They're spread out all over, but they visit when they can. Every six, eight months, I fire up the Harley and do a big round trip. Good kids, all of them. Bun did a hell of a job. I'm a sorry substitute, but I do what I can."
    "What are you up to these days? I heard you left the department."
    "A year ago this May. I don't do much of anything, to tell you the truth."
    "You still lifting weights?"
    "Can't. I got hurt. Had an accident on duty. Some drunk ran a red light and broadsided my patrol car. Killed him outright and knocked me all to hell and gone. I got a fractured fifth vertebra so I ended up taking an industrial retirement. A worker's comp claim."
    Too bad."
    'No point complaining about things you can't change. The money pays the bills and gives me time to myself. What about you? I hear you're a P.I.
    "I've been doing that for years."
    He led me through the kitchen to the glassed-in porch that ran along the rear of the house. He seemed to live the way I did, confined to one area like a pet left alone while its owners are off at work. The kitchen was completely tidy. I could see a single plate, a cereal bowl, a spoon, and a coffee mug in the dish rack. He probably used the same few utensils, carefully washing up between meals. Why put anything away when you're only going to take it out and use it again? There was something homely about the presence of the dishes in the rack. From the look of it, he lived almost exclusively in the kitchen and enclosed porch. A futon, doubling as a couch, was set up at one end, blankets neatly folded with the pillows stacked on top. There was a TV on the floor. The rest of the porch was taken up with woodworking equipment: a lathe, a drill press, a router, a couple of C clamps, a vise, a wood chisel, a table saw, and an assortment of planes. He was in the process of refinishing two pieces. A chest of drawers had been stripped, pending further attention. A wooden kitchen chair had been laid on its back, its legs sticking out as stiffly as a dead possum's. Shack must sleep every night with the heady scent of turpentine, glue, tung oil, and wood shavings. He caught my look and said, "Virtue of being single. You can do anything you want."
    I said, "Amen to that."
    Once upon a time, Bundy had sewn the cafe curtains, hanging them on rods across the middle of the row of windows. The green and white checked cotton, probably permanent press, still looked fresh: crisp, carefully laundered, with little clip-on curtain rings. I found my eyes filling inexplicably