True-Life Adventure

Street across from my house. I admired my paint job, locked the Toyota, and started across the street absently, just performing a familiar act I performed two or three times a day.
    I could have admired my own paint all the way across the street, as I sometimes do, but that particular day I decided to compare my house with the Hathwells’, two doors down, which hadn’t been painted in years. I had to look slightly to my left to do that, and that’s how I happened to notice that a car was coming right at me, quite a bit faster than a speeding bullet.

CHAPTER 7
    Reflex is a wonderful thing, full of surprises and revelations. If you’d told me I was going to be in a situation like that, I have no idea what I’d have told you I’d do, but here’s what I did do: I jumped straight up in the air and leaned backwards.
    I came down very hard and painfully on the pavement, and I rolled back towards my car, but the rolling was superfluous— the other car was long gone. I didn’t get the license number.
    I did get about three thousand bruises. Blick had his counter-revenge for my last revenge, although he didn’t know it; I figured if I’d told him about the missing files yesterday, he’d have solved the case by now and this would never have happened. Can you imagine having that much faith in Blick? It gives you some indication of my mental state. I was feeling not only hurt and defeated but also disoriented, because I was pretty well terrified.
    There was a stop sign at my corner, so that car couldn’t have been driven by some random rocket jockey who didn’t see me. It had to have pulled out of a parking place someplace behind me, where its driver was waiting. It didn’t stop to see if I was hurt, and it didn’t try to swerve to avoid me. So its driver was trying to kill me. That was the only conclusion you could draw from the incident, and that’s why I was pretty well terrified. I figured if he tried once, he’d probably try again. And next time he might have better luck.
    I dialed Blick, said I had some important information for him and asked if he could come over. He said sure.
    While I waited for him, I tried to put things together. Why would anyone want to kill me? I was kind of an easygoing guy, more sinned against than sinning, even in matters of the heart, I felt. So revenge was out.
    I was currently not involved in any triangle whatsoever, so jealousy was out.
    No one stood to inherit from me, either.
    Of course the thing had to do with the Birnbaum case, and I knew it. I was just fooling around before I got down to serious thinking about it.
    The murderer had stolen my copy of the case reports after reading about me in the Examiner and now he must be trying to kill me because I knew what was in the reports. I took time out to shudder, imagining what might have happened if I’d been home when he came for the reports. Then I got back to business.
    Okay. So I knew too much. But what the hell did I know? Those case reports were completely innocuous, so far as I could see; even a little on the slender side. A lot on the slender side, come to think of it.
    Jack was a funny guy to work for. On some cases, it seemed like he detected his buns off, and I was impressed as hell. On others, it seemed like he hardly did anything to justify his two hundred bucks a day, and I was hard put to make him look like a hero on paper.
    Such a case was the Koehler one. I even asked Jack about it; he said that nobody understood how much background checking a detective had to do, that they took it for granted you just went out and asked a few questions and people answered them just like that. He groused about it so much I figured I’d hit a sensitive spot and shut accordingly up. But there was hardly anything in those reports.
    As I recalled, Jacob had given Jack just five names to check out. I made a list of them: Sardis Kincannon, Joan Hearne, Susanna Flores, and Mr. and Mrs. Timothy A. Hearne.
    The Timothy A. Hearnes were Lindsay’s parents, who lived in Atlanta, and the first report I’d done for Jack described in detail how he’d hired Atlanta operatives to watch the house, how they had indeed watched the house, how they had contrived little tricks like posing as this or that repairman to get in the house, and how they could report with certainty that neither Lindsay nor little Terry was there.
    Joan Hearne was Lindsay’s sister, age thirty-three, and a vice president of the Women’s Bank of the Golden State.