V Is for Vengeance

rattled and no telling what I’d blurt out. You want to use my phone?”
    “Sure. As long as I’m here.”
    “Have at it,” he said, indicating the wall-mounted phone.
    I stood and reached for the handset, tucking it between my shoulder and my ear. I held the phone bill with my thumb close to the first mark he’d made. I punched in the number in the 213 area code. After three rings, I was treated to an ear-splitting screech, followed by a mechanical voice telling me the number was a disconnect: “If you feel you have received this recording in error, please hang up, check the number, and dial again.”
    “Disconnect,” I said.
    I tried the number again with the same result. The second Los Angeles number was also no longer in service. I dutifully tried a second time to be sure I was dialing correctly. Same dead end. “This is informative,” I said. I zeroed in on the Miami call and punched in those numbers. When the screeching began again, I held out the handset so Marvin could hear. The number in Corpus Christi rang twenty-two times by my count but no one answered. I hung up and sat down again, putting my chin in my hand.
    “So now what?” he asked.
    “I’m not sure. Let me think about it for a minute.”
    He shrugged. “The way I see it, we’ve got nothing.”
    “Shhh!”
    “Sorry.”
    Marvin returned to his seat. He was on the verge of saying something else, but I held up a hand like an auditory traffic cop. In my mind, I was running through index cards in rapid succession. We still had no address book and no appointment calendar. The numbers she’d called in the past few months were useless at this point. If I’d had access to Polk directories for Corpus Christi or Miami, I might have been able to backtrack from the phone numbers to the relevant street addresses. Checking those addresses, even if I had them, would have meant making the trip myself or hiring private investigators in Texas and Florida to cover the job for me. Both options were expensive and might not have netted us anything. If the phones had been shut down, the target locations had probably been shut down as well.
    This is what I knew: Audrey had reason to spend the night in San Luis Obispo on an average of twice a month. During her stays, she made use of a house in an isolated area where, with the exception of her neighbor, her privacy was guaranteed. What she did in that house entailed the use of a table big enough to seat ten, a pantry full of oversize canned goods, and skillets and saucepans sufficient to feed any number of visitors. Vivian Hewitt said she’d seen a van and a white panel truck pull into Audrey’s drive from time to time, but she’d never seen anyone going into Audrey’s house. This suggested that her visitors came and went by way of the back door, which wasn’t visible from her neighbor’s vantage point. Vivian had also told me that on nights when the lights were on late, Audrey made a point of closing her venetian blinds.
    I’d thought at first Audrey was the one busy covering her tracks. The problem was she’d been dead since Sunday, and I didn’t see how she could have done such a thorough job in the brief period between her arrest and her going off the bridge. This was Thursday and the house in San Luis had been stripped of personal items and all of the surfaces wiped down. When had she found the time? Vivian Hewitt claimed someone had been there Sunday or Monday night. Clearly, it wasn’t Audrey.
    I looked down at the phone bill. Of four phone numbers she’d called, three had been disconnected. Someone was sweeping up in the wake of her death, shutting down all the links, eradicating evidence. The only thing I’d spied with my little eye were the two snippets of clear plastic. I met Marvin’s gaze.
    He said, “What?”
    “I did find these.” I held up a finger, alerting him to my find while I slid a hand into my pocket and pulled out the two clear plastic stems. “What do these look like to you?”
    “The little doodads they use to secure price tags to clothes in department stores.”
    “Right. You know what I think was going on? Twice a month Audrey met with her crew and they sat around the table clipping tags out of all the garments they’d stolen. I don’t know what happened to the goods afterward or what happened to the crew, but once she died, someone got busy dismantling the operation.”
    “So now what?”
    “I think I started in the wrong place. There’s no point