She sighed. "Yes."

"You want to expand on that?"

"I nearly ran into him coming off the freeway. I heard this thump, and when I looked out the window, he was staring right at me."

"You do understand you could have cleared him years ago if you'd admitted that." I didn't wait for her response. She was beginning to sound martyred about the whole business and I didn't want to deal with that.

15

I stopped off at my place after I left Tippy and grabbed a hasty lunch, which I ate without much interest. There was precious little in the refrigerator and I was forced to open a can of asparagus soup, which I think I bought originally to put over something else. I've been told novice cooks are chronically engaged in this hoary ruse. Cream of celery soup over pork chops, baked at 350 for an hour. Cream of mushroom soup over meat loaf, same time, same temp. Cream of chicken soup over a chicken breast with half a cup of rice thrown in. The variations are endless and the best part is you have company once, you never see them again. Aside from the aforementioned, I can scramble eggs and make a fair tuna salad, but that's about it. I eat a lot of sandwiches, peanut-butter-and-pickle and cheese-and-pickle being two. I also favor hot sliced hard-boiled egg sandwiches on whole wheat bread with lots of salt and Best Foods mayonnaise. As far as I'm concerned, the only reason for cooking is to keep your hands busy while you think about something else.

What was bugging me at this point was this question of Morley's death. What if David Barney's paranoia was justified? He'd been right about everything else. What if Morley was getting too close to the truth and had been eliminated as a consequence? I was torn between the notion of murder as too farfetched and the worry that someone was actually getting away with it. I went back and forth, exploring the possibilities. His curiosity might well have been stimulated by his conversation with David Barney. Maybe he'd inadvertently stumbled across something significant. Had he been silenced? I could feel myself shy away from the idea. It was so damn melodramatic. Morley had died of a heart attack. The death certificate had been signed by his family doctor. I didn't doubt there were drugs that could trigger or simulate the symptoms of cardiac arrest, but it was hard to picture how such a drug might have been administered. Morley wasn't a fool. Given his health problems, he wasn't going to take medications not prescribed by his own physician. It almost had to be poison, but I hadn't heard the possibility mentioned. Who was I to step in and distress his ailing widow? She had problems enough and all I had to offer was conjecture.

I finished my soup, washed the bowl, and left it in the dish rack with my solitary spoon. If I kept up this cycle of cereal and soup, I could eat for a week without dirtying another dish. I wandered idly around the apartment, feeling restless and uneasy. I wanted desperately to talk to Lonnie, but I didn't see a way to do it, short of driving the hour up to Santa Maria. Ida Ruth seemed to feel he'd resent the intrusion, but I thought he should be apprised of what was going on. Currently, his case was in complete disarray, and I didn't see a way to clean it up before he came home. He was going to love me.

This was now Thursday afternoon. Morley's funeral was on Friday, and if I had questions to raise about the cause of death I was going to have to move quickly. Once he was buried, this whole issue would be buried with him. Since his death was attributed to natural causes, my guess was that nobody'd bothered to question his activities the last couple of days of his life. I still had no idea where he'd gone or whom he'd seen. The only thing I was sure about was that he'd taken those pictures. I was assuming his actions had been prompted by his conversation with David Barney, but I couldn't be certain. Maybe he'd talked to Dorothy or Louise about the case.

I put a call through to the house. Louise answered on the first ring. "Hi, Louise. This is Kinsey. You found the bag I left?"

"Yes, and thank you. I'm sorry we weren't here, but Dorothy wanted to go over to the funeral home to see Morley. We realized you'd stopped by as soon as we got back."

"How's Dorothy holding up?"

"About as well as could be expected. She's a pretty tough old bird. We both are if it comes to that."

"Uhm, listen, Louise, I know this is an imposition, but is there any way I could talk to the two of you this afternoon?"

"About what?"

"I'd really prefer to discuss it in person. Is Dorothy up for a visit?"

I could hear her hesitation.

"It's important," I said.

"Just a minute. I'll check." She put a hand over the mouthpiece and I could hear the murmur of their conversation. She came back on the line. "If you can make it brief," she said.