G Is For Gumshoe

"Tell you about it in a minute. Let's get out of here."

I said, "Clyde…"

"I heard. Go ahead. We can talk later. Irene will sleep for hours. Maybe I'd be smart to get a little shut-eye myself."

I hesitated. "One question. Yesterday, when we were scouring the neighborhood for Agnes… do you remember anyone with a toolshed or a greenhouse on the property?"

He opened his eyes and looked at me. "No. Why?"

"The pathologist mentioned it. I said I'd get back to her."

He shook his head. "I was bumping front doors. There might have been a shed in somebody's backyard."

"If you remember something of the sort, will you let me know?"

He gestured a yes both dismissive and resigned.

I picked up the box and we walked out to the car. Dietz tucked me in the passenger seat.

"What's the matter, she didn't like the tea set?" he said. He shut the door on the passenger side and I was forced to hold my reply until he'd rounded the car and gotten in himself. He fired up the engine and pulled out. I gave him a quick rendition of Irene's collapse.

"What do you think she's sitting on?" he asked when I was done.

"Beats me. I can think of a few possibilities. Abuse of some kind, for one," I said. "She might have been a witness to an act of violence, or maybe she did something she feels guilty about."

"A little kid?"

"Hey, kids sometimes do things without meaning to. You never know. Whatever it is, if she has any conscious recollection, she's never mentioned it. And Clyde doesn't seem to have a clue."

"You think Agnes knew about it?"

"Oh sure. I mink Agnes even tried to tell me, but she couldn't bring herself to do it. I sat with her late one night down in a Brawley convalescent home and she told me this long, garbled tale that I'm almost sure now had the truth embedded in it someplace. I'll tell you one thing. I'm not interested in driving back down to the desert to investigate. Forget that."

"Be pointless anyway after all these years."

"That's what Clyde says. What's the deal on Rochelle Messinger?"

Dietz pulled a slip of paper from his shirt pocket. "I got her number in North Hollywood. Dolan didn't want to give it to me, but I finally talked him into it. He says if we get a line on the guy, we're to stay strictly the hell away."

"Of course," I said. "What now?"

He looked over at me with his lopsided smile. "How about a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?"

I laughed. "Done."

We got back to the apartment at one o'clock, fully carbed up, our fat tanks on overload. I could feel my arteries hardening, plaques piling up in my veins like a logjam in a river, blood pressure going up from all the sodium.

Dietz tried calling Rochelle Messinger. When he got no answer after fifteen rings, he turned the phone over to me. I was aching for a nap, but I thought I'd better find out if Dr. Palchak had seen the slides yet. I didn't like the idea of cruising the neighborhood around the nursing home, bumping all those doors again. With luck, I wouldn't have to.

I put a call through to the pathology department at St. Terry's and had Laura Palchak paged. I had Irene's cardboard box on my lap, using it as an armrest. For ten cents, I would have put my head down and gone to sleep right there. Sometimes I long for the simplicity of kindergarten, which is where I learned to nap on command.

She picked up the phone on her end.

"Hi, Laura. Kinsey Millhone," I said. "I was wondering if you'd had a chance to examine the tissue slides."

"You bet," she said. There was a grim satisfaction in her voice.

"I take it your hunch turned out to be right on the money."

"Sure did. This is one I've never run across myself, but I remembered an abstract on the subject from a few years back. The hospital librarian tracked down the journal, which is on my desk somewhere. Hang on."

"What subject?"

"I'm getting to that. This is an article on 'Human stress cardiomyopathy' written by a couple of doctors in Ohio. Here we go. Catch this," she said. "Mrs. Grey suffered a characteristic damage to her heart-a cell death called myofibrillar degeneration brought on by fear-generated stress."

"Can you translate?"

"Sure, it's simple. When the body gets flooded with intolerable levels of adrenaline, heart cells are killed. The pockets of dead cells interfere with the normal electrical network that regulates the heart. When the nerve fibers are disrupted, the heart starts beating erratically and, in this case, that led to cardiac failure."

"Okay," I said cautiously. I had the feeling there was more. "So what's the punch line here?"

"This little old lady was quite literally scared to death."

"What?"

"It's just what it sounds like. Whatever happened to her in those hours she was gone, she was so badly frightened it killed her."

"Are you talking about her being lost or something more than that?"

"I suspect something more. The theory is that, under certain circumstances, the cumulative burden of psychological stress and pain can generate lethal charges in cardiac tissue."

"Like what?"

"Well, take a little kid. Her father beats her with a belt, ties her up, and leaves her bound in a vacant room overnight. Next morning, she's dead. The actual physical injuries aren't sufficient to cause death. I'm not talking about the stress levels most of us experience in the ordinary course of events. Without getting graphic about it, it's analogous to certain animal experiments relating focal myocardial necrosis to stress."

"You're telling me this is a homicide."

"In essence, yes. I don't think Dolan would consider it such, but that's my guess."

I sat for a moment while the information sank in. "I don't like this."

"I didn't think you would," she replied. "In the meantime, if you haven't figured out yet where she was, you might want to try again."

"Yes." I felt a heaviness in my chest, some ancient dread activated by the proximity to murder. I'd done my job efficiently. I'd tracked the woman down. I'd helped facilitate the plan to move her to Santa Teresa, despite her fears, despite her pleadings. Now she was dead. Was I inadvertently responsible for that, too?

After I hung up, I sat there so long I found Dietz staring at me with puzzlement. I was picking at the flaps of the cardboard box, peeling the first layer of paper away from the corrugation. I tried to imagine Agnes Grey's last day. Had she been abducted? If so, to what end? There'd been no demand for money. As far as I knew, there hadn't been contact of any kind. Who had reason to kill her? The only people she knew in this town were Irene and Clyde. Not beyond the possible, I thought to myself. Most homicides are personal crimes-victims killed by close relatives, friends, and acquaintances… which is why I limit mine.

Blindly, I looked down. The paper was coming loose from around the cup I'd rewrapped. The broken halves lay in a torn half-sheet of newsprint that was yellow with age. I blinked, focusing on the ba

I looked up. Dietz was standing right in front of me, hands on his knees, face level with mine. "Are you all right?"

"Look at this." I handed him the paper.

He turned it over in his hands, checking both sides. He noted the date as I had and his mouth pulled down in speculation. He wagged his head back and forth.

"What do you make of it?" I asked.