Free E is for Evidence by Sue Grafton Page A

simple extension of the small living room, the kitchen separated by a pass-through with bi-fold shutters painted white. There was very little in the way of furnishings. The card table seemed to double as dining-room table and home office. The telephone sat there, plugged into the answering machine, which showed no messages. The surface was littered with typing supplies, but there was no typewriter in sight. His bottle of whiteout was getting as sluggish as old nail polish. The wastebasket was empty.
    I went back into the kitchen and slid open the compactor, which was loosely packed, but full. Gingerly, I rooted through, spotting crumpled sheets of paper about three layers down. I removed the liner and inserted a fresh one. I doubted Andy would remember whether he’d emptied his trash or not. He’d probably spent most of his married life being waited on hand and foot, and my guess was he took household choresfor granted, as if the elves and fairies crept in at night and cleaned pee off the rim of the toilet bowl whenever he missed. I glanced at my watch. I’d been in the place thirty-five minutes and I didn’t want to press my luck.
    I closed and locked the sliding glass door again, made a final pass to see if I’d overlooked anything, and then let myself out the front, taking his trash bag with me.
    By noon, I was home again, sitting on Henry’s back patio with Andy’s garbage spread around me like a beggar’s picnic. Actually, the debris was fairly benign and didn’t make me feel I needed a tetanus booster just to sort through. He was heavy into pickles, olives, anchovies, jalapeño peppers, and other foodstuffs in which no germs could live. There were no coffee grounds or orange peels. No evidence whatever that he ate anything fresh. Lots of beer cans. There were six plastic Lean Cuisine pouches, layers of junk mail, six dunning notices rimmed in red or pink, a notice of a Toastmaster’s roast of a local businessman, a flyer from a carwash, and a letter from Janice that must have left him incensed, as he had crumpled it into a tiny ball and bitten down on it. I could see the perfect impression of his teeth in the wadded paper. She was bugging him about a temporary support check that was late
again,
said she, underlined twice and bracketed with exclamation points.
    At the bottom of the bag was the back end of a pad of checks, deposit slips still attached, with the name of Andy’s bank and his checking-account number neatly printed thereon. I saved that for future reference. I had set aside the crumpled papers that were shoved into the bag halfway down. I smoothed them out now—six versions of a letter to someone he referred to variously as “angel,” “beloved,” “light of my life,” “my darling,” and “dearest one.” He seemed to remember her anatomy in loving detail without much attention to her intellect. Her sexual enthusiasms still had him all aflame and had thus, apparently, impaired his typing skills—lots of strikeovers in the lines where he reviewed their “time together,” which I gathered was on or about Christmas Eve. In recalling the experience, he seemed to struggle with a paucity of adjectives, but the verbs were clear enough.
    â€œWell, Andy, you old devil,” I murmured to myself.
    He said he longed to have her suckle the something-something from his xxxxxxxx . . . all crossed out. My guess was that it was related to flower parts and that his botanical knowledge had failed him. Either that or the very idea had caused emotional dyslexia. Also, he couldn’t quite decide what tone to take. He vacillated somewhere between groveling and reverential. He said several things about her breasts that made me wonder if she might benefit from surgical reduction. It wasembarrassing reading, but I tried not to shrink from my responsibilities.
    Having finished, I made a neat packet of all the papers.