Free A Playdate With Death by Ayelet Waldman Page B

the trade, I fear. Available only to other investigators.”
    “C’mon, Al!”
    “Come work for me and find out.”
    I kicked his ankle, hard.
    “Okay, here’s what I did. It wasn’t that difficult. The hospital keeps records of births, obviously. Nowadays, those records are all computerized, and if you’re allowed access, or if you can somehow get into the system, the records are there at a touch of a button. However, because of patient confidentiality, it’s a challenge, to say the least, to get into the system. We were lucky, though, and Haverford Memorial never bothered to computerize its old records. I figured right off the records probably wouldn’t be stored at the hospital—they take up too much space. I called a few of the larger document storage facilities and found the one the hospital uses to store its old records. It wasn’t too far from here, so I just took a little drive on over.”
    “And they let you in to look at the documents?”
    “Well, let’s just say that a well-placed gratuity did the trick. You owe me a hundred bucks.”
    I got out my checkbook and wrote him a check, which he pocketed with a gracious “Thank you.”
    “No, thank
you,
” I said.
    “Lucky for us the records were very well-organized. I found the births recorded by day and date.”
    Together we went over the list. Four of the women who had given birth to babies on Bobby’s birthday had had girls. The mother of one of the three boys was named Michiko Tanazaki. I figured I could safely rule her out. That left two women, a Brenda Fessler who in 1972 was nineteen years old and a Susan Masters, who was twenty-six.
    Al promised to run a skip trace on the two and happily accepted the check I wrote him to cover the costs of the search. Then the two of us went inside to say hello to his wife.
    Jeanelle Hockey was a lovely, dark-skinned woman with perfectly ironed hair who favored twin sets and knee-length skirts. In many ways, she seemed an unlikely mate for Al, who, with his golf clothes and military haircut, was the last man you’d imagine in an interracial marriage. The two had met in the late 1960s, when he was a uniformed police officer, and she a civilian employee of the Los Angeles Police Department. They’d been married almost thirty years and had three daughters in their twenties.
    When we walked in from the garage, Jeanelle was going over Al’s gun collection with a pink feather duster. I’d only been to Al’s house a few times, and the sight of the racks of shotguns and cases of handguns and vintage pistols still made my skin crawl. He could tell I was nonplussed, perhaps because of the grimace on my face and the loud retching noises I made.
    “Want to hold one?” he asked, deadpan.
    “No! What is it with boys and guns? Isaac’s as obsessed with them as you are. Why? Can you explain this to me? Is it a phallic thing?”
    Jeanelle smiled and said, “If it’s phallic, then I don’t know what that says about me. I’ve been a target shooter for years. And our youngest, Robyn, is nationally ranked in the biathlon. She was an alternate for the Olympic team.”
    “Wow,” I said. “What’s that? Shooting and biking?”
    “Shooting and skiing,” Al said. “Robyn’s an incredible athlete. She’s at Cal State Northridge now, but she’s thinking about Quantico.”
    “The FBI?”
    “Yup. She’d make a great cop.”
    Jeanelle handed me a large photograph of a beautiful, carefully made up young woman aiming a rifle. Her curly brown hair was held off her face with a tortoiseshell clip, and her nails were long and painted a brilliant shade of aquamarine.
    Al’s daughters were all gorgeous and successful. And unmarried. A glance at the artillery around the room made it all too obvious why. Their father probably blasted a hole in any guy who dared show up at the front door.

    W HEN I got home from Al’s, I found my house empty and the light flashing on the answering machine. The first message was from Peter,