Free Diagnosis Murder 5 - The Past Tense by Lee Goldberg Page A

bell. It cost ten books, which was about ten thousand stamps.
    When we finished emptying the stamp bowl, Katherine made us grilled cheese sandwiches by wrapping them in aluminum foil and running the iron over them. It was how her mother taught her to do it. She sang while she worked, which always brought back memories of her performing at the Blossom Room. If she minded trading the stage for an ironing board, she never said so.
    Steve started wailing around noon. We put him down in his crib for a nap, but that only made him cry louder. When he was like that, there was only one way he'd sleep. We had to take a drive.
    So we bundled him up in his little rain slicker, put on our raincoats, and got into the Chevy. Five minutes after I started driving, Steve was asleep. The only problem was that if we stopped for more than a minute or two, he'd wake up again.
    We headed over Sepulveda Pass into the valley, as we often did on what we called our "nap expeditions." It gave Katherine an excuse to cruise by the many new neighborhoods and housing developments. Usually, once we'd decided Steve had slept long enough, we'd stop and visit a few of the furnished model homes, buy some produce at one of the fruit and vegetable stands, and head back home in time for dinner.
    The valley was one massive grading project, countless citrus and walnut orchards plowed under and replanted with neat rows of new homes. The construction had left the ground naked, and the steady downpour of the past week had turned the subdivisions into massive mud puddles and the streets into brown streams that spilled over the hundreds of sandbag dams meant to contain them.
    So we gave up on exploring the new subdivisions and daydreaming about the house we hoped to own someday. Instead, I drove towards the slightly more established neighborhoods where some lawns and trees had taken root. These were homes built in the postwar boom of the early fifties, catering to veterans on the GI Bill. The homes were one-story, two-bedroom, assembly-line stucco boxes designed to get the most square footage out of the fewest dollars and the cheapest materials.
    Vernon and Joan Pruitt lived in a house that faced a mirror reflection of itself across the street. Everybody in the Van Nuys housing tract had the same floor plan, only flip-flopped and alternating with every other house. Even the landscaping and the automobiles in the carports looked similar. It was dizzying. If it hadn't been for the addresses painted on the curbs and repeated in large numbers atop the carports, I never would have found the right house.
    I'd looked up the Pruitts' address before leaving the hospital the night before, telling myself I was doing it in case I needed the information to fill out paperwork on Sally Pruitt.
    As luck would have it, our Saturday "nap expedition" just happened to take us past the Pruitts' home.
    At least that's how I explained it to Katherine as I slowed to a stop in front of the house.
    I braced myself for an argument, but I didn't get one. Instead, she told me to get out of the car quickly before Steve noticed we weren't moving and woke up. She slid over into the driver's seat and said she'd drive around the block a few times.
    I pulled the collar up on my coat, held it tight around my neck, and ran through the rain to the protection of the Pruitts' covered front porch. I rang the bell.
    Vernon Pruitt opened the door immediately, giving me no chance at all to figure out what I was going to say. He was a big, barrel-chested man with a crew cut, wearing a two-tone bowling shirt and slacks.
    "Mr. Pruitt?" I asked.
    "Yeah?"
    "I'm Dr. Mark Sloan." I offered him my hand. "I was on call in the ER at Community General when your daughter was brought in."
    I figured I'd say as little as possible and let him fill in the missing information with assumptions of his own. It was easier than trying to come up with a convincing lie, though if I had thought of one, I'd have used it.
    He nodded and let