E Is for Evidence - Sue Grafton [38]
"Here, turn your hand up and lemme give you some," she said. I held my hand out and she filled my palm with tiny pretzels. They were shaped like Chinese pagodas en-crusted with rock salt. Her hostility had vanished. I'd seen that before-people whose mistrust takes the form of ag-gressiveness at first, their resistance like a wall in which a sudden gate appears. She'd decided to talk to me and I suppose she saw no point in being rude. Besides, I was buying. With ten bucks in my pocket, I couldn't afford more than thirty minutes' worth of drinks anyway.
She had taken out a compact and she checked her makeup, frowning at herself. "God. I am such a mess." She plunked her bag up on the table and rooted through until she found a cosmetics pouch. She unzipped it and took out various items, and then proceeded to transform herself before my very eyes. She dotted her face with liquid foun-dation and smoothed it on, erasing freckles, lines, discolorations. She took out an eyeliner and inked in her upper and lower lids, then brushed her lashes with mascara. Her eyes seemed to leap into prominence. She dusted blusher high on each cheek, lined the contour of her mouth with dark red and then filled her lips in with a lighter shade. Less than two minutes passed, but by the time she glanced at me again, the rough edges were gone and she had all the glamour of a magazine ad. "What do you think?"
"I'm impressed."
"Oh, honey, I could make you over in a minute. You ought to do a little more with yourself. That hair of yours looks like a dog's back end."
I laughed. "We better get down to business if thirty minutes is all I get."
She waved dismissively. "Don't worry about that. I changed my mind. Betsy's workin' on an overdose and I don't feel like going home yet."
"Your roommate took an overdose?"
"She does that all the time, but she never can get it right. I think she got a little booklet from the Hemlock Society and takes half what she needs to do the job. Then I get home and have to deal with it. I truly hate paramedics trooping through my place after midnight. They're all twenty-six years old and so clean-cut it makes you sick. Lot of times she'll date one afterwards. She swears it's the only way to meet nurturing men."
I watched while she drained half her Bloody Mary. "Tell me about Hugh," I said.
She took out a pack of chewing gum and offered me a piece. When I shook my head, she unwrapped a stick and doubled it into her mouth, biting down. Then she lit a cigarette. I tried to imagine the combination . . . mint and smoke. It was an unpleasant notion even vicariously. She wadded up the gum wrapper and dropped it in the ashtray.
"I was just a kid when we met. Nineteen. Tending bar. I went out to California on the Greyhound bus the day I turned eighteen, and went to bartending school in Los Angeles. Cost me six hundred bucks. Might have been a rip-off. I did learn to mix drinks but I probably could have done that out of one of them little books. Anyway, I got this job at LAX and I've been working airport bars ever since. Don't ask me why. I just got stuck somehow. Hugh came in one night and we got talkin' and next thing I knew, we fell in love and got married. He was thirty-nine years old to my nineteen, and I was with him sixteen years. I knew that man. He didn't kill himself. He wouldn't do that to me."
"What makes you so sure?"
"What makes you sure the sun's coming up in the east ever' day? It just does, that's all, and you learn to count on that the way I learned to count on him."
"You think somebody killed him?"
" 'Course I do. Lance Wood did it, as sure as I'm sittin' here, but he's not going to admit it in a million years and neither will his family. Have you talked to them?"
"Some," I said. "I heard about Hugh's death for the first time yesterday."
"I always figured they paid off the cops to keep it hush. They got tons of money and they know ever'one in town. It was a cover-up."
"Lyda,