Read Guilt for Free Online Page A

the backyard. The yellow tape was gone. The holes where air-sniffing tubes had been inserted were still open. The chair where Holly Ruche had sat yesterday had been moved closer to the felled tree sections and a woman’s sweater, black, size M, Loehmann’s label, was draped over one of the massive cylinders. A few errant blond hairs stood out on the shoulders. Beneath the chair, a paperback book sat on the dirt. What to expect during pregnancy.
    I said, “She came back when everyone left, wanting to check out her dream.”
    He said, “Location, location, location … okay, let’s ask around some more about the car. Haystacks and needles and all that.”
    Expanding the canvass another quarter mile produced similar results, initially. But at a house well north, also Tudor but grander and more ornately trimmed than Holly and Matt’s acquisition, a small, mustachioed man in his sixties holding a crystal tumbler of scotch said, “A Duesie? Sure, ’38 SJ, blue over blue—navy over baby.”
    His mustache was a too-black stripe above a thin upper lip. The few hairs on his head were white. He wore a bottle-green velvet smoking jacket, gray pin-striped slacks, black slippers with gold lions embroidered on the toes.
    Milo said, “What else can you tell us about it, sir?”
    “Gorgeous,” said the man. “True work of art. I saw it in … ’50, sowe’re talking a twelve-year-old car. But you’d never know. Shiny, kept up beautifully. Those chrome supercharger pipes coming out the side were like pythons on the prowl. All that menace and power, I’m telling you, that was one magnificent beast.”
    “Who owned it?” said Milo.
    The man shook his head. “I tried to get her to tell me, she’d just smile and change the subject.”
    “She?”
    “Eleanor,” said the man. “Ellie Green. She lived there—that brick place pretending to be this place, that’s where the Duesie used to park. Right in the driveway. Not often, just once in a while. And always at night but there was a porch light so you could see it. Down to the color. Looking back, it had to be a boyfriend of hers, but I was a kid, five years old, it was the car that interested me, not her personal life. I’d never seen anything like it, asked my father about it. He knew everything about everything when it came to cars, raced at Muroc before the war.”
    He grinned. “Then he married my mother and she civilized him and he went to work selling Packards downtown. He’s the one who filled me in on the Duesie. That’s how I know it was a true SJ. Because he told me it wasn’t one of those where someone retrofitted the pipes, this was the real deal.”
    “He never mentioned whose it was?”
    “Never asked him,” said the man. “Why, what’s up? I saw all the commotion yesterday. What happened at that place?”
    “Something was found there. What can you tell us about Ellie Green, sir?”
    “She babysat me. Back before I started school, I was always sick. My parents got tired of never going out, so they hired her to watch over me. Couldn’t have been fun for her, I was a runty piece of misery, had scarlet fever, bad case of the mumps, measles even worse, could throw up at will and believe me, I did when the devil told me to.” He laughed. “At one point they thought I had diphtheria but it was just some nasty flu. But Ellie was always patient.”
    “How old was she?”
    “Hmm … to a kid everyone looks old. Probably thirty, give or take? Why’re you asking about her? What was found over there? I asked one of your guys in uniform but all he said was
an incident
.”
    Milo said, “Some bones were dug up in the backyard. It was on the news, Mr.—”
    “Dave Helmholtz. I avoid the news. Back when I was a stockbroker I had to pay attention, now I don’t. Bones as in human?”
    “Yes, sir. A complete human skeleton. A baby.”
    “A baby? Buried in the backyard?”
    Milo nodded.
    Helmholtz whistled. “That’s pretty grotesque. You think Ellie