T Is for Trespass Read Online Free PDF Page B

the witness? Have you talked to him?”
    “Well, no. That’s just it. He’s never turned up, and Lisa has precious little in the way of information. ‘Old guy with white hair in a brown leather bomber jacket’ is as much as she recalls.”
    “The cop at the scene didn’t take his name and address?”
    “Nope, nor did anyone else. He’d disappeared by the time the police arrived. We posted notices in the area and we ran ads in the ‘Personals’ section of the classifieds. So far no response.”
    “I’ll meet with Lisa myself and then get back to you. Maybe she’ll remember something I can use to track this guy down.”
    “Let’s hope. A jury trial’s a nightmare. We end up in court and I can just about guarantee Gladys will show up in a wheelchair, wearing a collar and a nasty-looking leg brace. All she has to do is drool on herself and that’s a million bucks right there.”
    “I hear you,” I said. I went back to the office, where I caught up with paperwork.
    There are two items I suppose I should mention at this point:
    (1) Instead of my 1974 VW sedan, I’m now driving a 1970 Ford Mustang, manual transmission, which is what I prefer. It’s a two-door coupe, with a front spoiler, wide-track tires, and the biggest hood scoop ever placed on a production Mustang. When you own a Boss 429, you learn to talk this way. My beloved pale blue Bug had been shoved nose-first into a deep hole on the last case I worked. I should have bulldozed the dirt in on top and buried it right there, but the insurance company insisted that I have it hauled out so they could tell me it was totaled: no big surprise when the hood was jammed up against the shattered windshield, which was resting on or about the backseat.
    I’d spotted the Mustang at a used-car lot and bought it the same day, picturing the perfect vehicle for surveillance work. What was I thinking? Even with the gaudy Grabber Blue exterior, I’d assumed the aging vehicle would fade into the landscape. Silly me. For the first two months, every third guy I met would stop me on the street to have a chat about the hemi-head V-8 engine originally developed for use in NASCAR racing. By the time I realized how conspicuous the car was, I was in love with it myself and I couldn’t bear to trade it in.
    (2) Later, when you watch my troubles begin to mount, you’ll wonder why I didn’t turn to Cheney Phillips, my erstwhile boyfriend, who works for the Santa Teresa Police Department—“erstwhile” meaning “former,” but I’ll get to that in a bit. I did call him eventually, but by then I was already in the soup.

5
    I have my office in a little two-room bungalow with a bath and kitchenette, located on a narrow side street in downtown Santa Teresa. It’s in walking distance of the courthouse, but more importantly it’s cheap. My unit is the middle one of three, set in a squat row like the cottages of the Three Little Pigs. The property is perpetually for sale, which means I could be evicted if a buyer comes along.
    After Cheney and I broke up, I won’t say I was depressed, but I really didn’t feel like exerting myself. I hadn’t run for weeks. Perhaps “run” is too kind a word, as running is properly defined as six miles an hour. What I do is a slow jog, which is better than a brisk walk, but not by much.
    I’m thirty-seven years old and many women I know were whining about weight gain as a side effect of aging, a phenomenon I was hoping to avoid. I had to concede that my eating habits were not what they should have been. I devour a lot of fast food, specifically McDonald’s Quarter Pounders with Cheese, while simultaneously consuming fewer than nine servings of fresh fruits and vegetables daily (actually, fewer than one, unless you want to count the french fries). In the wake of Cheney’s departure, I’d been driving up to the take-out window more often than was good for me. The time had now come to shake off the blues and take myself in hand. I vowed, as