J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone, #10) by Sue Grafton

1

On the face of it, you wouldn’t think there was any connection between
the murder of a dead man and the events that changed my
perceptions about my life. In truth, the facts about Wendell Jaffe had
nothing to do with my family history, but murder is seldom tidy and no
one ever said revelations operate in a straight line. It was my
investigation into the dead man’s past that triggered the inquiry into my
own, and in the end the two stories became difficult to separate. The
hard thing about death is that nothing ever changes. The hard thing
about life is that nothing stays the same. It began with a phone call,
not to me, but to Mac Voorhies, one of the vice-presidents at California
Fidelity Insurance for whom I once worked.
My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a licensed California private
investigator, working out of Santa Teresa, which is ninety-five miles
north of Los Angeles. My association with CF Insurance had been
terminated the previous December, and I hadn’t had much occasion to
return to 903 State. For the past seven months I’d been leasing office
space from the law firm of Kingman and Ives. Lonnie Kingman’s
practice is largely criminal, but he also enjoys the complexities of trials
involving accidental injury or wrongful death. He’s been my attorney of
record for a number of years, stepping in with legal counsel when the
occasion arises. Lonnie is short and beefy, a body-builder and a
scrapper. John Ives is the quiet one who prefers the intellectual
challenges of appellate work. I’m the only person I know who doesn’t
express routine contempt for all the lawyers in the world. Just for the
record, I like cops, too: anyone who stands between me and anarchy.
Kingman and Ives occupies the entire upper floor of a small building

downtown. Lonnie’s firm consists of himself; his law partner, John Ives;
and an attorney named Martin Cheltenham, Lonnie’s best friend, who
leases offices from him. The bulk of the day-to-day work is attended to
by the two legal secretaries, Ida Ruth and Jill. We also have a
receptionist named Alison and a paralegal named Jim Thicket.
The space I moved into used to be a conference room with a
makeshift kitchenette. After Lonnie annexed the last available office on
the third floor, he had a new kitchen built, along with a room for the
copying equipment. My office is large enough to accommodate a desk,
my swivel chair, some file cabinets, a mini-refrigerator and coffee
maker, plus a big storage closet stacked with packing boxes
untouched since the move. I have my own separate phone line in
addition to the two lines I share with the firm. I still have my answering
machine, but in a pinch Ida Ruth covers incoming calls for me. For a
while I made a pass at finding another office to rent. I had sufficient
money to make the move. A sidebar to a case I was working before
Christmas resulted in my picking up a twenty-five-thousand-dollar
check. I put the money in some CDs—the bank kind, not the music—
where it was happily collecting interest. In the meantime I discovered
how much I liked my current circumstances. The location was good,
and it was nice to have people around me at work. One of the few
disadvantages of living alone is not having anyone to tell when you’re
going someplace. At least now at work I had people who were aware
of my whereabouts, and I could check in with them if I needed any
mothering.
For the past hour and a half, on that Monday morning in mid-July, I’d
sat and made phone calls on a skip trace I was working. A Nashville
private investigator had written me a letter, asking if I’d check local
sources for his client’s ex-husband, who was six thousand dollars in
arrears on his child support. Rumor had it that the fellow had left
Tennessee and headed for California with the intention of settling
somewhere in Perdido or Santa Teresa counties. I’d been given the
subject’s name, his previous address, his birth date, and his Social
Security number with instructions to develop any lead I could. I also
had the make and model of the vehicle he was last seen driving, as
well as his Tennessee license plate number. I’d already written two
letters to Sacramento: one to request driver’s license information on
the subject, another to see if he’d registered his 1983 Ford pickup.
Now I was calling the various public utility companies in the area,

J is for Judgment (Kinsey Millhone, #10) by Sue Grafton