Crazybone Read Free

would pay her and her daughter fifty thousand dollars. That just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”
    Twining made a Who-knows? gesture with one hand. “She’s one of those people who think insurance is a ghoul’s game.” He looked at me squarely and added, “Even stone-fox widows can be a little nuts.”
    I ignored it; there was nothing to be gained in challenging him again. “Did you talk to her after that?”
    “Once. To see if maybe she’d changed her mind. She wouldn’t even let me in the house.”
    “So you haven’t told her about Intercoastal bringing in an investigator.”
    “Not my place. Besides, Fujita said I should keep it confidential. You going to see her?”
    “As soon as I can.”
    “How about if I go out there with you, pave the way—”
    “Not necessary. All I need is directions to her home.”
    He provided them, and we both came up out of our chairs as if some kind of bell had gone off. No handshake this time, no parting words — both of us anxious for me to be gone. At the door I glanced back and he gave a little dismissive wave; his smile had slipped halfway into a sneer. What an asshole, his eyes said.
    I went out thinking the same about him.

2
    One of the good things about living in Greenwood was that no matter where you were located, even along the main road through the village, you felt you were in the country. Trees and ground cover grew in dense profusion: half the streets and side roads were shade tunnels created by the interlocking branches of oak, manzanita, eucalpytus, plum and wild cherry, other trees I couldn’t name. Busy six-and eight-lane Highway 280 was only a couple of miles away, but here the effect of quiet rusticity was so complete you might have been tucked away in a High Sierra backwater. To my mind, the best part was that it was still a natural habitat, not an architect’s wet dream like so many ritzy planned communities these days. The builders had taken advantage of the environment without any sort of destructive tampering. Peaceful coexistence between man and nature. Even developer in California, particularly the perpetrators of tracts thrown up on indiscriminately clear-cut and bulldozed land, in which every house looks the same and the overall effect is of a gigantic penal colony, ought to be force-fed the principles of the Greenwood method.
    But even then, I thought in my cynical fashion, the greedy bastards still wouldn’t get it or give a damn if they did. They didn’t care where or how other people lived, as long as they didn’t have to be there among them. Half of the land-raping, build-’em-fast-and-loose developers in the Bay Area probably resided right here in woodsy, horsey, affluent Greenwood.
    Whiskey Flat Road, along which I was driving as I indulged in these gloomy speculations, was a narrow lane about a third of a mile west of the village center, where the rolling land began to rise into steeper hills. There were homes on large parcels along both sides, a picture-postcard brook that kept meandering from one side of the road to the other through carefully constructed culverts. I passed gated drives, pastured horses, fences of wood and chainlink and stone and mossy brick, most of them overgrown with ivy or oleander shrubs. About half the houses were hidden, the rest partially so. Number 769 was more or less in the second category, set up on a little knoll on the west side and surrounded by trees and shrubbery so that you had a kind of filtered look at it even when you turned into the driveway. I couldn’t even be sure of its architectural style from down below, though most of the Whiskey Flat homes were variations of the sprawling, single-story ranch type.
    The drive was gated, but the gate was open; I went on through, uphill past the first screen of trees. Ranch-style, all right, off-white with dark-green trim, tinted glass and brickwork, solar panels, a redwood side deck that wrapped around to the rear; the whole cradled by two huge