Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Vol. 40, No. 6, June, 1995

I nodded and waved a hand to my door, then led her inside, and once we were there she said, “We’ve just tentatively I.D.’d the body you found the other day.”

“Oh?”

“He seems to be a Vietnamese named Doan. He drove a taxi down in Portland. We found his car in a gully about ten miles north of Big Pine. Wallet and I.D. were in the glove compartment.”

“I see.”

“I’m on my way to see his wife — to tell her — and bring her in to make a formal I.D.” She shrugged. “I thought you might come along, unless you’re... busy, or...”

I told her I’d be glad to tag along.

Once in her car and on our way down the mountain, she said, “I feel bad about last night.”

“So do I,” I admitted.

She sighed raggedly. “I was way out of line.”

“Out of control,” I said.

She looked at me sharply as if to argue but then nodded. “You’re right. Out of control.” She shook her head. “I shouldn’t have pushed that kid around. I know.” She looked at me again. “That’s not me, really.” She laughed ruefully. “I don’t know what I’m doing.”

I said, “You’re trying to be something you’re not.”

“I suppose.”

“Like me, I guess.”

Dilly frowned at me.

I sighed and stared out at the black night world for a moment. “Last night,” I said, “I had a good long think about how I feel, and I decided I feel pretty rotten, actually. Sandy is twenty-three,” I told her. “About half my age, and... it was not a mutually arrived at decision to break up. It was her idea, and the issue was age.”

“I’m sorry.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I’m not so broken up over our breaking up as I am over being so damned old all of a sudden.”

“You’re not old.”

“When you get a look at yourself through the eyes of someone twenty years younger, you’ll know what I mean.”

She thought that over, then said, “Hmmmm.”

I nodded. “Anyway,” I went on, “I’ve been putting myself through some hoops lately. Trying to make myself over into someone — with a more youthful outlook or something.”

She went quiet for a moment, then said, “You quit smoking and turned vegetarian.”

“I’ve also started running, getting in shape...”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“No,” I agreed, “but it’s a front. A way to kid myself. The point is, I have to learn to live with my age, whatever it is. And you have to live with yourself,” I told her. “Be the kind of law officer you are.”

“I know,” she said with a hint of hopelessness. “But that’s the kind of law people around here expect.”

“You could change their expectations,” I said. “You said before you hadn’t made your mark yet. Well, make it.”

She laughed. “That’s easy to say...”

“Loretta, this isn’t the nineteenth century, and you’re not Wyatt Earp, so quit pretending. Be the new sheriff in town.”

She had nothing to say to that, and I was done preaching, so I settled back and let her think.

Loretta drove us into Portland, through a semithriving business section and into a not so thriving semiresidential area where we eventually found the right street of older, two and three story buildings, store-fronted, apartment-topped, with cars parked at every inch of available curb space.

We parked about a block away and walked back, checking the numbers on the buildings. We found the right one at the end of a wide, dead-end alley. Overhead, dark laundry hung from lines that crisscrossed between buildings; it waved like black pennants in some ancient battle in the stormy night sky.

There was the heavy odor of drying squid in the air.

The building we entered was fronted by a small store that advertised fresh fish, but once we were inside and out on the stairs there was some room for doubt about the claim.

“This is not a haunt of the rich and famous,” said Loretta as we climbed the stairs.

The second floor hall was narrow and rather dark, and we had to flick lighters before the doors to read the numbers.

The right apartment was at the end of the second floor hall, where, in response to Loretta’s knock, the door opened the length of the double chain-lock and a pair of curious brown eyes peered up at us.

“Is your mother home?” Loretta asked the little boy.

Another pair of eyes, these about a foot higher up, came to the door.

“I’m Sheriff Dilly, ma’am.” She held her I.D. up to the woman, who frowned at it. “From Big Pine. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

The little boy said something in Vietnamese, and the woman appeared startled. The door closed, there was some whispered conversation behind it, then it opened all the way, and the little boy scampered out and down the hall in his pajamas.

The woman, thirtyish, tiny, dark-haired, and pretty, was holding a sleeping infant against one shoulder. She stood back from the door and nodded and smiled us inside.

The dimly lit studio was small, sparsely furnished, but pin-neat except for the walls, which were covered with the crayon drawings of a child, who might have been one or all of the three children, aged three to six, who were sprawled on a floor mat in front of a flickering black and white TV, and whose eyes followed Loretta and me as we stepped inside.