F is for Fugitive

Clemson was standing in the door to his office. He had his suit jacket off, shirt collar unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, and tie askew. The gabardine pants looked like the same ones he'd had on two days ago, bunched up in the seat, pleated with wrinkles across the lap. I followed him into his office in the wake of cigarette smoke. His secretary tippy-tapped back to her desk out front, radiating disapproval.

Both chairs were crowded with law books, tongues of scrap paper hanging out where he'd marked passages. I stood while he cleared a space for me to sit down. He moved around to his side of the desk, breathing audibly. He stubbed out his cigarette with a shake of his head.

"Out of shape," he remarked. He sat down, tipping back in his swivel chair. "What are we going to do with that Bailey, huh? Guy's a fuckin' lunatic, taking off like that."

I filled him in on Bailey's late-night call, repeating his version of the escape while Jack Clemson pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head in despair. "What a jerk. No accounting for the way these guys see things."

He reached for a letter and gave it a contemptuous toss. "Look at this. Know what that is? Hate mail. Some guy got put away twenty-two years ago when I was a PD. He writes me every year from jail like it's something I did to him. Jesus. When I was in the AG's office, the AG did a survey of prisoners as to who they blamed for their conviction- you know, 'why are you in prison and whose fault is it?' Nobody ever says, 'It's my fault… for being a jerk.' The number-one guy who gets blamed is their own lawyer. 'If I'da had a real lawyer instead of a PD, I'da got off.' That's the number-one guy, okay? His own lawyer. The number-two guy that was blamed was the witness who testified against him. Number three-are you ready?-is the judge who sentenced him. 'If I'da had a fair judge, this woulda never happened.' Number four was the police who investigated the case, the investigating officer, whoever caught 'im. And way down there at the bottom was the prosecuting attorney. Less than ten percent of the people they surveyed could even remember the prosecutor's name. I'm in the wrong end of the business." He snorted and leaned forward on his elbows, shoving files around on his desk. "Anyway, skip that. How's it going from your end? You comin' up with anything?"

"I don't know yet," I said carefully. "I just talked to the principal at Central Coast High. He tells me he saw Jean at the Baptist church a couple of times in the months before she was killed. Word was she was infatuated with your son."

Dead silence. "Mine?" he said.

I shrugged noncommittally. "Kid named John

Clemson. I assume he's your son. Was he the student leader of the church youth group?"

"Well, yeah, John did that, but it's news to me about her."

"He never said anything to you?"

"No, but I'll ask."

"Why don't I?"

A pause. Jack Clemson was too much the professional to object. "Sure, why not?" He jotted an address and a telephone number on a scratch pad. "This is his business."

He tore the leaf off and passed it across the desk to me, locking eyes with me. "He's not involved in her death."

I stood up. "Let's hope not."

16

The business address I'd been given turned out to be a seven-hundred-square-foot pharmacy at one end of a medical facility half a block off Higuera. The complex itself bore an eerie resemblance to the padres' quarters of half the California missions I'd seen: thick adobe walls, complete with decorator cracks, a long colonnade of twenty-one arches, with a red tile roof, and what looked like an aqueduct tucked into the landscaping. Pigeons were misbehaving up among the eaves, managing to copulate on a perilously tiny ledge.

The pharmacy, amazingly, did not sell beach balls, lawn furniture, children's clothing, or motor oil. To the left of the entrance were tidy displays of dental wares, feminine hygiene products, hot water bottles and heating pads, corn remedies, body braces of divers kinds, and colostomy supplies. I browsed among the over-the-counter medications while the pharmacist's assistant chatted with a-customer about the efficacy of vitamin E for hot flashes. The place had a faintly chemical scent, reminiscent of the sticky coating on fresh Polaroid prints. The man I took to be John Clemson was standing behind a shoulder-high partition in a white coat, his head bent to his work. He didn't look at me, but once the customer left, he murmured something to his assistant, who leaned forward.

"Miss Millhone?" she said. She wore pants and a yellow polyester smock with patch pockets, one of those uniforms that would serve equally for a waitress, an au pair, or an LVN.