bounced checks and bad decisions

Kinsey Millhone should have listened to her gut. Her gut told her not to take the job from Alvin Limbardo. But her rent was coming due, and it sounded like an easy enough job. All she had to do was deliver a check, a cashier’s check for $25,000. Kinsey knew that he was lying about something.

Turns out, Alvin Limbardo was lying about everything.

Kinsey hadn’t started on the job for a few days, waiting for his check to clear. Instead, she got a letter from her bank returning the rubber check and fining her for the inconvenience. As she is a private investigator, she knows how to chase down a deadbeat. All it takes is a trip to L.A. and some ingenuity. So when she finds the address listed on the check, Kinsey is surprised to find out that the first person she sees at the sketchy apartment building asks if she’s looking for Alvin Limbardo.

Turns out that Alvin Limbardo is the alias that the apartment dwellers use when they don’t want to use their real names. Kinsey describes the man and finds out that his real name is John Daggett, and he’s not there. He’s in Santa Teresa, where Kinsey had just come from. But Daggett’s wife is there, so Kinsey goes to talk with her.

Talking to Lovella, Kinsey finds out that Daggett had just gotten out of prison recently, and they married and were very happy until he started drinking again. Then he sold their furniture, beat up Lovella, packed up his stuff, and took off in a hurry. He has a friend named Billy Polo, who lives in Santa Teresa, so Kinsey heads back home to try to find Daggett there. Or if not Daggett, then Polo.

Now that Kinsey has a name she can look up, she finds Daggett’s family, a brother-in-law, a daughter, and his wife Essie, who is still married to the man. Kinsey leaves the bigamy out of the conversation and tries to figure out where Daggett could be. She also leaves out the cashier’s check, but she does find out that Daggett had been in jail for driving drunk and causing an accident that killed several people, including the parents of the boy the check is made out to.

However, it doesn’t take Kinsey long to find Daggett once again, when his body washes up on shore after a nasty storm. The police call it an accident, saying he had been drunk on a boat and fallen overboard during the storm. But Kinsey thinks that there is more and keeps digging. This is no longer about a bounced check. It’s about finding the truth of what happened to the man. But as she puts the clues together and makes the connections no one else is looking for, she puts herself in the sights of a killer.

D is for Deadbeat is the fourth in Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone series. While each of these books stand alone as a story, there are certain threads that come together over time, reaching through more than one book. In this case, it’s Kinsey’s relationship with police officer Jonah Robb, who she has been flirting with for some time now. In this novel, Kinsey finds herself coming into contact with ex-cons, grieving families, and devout Christians, all while trying to draw out the truth from those who don’t want to get near it. She is, as always, smart, reasoned, sarcastic, acerbic, persistent, relentless, and occasionally foolhardy as she risks her life for $400 and her personal idea of justice.

I have had a longtime love affair with Kinsey and with author Sue Grafton, and this book is just another amazing adventure through her world, which is California in the 1980s, with its wealth, glamour, and ugly underbelly. It’s long before personal computers and cell phones, so she has to get by with archived newspapers, snail mail, and phone books. There are no instant searches or GPS, so she has to rely on her ability to do research, on her wits, and on her one indestructible black dress that can fit almost any occasion.

I have read through this book many times, and this time decided to go with the audio book. When I started A, I had some doubts about narrator Mary Peiffer. She wasn’t my first choice for the voice of Kinsey. But as I go through these books, I think I was wrong with that initial assessment. Now I think she’s a perfect Kinsey, with just the right dryness and comedic timing, and I love listening to these books. I cam hear the eye rolls as Kinsey comes across the characters from Daggett’s life, and Peiffer has a way of keeping Kinsey’s intelligence at the ready, so when Kinsey has one of those flashes of hers that means it’s all coming together, we believe in her genius as much as we believe in how she was stupid enough not to figure it all out soon enough to save her hide with ease.

But no matter what, I will always love Kinsey and I will be grateful to Grafton for showing us all how we can be smart and stupid, insightful and blind, perfect and flawed. And we can all enjoy a good book on a rainy day, lying on the sofa under a quilt. D is for Deadbeat would be perfect for just that thing.