Mrs. Hellstrom was right about the smell. Years’ accretion of dog, unwashed dishes, and unswept floors produced a thick, cloying atmosphere that made me feel faint.
I pushed open windows in the kitchen and the living room, in itself quite a task since the ropes and pulleys were stiff with disuse, and made a quick survey of the house. Mrs. Frizell seemed to do fine without the trappings of modern technology: she had a small radio, but no television, no CD, not even a turntable. She did own a camera, an ancient Kodak that wouldn’t have bought a nickel bag on the street.
Back in the living room I pulled a wobbly chair in front of the secretary. It was an old, dark piece of furniture with a rolltop-covered writing shelf in the middle, bookshelves above, and drawers below. The rolltop had been wedged shut years before by the papers stuffed into its edges. Papers were crammed against the diamond-glass doors of the bookshelves and were stuffed into the drawers. Everything was covered with a fine layer of grime.
If I hadn’t been fed up to the gills with Todd, Dick,
Murray, and even Freeman, I would have shut the windows and gone home. It was ludicrous to think anything of value, let alone of interest, might be in that landfill. But I needed something, a crowbar to pry Todd Pichea loose from Mrs. Frizell, and I was out of ideas. All I wanted was some kind of document that would give me, if not a crowbar, at least a wedge.
As I surveyed the horrors in front of me I couldn’t help wondering how much of my determination was due to concern for Mrs. Frizell, and how much was due to my own feelings of humiliation. I’m a sore loser and so far Todd—and Dick—had beaten me in every encounter.
“You’re not driven by revenge—you fight for truth, justice, and the American Way,” I grinned to myself.
Presumably Mrs. Frizell had filed her papers on the LIFO system—last in, first out. The trick would be to remove the top layer—from the bookshelves as well as the writing shelf—without disturbing the Paleozoic regions underneath.
Despite Mrs. Hellstrom’s work the living room carpet— a threadbare gray mat that might once have been maroon—was still too thick with dust to sit on. I went upstairs and found one of the sheets she’d laundered. Spreading it on the floor, I carefully began lifting documents from the secretary and putting them on the sheet.
In the midst of the kitchen squalor I’d noticed a huge pile of paper bags—Mrs. Frizell never threw anything away. I brought those in and stood a row of them next to the secretary. I was making an arbitrary decision to examine everything dated after 1987 and to put earlier stuff in bags by year.
By five o’clock I’d filled two dozen bags. The sheet below me had turned black from the grime I’d shaken from the papers. Mrs. Frizell was on the mailing list of every animal-care products company in North America and she’d saved all their catalogs. She’d also kept her vet bills going back to 1935—the earliest year that had floated to the top so far—and newspaper clippings detailing cruelty to animals. I hadn’t found anything that concerned her son, but most of the stuff I’d handled only dated to the late seventies.
Her own financial papers were wedged in pell-mell with the vet bills and newspaper clippings. There wasn’t much to them. She drew a monthly social security check, but apparently the box factory she’d worked in hadn’t been union. Or at least there didn’t seem to be any pension plan beyond the U.S. government. The Bank of Lake View had paid her real estate taxes for her and looked after her modest savings. They apparently had also paid her utility bills. I found a couple of copies of the quarterly statements they sent Byron Frizell in San Francisco detailing their transactions on her behalf.
Social security doesn’t have an electronic transfer system. They had to send their checks to Mrs. Frizell herself, and she had to be responsible enough to remember to take them to the bank. She apparently was collected enough mentally to do this, since her passbook, which I found under a 1972 Jewel flyer advertising Purina at ten cents a pound, had regular monthly entries.
That was a feeble straw to catch at, that my self-appointed client was mentally alert enough to take her money to the bank. And it didn’t help deal with the painful condition she was in right now. Obviously no one could say she was competent to handle her own affairs today.
On closer inspection the passbook didn’t look like much of an ally, either. Mrs. Frizell had brought her check to the Lake View bank on the tenth of every month for eighteen years, but she’d stopped abruptly in February, when the balance stood at just over ten thousand. What had she done with them since? Was I going to find four checks floating in this paper sea some place?