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Title:
D is for Deadbeat
Series: Kinsey Millhone
#4
Author: Sue Grafton
Rating: 3 of 5
Stars
Genre: Mystery
Pages:
209
Words: 72K
Publish: 1987
Ahhhh,
Kinsey is just a stupid woman. Call me sexist, but while I can
understand a man being stupid (because I usually understand the WHY
of why he’s being stupid), I simply do not understand some, errrr,
most of the things Kinsey does, I just don’t. What she reacts to,
and how she reacts to those things, completely mystifies me. And not
in an inscrutable way, but in a head scratching “WUUUUUT?!?” kind
of way.
Which
leads to you asking “But Master Bookstooge, WHY did you give this
3stars then?” That is very astute of you, oh useless student who
I’ve taken pity on. Maybe once you’ve worked like a death slave
for me for another four years you’ll understand the Mysterious Ways
of Master Bookstooge.
Needless
to say, I think I’m fast approaching Maximum Nopeage for this
series. But today is not that day!
★★★☆☆
From
Fandom
Kinsey
Millhone receives a contract from ex-con Alvin Limardo to deliver a
cashier's check for twenty-five thousand dollars to a
fifteen-year-old boy named Tony Gahan. According to Limardo, Tony
helped him through a tough time in his life, leaving Limardo
indebted. However, when the retainer check Limardo made out to Kinsey
for four hundred dollars bounces, she learns that Alvin Limardo is
actually John Daggett, a man known by all and liked by few, and
recently released from a local prison. He is also a bigamist. His
first wife Essie's fanatical religious views have kept her married to
Daggett, while Daggett, in disregard of his marital status, underwent
a second marriage to Lovella on his release from prison, whom he has
subjected to domestic abuse.
In
her search to find Daggett and get her money back, she discovers that
he was found dead on the beach only a few days after hiring her.
Through Daggett's daughter Barbara, Kinsey learns that Tony Gahan was
the sole survivor of a family killed in a car accident caused by
Daggett, for which he received a conviction on charges of vehicular
manslaughter. Tony's been a wreck since the death of his family,
rarely sleeping and doing poorly in school. He now lives with his
uncle and aunt, Ramona and Ferrin Westfall. Also killed in the
accident was a friend of Tony's young sister, and a boy called Doug
Polokowski, who had hitched a ride in the car. Kinsey tracks down an
ex-con friend of Daggett's, Billy Polo, now living in a trailer park
with his sister, Coral. Billy introduced Lovella to Daggett. Kinsey
finds out that Doug Polokowski was Billy and Coral's brother. There's
no shortage of people with a motive for Daggett's death, but the
police are classifying it as an accident.
Kinsey
discovers that shortly before his death Daggett was staggering about
drunk at the marina in the company of a blonde woman in a green
outfit. She sets out to discover which of the numerous blonde women
in the case might be the killer. She also suspects that Billy Polo is
not giving her the full truth about his involvement with Daggett, a
suspicion confirmed when Coral finally levels with Kinsey and reveals
him to be blackmailing someone he suspects of Daggett's killing. The
blackmailer murders Polo at the beach, using Kinsey's own gun, stolen
from her car a few days earlier. Coral also admits to scheming with
Billy and Lovella to rob Daggett of money he had come by illicitly in
prison, not knowing that Daggett had given the money to Kinsey to
pass on to Tony.
The
police investigating Billy's murder discover a home-made silencer
used in the killing. Kinsey immediately recognises the towelling used
as padding as coming from the Westfall household, and Ramona jumps to
the top of her suspect list. This means confronting Tony, who has
given Ramona an alibi for the time of Daggett's death. In pursuing
Tony, Kinsey realises Tony himself, dressed as a woman in his aunt's
wig, was actually the killer. He was also the one who stole her gun,
and killed Billy Polo, who had recognized Tony at Daggett's funeral.
Killing the man who killed his family has done nothing to ease Tony's
torment, however, and he commits suicide by throwing himself off a
building in front of Kinsey, despite her best effort to talk him
down.
