B is for Burglar (18 page)

It was chilly and there was a frisky little breeze making breathy sounds in the pine boughs. The house behind the Grices' had canvas awnings that were snapping
like sails, and the hollow sigh of dry grass gave the whole enterprise an eerie ambiance of its own. I was feeling jumpy anyway because I'd just been looking at pictures of a charbroiled corpse, and here I was, about to do a little breaking-and-entering number that could land me in jail and cause my license to be snatched away. If the next-door neighbors set up a howl and the cops arrived on the scene, what was I going to say? Why was I doing it anyway? Ah, because I wanted to know what was in this wee metal house and I couldn't figure out how else to get in.

I fixed a tiny beam of light on the bottom of the padlock. In the diagram my burglar friend had drawn of a lock like this, there is a flat, hairpin spring that latches into notches in the shackle. Usually only the tip of the key actuates the spring, so it was a question of figuring out which of my picks would spread the latch apart, releasing the mechanism. In truth, I could have tried a paper clip with a small L bent on one end but that was the shape of the first pick I used and the padlock wouldn't budge. I tried the next pick which had an H shape in the point. Nope. I tried the third, working it carefully. The lock popped open in my hand. I checked my watch. A minute and a half. I get a bit vain about these things.

The shed door made a wrenching sound when I opened it and I stood for a moment, heart thudding in my throat. I heard a motorcycle putter past in the street but I didn't pay much attention to it because I had just understood Mike's custodial relationship to his uncle's property. In the shed, along with the stack of clay pots, the hand-push lawn mover, and a weed whacker were six
shelves crammed with illegal drugs: Mason jars full of reds and dexies, yellow jackets, rainbows and sopers . . . along with some fat plastic packets of grass and hashish. Well, this was all just too yummy for words. I didn't think Leonard Grice was the druggist, but I was willing to bet money his nephew had invested heavily in this little portable Rexall. I was so enamored of my discovery that I didn't know he was behind me until he let out an astonished “hey!”

I jumped back and whipped around, suppressing a shriek. I found myself face-to-face with the kid, his green eyes glowing in the dark like a cat's. He was as startled to see me as I was to see him. Fortunately, neither of us was armed or we might have had a quick duel, doing each other a lot of needless harm.

“What are you
doing
?” he said. He sounded outraged, as if he couldn't believe this was happening. His Mohawk was beginning to grow out and the wind was making it lean slightly to the left like a field of tall grass in one of those old commercials for Kotex. He had on a black leather motorcycle jacket and a rhinestone earring. His boots were knee-high and made of plastic scored to resemble cobra skin only looking more like psoriasis. It was hard to take this lad seriously, but in some odd way I did. I closed the shed door and snapped the padlock into place. What could
he
prove?

“I got curious about what you were doing back here so I thought I'd take a peek.”

“You mean you just broke in?” he said. His voice had that adolescent crack left over from puberty and his cheeks were hot pink. “You can't do that!”

“Mike, sweetie, I just did,” I said. “You're in big trouble.”

He stared at me for a moment, his expression blank. “You gonna call the cops?”

“Shit yes!”

“But what you did is just as much against the law as this,” he said. I could tell he was one of those bright boys accustomed to arguing righteously with adults.

“Oh crap,” I said, “wise up. I'm not going to stand out here and argue the California penal code with you. You're dealing drugs. The cops aren't going to care what I was up to. Maybe I was passing by and thought you were breaking in yourself. You're out of business, kiddo.”

His eyes took on a shrewd look and he changed his tack. “Well now, wait a minute. Don't go so fast. Why can't we talk about this?”

“Sure, why not? What's to say?”

I could practically see his brain cells scurry around forming a new thought. He was no fool, but he still surprised me with the line he took. “Are you looking into Aunt Marty's death? Is that why you're here?”

Aunt Marty. Nice touch, I thought. I smiled briefly.

“Not quite, but that's close enough.”

He glanced off toward the street, then down at the toe of his cobra boot. “Because I got something . . . you know, like some information about that.”

“What kind of information?”

“Something I never told the cops. So maybe we could make a trade,” he said. He stuck his hands in his jacket pockets looking back at me. His face was innocent, his
complexion clear, the look in his eyes so pure I'd have given him my firstborn if I'd had one. The little smile that crossed his face was engaging and I wondered how much money he'd made selling dope to his high-school friends. And I wondered if he was going to end up with a bullet in his head for cheating someone higher up in the scheme of things. I was interested in what he had to say and he knew it. I had to make quick peace with my own corruption and it wasn't that hard to do. Times like this, I know I've been in the business too long.

“What kind of trade?”

“Just give me time to clear this stuff out before you tell anyone. I was about to lay off anyway because the narcs have some undercover agents at our school and I thought I'd cool it 'til the pressure's off.”

We're not talking permanent reform here, folks. We're talking simple expediency, but at least the kid wasn't trying to con me . . . too much.

We looked at each other and something shifted. I knew I could rail and stomp and threaten him. I knew I could be pious and moralistic and disapproving and it wouldn't change a thing. He knew the score as well as I did and what we had to offer each other might not be a bad bet on either side.

“All right, you got it,” I said.

“Let's go somewhere and talk,” he said. “I'm freezin' my nuts off.”

It bothered me to realize that I'd started to like him just a little bit.

 

 

 

 

We went to The Clockworks on State Street; he on his motorcycle, with me following in my car. The place is a teen hangout and looks like something out of a rock video; a long, narrow room painted charcoal gray with a high ceiling and the lighting done in pink and purple neon tubing. The whole of it resembles the interior of a clock in abstract and futuristic forms. There are mobiles looking like big black gears suspended from the ceiling, the smoke in the air moving them in slow circles. There are four small tables near the door and on the left are what look like shelves at chest height in a series of standing-room-only booths where couples can neck while drinking soda pop. The menu posted on the wall is larded with side orders like dinner salad and garlic toast that kids can snack on, paying seventy-five cents for the privilege of taking up table space for hours at a time. You can also buy two kinds of beer and a house chablis if you are old enough and have tangible proof. It was now nearly midnight and there were only two other people in the place, but the owner apparently knew
Mike and his gaze slid over to me appraisingly. I tried to look like I was not Mike's date. I didn't mind a May/December romance now and then, but a seventeen-year-old is pushing it some. Also I'm not clear on the etiquette of making deals with junior dope peddlers. Who pays for the drinks? I didn't want his self-image to suffer.

“What do you want?” he asked, moving toward the counter.

“Chablis is fine,” I said. He was already pulling his wallet out so I let him pay. He probably made thirty grand a year selling grass and pills. The owner looked over at me again and I waved my I.D. at him casually, indicating that he could card me, but he'd be wasting a trip across the room.

Mike came back with a plastic glass of white wine for me and a soft drink for himself. He sat down, surveying the place for narcs in disguise. He seemed strangely mature and I was having trouble dealing with the incongruity of a kid who looked like a Boy Scout and behaved like a Mafia management trainee. He turned toward me then, resting both elbows on the table. He'd taken up a sugar packet from the container on the table and he tapped it and turned it restlessly, addressing most of what he had to say to the trivia question printed on the back.

“Okay. Here's what happened,” he said, “and I'm tellin' you the truth. For one thing, I didn't stash at Uncle Leonard and Aunt Marty's until after she got killed and he moved out. Once the cops got done and everything, it occurred to me the utility shed was perfect so I
moved some stuff in. Anyway, I went by the house the night she got killed. . . .”

“Did she know you were coming?”

“Nuh-uh, I'm getting to that. I mean, I knew they went out on Tuesday nights and I thought they'd be gone. Like, you know, if I was hard up and needed some bucks or something, I might cruise by and pick up some loose change. They kept cash around—not a lot, but enough. Or sometimes I'd take something I could unload somewhere else. Nothing they'd miss and nobody'd ever said anything about it so I figured they hadn't tipped to it yet. Anyway what happened was I went over there that night thinking the place would be empty, but when I got there the door was open—”

“The door was standing open?”

He shook his head. “I just kind of turned the knob and it was unlocked. When I stuck my head in I knew something weird was going on. . . .”

I waited, watching him uneasily.

He cleared his throat, looking over his shoulder at the front entrance. His voice dropped.

“I think the guy was still there, you know? The light was on in the basement and I could hear someone knocking around down there and there was this rug in the hall, like an area rug that had been thrown over something. I saw a hand sticking out with blood on it. Man, I took off.”

“You're pretty sure she was dead at that point?”

He nodded, hanging his head. He ran a hand along the pink center divider of hair, looking off to one side. “I should've called the cops. I knew I should, but the
whole thing really freaked me out. I hate that shit. And what was I supposed to do? I couldn't tell the cops anything and I didn't want 'em looking at
me
, so I just kept my mouth shut. I mean, I couldn't see what difference it made. I didn't see who did it or anything like that.”

“Do you remember anything else? A car parked out front . . .”

“I don't know. I didn't stay long. I took one look at that shit and I was gone. I could smell all these gasoline fumes or something and . . .”

He hesitated briefly. “Wait a minute, yeah, there was a brown grocery bag in the hall too. I don't know what it was doing there. I mean, I didn't know what the fuck was happening, so I just backed away real quiet and came on down here and made sure people saw me.”

I took a sip of wine, running through his story. The chablis tasted like fermented grapefruit juice. “Tell me about the grocery bag. Was it empty, full, crumpled?”

“It had stuff in it, I think. I mean, I didn't see anything in particular. It was one of those brown paper bags from Alpha Beta, standing just inside the door to the right.”

“Did it look like she'd been shopping? Is that what you're trying to say?”

He shrugged. “It just looked like junk, I guess. I don't know. Maybe it belonged to whoever was down in the basement.”

“Too bad you didn't make an anonymous call to the cops. Maybe they could have gotten there before the place went up in smoke.”

“Yeah, I know. I thought about that later and I was bummed I didn't do that, but I wasn't thinking straight.”

He polished off his soft drink and rattled the ice in the cup, tilting a cube into his mouth. I could hear the ice crunching in his teeth. It sounded like a horse chewing on a bit.

“Do you remember anything else?”

“No, I guess that's it. Once I figured out what was going on, I back out of there and hightailed it down here as fast as I could.”

“You have any idea what time it was?”

“Nuh-un, not exactly. It was quarter of nine when I got here and it probably took me ten minutes on the motorcycle by the time I found a place to park and all like that. I had to walk the sucker for two blocks so nobody would hear me start it up. It was probably eight-thirty or something like that when I left Uncle Leonard's house.”

I shook my head. “Not eight-thirty. You must mean nine-thirty. She wasn't killed until after nine.”

He took the cup away from his mouth, looking at me with puzzlement. “She wasn't?”

“Your uncle and Mrs. Howe both say they talked to her at nine and the cops took a call they think was your aunt at nine-oh-six.”

“Well, maybe I got it wrong then because I thought it was quarter of nine when I got here. I looked at the clock when I walked in and then I turned around and asked this buddy of mine what time it was and he checked his watch.”

“I'll see if I can check that out,” I said. “By the way, how's Leonard related to you?”

“My dad and him are brothers. Dad's the youngest in his family.”

“So Lily Howe is their sister.”

“Something like that.”

The purple neon tubes began to blink out in succession and the pink ones went dark after that. The owner of the place called over to the table. “Closing down in ten minutes, Mike. Sorry to break it up.”

“That's okay. Thanks, man.”

We got up, moving toward the back entrance. He was not much taller than I and I wondered if we looked like brother and sister or mother and son. I didn't say anything else until we got to the parking lot.