King Maybe (24 page)

“I'm not exactly used furniture myself.”

“Let's not go over things we've already covered. Actually, you should be pleased, shouldn't you? Here I am,
extending
myself, going out of my way to offer you advice, when you know perfectly well that I don't care what you do.”

Sometimes the word
insufferable
just falls short. “Thanks.”

“That's settled, then. Why are you here?”

“You were going to give me a bunch of money yesterday.”

He said, “Mmmmm.”

“Mmmmm?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Give me a vowel. Yes or no?”

He said, “Do you have the stamp?”

“I do.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure.” I backed away from him—Stinky's got fast hands—and fished it out of my pocket, sealed in a little baggie.

“Give it to me.”

“Money.”

“A closer look, then.”

I clutched both sides of the baggie tightly enough to turn my knuckles white and said, “Grab it, and it'll tear. I'll make sure of it.”

“Barbarian,” Stinky said mildly. He brought his eyes within a few inches of the stamp and then nodded. “How much did we say?”

“
We
didn't say anything. I said fifty, you said forty-five, and I reluctantly agreed. With fifteen more due when the threat from the Slugger has been eliminated.”

“Forty,” he said.

“Stinky,” I said, “you cease to interest me.” I replaced the stamp in my pocket and turned to leave.

“Do you have another buyer?” he said, inadvertently presenting me with a bargaining chip.

I turned back to him. “I do.”

He widened his eyes as much as the Botox would allow. “All the business we've done together. All the good times we've had, the laughs we've shared. Don't they
mean
anything to you?”

I said, “Not a whit.”

“Who's the buyer?”

“Turnaround Dave.”

He looked like he'd smelled something that didn't belong in a kitchen. “You're slumming.”

“I don't know about you,” I said, “but lately I've noticed that when I spend money, I rarely think about where I got it.”

“Dave wouldn't know what to do with that stamp.”

“Not really my problem, is it? I mean, once he pays me, it's not like I'll actually give a shit.”

“Philistine,” he said. “Football fan.”

I said, “Forty-five. Now.”

“Can't,” he said. “I can do the forty. Madame Butterfly out there is charging me five to bury Jejomar.”

I looked at him long enough that anyone
else
with a guilty conscience would have looked away, and then I nodded and let him think I'd fallen for it. “Fine,” I said. “I believe you. Get the money.” It's important to allow people small victories, especially when they know a lot of shooters.

“Right back,” he said, and I used the time alone to call Louie.

“Still got the limo?” I asked.

“I only got it back around noon.” Louie sounded aggrieved.

“Sorry. Feels longer. I'm going to need it tonight. Does it still have those hand-painted plates on it?”

“Like I said, I only got it back—”

“Good. Where can I pick it up?”

“The garage on Woodman.”

“Okay. Be about an hour and a half.”

“Take your time,” he said. “It's been demographically established that around this time many of us eat dinner.” He hung up just as Stinky came back in, a thick wad of money in his hand. I said, “Is that all of it, or do I need to count it?”

“You wound me,” he said.

“Not yet I haven't.” I reached out and took the bills. “
Now
I have.”

“The stamp,” he said.

“Later. And I know this is an outrage and I've betrayed you and all that, but this will get the Slugger off your back forever, and it will avenge Jejomar, and you're still going to get your damn stamp, but not until I'm through with it. Or, if you want, I could give you the stamp right now and forget all about the Slugger, forget all about Jejomar. He wasn't my houseboy, and I'm not the one whose name the Slugger knows. And as a last argument, have I ever promised you anything you didn't eventually get?”

He actually thought about it, the creep. “No.”

“So. Want the stamp now, with the Slugger still out there and your conscience a single festering sore over Jejomar's death, or you want it later, with the Slugger gone and Jejomar able to rest in peace, knowing that his killer is in the big ditch?”

“Later,” he said, but it cost him a lot. He put out a steadying hand and grasped the edge of the counter.

“Couple of days,” I said, shoving the money into my pocket, “and all this will be over.”

When I went out through the condo's front door, the wind almost blew me down.

PART FIVE

A HARDER DARKNESS

And here come hired youths and maids

that feign to love or sin

In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.

—Rudyard Kipling

(Not actually about Hollywood, but it might as well be.)

24

Reconciliation Cruise

Sitting behind the wheel, Ronnie said, “It's kind of a boat.”

“Lookit all the mass you got,” Louie said, as though he were trying to sell her on it, which in a sense he was. “You get into a one-on-one in this thing, you're the party's gonna walk away.”

“She's not going to get into a one-on-one,” I said, standing beside the open passenger door. “This is going to be a nice, uneventful evening.” The wind slammed the car door closed, and I had to yank my hand back to keep all my fingers.

Ronnie said, “I didn't know you had hurricanes in California.”

“Santa Ana,” Louie said. “Blows down from the desert. The hills above Newhall have caught fire.” He sniffed the air. “I could smell it a while ago. Anyway, a little wind shouldn't bother you. This baby, you couldn't blow it over with a water cannon.”

“But it's so
wide
,” she said, all eyes. “What happens if I scratch it?”

“Junior pays me.” The wind stood his ponytail on end, making him look like a candle. “You don't worry about a thing—”

“. . . little lady,” Ronnie said, finishing the thought for him. “This is the kind of car, in Jersey they'd use it for a guy with his feet in a tub of cement.”

I said, “Jersey?”

“Trenton, remember?” she said, with a smile that meant,
Gotcha
.

Louie said, “Cement?”

“It's a
joke
, guys.”

“You say so.” Louie shrugged, holding his ponytail down with both hands. “So. Gonna be okay?”

“Easy peasy,” she said. “I was just catering to the male ego a little. Let's go, Junior.”

I opened the door, and the wind snatched at it again, but I kept hold. “When the hell is this supposed to let up?” I asked.

Louie said, “Tomorrow.”

“You can't go
in there all superstitious,” she said, heading south on Woodman toward Ventura. “It's just going to distract you.”

“You sound like Herbie.”

She took her eyes off the road and kept them on me long enough to make me fidget. “Really? Like
Herbie
? That may be the nicest thing you ever said to me.”

I said, “Oh, don't be silly.”

“Well, it might be. He's sort of your gold standard, isn't he?”

“I guess.”

“You're pouting.”

“I don't pout.”

“Of course not. You know, I thought this was going to be sort of an . . . I don't know, a reconciliation cruise.” She hung a right. “With music on the sound track and everything. ‘My Heart Will Go On,' that kind of stuff.”

Ventura was unnaturally empty, and at this rate we were going to get there in no time. I said, “How are you planning to go?”

“Would you ask a man that question?”

“Yes,” I said. Then I said, “I don't know.” Then I said, “Probably not.”

“Well, I thought I'd take Beverly Glen up the hill and then Mulholland to—”

“Never mind,” I said. “Fine.”

“You are really, really jumpy.”

“Yes,” I said. “I am.” We drove in silence for several blocks.

“You've done this before
how
many times?” She made a left, heading uphill.

“Who can count?”

“Oh, well,” she said. “Are we going to have a talk?”

“This isn't a talk?”

“No, this isn't a talk. This is a dialogue between a responsible adult and a stunted child.”

“I've already told you not to wait for me while I'm in there, haven't I?”

“You have.”

The street steepened and began to curve, and I could feel my heart strumming away in both wrists and at the side of my neck. That
never
happened. I said, “Okay. I'm seriously spooked.”

She took one hand off the wheel and put it on mine. “I'll wait for you.” A car rocketed around the curve toward us with its brights on, and she put both hands on the wheel again.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “Not even in the general neighborhood. Go down to San Vicente or someplace where there are a lot of restaurants and eat something. If this is what I think it is, which is a setup of some kind, I don't want you getting snagged in it, too. It's bad enough that I had you drive me.”

“I helped last time.”

I said, “There's a turn coming up on the right. Would you make it, please, and then pull over?”

She did, and when the car had been put in park, on an appealingly dark stretch of curb, I slid over and wrapped my arms around her. “You saved my ass,” I said, my mouth moving against the tickle of her fine golden hair. “
That's
what I should have been talking about that night. No one, not even Herbie, ever pulled me out of the fire like that. In fact, you were brilliant all night long.” I kissed her, and she gave a lot of it back. “Stinky says I should go into business with you.”

“You were doing great there for a minute or two,” she said, sitting back. “Leave Stinky out of it and leave the future to the future. Are you seriously telling me that you're scared to do this job but that you have no alternative?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, then let's do this. I'll drive back and forth, east and west on Mulholland, just four or five minutes away. You leave your phone on, and I'll leave mine on. Anything at all that goes wrong, you say ‘Mayday' and I come on the hop. If you're not out front, I pancake another gate. If I have to drive this tank, might as well get some use out of it.”

I said, “Okay. On one condition. If I tell you to get the hell out of there, you do it. No hesitation, no heroics. You just peel off and take the car back to Louie. Deal?”

She pulled her purse out from between us. “Here,” she said, extricating a length of rubbery wire. “It's a single earbud. Plug it into the phone. That way you'll be able to hear me talking to you but no one else will, and you'll have an ear free for the house. I'm going to be listening until we're together again. If you need to talk about anything, ask advice, call for help, I'll be on the line.”

“And if I'm in serious trouble and I don't think it's a good time even to whisper, I'll push a key and hold it down. When you hear that, disconnect and go away. Go away fast.”

She looked at me, but I knew she wasn't actually seeing me. She was running scenarios in her head. Then she shrugged. “Will do,” she said. “Am I allowed to wish you good luck?”

I put my arms around her again and marveled at the way we fit together. I kissed her hair, then her forehead, then the tip of her nose, and then her lips. “Hell yes,” I said.

25

Piece of Cake

I could smell the distant fire, feel it in the back of my throat.

The street on which Granger lived was rich in eucalyptus trees, their topmost branches clawing at the sky as the wind whipped them around, making a sound like a waterfall. The smoke was a sharp edge in the air, just another little something to bring the hairs on the back of my neck to attention. The animal reaction to fire may be harder to awaken in people than it was, say, a thousand years ago, but it still had all its potency, and it was just the spark needed to bring the black stew of my anxiety to a boil. It seethed and bubbled in the center of my chest.

From where I stood at the curb, looking back at the long curve of the street, only one house was visible; up here in the hills of gold, the homes were squared away on huge lots, hidden behind daunting fences aimed partly at people like me and partly at tourists and other lookie-loos. This was a street of gates.

Before punching up the code to Granger's gate, before doing
anything
that would commit me, even emotionally, to the break-in, I waited at the curb until Ronnie's taillights disappeared around the corner that would take her up to Mulholland, where she'd be just one more black Town Car in a neighborhood of black Town Cars. The car had already served its primary purpose in delivering me to the gate. If anyone could get out of a car on this street without drawing a curious stare from a neighbor, it would be because he arrived in a limo.

The way Granger had explained the alarm system to me, it was rococo in its complexity, and I was about to breach the weakest and easiest of its perimeters. Five digits punched into the keypad mounted on a shiny brass pole at the level of a driver's window would slide the gate aside. It was heavy steel, on deep runners, and it snicked into a reinforced vertical slot when closed. I thought it was unlikely that Ronnie could flatten it even with the Town Car. I took a deep breath and then another, looked up and down the block, and keyed the numbers into the pad. The gate slid noiselessly to the left, and I said into the phone, “I'm going in.”

“I'm with you,” Ronnie said. “And listen, while you've got nothing to do, I don't just have . . . um, regard for you. I love you like crazy.”

I stepped over the gate's track and stopped, looking up at the house, which was even bigger than I'd expected.

She said, “Are you there?”

“I'm here. Listen, if there was a Guinness World Cup for Reciprocity, I'd win it.”

“The Guinness World Cup for Reciprocity,” she said. “If it's engraved, it'd have to be a pretty big cup.”

“I reciprocate like mad,” I said. “It's kicking things off that gives me the willies.”

“I'll bask in the warm glow of your reciprocity and let you get to work. Can you smell the fire, too?”

“Sharp as a razor, red as a pomegranate.”

“I'll be listening for you,” she said.

I tapped the earplug as a kind of farewell and heard the gate slide home behind me. It took a different combination, keyed into a pad just inside the house's front door, to open it again, and the front door itself had a ten-digit key, seven of which were punched in outside and the remaining three inside, within ten seconds of closing the door. None of the windows could be opened without keying in yet another code—a different one for each of the three floors—from the inside. In other words, as far as getting in was concerned, the windows were an invitation to go directly to the police station, because that's where all the alarms actually sounded, and Granger had told me that response was generally within a span of about eight minutes.

And that was the
easy
part. When you finally got inside, it got complicated.

The house rose up in front of me like Xanadu in
Citizen Kane
, but less welcoming and minus the single lit window. A central tower, with a spiral of small windows climbing it, stretched upward the full three stories, and the two wings sloped back symmetrically with an unintentionally aeronautical effect. It would have been almost comically imposing if I weren't scared senseless. There was nothing funny in its sheer blunt mass, its hulking outline a harder darkness imposed upon a dark sky. Bits of it seemed to shimmer and shift as moonlight flickered its way through the dancing eucalyptus limbs, throwing moving shadows on the walls. Nice, malevolent little special effect. Taken as a whole, it looked like the kind of place where there'd be drains in the cellar to make it easier to clean up after the servants were bled out.

The front door stood twenty or thirty yards from the gate. Granger had told me to stick to the driveway, which was covered in gravel that crunched loudly underfoot. The lawn, he'd said, had sensors that when tripped lit up the place like a football stadium. The hiss and whoosh of the wind pretty much drowned out the sound of my footsteps, but even so I had to fight the impulse to move to the grass, where I could walk silently.

When Ronnie had asked me how many times I've done this before, I'd hurried over the answer, as though it were beyond computation, but it wasn't. More than twenty years in the trade, so to speak, and let's say twenty jobs a year, averaging in the higher numbers during the first four or five years, when I didn't know what to steal and how to sell it. Later, as my eye improved, the need was less frequent. Then add in the so-called practice runs I'd done in my teens, when I didn't take anything, when the victory was in getting in and getting out again. There were probably fifty of those, and after a while I'd started a spreadsheet to keep track of what I cunningly called my B-points,
B
being a sixteen-year-old's code for
burglary
. I gave myself points for elegance, for quickness, for invisibility—the traces, or lack thereof, of my having been in a place—and later, as I got better, for difficulty and the estimated value of the swag I left behind. When, with some embarrassment, I'd told Herbie about my point system, he'd nodded approval. “Pretty much the things you oughta be thinking about,” he'd said. “Now, burn all that shit before anyone else sees it.”

So let's say four hundred fifty in-and-outs, without ever getting nabbed. Why the hell was this one making my knees so shaky? My knees were
never
shaky.

Kid
, Herbie said,
don't go in
.

It stopped me. Not the fact that Herbie was talking to me, even though he was dead, because he did that all the time. It was the fact that he'd said,
Don't go in
. He'd never said that before.

“I've got to,” I said. I said it silently, so you couldn't have heard it if you'd been there, but then you wouldn't have heard Herbie either. “If I don't, I'm screwed.”

Figure that out later
, Herbie said.
Like I told you a hunnert times. One thing at a time. Figuring out not to go into this house, you can do that right now. Figuring out what happens later—you can do that later.

This was the second time in a few minutes I'd been advised to focus on the present. So I did for a moment or two. I considered
not
going in, and every time I did, I saw the not-very-appealing face of Officer Biehl and thought about going to jail. That was enough to force me to start walking again. I'd gotten halfway to the house, and it looked even taller and grimmer. And then, just as I was about to dismiss Herbie's arguments for good—he was, after all, dead and probably a wishful figment of my paranoia—a light snapped on behind a big picture window on the left, which my memory of the floor plans told me was the living room.

“Right,” I said out loud to Herbie. “I'll figure it out later.”

As I turned to go, lights came on in two other windows: one to the right of the front door—part of Granger's office suite—and one in what was probably the second-floor drawing room, in the left wing. They snapped on simultaneously, so if it was a single person, he or she had
very
long arms. I pressed the little button on my watch and got a pale blue 9
p.m.

Nine. It wasn't even a full week since daylight saving time had made its final curtsy and tiptoed over the horizon. Back then it had been getting dark at this time. People with timers on their lights tend to set them bang on the hour or the half hour. (Note to homeowners: Set yours at very odd times and in clusters, so that groups of two or more come on about a minute apart. We'll be miles away before the next one clicks on.)

So it was just timers that hadn't been changed.

Timers I could deal with.

The house loomed above me as though it were leaning forward a little to see me better, as I ignored Herbie's urgent
tsk-tsk-tsk
in my mind's ear and made for the front door. I knew the interior layout as well as anyone can possibly know a house he hasn't actually been in, I knew what I was after, I knew where to pick up some bonus goods that could be fenced safely and anonymously, even without involving Stinky, and I knew that the guy who owned the place wouldn't even land until midnight or so.

Optimism on demand: this was going to be a piece of cake. A quick look around to make sure it was empty, grab some of Granger's jewelry, all the while doing lighthearted, witty
Thin Man
banter on the phone with Ronnie, get the Turner last because it'll be heavy, take a final bow, and exit.

There
, that
was the frame of mind I needed. I mean, come on, four hundred fifty times? I punched in the seven-digit code, listened for the click, and opened the door, and as I did so, a gust of wind practically blew me across the threshold. But it didn't, and I preserved my sangfroid,
which
,
I suddenly remembered, is defined as
“composure or coolness, sometimes excessive, as shown in danger or under trying circumstances
.
”

I closed the door behind me and punched in the three-digit confirmation code
.
The door clicked again, and something that sounded heavier than a guillotine blade fell into place inside the door. Note to self: Do not attempt to shoulder the door open. No matter what's behind you or how fast it is, punch in the code carefully and precisely, and when you're on the outside, whatever the hell made that noise will be between you and your pursuer. I turned and took my first look around.

The hallway had vaulted ceilings and had been painted a dark terra-cotta. Since the only available light was coming from the lamp on the other side of the garage-width archway into the living room, it was pretty dim. To my right, a hall stretched off toward that wing of the house, which, I knew from the floor plan Granger had given me and the builder's plans Anime and Lilli had found, housed an enormous home-office suite—an actual office, a secretarial space, and a casual den—plus a “fun room” with a soda fountain and one whole wall of transparent drawers filled with different kinds of candy, a china room, which I was assuming held dinnerware rather than an actual piece of the Middle Kingdom, a gift room, whatever that was, and three guest suites, each with bedroom, sitting room, and full bath. All of that, plus kitchen, dining room, breakfast room, and a few more guest suites in the other wing, was on the first floor. The Turner was in the den of Granger's home office.

There were no lights on in the long hallway into the wing on the right, and the door was closed to the room in Granger's office suite where the light in the window had come on, the room that housed the Turner. I knew from the plans that the hall elbowed back at about a thirty-degree angle just past the gift room, but it was too dark down there to see the turning. The house was the biggest I'd ever been in, big enough to have its own suburbs, and I knew I wouldn't be able to hear someone moving around in its Pacoima or Palmdale, but I was in its Beverly Hills, which was to say the entrance hall and the living room, plus the portion of the hall to my right before it angled away, and that area was either empty or inhabited by very, very quiet people. I extended my antennae, their acuity developed over all these years of being in places where I wasn't supposed to be, and sensed no one.

Still, I waited, mouth-breathing, until my heartbeat had returned to normal. A couple of creaks, the kind of incidental noises you'd expect in a cooling structure on a windy evening, but nothing that made me want to reopen the front door and run screaming into the night.

And then there
was
a noise, the sharp bang of something hard hitting something hard, a bit muffled but not very far off, and since the entry hall was essentially an echo chamber, I had no way of knowing what direction it had come from. I invested two full minutes of complete motionlessness, ears exploring all the directions I thought were likely, and heard nothing more. Obviously, I couldn't see any of the other rooms from where I was standing, but thanks to a pair of floor-to-ceiling windows flanking the door, I
could
see a slice of outside. I slid my feet over to the right-hand window, put an eye against it, and saw the culprit. Perhaps. A eucalyptus branch had come down, taking with it a good-size birdhouse on a pole, which had slammed into the brick edge of a reflecting pool.
Hence
, I thought,
bang
. I tried to remember whether I'd seen it when I was coming in, but I'd been watching the lighted windows and probably wouldn't have registered it. I took a deep, deep breath, flexed my shoulders and shook my head to loosen my neck muscles, and turned my attention back to the job at hand.

Judging from my view of the outside and from what I could see in here, especially the clash between the medieval vaulted ceiling in the entry hall, the Spanish-style arch that opened into the living room, and the 1970s hallway running off to the left, this was what I think of as a Stage Five Los Angeles house, which is to say built in the 1990s or later by people with more money than judgment, a grandiose self-image, and a limited frame of reference. The general principles seemed to be (1) make it better by making it bigger, (2) select the most garish aspects of three or four mismatched styles, (3) throw them together in the dark and take them however they land, and (4) spend money on visible surfaces and economize on dreary details like structural support and materials that can't be seen.
Bingo
, a monument to hubris for twenty or thirty years and a maintenance nightmare after that.