King Maybe (26 page)

The china room was, unsurprisingly, a hymn to china, much of it hand painted and heavily trimmed in gold. I spotted nine full services for eight, six of them Limoges, complete with tureens, heavy salad bowls, and serving platters, plus shelves upon shelves of Baccarat, Lalique, and Waterford crystal. It was kept out here, the door to the corridor open, to be seen, and even someone at my raggedy end of the economic spectrum knew that setting it out for show was a
lot
less classy than putting it behind cabinet doors, where it belonged.

I whispered into the phone, “This is not a healthy environment.”

“You want out?”

“You're still there,” I said, smiling in the dark.

“Knucklehead,” she said. “Yes or no?”

“Yes, but not yet. Stay within a mile or two, though, so I can scream when I can't take any more.”

“Will do.”

“Duty calls.”

The gift room couldn't have been called anything else. The far end was a tidy pile of wrapped packages, perhaps a hundred of them, with personal little color-coded Post-its on them reading
male, female, sports fan, d-list, assistant, asshole, talent, blow-off
, and a few less generic reminders:
watch (him), watch (her), sunglasses,
and so forth. One long wall was taken up by a wrapping table with huge spools of ribbon hanging at one end and rolls and rolls of tape at the juncture of the table and the wall. Seasonal and generic paper hung from thick rolls down all four walls, and the floor opposite the wrapping table was literally knee-deep in flat, precreased boxes that could be snapped into three dimensions in a moment or two. They ranged from little tidy ones—for jewelry, I supposed—to some that were four and five feet long.

It is not more blessed to give than to receive, if this is the way you give.

Of the three rooms in the office suite, the den with the painting in it was the farthest from the entry hall and the only one with a shutdown alarm. So I skipped it, figuring
to get the Turner on the way out, and went into the main office, just to take a look. Big and buttery, full of very nice nineteenth-century furniture, none of which looked like it had been dragged out of some prop room. The moment this thought crossed my mind, I realized that my first impulse had been correct: that clumsy piece of Victorian duff in the studio office had been put there solely for my benefit. It was a set piece in the little scene Granger had cast me in. He'd allowed me an easy swipe through a bunch of potential film treatments to convince me that he was indeed considering Jake's magnum opus. It was a way of soothing my feelings so I wouldn't be pissed off enough at being made a fool of that I'd turn down his offer. For all he knew, I was sufficiently hotheaded to tell him to go fuck himself. He would have gained nothing by putting me in jail, and he wanted to make sure I wouldn't be intransigent, so he'd gamed me. Successfully.

I said, out loud, “Son of a bitch.”

“Someone there?” Ronnie said in my ear.

“No, no. Just undergoing an ego adjustment.”

“Come on,” she said. “I can see the flames across the Valley from here, and I don't like it.”

“Ten minutes,” I said. “And then I'm finished with King Maybe.”

Famous last words.

26

Made of Sand

I'd seen the elevator indicated on the floor plan, but it had slipped my mind. There it was, though, in the far right corner of the office, bigger and more modern than the one at Farscope. In a laborsaving frame of mind, I pushed the button, and the door slid silently and obediently open.

Sure enough, the buttons said it went up to the third floor. From my recollection of the layout, that meant it would open directly into the third-floor room where Granger had put his serenity boulders and rock garden. I thought for half a second about going up there just long enough to pee on one of his boulders, but it seemed a little too big-dog to give me any real satisfaction. Also, a new method of developing DNA info from urine is high on the law-enforcement hit parade, so I just pushed 2.

The true sound of money is silence. The elevator was so quiet and gentle that I was almost unprepared, when
the doors opened, to find myself on a different floor. But the
real surprise was the room the doors opened into. It was from another world, the first truly nondescript room I'd seen in the house, a sort of third-string everything room with two economy couches, a couple of cheap tables, and some mismatched chairs. Unread copies of crap books leaned any old way on the shelves. The walls were hung with the kind of badly framed kitsch people buy on outings to Marin County and Cape Cod. It took me a blank, openmouthed moment to realize it was a museum of the past he had decided never to return to, a kind of memento mori to remind him that things that float can also sink. He rode that elevator every day from his all-butter office to the rancid margarine of his past.

The room's sad, musty gravitation slowed me down for a moment. This was the past that kept the shark swimming forward.

Since I have a fundamentally devious mind, it also occurred to me that this cut-rate clipping from his earlier life would be a great place to hide something deeply, unusually valuable, and I made a note to give it full attention for a couple of minutes on my way out.

Stepping into the corridor outside, I turned left and found myself on the landing for the circular stairway, ascending from the first floor and twisting on up to the third. To the right, the landing opened into an enormous double-door room that had a highly polished wooden floor and furniture almost pasted to the walls in that way that says “dancing,” and on the far side of the landing was the hall that led to the second story of the left wing, the ground floor of which I hadn't had the time to explore. A splash of parchment-yellow light fell through an open door thirty or forty feet down the hall, the second-floor drawing room where the other lamp had come on when the timers ticked into place.

Beyond that I knew I'd find the two bedroom suites, three rooms each, claimed by the master and mistress of the domain, his (of course) bigger than hers. His was the one closer to the stairs, and in the anteroom directly off the hallway, he'd said, he had a small, relatively cheap jewelry safe, probably as hard to open as a drugstore diary, containing around $60,000 in second-tier jewelry that I had been invited to pocket. I approached it, pausing long enough for a really comprehensive listen before I reached the lit open door of the drawing room. I heard nothing at all until a giant
whuff
of wind gave the front of the house a huge slap before it divided and whistled around the sides, and I cloaked myself in the noise and hurried past, to the door leading to Granger's suite.

When I opened it, I was surprised to find not the cramped little foot-wiping demi-closet I usually equate with anterooms but a big, open, L-shaped space that was lined with literally dozens of framed color photographs, mostly eleven by fourteen inches, immediately recognizable as studio shots: Granger on the sets of his various series and movies, usually modestly seated in the middle of a bunch of standing actors and production principals, or else standing with most of
them
sitting.

Just out of curiosity, I skimmed them until I came face-to-face with Suley in her Tasha Dawn incarnation, in a row of pictures positioned obscurely below eye level in a not very well illuminated corner. Not exactly pride of place for the mistress of the house. In one shot, obviously taken early in the series, she stood beaming, thrilled, heartbreakingly young, beside a seated Granger, surrounded by crew members, actors playing executive zombies in full makeup, and the handsome alive guy, who was—as he almost always seemed to be—shirtless. In another shot, clearly staged, she was going over script pages, looking older and less sure of herself, while cast members and crew gathered around trying to seem interested. Granger was sitting across a small table from her, and looking over his shoulder at her was—

Why was I wasting time on this?

The little safe was just behind the door, where it wouldn't be visible to someone who'd pushed the door open to peek in. It took me about thirty seconds to pop the lock, and I was shoveling glitter into my pocket when time stopped.

I was looking at my plastic-gloved left hand on the safe, at the open door of the safe, at the useless, ugly, expensive bangles, perhaps stolen from Ronnie's mythical father, that were still inside the safe, but what I was
seeing
was a short upper lip beneath a pug nose, eyes too close together, and the concentrated expression of someone who's long grown used to the fact that most conversations go too fast for him.

At the guy who'd been looking at Tasha over Granger's shoulder in the photograph.

I knew who it was, I was
certain
I knew who it was, but I went back and looked anyway. He was still there, wearing the fade-into-the-background costume of a two- or three-line cast member.

Officer Biehl.

An
actor
. The brass legend on the picture frame said
dead eye, season two
. I'd only watched shows from the first year, but I'd undoubtedly seen him in other stuff.

I'd
known
in Granger's office that I'd seen him before. An actor, in a studio full of actors, in a studio that produced several cop series, that probably owned a whole fucking fleet of police cars, complete with functional cherry lights.

I realized what had been out of focus when Biehl, or whatever his name was, had been in the office: Granger had kept calling him “Officer” and he hadn't been corrected, even though Biehl was wearing a sergeant's badge.

Cops don't take rank lightly, given the crap they have to shovel to earn it.

I had the weightless, unanchored feeling I associate with nitrous oxide. Granger had nothing on me. I was free to stuff my pockets, spray-paint his goddamn Turner, and walk out of there, free as a bird. The only person who'd seen me there was “Officer Biehl,” and what was he going to do? Confess to impersonating a cop? For that matter, how much of Granger's monologue about owning the Culverton Police Department was true? It had been persuasive because “Officer Biehl” had backed it up, even volunteered some of it.

I thought,
It can't be this easy
. Distrusted it all the way to the soles of my shoes.

I was experiencing the unsettling sense I sometimes have in dreams, that everything around me is made of sand and that all it would take is one sharp push to reduce the solid world to a collapsing beach castle, leaving me in a flat, dark space without a landmark in any direction.

“I'm coming out,” I said into the phone. I could hear my heart beating against the earbud. I'd gone back to the safe and was grabbing another handful of jewelry.

“On my way,” Ronnie said.

“It's a fix,” I said to her as I went out into the corridor. I wasn't even lowering my voice. “The whole thing is a setup.” I came up to the open door into the upstairs drawing room, stopped talking out of habit, slowed, then started past it.

But this time I looked in.

This time I saw her.

There was a click on the phone, and standing there numbly, swaying as though I were hanging from a hook, I said automatically, “Hold on,” and pushed the button to take the call. I was trying to turn what I was seeing into something else,
anything
else, when Anime shrilled,
“Machiavelli!”

Around the stone in my throat, I said, squinting at the drawing-room floor, “What . . . what about Machiavelli?”

“Mach One and Mach Two,” she said as I moved unwillingly but irresistibly through the door. “Mach One is the Prince, Mach Two is the Princess.”

I said, “I can't talk now,” and hung up.

She'd been beaten to death.

From the waist down, Suley was on a thick pastel carpet, and from the waist up she was on a dark hardwood floor. One hand was extended to within a few inches of an overturned table—the sound I'd heard and written off to the wind. With a surge of heart-shriveling self-loathing, I realized that she'd been alive when I came in. She'd tried to call me to her.

She was curled onto one side, her knees drawn up, like a child with a stomach ache trying to find a position that doesn't hurt. Except for a cut on her left cheekbone, her face was unmarked, but the blood on her neck and shoulders said she'd been hit repeatedly with the heavy silver candlestick that lay beside her on the floor.

I was bending over her, hoping to detect a breath, when I suddenly registered the soft click I'd heard as I rushed into the room. I straightened galvanically, leaping toward the light switches.
Three
lockdown rooms, that son of a bitch, not two.
Three.

I'd gotten less than halfway to the electrical plate when the whole house seemed to shudder, and then from every direction came a heavy clank that sounded like the thing that had clamped down inside the front door, multiplied by a hundred. I ran to the window to the left of the fireplace just in time to see four thick iron bars thrust their way from top to bottom.

Lockdown.

27

Not One Damsel in Distress

Eight minutes.

He'd said the cops could get there in eight minutes.

Of course, literally everything he'd told me had been a lie. Might be eight minutes, might be four, might be twenty. But I had to work with something, so I chose eight.

I was bending over her, holding a finger just beneath her nostrils—I realized belatedly that I'd said “Excuse me” when I extended the finger—trying to feel the warmth of a breath. With my other hand, I set the timer on my watch for eight minutes.

No breath.

No pulse.

Damn, damn, damn, damn.

Okay
, I thought, backing off mentally in the interest of not going to pieces and looking at the setup with a professional eye,
good job
. I'd walked into the ideal setup, the only thing he'd been after from the start: burglar, dead woman, weapon of opportunity, otherwise empty house, locked down, cops coming fast. Seeing it that way, it was pretty close to perfect. He'd gotten rid of his wife, she'd never spill anything to anyone about their lives, he was free as a bird, and the burglar was looking at life for murder during the commission of a felony.

All wrapped up for the jury.

And, I thought, the hell with me. What about
Suley
?

I said, out loud, “This can't be permitted.”

Seven minutes, forty seconds.

When I was eighteen years old, my father announced that he was coming back to us and we were going to be a family again. The prospect of the reunion drove me to rent a little shack in Topanga Canyon, smuggle my stuff out of my mother's house, and move in, all alone on my mountain. It immediately became apparent that I was
not
alone there, that in fact I shared it with a global convention of rats.

My second day there, I bought two big rat traps, baited them with peanut butter, and went to bed. I dropped off and slept for what felt like thirty minutes, and then heard a
WHACK
like a pistol shot. It wouldn't have been any louder if it had been caused by someone slapping my face.

I lay there, bouncing to the tom-tom in my chest until it was drowned out by the wood of the trap banging against the living-room floor. Then it scraped. Then it banged again. It seemed obvious to me that the rat was out there, in my new living room, dying in agony.

The only manly, self-respecting thing to do was to get up, go out there, and bring the situation to a merciful end. I summoned my courage and learned a valuable lesson:
it doesn't always come when you call it
. As a lower-impact alternative, I piled the pillows and blankets over my head and stayed that way until it got light. And when I finally ventured into the living room, I found the trap empty except for about two inches of tail trapped beneath the hammer, chewed through by a rat who had no intention of dying.

Sitting there beside Suley, I said, “Me neither.”

Seven minutes and twenty seconds.

So. The cops were on their way, and Granger's script called for them to find the body and her murderer, standing around shifting pointlessly from foot to foot. The only thing to do was make us
both
disappear. What could possibly thwart Granger more completely than to send the cops into a nice, neat, empty house: nothing missing, no burglar, no murder victim, no trace of violence? He'd have a houseful of cops and no idea in the world what was happening.

No trace of violence.
I could take care of that—well enough at least to stand up to visual scrutiny—while I thought about hiding places. I got up fast.

The door that I'd assumed would lead to a bathroom opened instead onto something even better, a linen closet. That was such an odd enough place for one that I decided it had been
intended
as a bathroom until, late in the building process, someone realized there were no linen closets. Linen closets weren't a priority for a guy who used a whole room to display his china. Can't kindle a lot of envy with a linen closet.

I grabbed a blanket and four hand towels, closed the door, and went back to her.

“Please forgive me,” I said. I straightened her legs and her trunk—she was still pliable, she was still warm, she'd only recently gone into the other room, forever. When I had her straightened out, I opened the blanket on the floor beside her and rolled her onto it. There was a lot of blood in her hair.

Beneath her, open and facedown, was a book. It was a children's book, big and brightly colored with a picture on the cover of a young woman in nineteenth-century costume aboard what looked like a pirate ship. The title was
Not One Damsel in Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls.
My inward breath caught and felt for a moment like a sob, and I swallowed it, sniffed hard, and thought,
Later. First let's find a way to fuck this guy up.

I picked up the book and placed it on her chest, straight as I could, then folded the blanket neatly over her. I said, “This won't be for long, honest,” and then I got to my feet so I could look at the bloodstains. While I was up there, I righted the table and picked up the candlestick.

There was blood and hair on the base. It was Georgian, massive, sterling, sharp-cornered. Judging from the weight, the base had probably been filled solidly with bronze, which is heavier than iron. He'd grabbed it by the slender upright and used the sharp-cornered base as a club. The top half was clean and bright.

I took the candlestick and two of the hand towels and ran across the hallway and into a bathroom, where I scrubbed the silver clean and rubbed it dry. Then I soaked the hand towels and wrung them out so they wouldn't leave a drip pattern and ran back into the drawing room.

She'd bled only on the dark wood; the carpet was clean. I dropped the wet, folded towels onto the blood pattern and used my feet and my weight to scrub the floor clean, turning and refolding the towels twice. Then I put down a dry towel and rubbed it briskly over the damp part of the floor. When I turned it over, there was only a shade of pink on the white cloth, a blush. I backed up to get a broader view of the floor. I rolled the damp towels in the dry ones, studying the scene.

Good enough. Obviously, the blood would show up when and if the cops used luminol, but equally obviously, there was no visible reason to use luminol in this room, at least not tonight. By the time they finished with the first floor and got up here, the cops would believe that the whole thing was an alarm malfunction. The room looked as peaceful as Easter except for Suley, folded in her blanket, and a flipped-back corner of the carpet where he'd probably caught a toe on it, coming in . . .

And there it was in front of me, all of it at the same time, as it had probably happened: her, sitting in that armchair, reading some story about a strong young woman, the chair turned toward the dark fireplace, him coming through the door in stockinged feet and
with gloves on, reaching for the candlestick, snagging his toe under the carpet and making a noise, her jumping to her feet, seeing him, knowing beyond any doubt what it meant. Trying to get around him—that was why she was mostly off the carpet—him sidestepping to cut her off, bringing the candlestick down and then down again and, probably, again.

And then his nerve had failed him slightly, so perhaps he was partly human after all. He'd decided, wishfully, that she was dead and then bolted before making sure.

I had five minutes and forty-three seconds.

Where?
Three stories, 34,000 square feet, where could I put her? Where could I put myself?

Big house. Big air-circulating systems. Big intake vents.

I pulled a couch from the wall and looked behind it, and there it was, just above the baseboard, maybe fourteen inches square, with an old-fashioned metal grate over it. There would be a filter pad about a foot up. I could push the pad up, ease Suley into the vent, then go in myself at the diagonal, feetfirst, shoving myself back until we were out of sight, pray that the duct held, pull the grate into place again, and then flip the filter down, making us invisible. Except—

Except that the grate didn't pop out or in. It was secured with a screw at each corner. No way to close it from inside.

I heard distant sirens. Maybe half a mile, three-quarters of a mile off.

Jesus,
Ronnie
. I'd never talked to her again after Anime called.

I shoved the couch into place and pulled out the phone. Pushed the button to reconnect, and there she was.

“Something's gone wrong, hasn't it?” she said. “I'm a few minutes from you—”

“
No
. Go away, don't come. I can't talk. Just go somewhere and wait for my call.”

“But I—”

“I know. But goodbye, and don't get
near
this place.”

“I'll be waiting.” She hung up.

“Thank you,” I said reflexively, although I knew she was gone. I reached over and centered the candlestick on the table, just to be doing something, and listened to the sirens getting louder.

Five minutes and seven seconds. Hopeless, except.
Except.
I pushed speed dial for Anime.

“It's really
sick
,” she said. “What that girl is doing—”

“
Don't talk.
Listen. Granger's alarm company, Armstrong something—”

“Hepworth,” she said.

“Armstrong Hepworth. I need to know what happens when a house goes into lockdown. It must be something they promote on their site, how hard it is to get through it in either direction—”

“Lilli!” she shouted. “Armstrong Hepworth, lockdown mode,
now
!”

“The specific question is, who can get in? How hard is it to get in? Call me when you know.”

I hung up, ransacking the house in my mind's eye, both the parts I'd been in and the areas I'd seen only in the builder's drawings and then the drawings for modifications, beginning with the basement, thinking about going down there to see, maybe there was room in the gravity heater,
although if I were a cop I'd check in the gravity heater
, but there might be something else down there, and did the elevator go all the way down to the . . .

The elevator.

The elevator.

Sirens louder now. A couple of minutes away.

The
elevator
.

And I was running, leaving Suley behind for the moment, running on nothing but hope because I didn't have anything else, out of the room and into the hall, barreling down the circular staircase, taking the steps three at a time and keeping away from the spiral of windows, and then I was sprinting down the central hall on the ground floor and through the kitchen into the pantry and down the stairs, losing it a quarter of the way down and landing with all my weight on my right knee on the edge of a stair, feeling an explosion of pain, as if every nerve in my body had gathered there to say hi to the stair, and I knew it was going to be trouble, knew it was going to stiffen up, but that was later, and there wasn't any time at
all
for later. There was only right now, about four and a quarter minutes of right now.

It was where I remembered it, by the painting supplies: the ladder. Narrow, aluminum, lightweight, perfect. I limped to it as fast as I could, realized I'd need to bring the ladder back down here (
no time, no time
) to avoid giving them a clue, and with a sinking heart grabbed a big coil of clothesline that was hanging from a nail in the wall, hung it around my neck, hoisted the ladder, and went.

The leg was
absolutely
going to be a problem. I practically had to drag it up the stairs behind me, feeling like the mad doctor's troll assistant in some old horror movie, keeping the ladder angled up so it wouldn't catch on one of the stairs above me and send me racketing all the way back down again, maybe unable to get up this time, and when I reached the top of the stairs, I had two and a half minutes left.

And the sirens were whoop-whooping away, their tones sliding up the scale in obedience to the Doppler effect, announcing that they were coming toward me, if any further evidence were required.

I'd left the elevator upstairs, in Granger's Room of the Rancid Past, so I hauled the ladder and my stiffening leg up the curving staircase and into the stuffy room. I leaned the ladder against the wall and pushed the button and stood there, swearing under my breath, as its doors opened grudgingly, at a rich man's pace, no problem, the world will wait.

Two minutes, twelve—

The sirens peaked in volume and then shut off. They were
here
. So he'd lied about the eight minutes, too.

The question was, could they get in?

At last the doors yawned widely enough to allow me to shove my way through and hit the
stop
button. The doors halted, two-thirds open, and to my relief there was no automatic alarm bell.

Wrestle the ladder to the rear corner of the elevator cab, look up at the ceiling. And see that Laverna, the Roman goddess of thieves, was doing her part. Unlike many elevator passenger cabs, which had a drop-down ceiling to hold the lights, the removal of which ate precious time before you could get to the real ceiling, this one had its lights recessed directly into the ceiling, one in each of three of the ceiling's four panels. The lack of wiring in the fourth made it clear which panel was the legally mandated emergency escape hatch. It was, as it often is, the one in the left rear corner if you were facing the back of the compartment.

I could just barely hear police radio chatter and behind it the sirens of a few Johnny-come-latelies, hauling ass to join the fun. I got the ladder into position and started to climb.

So, naturally, my phone rang. Anime. I punched her in, hanging there, and she said, “It says here, ‘Three levels of absolute security: the account number, a personal PIN number, and a special lockdown code word, which the owner is to guard carefully.' Hey, have you noticed how no one ever tells you to guard something carelessly—”