Square in the Face (Claire Montrose Series) (9 page)

“Of course.” He gave her a wink. The thing about Jimmy was that he never asked why you wanted to do what you wanted to do. He narrowed his eyes and stroked the sparse goatee he had been attempting to grow for as long as Claire had known him. “You could try putty in the mechanism. Or tape. But that would only work with certain kinds of locks, and if no one tries the door after they think they’ve locked it. What kind of lock will you be working with? Standard Yale? Disc tumbler? Your five-pin household?”

Claire was already beginning to feel overwhelmed. “I don’t have any idea.”

“Then what I would really recommend is a pick kit. I’ve got the basics for thirty-nine-ninety-five, or a deluxe set for seventy-nine-ninety-five.” He was already unlocking one of the display cases.

“You mean, like to pick a lock? Can anybody do that?”

“Sure, if you practice a bit.” He pulled a palm-sized folded leather case from the top glass shelf and flipped it open. Inside were a dozen black metal tools, each about the size of a toothpick. He picked up one that had a ninety-degree bend at one end. “See, you slide this in where the key would go, and then put pressure on it. Then you take a pick or a rake,” he touched tools that had either a single hooked end or a series of waves, then picked up one to demonstrate, “slip it in, and you just start working it and working it until the tumblers click home.”

“Won’t that take a long time?”

Jimmy shrugged. “My first one took an hour. Now I can do one in about five minutes. My advice is to practice at home first on as many different types of locks as you can find. You would probably be pretty good at it.” He cleared his throat. “In my experience, women have more delicate, sensitive fingers.”

This was Jimmy’s version of flirting, but Claire ignored it. Instead, curiosity got the better of her. “Do you sell very many of these pick kits?”

“It’s a steady mover.”

“What do people buy them for?”

Jimmy narrowed his eyes and gave a warning shake of his head. “You know my motto. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. Maybe,” he lifted his shoulders, “maybe some people get locked out of their houses a lot.”
Or
, Claire thought
, they get locked out of other people’s houses a lot
. He realized she was eyeing him skeptically. “Or maybe, you know, it’s like a hobby.”

In a country where shooting an AK-47 could be classified as a hobby, Claire supposed anything was possible. She bought the less expensive pick set, as well as a nineteen-ninety-five booklet that Jimmy promised would give her step-by-step instructions for all types of locks. And remembering the sickening wash of terror when the dog had leaped at her, she had Jimmy throw in a bottle of Dog B Gon. It might come in handy the next time she went running.

As he was slipping her purchases in a bag, Claire asked him if he knew where she might be able to get some fake I.D. “I’m not talking a driver’s license, or anything like that. But what if I wanted to make someone think I was a college student?”

Despite the fact that they were the only two people in the Shoppe, Jimmy whispered his recommendation from the side of his mouth.
 
“Harry’s Camera. Beaverton.” He handed the bag to her, then added, “This building you’re interested in. It doesn’t have an alarm, does it?”

Claire noted that Jimmy hadn’t brought up that possibility until after he had made his sale. “I hadn’t thought about that.” Her plan, such as it was, was already crumbling. “I don’t know. Do you have anything that could circumvent one?”

Jimmy shook his head. “Probably not. There’s two basic types. One monitors the perimeter - your doors, windows, transoms, vents, skylights. They’re usually set to notice vibrations. Some sophisticated alarms are tuned to the frequency of breaking glass. The other type of alarm monitors the interior space with either heat or motion detectors. But both are prone to falsing.”
“Falsing?” Claire echoed.

“Say a heavy truck goes by. Or a helium balloon left over from a party starts drifting around. Nine times out of ten, an alarm goes off for the wrong reason. That’s why most of them aren’t hooked up to police stations any more - too many false alarms. Even the monitoring agencies don’t take them too seriously. And a lot of alarms aren’t monitored at all.”

“Then what would be the point of having one?”

“The primary goal is to scare someone off. If some jerk is kicking in your back door and starts hearing a loud noise, nine times out of ten he’ll decide it’s better to go someplace else. And even with an unmonitored alarm, usually someone will notice and eventually check it out, even if it’s just a neighbor calling to complain about the noise.”
 

“But I don’t have any idea what kind of alarm system this building has, or if it even has an alarm system.”

“You’ve got questions, Jimmy’s got answers,” Jimmy said. He paused and looked around the empty store. “Do you want my advice?”

“Of course I do, Jimmy.”

“I think you should break out, not break in.”

###

Evidently, Harry was a lot less secretive than Jimmy about his business, because his half-page ad in the Yellow Pages trumpeted “I.D. - all types!” in seventy-two point type. Harry’s turned out to be located in another anonymous suburb strip mall. Harry probably made most of his money, not off the few cameras in a dusty glass case, but through the sale of instant identification displayed on a Plexiglas divider in the middle of the room. The clerk behind the counter told Claire that the I.D. section was self-serve, and she could see that the woman had the same “I don’t want to know” attitude as Jimmy. The cards bore official-looking headings like “Employee I.D.,” “College I.D.,” and “Student I.D.” Some had spaces for height, weight, date of birth, and/or hair and eye colors. One version just said “Official Identification Card,” another showed a pseudo-governmental eagle with the words “United States Federal Service Employee.” As far as Claire could tell, none of the college I.D. cards available at Harry’s Camera were for colleges that actually existed. Corona State sounded good, Claire decided as she looked over her choices. It seemed plausibly Californian. She could be a transfer student who hadn’t gotten her Portland State I.D. yet.

To complete her makeover, Lori had loaned Claire an age-appropriate outfit of chunky shoes paired with a frankly polyester dress. For a day or two, Claire had even thought about wearing a wig to the doctor’s office, until she’d realized that once she took off her underwear she would give away the game away. And she wasn’t brave or stupid enough to try dyeing her pubic hair. Before coming to Harry’s Camera, Claire had compromised by pulling her hair back in a bun so tight that it made her eyes hurt. At least it no longer looked curly, and thus perhaps not so much like Claire Montrose.

She used a touch screen computer to enter the information she wanted to claim as hers. The result was printed out on card stock on a special color printer. Then Claire sat in one of the photo booths, pulled the wine-red curtain, and snapped herself two times. Holding the still wet photos by their edges, she took her new Corona State I.D. to the laminating machine.

After obtaining the pick kit and a new I.D. card, Claire stopped by John’s Market in Multnomah Village. Part grocery store and part deli, it also housed a mail center that offered boxes with addresses that
sounded more like they belonged to apartments. Claire had realized that it wouldn’t be a good idea for any mail the Bradford Clinic sent Lucy Bertrand to be returned to them marked “No Such Address.”

The phone was ringing when she walked in the front door. “Claire - it’s Lori. I’ve been trying to get hold of you all afternoon.” Her words tumbled over one another.

“What’s up?”

“We got the results of Zach’s last bone marrow aspiration today. Dr. Preston said he’s in remission.”

“That’s great news!” Lori was silent for so long that Claire finally added, “Isn’t it?”

“Havi thinks so.
 
I’m not so sure. It’s not that hard to get a child into remission. The trick is getting them to stay there. Zach still looks so sick. And just because the bone marrow looks normal doesn’t mean that the leukemia isn’t hiding out someplace. And Zach’s still going to be on chemo, just lower doses. That’s for two or three more
years
. We’re not out of the woods yet, not by a long shot.” Lori took a deep, shuddering breath. “Do you believe in a mother’s intuition?”

Claire didn’t, not any more than she believed in people’s bringing bad luck down on themselves by voicing their fears. “Why?”
“Because part of me thinks he will need a transplant. And if that happens and you can’t find his sister, then there isn’t any hope.”

###

As she drove to Susie and J.B.’s house, Claire couldn’t stop thinking about Zach and Lori. Why couldn’t her friend relax and accept the blessing of her son’s remission? But Claire knew if she were Lori, she would be weighing the odds, too, and doing anything she could to make them be in her favor.

J.B., her semi-brother-in-law, was something of a shade-tree mechanic. He could be counted on to own a half-dozen cars in various states of functionality, and he had agreed to loan one to Claire, her last step in her efforts to distinguish herself from Lucy. In addition to J.B.’s pickup, three cars were parked in the driveway, with another half-dozen along the curb. They were all beat-up enough that they could plausibly belong to a college student.

“Hey, Big Sis,” Susie said when she answered the door. She dropped a kiss on Claire’s cheek. “J.B. will be out in a minute. He’s just getting Eric ready for the day.” Dressed for her job as a hairdresser, Susie wore white denim mini-skirt and a green smock with her name embroidered over her heart. An ankle bracelet made a line under her nylons.

When the painting Claire had inherited had sold for millions at auction, she had offered part of the proceeds to her sister. After all, Susie was Great Aunt Cady’s niece, too, even if she hadn’t been named in the will. But all Susie would accept was enough to set up a trust fund for Eric’s college education and to pay for her classes at the Portland Beauty Academy. Susie had dreamed of being a hairdresser since her eighth birthday and the gift of a Barbie Kut-N-Kurl set.

“Suse, I’ve been meaning to ask you - have you noticed that Mom’s buying a lot of “ - Claire veered away from the word junk in case Susie also shopped QualProd -”stuff off TV?”

“You mean that QualProd crap? I tried to talk to her about it. I mean, she’s got three different skin care systems underneath the bathroom sink. Mom tried to tell me it was like she was the member of a special club!” Susie rolled her eyes, which were highlighted with blue shadow and rimmed with black eyeliner. “Yeah, a real
special
club that you can only join if you have a credit card with some money left on it. She says no matter what time of the night it is, when she wants to talk to someone, she can always talk to a QualProd operator. I told her if she feels lonely, she should just call me, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Or me, Claire thought. Or Mom could call me. It hurt a little that neither her mother or her sister seemed to have discussed calling Claire as an option. “I’m worried about her. It seems like we should do something.”

A shrug of Susie’s thin shoulders. She was whittled down to almost nothing by cigarettes. “I don’t know that there’s much that we can
do. When was the last time either one of us successfully told Mom how to run her life? Until she gets tired of it, I think she’s going to watch QualProd all day wearing her QualProd bathrobe and with her QualProd slippers on her feet and her QualProd throw across her lap.”

Claire realized Susie was probably right. “How are things down at Curl Up and Dye?”

“Same old, same old. Everybody’s always yaking at me, telling me stuff I don’t really need to hear. Sometimes I think they just come to get their hair done because I’m cheaper than a therapist. The worst ones are the perms because they take so long. By the time you finish combing them out they’ve had time to get everything - and I mean every little thing - off their chests. Yesterday, I heard about,” Susie began to tick off on her long, yellow-stained fingers, “one, about how some lady’s having an affair with her boss and both their spouses know and think it’s okay, and two, about how some other lady’s mother wasn’t really dead but stuck away in an insane asylum, and three, then I got some girl who wanted to me to help her figure out if her boyfriend’s gay.” A snort. “Like I’m gonna know. She wanted to know if it was bad sign he was getting all these dirty e-mail messages from people with names like Boy Toy.” She shook her head. “I got this job so I could cut hair, not be a counselor. “

That was the difference between her and Susie, Claire thought. Susie didn’t want to hear everyone’s secrets, but Claire would love a job where people confided in her all day. Whenever she saw a movie showing a Catholic making a confession, she always found herself a little envious of the priest sitting on the other side of the screen.

A little body suddenly hit Claire from behind, almost knocking her over. Turning, she reached down and swung two-year-old Eric up into the air while he squealed.

“Hey, sweetness, how’s it going?”

Eric’s only answer was to squeeze her nose and make a honking sound. He was still laughing at his own joke when she set him down.

“I wish I had his energy,” Claire said as she watched him zoom around the room.

“God got it mixed up,” J.B. said as he came into the room wrapping a rubber band around his ponytail. His denim shirt had the sleeves ripped off, the better to show off muscular arms tattooed with a Harley and a dancing girl. Around his neck, a black beeper dangled from a leather thong. Claire hoped that the beeper didn’t mean J.B. had gone back to his old sideline of selling a gram of this and a kilo of that. “It should be the kids drinking coffee and complaining that they just want to go back to bed, and the adults should be the ones bouncing off the walls.”
 
He turned to Claire. “Let’s go see what we have on the lot.”

As they stepped outside, Claire turned to catch the screen door before it could bang into Eric. She caught a glimpse of J.B. sneaking a kiss from Susie. When she was sixteen, Susie had dropped out of high school, moved out of their mom’s apartment and in with J.B. Claire had thought Susie would be lucky if the whole thing lasted six months, but here they were, still together seventeen years: one baby, five or six motorcycles and probably three hundred cars later.

J.B. waved his hand to indicate the ten or so cars parked in front of his house. “You can have anything except my pickup or the Chevette,” J.B. said. “Susie uses that to get to work.”

“Chevette!” crowed Eric. In the daylight, Claire could see that his blond hair was beginning to darken, but his eyes were still a bright, fierce blue. He ran to one of the cars in the driveway and banged on its door with his fist. “Pinto!”

Claire looked closer. It
was
a Pinto. “Eric can tell cars apart? I thought kids his age were into dinosaurs.”

J.B. shrugged, setting his dangling skull and crossbones earrings into motion. “Oh, he can also tell the difference between a T. Rex and a Brontosaurus. But he likes cars nearly as well.”

Claire guessed that, in its own way, the Pinto could also be considered to be a dinosaur. It seemed to be held together primarily by gray primer. “A Pinto, huh? I didn’t think those existed anymore.”

“It’s a ‘71, so it’s probably a collectible. I got if for fifty bucks. It even runs. Do you want to borrow it?”

Claire had an image of having to come to a sudden stop at a red light, her car being bumped from behind, the sudden whoosh! of flames. She shook her head.

She came away with a twenty-year-old Firebird, British racing green except for one bright blue fender. On the way home it started to drizzle, and she discovered that the car’s heater didn’t work. It was also almost impossible to see out the rear window, which was slanted at such an extreme angle that the rain beaded up on it and didn’t go anyplace. She wouldn’t need the car for long, though, just for her visit to the clinic tomorrow afternoon. The car completed Claire’s transformation into Lucy Bertrand, a transfer from Corona State who had just figured out she might have a little problem on her hands.