The Fame Thief (33 page)

He smoothed the paper on the table with his index finger as though to eliminate the crease. “And I told you, too, that I hadn’t kept up with the Internet. So okay, so I still don’t know anything about the Internet, but we got guys who do, and one of them, a kid in one of the lawyers’ offices in Century City, he came up with something interesting. Here.”

He turned the paper around so the writing was right-side up for me, and slid it to me with his fingertips. It was an address in Palm Springs, and beneath that, a name: Robert LeCochon.

I looked up at him at a hard, tight grin I hoped would never be leveled at me, and we said, in unison, “Bobby Pig.”

Tuffy’s legs were outlined in fire, a line of hot reddish gold lighted by the rising sun banging off the thicket of pale hair on his calves. He was wearing a blue polo shirt and a pair of beige Bermuda shorts as though he’d been born in them, and he was carrying two large, heavy bags that seemed to weigh nothing at all. Once in a while he’d start to whistle, and Dressler would have to shush him.

At long last Dressler’s golf shorts were seeing a golf course. In fact, two pairs of them were, because I was also sheathed in a loud, ugly plaid from the waist down. The waist was so small that the slacks gapped open by about four inches in front, held together by my belt. It felt drafty.

Dressler’s grimness lifted slightly every time he looked at my pants.

At eight that evening, Babe had gone to LAX and lifted a set of plates from a car parked in the lot for the international terminal. Then he’d left his car in the structure, stolen a second car, and driven it home to put the plates on it. With any luck, by the time we were finished here, he could get back there and replace both the plates and the car while their owners were still in Puerto Vallarta or Bangkok or wherever.

We’d parked the stolen car with the stolen plates a quarter of a mile from the entry to the golf club around 4:30
A
.
M
. and then found our way onto the course and over a lot of expensive grass in the dark until we got to the fourth tee, where we waited for sunrise. When it began, we were still alone on the course, although from a distance I heard the crack of someone hitting a ball.

“Probably on the first tee,” Dressler said. He said to Tuffy, “Driver.”

Tuffy said, “Huh?”

“The wood one, gimme the wood one.”

Tuffy handed him the club. Dressler stepped up to the ball he’d teed up in the dark, looked down at it for a moment, did a little wiggle with his hips, and knocked it straight down the middle of the fairway.

Tuffy whistled approval and I said, “Very impressive.”

“Half the developments in Southern California were negotiated on golf courses,” Dressler said. “Every stroke I got closer to par was worth a few million bucks.” He slipped the club back into one of the bags Tuffy was toting, and the three of us took off in the direction his ball had gone.

The fourth hole was a long one, with the fairway hooking to the left about 70 percent of the way to the green. If you ignored the bend in the fairway and just kept going straight, you’d be in Robert LeCochon’s back yard.

What we hadn’t been able to tell from Google Earth and Google Maps was whether the yard was fenced. We hadn’t seen anything thick and straight marking the line between the golf course and the yard, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t something too thin to be visible in the picture.

“Five-iron,” Dressler said as we neared the ball.

The sun had risen a few more degrees, a slice of burning
orange on the horizon behind us. As Dressler studied his ball and Tuffy hunted for the five-iron, I went over to Dressler and stood beside him. In my hand was the color printout from Google Earth that told us that the long, low Santa Fe–style house directly in front of us was where Bobby Pig had gone to ground all those years ago, sticking his head out only when Pinky Pinkerton had told Edna to place that call.

“A net,” Tuffy said, holding out a club and squinting toward Bobby’s house. “Some kind of net.”

“Sure,” Dressler said. He took the printout, folded it, and put it in his pocket. “To keep his windows from getting broken. He must be pretty confident, not even fenced in like this.” He looked down at the club. “That’s a seven.”

Tuffy said, “So what?”

I said to Dressler, “Are you keeping score or something?”

“Details are important,” Dressler muttered, but he took the club, positioned himself above the ball, and whapped it. He watched with surprise as the ball rose and kept going about sixty yards until it was stopped by the net. He said, “Maybe a seven was the right club after all.”

I said, “Let’s go.”

“You didn’t have to come, you know,” Dressler said, sliding the club into the bag.

“I saw her, remember? I’d be here even if you weren’t.”

“Calm down,” he said. He set off for the net and we followed. “Look at Tuffy. Is he all crazy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. The top half of the sun, sliding above the treeline behind us, struck a big window in Bobby Pig’s house with a blaze of fire, and I shielded my eyes with my hand. “Are you all crazy, Tuffy?”

Tuffy said, “I’m hungry.”

“After,” Dressler said. “I’ll buy us all a big breakfast after.
Once we’re clear of Palm Springs. See the tall pine tree to the left?”

I squinted against the glare. “Yes.”

“Under there. Nice and shady.” He turned and looked behind us. Acres of rolling grass, not a soul in sight. “Good,” he said. “This is the tricky part.”

Under the pine, which I identified without thinking about it as a Monterrey Cypress, going brown and probably dying in this dry heat, Tuffy examined the net as Dressler unzipped the little shoulder bag I’d been carrying. “It just lifts up over here,” Tuffy said.

Dressler said, “Here,” handing me a tight, white little ball of wadded-up plastic. “Tuffy, get this on fast. Who knows how long we’ll be alone?”

The thin white suits went on right over our clothes and zipped up the front. The only thing that slowed us down was that we had to take our shoes off, put the suits on, and then put the shoes back on before covering them with elastic booties made of the same stuff as the suits. When we were finished, we looked like the guys who handle radioactive materials.

“Put the caps and gloves on,” Dressler said as Tuffy lifted the net. “These things were designed for clean rooms, like in computer labs, but they’re great for someone who wants to keep his DNA to himself. Science is a wonderful thing.”

“What if he’s got someone on lookout?” I said.

“Then we kill him or he kills us,” Dressler said. “But my guess? My guess is he thinks he’s got things salted away. My guess is that he’s sleeping like a baby.”

The house was a grayish taupe, the approximate color of old, well-dried adobe, essentially a series of rectangles with rounded corners, at the top of a gently rising lawn about fifty feet long. Whoever built the house obviously thought a golf course was
a great view, because about half of the side of the house facing us—which I figured was the back, since the street was on the other side—was glass. Big picture windows, either dazzling with the rising sun or framing dark rooms, plus a couple of double-size sliding glass doors, made the reason for the net obvious. Most of the house was breakable.

We were moving silently now, just three moon men climbing the hill. By unspoken agreement, Tuffy and I were in front, where we’d stop or slow any bullets, and Dressler was a couple of feet behind. The slope was minimal, but I could hear him breathing harshly behind me and I remembered, for the first time that morning, how old he was.

Sliding doors are a pain because there’s not much anyone can do about a piece of iron or wood laid down on the inside track to stop the sliding half, so I was happy to see, to our left, a standard-size door that, my house radar told me, led to the same kind of utility room I’d passed through to get into Edna’s place. I pointed a plastic-gloved hand toward it, and the other two honored my expertise in breaking and entering by following along without any argument.

All those windows were unsettling. It was almost enough to make me doubt the wisdom of the clean-room suits. In our golf slacks, we could at least have poked around for a bit, trying to look like we were searching for a ball that had found its way through the net. Dressed as we were, it would be impossible for anyone who spotted us to mistake us as anything but death on foot.

After living in the city, I found it amazingly quiet out there. One mockingbird, high in the Monterrey Cypress, let loose a trilling salute to the morning as we approached the door, and I saw Tuffy flinch when someone hit a golf ball far away, but other than that, the world was in that silent, gathering-itself-for-the-day
mode we miss in the city, buried as it is beneath the clamor of early rush hour. A dry, rustling sound drew my attention, and I turned to see the mockingbird drop down out of the Cypress and then spread its wings and soar up toward another tree, just a generic tree with flat, broad leaves in the neighboring yard.

Tuffy shifted anxiously from foot to foot behind me as I worked on the lock, which was good enough to keep us standing there for two very, very long minutes. They both sighed when I finally managed to turn the knob. No chain, no latch on the inside. Bobby Pig had stopped worrying decades ago.

With the door open about an inch, I pointed at myself and then at the two of them, waving them behind me as I eased the door the rest of the way open. Over my shoulder, I said, just audibly, “Breathe through your mouths. Touch your tongue to the top of your mouth. Stay away from walls and furniture.” Then I made the universal raised-finger-to-lips
shhhhhh
sign and went in.

The utility room was half the size of Edna’s kitchen, all gleaming brushed stainless steel, front-loading everything: washer, dryer, even a home dry-cleaning unit. Spotless. Along one wall a stainless steel rod had been suspended, and from it, on bright steel clothes hangers, were nine or ten identical pairs of pale blue pajamas. I touched one and felt silk.

Dressler jostled me, trying to get past, and I turned to him and, for the first time, stared him down. With my mouth almost touching his ear, I said, “This is what I do. I’m the expert. You’re the amateur.”

I turned my back to him again, eased open the door to the kitchen, and went in. I could hear the rustling of their plastic slippers as they followed.

It was an enormous room with a marble-topped island in the center. A restaurant-size range stood against the wall to the
left, eight burners. Inset into the wall above it was a bricked rectangle with a black iron door: a pizza oven. The sink and dishwasher were to the right, and straight ahead, beyond them, was a double-wide archway leading into the dining room and, beyond that, the living room. The sun was mostly up behind us now, and the windows in the living room looked out onto the deep bluish shadow cast by the house. A Bentley, dark blue or black, was visible through the giant window in the living room.

To our left, an open doorway led from the kitchen into a hallway. I took the Google Earth printout from Dressler and undid one of the little convenience zippers in my plastic suit to get my wallet. I slipped out the little pen that came with the wallet and made a quick, speculative sketch: the kitchen in which we stood with the utility room behind it, the two big rooms in front of us, and, to the left, a long corridor running the full length of the house. Off it, further to the left, I sketched in two bedrooms and a bath, and, at a guess, a much larger bedroom with its own bath at the end. I pointed at it, eyebrows elevated.

Dressler looked at it and nodded, and Tuffy, forgetting himself, grunted and then covered his mouth with his hand as we both stared at him. I tapped the pen against the paper for a second, thinking. My burglary mentor, Herbie, always said it’s the thing you don’t expect that’ll kill you. I expected whoever was in the house to be in the bedrooms at this hour, so if I were on my own, I’d first make a quick tour of the rooms I thought would be empty, the living room and the dining room, just to eliminate any surprises. Then I’d start listening at bedroom doors.

I headed off toward the archway to the dining room with the two of them a couple of feet behind me.

The dining room was exactly as I’d envisioned it, spacious and floored in the pale wood, probably bamboo, I’d seen from the kitchen. To the far left, beyond the heavy table set for eight,
was a doorway into that same corridor. The doorway corresponded with the one I’d sketched conjecturally on my little floor plan. Dressler, behind me, had the floor plan in his hand, and when he saw the open doorway he made a single little click with his tongue, sort of a
tsk
, to indicate either surprise or approval.

The place was remarkably quiet; the sound of our plastic slippers on the floor and the legs of our plastic pants whisking together was practically deafening. On a hunch, I took a good look at the dining-room windows to my right; they were double-paned, almost certainly for insulation against the heat, but double-paned windows are also one of the great silencers, and I relaxed a little. I’d been concerned about the noise of gunfire inside the house alerting the neighbors, but now I removed that from my list of worries.