by Thomas Perry
As she began to sprint, she heard the heavy cue ball hit, bounce, and then roll down the shingle roof, making a thump each time it rolled from one shingle down to the next. From the front of the house it sounded a bit like someone running along the roof to the back of the house. The lawn in front of the house was suddenly lighter. She looked back and saw that the living room lights had come on. She could see a man going from room to room turning other lights on. He wore a pistol on his hip over a black jumpsuit-like uniform. In the two seconds that the glance lasted she saw him pull the pistol from the holster and turn away from her toward a window that gave him a view of the backyard.
In two more seconds she was on the street, sprinting to the Nissan Altima she’d left around the corner. In ten more seconds, she was inside it, pulling away.
14
On the way back to the hotel Elle contemplated her visit to the Mannon house. The house had been intended to appear welcoming, a place for bringing relatives and friends together and for showing off. The enormous, fancy kitchen was there to celebrate the husband’s profession, but it was also designed to feed a crowd fancy food. The rest of the house was full of pictures of all four Mannons together. But the big one in the dining hall was the tip-off. The room was all about her. The whole house was all about her, really. The kitchen was a trophy, showing she had won the famous restaurateur.
The house was her taste and her eye and celebrated her physical beauty and personality. Anne was the inspiration and the beautiful object and the designer and the connoisseur.
One detail Elle wondered about was the birth control. Either you were taking precautions or you weren’t. A woman might use birth control pills or an IUD, or her husband might wear condoms. What raised questions in Elle’s mind was that she’d found two forms of birth control.
Elle’s casual inspection of Anne’s bathroom had indicated that she was using birth control pills. So why had there been condoms in the bottom drawer of the vanity? The box had been opened and some had been removed. Elle had looked in the two most likely places to find the missing condoms. Usually if a couple used them, they were kept in the nightstand on the man’s side of the bed. If the couple considered the topic a little more erotic, the condoms might be on her side of the bed and she would put one on him. But there had been none anywhere in the bedroom. They were only in the box in her bathroom cupboard, in the bottom drawer, way at the back, where nobody but Anne was likely to find them.
Elle stopped the car on a dark street off Beverly Glen, changed into clothes that were comfortable and unambiguously female, bundled the others and put them in the trunk, and drove into the hills toward the Valley.
Elle wondered if Anne’s cheating might have been habitual. In the video Anne had been going through the motions—not overcome by passion or caught at some moment of extreme vulnerability. The three of them had approached the subject of sex as though they were coaxing one another into accepting a high-calorie dessert. If you’ll do it I’ll do it.
Elle took out her phone, typed “shelf life of condoms,” and waited. There were four or five answers visible on the screen at once. The shelf life was five years for standard types and three years for the ones with spermicide. The box she had found in Anne’s bathroom was recently purchased. She could conclude only that Anne kept a supply of condoms for occasions when the man she was having sex with wasn’t her husband. It was to keep her from coming home with an STD.
The close call Elle had experienced at the Mannon house made her decide not to take the extra risk of visiting the home of Santo Teason tonight. Her best strategy was to avoid the risks that she was too tired to take and to stay alive long enough to figure out who had killed the five people who were dead so far.
The hotel valet took her Altima and she went inside. When she had taken five steps she saw that Tim Marshall was across the lobby inside the bar. He was sitting in a padded chair beside a small table. What was he doing drinking in a hotel bar alone at this hour? She didn’t want to know. She looked the other way and walked faster.
As Elle moved across the lobby toward the elevator he spotted her and emerged as though he’d been waiting for her to return. “Annie!” he called. The lobby was quiet, so she heard him clearly. He headed her off while she was still twenty feet from the elevator, so she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t seen him. She said, “Are you staking me out for some reason?”
“I wasn’t actually watching for you,” said Tim. “I just happened to see you. I was about to have a drink in the bar before I go up to bed. It occurred to me that if you were finished with your work you might like one too.”
She looked at him and admitted to herself that she had let the acquaintance go on too long without deciding what he was—a confidence man, somebody she might be able to use, or a Canadian cowboy about to get famous. She said, “I’m done. The least I can do is buy a round of drinks. Come on.”
She strode ahead of him into the nearly empty bar, stepped to the bartender, and said, “What’s your best single-malt Scotch?”
“We have Talisker, Oban, Lagavulin, Laphroaig, Glenlivet, Glenfiddich, Macallan—”
“Let’s try the Talisker,” she said. She looked at Tim, then back at the bartender. “We’ll each have three fingers of it.” She held up her small hand. “Your fingers, not mine.”
The bartender poured the two glasses, and she set a credit card on the bar and carried both drinks to the table where Tim had been sitting. As she returned to the bar to get her card and sign the bill, she watched Tim in the big mirror. If he was a con man or some other kind of criminal he might not be above putting a drug in her drink. But when she returned he was still standing by the table far from the glasses, waiting to pull out her chair. “Sit down,” she said.
He sat, and she sat down in the chair beside him. “You like to sit next to the girl, right?”
“Right.” He lifted his glass. “To ladies whose hearts are in the Highlands.” He took a sip.
“Do you like that?” she asked, as though it were a test.
“I do,” he said. “When it’s late at night and you’re with a pretty woman, a single malt is like having a second friend at the table who’s older and wiser and will disappear when you want him to.”
She laughed. “Ancient Scottish wisdom?”
“We drink Scotch in Canada too.”
“Have you started to miss Canada yet?”
“Not as much as I would have expected,” he said. “When you think about it, you realize what you miss about home isn’t there anymore. It’s your younger days. I’ve always lived near Calgary. My parents moved to Edmonton when my dad retired, and my sister is in Vancouver. I see them on Christmas and Thanksgiving.”
She said, “Thanksgiving, huh?” She had him. Con man.
“Yeah, Thanksgiving,” he said. “We have Thanksgiving. It’s the second Monday of October. Look it up.”
She took out her phone and thumb-typed “Thanksgiving in Canada.” There it was. And they even served turkey and pumpkin pie. “Good for you,” she said. She meant the opposite. Canadian cowboy.
He shrugged. “Anyway, I do miss my family, and I miss the work I do. But this hasn’t been a hard time for me. I expect to be thinking about it occasionally for the rest of my life.”
“Why?”
“Because something happened. There are doors. Sometimes you recognize a door at the time but don’t know what’s beyond. This time is like that. I know that whatever is there, it’s not like the side I’ve seen so far.”
“You mean you’ll be a star?”
“Not necessarily. Maybe you and I will get married and always look back on this as the time when everything changed.”
She took a sip of Scotch and rested her chin on her fists. “This is quite a quick escalation, isn’t it?” she said. “So when is our big day?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll have to talk it over.”
“We could plan it for Canadian New Year’s or Canadian Fourth of July.”
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“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”
“Just a question that keeps coming up in my mind.”
“What’s the question?”
She took another sip of Scotch. “I would like to know whether you are who you’ve said you are. If you are, that’s fine. If you aren’t, that might be pretty good too. You might be somebody who’s even more interesting to me.” She had said it as plainly as she could. “If that’s the case, all you have to do is take a swig of that Scotch to get the strength and then say it, and I won’t ask any more questions.”
“I’m just who I’ve told you I was,” he said. “If I were going to lie about it, I’d make up something more appealing than a guy who cleans horseshit off his boots. I’d say I’m rich and famous in Canada, but people in the United States aren’t familiar with my name yet. I’m the genius inventor of a robot that does everything that people don’t want to do—dive to twenty-three thousand feet, clean furnaces while they’re fired up, deice the wings of a plane while it’s flying. There probably is somebody just like that, and neither of us knows his name.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’ll have to believe you’re Tim Marshall the horse trainer turned actor. It’s all I’ve got to work with.” She finished her drink and set it down. “Meanwhile I’m off for a night’s sleep.”
“Want to see my passport?”
She shook her head. “If you didn’t have something to show me you wouldn’t offer. Like most people, I wouldn’t know a Canadian passport from a French prayer book.” She patted his arm. “The difference is that I know I wouldn’t. Sleep tight.” She started for the doorway.
“Will you go out to dinner with me tomorrow night?” he said. “I’m asking you well in advance so you’ll get your work out of the way, and I promise it will be really special.”
“Call me tomorrow. But not before noon.” She walked across the lobby to the elevator and disappeared.
15
The next day he called her room telephone during the early afternoon as she was laying out her chosen outfit for breaking into Santo Teason’s house that night. She looked at her watch. It was 1:30, comfortably later than when she had told him he could call, but not yet approaching the cutoff for being too late to call a person for the same night. She had to pick it up. “Hello,” she said.
He spoke with a relentless cheerfulness without identifying himself. “I called some of the television people to ask for recommendations, and I heard about a really great dinner place. It’s all the way up in Santa Barbara, but it’s supposed to have the best food.”
“The Ballard Inn,” she said. “If we made it to Santa Barbara, that would still be a very long drive.”
“A different place. It’s called Sous les Arbres. It’s new, and it’s in the hills about five miles north of Santa Barbara City Hall.”
“I come to California a lot and I’ve never heard of it.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s new. My producer said it was terrific. I was lucky to get the reservation.”
She hesitated. She was anxious to break into the Teason house tonight. The police didn’t seem to be making any progress on finding out who the killer was, and Santo Teason was her last visible suspect. At another time she might have felt intrigued by Tim Marshall. He was handsome and unfailingly pleasant, and he liked her, but he could never be as important as finding the man who had killed five people including her best friend. Still, she could see there was a more practical way to view this situation. If someone was watching her and deciding if she was a threat, then going on a date might make her seem harmless and ordinary. Being out of sight for a few hours wouldn’t hurt, and having dinner in Santa Barbara wouldn’t keep her from paying a visit to the Teason house later that night.
Maybe Tim was bent on going far away so they could talk during the drive, and he would work up his nerve to tell her he was a con man and not a guileless cowboy. All right, she thought. Last chance. “What time do you want me in the lobby?”
“Six. We’ll be there by eight.”
“See you then.”
She put the burglary clothes back into her suitcase and went to the closet for the good dress she had brought from home. She’d had it for a month but hadn’t worn it yet. As soon as she had seen it on the rack in the store she had been determined to have it. Trying it on was mainly about size. She had known she was enduring the process of putting it on and looking in all the mirrors partly because she liked looking at it.
Later, while she dressed in front of the mirror in her hotel room, she nodded. The dress was perfect. Most of it was black fabric, but as anyone knew, black wasn’t just black, an absence of light like the inside of a pocket. There were red blacks, blue blacks, brown blacks. This one was gray black, which went with the small triangle of trim along the high neckline. It was more mature and sophisticated than most of her clothes. That was probably because it wasn’t a disguise. The way it hung on her acknowledged that she was shaped like a woman without making a point of it.
The black high heels would bring her about an inch above Tim Marshall’s shoulder too—about as close to his eyes as she would ever be. But as she looked at her reflection, she decided to cut back a little bit. She wanted to look attractive and sexy, but she wasn’t going to send her brain on vacation. Until the killer was caught, she might very well have to run for her life at any time. She stepped down from the high heels and into her black flats.
When she arrived in the lobby she saw him through the big glass doors, waiting outside on the loop. He was standing there in a very nice subtly patterned gray sport coat and light gray pants. He hadn’t worn a necktie, but with his muscular frame he looked more natural without one.
The car wasn’t the stupid oversize SUV she had feared he might rent. It was a Tesla Model S, dark gray with black leather upholstery. He opened her door for her, and when he closed it, she felt pleased. He had been thinking about what sort of ride she would like.
She said, “This is a surprise.”
“Yes,” he said. “I like to rent cars I haven’t driven before. Only this isn’t a rental. It’s a test-drive.”
“Okay. Do we have to be back in ten minutes?”
“No. I’ve got it until tomorrow afternoon. I agreed to write a review for a Canadian car magazine so they provided me with a loaner.”
“Are you sure there’s enough battery range to get us there and back?”
“They told me this one is officially charged to a hundred eighty-two miles, but the actual range is unofficially longer. If it’s true, it will be in my review. If it’s not true, we’ll have to walk home.”
She looked at the clear, open expression on his face as he drove the car forward. Maybe he was lying to sound smart. Or maybe he had conned somebody at Tesla too. That would be a promising development. “Does it bother your conscience?”
“Of course not. I’m really going to write it. Elon Musk is a Canadian citizen, and I guess the company wants to appeal to national pride.”
“If you don’t like it will you write a bad review?”
“Sure,” he said. “I have no reason to lie. If you notice something wrong that they can fix, they’ll do it, be grateful, and sell more cars.”
“I guess that would be true,” she said. Whether he told the truth was an important question, the one she had been asking in a hundred ways since she met him. It was really the only question, and he had been answering yes every time she found a new way, new words, a new context for it.
If he was really this Canadian cowboy whose rugged handsomeness, gentle personality, and strength of character had charmed a bunch of Hollywood producers into bringing him here, then she wasn’t interested. But if he was a highly skilled con man, that was an attraction. It would allow her to tell him who she really was, and they could, paradoxically, have an honest relationship. He might even be able to help her find the killer. And if one of his cons was making himself into a woman’s idea of a perfect guy, he would find making her happy pretty easy.
She spent most of her time looking out the window at the mountains to her right as he drove. There was something keeping her from feeling comfortable with him. Maybe it was simple timing. She was afraid for her life right now and feeling loss and guilt about Sharon. She couldn’t feel sadness, shame, and fear and still be receptive to the overtures of a suitor. She was unattached and that was the way she had to be for now. She was resolved to be pleasant, but that was about all she could manage.
The restaurant was close to living up to its sudden renown. Their table actually was “Sous les Arbres.” It was outdoors under some graceful locust trees and beside a rocky brook that had an audible trickle of running water, which made Elle suspect it had been plumbed like a fountain. It was too late in the summer for a natural stream to be full. She forgave the artifice because the food was so good. They stayed a long time. It was about eleven when they got into the car and Tim drove them back into Santa Barbara and swung along the ocean onto Cabrillo Boulevard.
Tim seemed excited to be so close to the ocean. He said, “I don’t get to be this close to the Pacific except when I visit my sister in Vancouver. It’s not the same up there. It’s not tropical looking, with palm trees and stuff. I’ve been meaning to get to the ocean ever since I got invited to L.A.”
“Santa Barbara is nice,” she said. “It’s also more accessible than most of the coast.”
Tim said, “The beaches right here are beautiful.”
“True. I’ve been here a few times in daylight, and it’s always a treat.”
He pointed to the west. “Have you ever explored to see what’s up that way? I mean along the shore.”
“The road moves off the coast for a ways, and then you go by the university, which is on a point, so the ocean is visible again. And there are places where you get a glimpse of beach and a couple of parks with beach access. Then the road goes inland a bit as a shortcut to places like Lompoc. Not a great trip in the nighttime, if I remember correctly, but pretty other times.”
