King Maybe

by Timothy Hallinan

  Lilli said, “They’re all weepies. Girl likes to cry.”

  “You tough guy,” I said, and Lilli gave me a broad smile.

  “Pisces,” Anime said scornfully. “They’re always reaching for the hankie.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” I said.

  “Which part did you miss?”

  “Rina is . . . uhhh, a Scorpio.”

  “Well,” Anime said, a bit stiffly, “if you’d told me Rina’s astrological sign was pertinent, I’d have factored it into the equation.”

  “This girl, Patricia, she’s claiming that her birthday is this week.”

  Lilli said, “We forgot. We should have spotted that.”

  “Patricia is March twelfth,” Anime said, looking at her notes. “We got it from the birth certificate, since we haven’t hacked the privacy walls on her Facebook page yet.”

  “See,” I said, “I think she’s a liar on every level. She’s faking this birthday so she can share the party and get closer to Rina. I think she talked some friend of hers into saying she’d seen Rina’s boyfriend holding hands with another girl.”

  “Men,” Lilli said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Anime had returned to dissecting her burrito. “What about Katie Mendoza?”

  “She had soap in her eyes,” Lilli said, as though for the ten-thousandth time. “I was walking her to the nurse’s office. Uh, guiding her.”

  “Was Rina’s BF holding hands with that girl?” Anime said.

  “According to the boyfriend, yes. What I doubt is the second girl’s testimony. Whether she was even there. Seems orchestrated somehow.”

  “Listen to us,” Lilli said. “You’d think there were no real problems in the world.”

  “Feels real to Rina,” I said. “Same way I’ll bet Anime felt about Katie Mendo—”

  “’Kay, ’kay ’kay.” Lilli said. “So what’s the new job?”

  Three minutes later I was studying the living room of Jeremy Granger’s house, in full color. Unfurnished and vast, it looked like the space where the first Boeing 787 was assembled, even on the cramped screen of Anime’s phone.

  “Zillow,” Anime said, as if it were a word.

  Looking at her own phone, Lilli said, “Thirty-four thousand square feet. Built in 1982 by a guy who produced game shows. Sold in 1996 to somebody from Qatar who never lived in it. Sold again in 2000 to a woman who’s described here as an heiress, pretty much the same thing as saying ‘pitiful nonachiever.’ Sold to a rock-and-roller in 2004 and then to your guy in 2008.”

  “These pictures are from when it was on the market the time he bought it,” Anime said. She reached over and swiped the screen, making way for a new picture, a formal dining room half a block long. “There’s even a movie, a tour of the house. The agents put them online for rich people who are on, like, different continents.”

  “Or alternate universes,” Lilli said. “The rock star the Qatar guy sold it to was Mr. Overdose, you know, Ray what’s-his-name, the lead singer of the Thuds. He died there. Probably died three or four times before he made it all the way.”

  “Explains the lower price,” Anime said. “Death’ll do that.” She was calculating in her head, lips moving silently. “Down twenty-nine, almost thirty percent from the first time it sold. I could bring up a Beverly Hills real-estate median-price graph, but that’s probably not what you’re looking for.”

  “This is perfect,” I said. “Send me the links so I can go over them. I’ve got a floor plan he drew for me, but I need to know if it’s accurate.”

  “You want the builder’s plans?” Anime said.

  I said, “Excuse me?”

  “You know, the ones the City of Beverly Hills had to approve.”

  “I know what they are. I just didn’t believe my ears.” I grabbed a chip out of the basket, evading the slap Lilli aimed at my hand. “If someone makes big changes—you know, structural changes—to a house, would that have to be given to the city, too?”

  Lilli said, “You mean, if your guy or the Thud decided to add, like, an indoor pool—”

  “Exactly. Or any other change that might come as an unwelcome surprise.”

  “We can get it,” Lilli said, “as long as they filed with the city. Sometimes people don’t.”

  “And you can get me a copy of those?”

  “Sure,” Anime said. “We know a specialist.” She pushed the eviscerated burrito away, rearranged but largely uneaten, and Lilli immediately buried her fork in it. “I’m kind of surprised you don’t know one,” Anime said. “Considering.”

  “I need you guys to go to work on this, fast. I want aerial pictures if you can find them so I can see what’s around the house, I need all those plans, I want information on the alarm system, which he told me the name of and I’ll remember it in a minute, I want everything you can get. The names of the neighbors, if you can find them. And for the thing with Rina, everything you can find on Patricia Anne Gribbin. Everything.”

  “When?” Anime said.

  “By two tomorrow, for the house. Rina, you can have until Friday at noon.” I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out two fat, crinkled envelopes. “There should be a little more than twelve thousand in each of these. Okay?”

  Lilli was eating, but Anime had her hands free, and she made the envelopes disappear so fast it was as though they’d never been there. She gave me a bright smile. “College fund,” she said.

  17

  Shortcuts

  As I trailed Anime and Lilli back to the storage facility, just being Papa Bear, I called Stinky again and left a message to the effect that the stamp would be glued to an envelope and mailed to Transylvania at ten the next morning if I hadn’t heard from him. In fact, I was beginning to see a better use for it, but I couldn’t think of any reason Stinky should be resting comfortably while I was tethered to an anthill.

  The electric gate slid open for the girls’ car, and I followed them in, scanning the weedy field on the other side of the chain-link fence, the field from which—on another windy night a few months earlier—a skeletal hit man had arisen to kill us, actually wounding Lilli. I got out of my car before they did and waited beside the big garage door. When Lilli unlocked it, I went in ahead of them and looked around as they snapped the lights on.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Whew,” Lilli said. “When I think of all the times we’ve come in here without you, it just makes my palms sweat.”

  “Her palms always sweat,” Anime said, earning a vicious glance from her girlfriend. “Do you know that doctors made up a fancy name for that? Palmar hyperhidrosis. I mean, seriously, is that stupid or not?”

  “Puts the doctor in charge,” I said. “You go in and say, ‘My hands sweat,’ and he says, ‘You have palmar hyperhidrosis. That’ll be two hundred and thirty bucks.’”

  “Well, we’re inside now,” Lilli pointed out. “Look, we’re alive and everything.”

  “I worry about you.”

  “Worry about yourself,” Anime said. “You’re in worse trouble than we are.”

  Louie said, “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Why? Don’t you have a watch?” I’d been poking my way east, not paying attention to where I was until I registered the soul-puckering ugliness of the failing mini-malls, chain restaurants, and car washes that characterize the area where Saticoy Street and Van Nuys Boulevard intersect, and I realized I wasn’t far from Louie’s. So I’d called him.

  “That’s like a reproach,” he said. “You call me too late, and I say that, about what time is it, and you feel guilty.”

  “I’m bearing up under it somehow,” I said. “Have you found out anything about Stinky?”

  “Nope. I put lines out, but nobody’s called in. Went past his house, but everything was dark.”

  “Not surprised. Did you try the door?”

 
“What are you, crazy? I don’t do that. I have people who do things like that.”

  “Name one,” I said.

  “Why? You wouldn’t know them anyway.”

  “I just want to hear what you come up with.”

  “Edward J. Fensterfoot,” he said.

  “Little guy,” I said. “Yellow ears. You want a cup of coffee?”

  “It’s midnight. You woke me up. I should be asleep. Why would I want a cup of coffee?”

  “You know, male bonding? Mind melding. Hoisting the hearty mug of friendship in the teeth of a cold universe. Sharing a laugh at the pointlessness of it all.” I turned south onto what I hoped would be a shortcut to the freeway, some nameless, characterless, beauty-free street, just 1950s apartment houses, broken streetlights, scraggly trees, and bad-luck wind. “So whaddya think?”

  “I think I’m going back to sleep.”

  “Before you hang up, can you think of anyone I could talk to about what’s-her-name, Tasha Dawn?”

  Louie yawned. “Only person I knew who met her was Garlin Romaine, and that was when Garlin was doing fake paper. Now that she’s a big art hotshot, she probably won’t be happy to hear from me.”

  “Well, get me an address if you can. By tomorrow.”

  “I just know,” Louie said, “that it’s only your good breeding that’s kept you from mentioning money.”

  “A thousand for the artist. Find Stinky, two thousand.”

  “I’ll try. I mean, Garlin, no problem, I could do that free, although I know you’ll forget I ever said so. But Stinky, who does he even know? I don’t think he’s left the house in ten, fifteen years. It ain’t like he’s got groups he moves in. The way he lives, he might as well be in a display case.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “You’ve given me an idea.”

  But before trying out my idea, I slipped beneath the freeway and across Ventura, heading south into the hills so I could drive past Stinky’s place, which was as dark as it had been last time I saw it. I went all the way around to the golf course, hung a U-turn, and went past again. Then, throwing caution to the prevailing winds, I drove the big Caddy up the driveway, turned off the lights but left the motor running, took the Glock out of the dash compartment, and waited.

  For nothing, as it turned out. I gathered my courage, dismissed my fears, and opened the car door. And then, the precise moment I got out of the car, something did happen. A gust of wind slammed me on the back and blew Stinky’s front door open, hard enough to make it bang against the wall.

  I screamed.

  And stood there, gasping for breath. Apparently I hadn’t dismissed my fears sharply enough. At least, I comforted myself, I hadn’t fired the gun, but that was only because that particular Glock had a stiff pull, which Duck Dixon had described to me when I bought it as “the suicide’s parachute.” Duck’s theory was that suicides are shaky and usually deeply ambivalent on some level or other, and a gun that’s just plain hard to fire might be all the persuasion they need to put the weapon down, paste on a smile, and go forth to seize the day, get the girl, win the Nobel Prize. Or he could have made it all up on the spot when I complained about the pull.

  It took me five pulse-pounding seconds to realize the significance of that earsplitting bang when the door slammed into the wall. When I was here last and had pushed it open, it had bumped into someone, Stinky’s houseboy Jejo-something, who was in no condition to get up and move. Jejomar, short for Jesus, Joseph, Mary. I apologized to his spirit for momentarily forgetting his name as I stepped into the hall, which was empty. The moon was up, and its light, which was coming over my shoulder, was enough to let me see that the floor was free of bodily fluids or any of the other unattractive residues murder so often leaves behind. I backed out, into the warm, windy night. I knew I would have registered crime tape if there had been any, even if I’d passed it in the dark, but I looked again to make sure. Nope.

  Whoever had moved the body hadn’t done it officially.

  That left me with three possibilities: (1) Jejomar hadn’t been dead in the first place, (2) the Slugger and his guys had come back to clean up, or (3) Stinky had arranged for Jejomar to be picked up and transported someplace more fitting.

  I’m better than I’d like to be at recognizing when someone is dead, so that smoked Number One. The Slugger was a possibility—in fact, that might have been why he was still in the neighborhood when we arrived—so Number Two survived the first sharp pass of Occam’s razor.

  But the one I liked best was Number Three.

  I was actually enjoying the big car, the deference its sheer mass earned from the other cars on the road, as I headed for the Wedgwood, one eye on the rearview mirror. At a point a little less than halfway up the Cahuenga Pass, roughly at the spot where a decisive battle had taken place in 1831, an uprising against an unpopular Spanish governor who was probably the inspiration for the one that Zorro was always fighting, my primary phone rang. It read blocked, so I let the call bounce over to voice mail. A minute later the phone did the neurotic little end-of-its-rope shiver it always puts out when it gets voice mail, and I angled over to the right-hand lane with the phone on my lap—a bright screen at night will earn you a big ticket in LA—and turned on the speaker.

  “Have we got stuff for you,” Anime said, and, behind her, Lilli shrilled, “Jeez, look at this!” and Anime hung up.

  Stuff about what? About Patricia and what I was beginning to think of as her campaign against Rina, or about Jeremy Granger’s 34,000-square-foot bungalow in Brentwood?

  And was I really going to break into that house in about nineteen hours?

  The burst of wind that hit the side of the car was enough to make me correct my steering. Even in a car that heavy. I got off at the Hollywood Bowl to take a final shortcut, watching the mirror all the way.

  18

  Liminal

  By 1:30 a.m., I could have walked through Jeremy Granger’s house backward with my eyes closed, thanks to the links that Anime and Lilli had sent me: high-definition photos on Zillow and Curbed LA, and virtual walk-throughs on VisualTour, all sites that the intelligent twenty-first-century burglar should bookmark. The place was as big as God’s house must have felt after the Kid moved out, and there wasn’t a square inch of it that wasn’t either ostentatiously overornamented or unconvincingly austere. The ceilings on the first floor averaged fourteen feet and sixteen on the second and third, not inappropriate for a medieval chapel but still an odd choice for a guy who was sensitive about being short. Just out of curiosity, I checked the original blueprints and found the first-floor ceilings indicated at sixteen feet, too, so I supposed he’d raised the floor on the ground story, where he’d do most of his entertaining. Spare no expense; add in his $60,000 cowboy boots and he’d effectively lowered the ceilings by two feet, four inches.

  Most of the slightly lower first-floor ceilings were painted with vaguely Italianate clouds and rays of sunlight, so banal they could have been copied from budget greeting cards or toilet-paper wrappers. In the dining room, the skyscape had been augmented with baby angels sweet enough to eat on sticks. The master bedroom’s ceilings, on the second floor, were innocent of paint, but one wall supported a flaking fresco created in some obscure Italian church in the fifteenth century by someone who definitely wasn’t Giotto. It had been sawed out by architectural vandals centuries later for sale to the highest bidder.

  Who, according to the records, had been Jeremy Granger, the year after he bought the place. You couldn’t blame him for the basic layout of the house, although his buying it was an editorial comment in itself. The floor plan hadn’t changed much since the first owner laid it out. The guy from Qatar apparently never set eyes on it; for him it was just an investment on a spreadsheet. The heiress lived mainly on the ground floor, since there was no elevator then and stairs were beneath her. The Thud put in an elevator and constructed a recording studio on the third fl
oor, and when his career went upsy-daisy, he pulled the studio and replaced it with a boxing ring, complete with a microphone that could be lowered into the center of the ring, 1950s style. He’d killed himself quite messily in the ring with an absolutely end-of-the-line mix of pharmaceuticals and an electric carving knife that he’d plugged into the microphone outlet, so it might not have been for purely aesthetic or spiritual reasons that Granger yanked the ring, scattered sand over the floor, brought in a few big gray rocks and some ferns, and claimed that it was a meditation space.

  The “meditation space” made Granger, in my book, a Grueddhist, another of the gruesome LA poseurs who claim to follow the Buddha’s Way to enlightenment in between bouts of ripping people off. In my forays through Beverly Hills, I’d seen the Buddha meditating on license-plate frames that belonged to cars so big they probably emitted carbon monoxide when the engine was off. I’d seen his likeness offered as a $1,500 “table accent.” I’d seen it in the display windows of upscale lingerie shops, flanked by bustiers and garter belts. I’d wondered occasionally what the Christian reaction would have been to a full-scale crucifixion employed as a decorative element in, say, the window of a marital-aids shop in Abu Dhabi, in the unlikely event that there were any marital-aids shops in Abu Dhabi. But while the crucifixion was taken seriously in much of the world as a kind of hair-raising shorthand for “I am the way and the life,” to Grueddhists like Granger, the Buddha, wrapped in his eternal calm, was essentially a spiritual clothing label that said, I’m cooler than you, and I’ll be cooler than you when I’m dead, too.

  I was in my dim, silent living room at the Wedgwood, sitting on the couch drinking ice water, with my laptop open on the oak coffee table. Beside it a tiny portable inkjet printer ground out the building plans that Anime and/or Lilli had dug up. The plans were solid gold, because they told me not only where the walls were but also what was behind them. I yawned, not because I was bored but because I was tired.

  I was also feeling sour.

  I had no one to cuddle with, which was a problem, because I’m not an indiscriminate cuddler. In my entire adult life—actually, ever since the thorny thicket of desire that was tenth grade—I’ve only seriously wanted to cuddle with two people, and I’d screwed it up with both of them.