“Good. Where can I pick it up?”
“The garage on Woodman.”
“Okay. Be about an hour and a half.”
“Take your time,” he said. “It’s been demographically established that around this time many of us eat dinner.” He hung up just as Stinky came back in, a thick wad of money in his hand. I said, “Is that all of it, or do I need to count it?”
“You wound me,” he said.
“Not yet I haven’t.” I reached out and took the bills. “Now I have.”
“The stamp,” he said.
“Later. And I know this is an outrage and I’ve betrayed you and all that, but this will get the Slugger off your back forever, and it will avenge Jejomar, and you’re still going to get your damn stamp, but not until I’m through with it. Or, if you want, I could give you the stamp right now and forget all about the Slugger, forget all about Jejomar. He wasn’t my houseboy, and I’m not the one whose name the Slugger knows. And as a last argument, have I ever promised you anything you didn’t eventually get?”
He actually thought about it, the creep. “No.”
“So. Want the stamp now, with the Slugger still out there and your conscience a single festering sore over Jejomar’s death, or you want it later, with the Slugger gone and Jejomar able to rest in peace, knowing that his killer is in the big ditch?”
“Later,” he said, but it cost him a lot. He put out a steadying hand and grasped the edge of the counter.
“Couple of days,” I said, shoving the money into my pocket, “and all this will be over.”
When I went out through the condo’s front door, the wind almost blew me down.
PART FIVE
A HARDER DARKNESS
And here come hired youths and maids
that feign to love or sin
In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.
—Rudyard Kipling
(Not actually about Hollywood, but it might as well be.)
24
Reconciliation Cruise
Sitting behind the wheel, Ronnie said, “It’s kind of a boat.”
“Lookit all the mass you got,” Louie said, as though he were trying to sell her on it, which in a sense he was. “You get into a one-on-one in this thing, you’re the party’s gonna walk away.”
“She’s not going to get into a one-on-one,” I said, standing beside the open passenger door. “This is going to be a nice, uneventful evening.” The wind slammed the car door closed, and I had to yank my hand back to keep all my fingers.
Ronnie said, “I didn’t know you had hurricanes in California.”
“Santa Ana,” Louie said. “Blows down from the desert. The hills above Newhall have caught fire.” He sniffed the air. “I could smell it a while ago. Anyway, a little wind shouldn’t bother you. This baby, you couldn’t blow it over with a water cannon.”
“But it’s so wide,” she said, all eyes. “What happens if I scratch it?”
“Junior pays me.” The wind stood his ponytail on end, making him look like a candle. “You don’t worry about a thing—”
“. . . little lady,” Ronnie said, finishing the thought for him. “This is the kind of car, in Jersey they’d use it for a guy with his feet in a tub of cement.”
I said, “Jersey?”
“Trenton, remember?” she said, with a smile that meant, Gotcha.
Louie said, “Cement?”
“It’s a joke, guys.”
“You say so.” Louie shrugged, holding his ponytail down with both hands. “So. Gonna be okay?”
“Easy peasy,” she said. “I was just catering to the male ego a little. Let’s go, Junior.”
I opened the door, and the wind snatched at it again, but I kept hold. “When the hell is this supposed to let up?” I asked.
Louie said, “Tomorrow.”
“You can’t go in there all superstitious,” she said, heading south on Woodman toward Ventura. “It’s just going to distract you.”
“You sound like Herbie.”
She took her eyes off the road and kept them on me long enough to make me fidget. “Really? Like Herbie? That may be the nicest thing you ever said to me.”
I said, “Oh, don’t be silly.”
“Well, it might be. He’s sort of your gold standard, isn’t he?”
“I guess.”
“You’re pouting.”
“I don’t pout.”
“Of course not. You know, I thought this was going to be sort of an . . . I don’t know, a reconciliation cruise.” She hung a right. “With music on the sound track and everything. ‘My Heart Will Go On,’ that kind of stuff.”
Ventura was unnaturally empty, and at this rate we were going to get there in no time. I said, “How are you planning to go?”
“Would you ask a man that question?”
“Yes,” I said. Then I said, “I don’t know.” Then I said, “Probably not.”
“Well, I thought I’d take Beverly Glen up the hill and then Mulholland to—”
“Never mind,” I said. “Fine.”
“You are really, really jumpy.”
“Yes,” I said. “I am.” We drove in silence for several blocks.
“You’ve done this before how many times?” She made a left, heading uphill.
“Who can count?”
“Oh, well,” she said. “Are we going to have a talk?”
“This isn’t a talk?”
“No, this isn’t a talk. This is a dialogue between a responsible adult and a stunted child.”
“I’ve already told you not to wait for me while I’m in there, haven’t I?”
“You have.”
The street steepened and began to curve, and I could feel my heart strumming away in both wrists and at the side of my neck. That never happened. I said, “Okay. I’m seriously spooked.”
She took one hand off the wheel and put it on mine. “I’ll wait for you.” A car rocketed around the curve toward us with its brights on, and she put both hands on the wheel again.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “Not even in the general neighborhood. Go down to San Vicente or someplace where there are a lot of restaurants and eat something. If this is what I think it is, which is a setup of some kind, I don’t want you getting snagged in it, too. It’s bad enough that I had you drive me.”
“I helped last time.”
I said, “There’s a turn coming up on the right. Would you make it, please, and then pull over?”
She did, and when the car had been put in park, on an appealingly dark stretch of curb, I slid over and wrapped my arms around her. “You saved my ass,” I said, my mouth moving against the tickle of her fine golden hair. “That’s what I should have been talking about that night. No one, not even Herbie, ever pulled me out of the fire like that. In fact, you were brilliant all night long.” I kissed her, and she gave a lot of it back. “Stinky says I should go into business with you.”
“You were doing great there for a minute or two,” she said, sitting back. “Leave Stinky out of it and leave the future to the future. Are you seriously telling me that you’re scared to do this job but that you have no alternative?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then let’s do this. I’ll drive back and forth, east and west on Mulholland, just four or five minutes away. You leave your phone on, and I’ll leave mine on. Anything at all that goes wrong, you say ‘Mayday’ and I come on the hop. If you’re not out front, I pancake another gate. If I have to drive this tank, might as well get some use out of it.”
I said, “Okay. On one condition. If I tell you to get the hell out of there, you do it. No hesitation, no heroics. You just peel off and take the car back to Louie. Deal?”
She pulled her purse out from between us. “Here,” she said, extricating a length of
rubbery wire. “It’s a single earbud. Plug it into the phone. That way you’ll be able to hear me talking to you but no one else will, and you’ll have an ear free for the house. I’m going to be listening until we’re together again. If you need to talk about anything, ask advice, call for help, I’ll be on the line.”
“And if I’m in serious trouble and I don’t think it’s a good time even to whisper, I’ll push a key and hold it down. When you hear that, disconnect and go away. Go away fast.”
She looked at me, but I knew she wasn’t actually seeing me. She was running scenarios in her head. Then she shrugged. “Will do,” she said. “Am I allowed to wish you good luck?”
I put my arms around her again and marveled at the way we fit together. I kissed her hair, then her forehead, then the tip of her nose, and then her lips. “Hell yes,” I said.
25
Piece of Cake
I could smell the distant fire, feel it in the back of my throat.
The street on which Granger lived was rich in eucalyptus trees, their topmost branches clawing at the sky as the wind whipped them around, making a sound like a waterfall. The smoke was a sharp edge in the air, just another little something to bring the hairs on the back of my neck to attention. The animal reaction to fire may be harder to awaken in people than it was, say, a thousand years ago, but it still had all its potency, and it was just the spark needed to bring the black stew of my anxiety to a boil. It seethed and bubbled in the center of my chest.
From where I stood at the curb, looking back at the long curve of the street, only one house was visible; up here in the hills of gold, the homes were squared away on huge lots, hidden behind daunting fences aimed partly at people like me and partly at tourists and other lookie-loos. This was a street of gates.
Before punching up the code to Granger’s gate, before doing anything that would commit me, even emotionally, to the break-in, I waited at the curb until Ronnie’s taillights disappeared around the corner that would take her up to Mulholland, where she’d be just one more black Town Car in a neighborhood of black Town Cars. The car had already served its primary purpose in delivering me to the gate. If anyone could get out of a car on this street without drawing a curious stare from a neighbor, it would be because he arrived in a limo.
The way Granger had explained the alarm system to me, it was rococo in its complexity, and I was about to breach the weakest and easiest of its perimeters. Five digits punched into the keypad mounted on a shiny brass pole at the level of a driver’s window would slide the gate aside. It was heavy steel, on deep runners, and it snicked into a reinforced vertical slot when closed. I thought it was unlikely that Ronnie could flatten it even with the Town Car. I took a deep breath and then another, looked up and down the block, and keyed the numbers into the pad. The gate slid noiselessly to the left, and I said into the phone, “I’m going in.”
“I’m with you,” Ronnie said. “And listen, while you’ve got nothing to do, I don’t just have . . . um, regard for you. I love you like crazy.”
I stepped over the gate’s track and stopped, looking up at the house, which was even bigger than I’d expected.
She said, “Are you there?”
“I’m here. Listen, if there was a Guinness World Cup for Reciprocity, I’d win it.”
“The Guinness World Cup for Reciprocity,” she said. “If it’s engraved, it’d have to be a pretty big cup.”
“I reciprocate like mad,” I said. “It’s kicking things off that gives me the willies.”
“I’ll bask in the warm glow of your reciprocity and let you get to work. Can you smell the fire, too?”
“Sharp as a razor, red as a pomegranate.”
“I’ll be listening for you,” she said.
I tapped the earplug as a kind of farewell and heard the gate slide home behind me. It took a different combination, keyed into a pad just inside the house’s front door, to open it again, and the front door itself had a ten-digit key, seven of which were punched in outside and the remaining three inside, within ten seconds of closing the door. None of the windows could be opened without keying in yet another code—a different one for each of the three floors—from the inside. In other words, as far as getting in was concerned, the windows were an invitation to go directly to the police station, because that’s where all the alarms actually sounded, and Granger had told me that response was generally within a span of about eight minutes.
And that was the easy part. When you finally got inside, it got complicated.
The house rose up in front of me like Xanadu in Citizen Kane, but less welcoming and minus the single lit window. A central tower, with a spiral of small windows climbing it, stretched upward the full three stories, and the two wings sloped back symmetrically with an unintentionally aeronautical effect. It would have been almost comically imposing if I weren’t scared senseless. There was nothing funny in its sheer blunt mass, its hulking outline a harder darkness imposed upon a dark sky. Bits of it seemed to shimmer and shift as moonlight flickered its way through the dancing eucalyptus limbs, throwing moving shadows on the walls. Nice, malevolent little special effect. Taken as a whole, it looked like the kind of place where there’d be drains in the cellar to make it easier to clean up after the servants were bled out.
The front door stood twenty or thirty yards from the gate. Granger had told me to stick to the driveway, which was covered in gravel that crunched loudly underfoot. The lawn, he’d said, had sensors that when tripped lit up the place like a football stadium. The hiss and whoosh of the wind pretty much drowned out the sound of my footsteps, but even so I had to fight the impulse to move to the grass, where I could walk silently.
When Ronnie had asked me how many times I’ve done this before, I’d hurried over the answer, as though it were beyond computation, but it wasn’t. More than twenty years in the trade, so to speak, and let’s say twenty jobs a year, averaging in the higher numbers during the first four or five years, when I didn’t know what to steal and how to sell it. Later, as my eye improved, the need was less frequent. Then add in the so-called practice runs I’d done in my teens, when I didn’t take anything, when the victory was in getting in and getting out again. There were probably fifty of those, and after a while I’d started a spreadsheet to keep track of what I cunningly called my B-points, B being a sixteen-year-old’s code for burglary. I gave myself points for elegance, for quickness, for invisibility—the traces, or lack thereof, of my having been in a place—and later, as I got better, for difficulty and the estimated value of the swag I left behind. When, with some embarrassment, I’d told Herbie about my point system, he’d nodded approval. “Pretty much the things you oughta be thinking about,” he’d said. “Now, burn all that shit before anyone else sees it.”
So let’s say four hundred fifty in-and-outs, without ever getting nabbed. Why the hell was this one making my knees so shaky? My knees were never shaky.
Kid, Herbie said, don’t go in.
It stopped me. Not the fact that Herbie was talking to me, even though he was dead, because he did that all the time. It was the fact that he’d said, Don’t go in. He’d never said that before.
“I’ve got to,” I said. I said it silently, so you couldn’t have heard it if you’d been there, but then you wouldn’t have heard Herbie either. “If I don’t, I’m screwed.”
Figure that out later, Herbie said. Like I told you a hunnert times. One thing at a time. Figuring out not to go into this house, you can do that right now. Figuring out what happens later—you can do that later.
This was the second time in a few minutes I’d been advised to focus on the present. So I did for a moment or two. I considered not going in, and every time I did, I saw the not-very-appealing face of Officer Biehl and thought about going to jail. That was enough to force me to start walking again. I’d gotten halfway to the house, and it looked even taller and grimmer. And then, just as I was
about to dismiss Herbie’s arguments for good—he was, after all, dead and probably a wishful figment of my paranoia—a light snapped on behind a big picture window on the left, which my memory of the floor plans told me was the living room.
“Right,” I said out loud to Herbie. “I’ll figure it out later.”
As I turned to go, lights came on in two other windows: one to the right of the front door—part of Granger’s office suite—and one in what was probably the second-floor drawing room, in the left wing. They snapped on simultaneously, so if it was a single person, he or she had very long arms. I pressed the little button on my watch and got a pale blue 9 p.m.
Nine. It wasn’t even a full week since daylight saving time had made its final curtsy and tiptoed over the horizon. Back then it had been getting dark at this time. People with timers on their lights tend to set them bang on the hour or the half hour. (Note to homeowners: Set yours at very odd times and in clusters, so that groups of two or more come on about a minute apart. We’ll be miles away before the next one clicks on.)
So it was just timers that hadn’t been changed.
Timers I could deal with.
The house loomed above me as though it were leaning forward a little to see me better, as I ignored Herbie’s urgent tsk-tsk-tsk in my mind’s ear and made for the front door. I knew the interior layout as well as anyone can possibly know a house he hasn’t actually been in, I knew what I was after, I knew where to pick up some bonus goods that could be fenced safely and anonymously, even without involving Stinky, and I knew that the guy who owned the place wouldn’t even land until midnight or so.
Optimism on demand: this was going to be a piece of cake. A quick look around to make sure it was empty, grab some of Granger’s jewelry, all the while doing lighthearted, witty Thin Man banter on the phone with Ronnie, get the Turner last because it’ll be heavy, take a final bow, and exit.
There, that was the frame of mind I needed. I mean, come on, four hundred fifty times? I punched in the seven-digit code, listened for the click, and opened the door, and as I did so, a gust of wind practically blew me across the threshold. But it didn’t, and I preserved my sangfroid, which, I suddenly remembered, is defined as “composure or coolness, sometimes excessive, as shown in danger or under trying circumstances.”
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