by Josh Lanyon
I pointed to the Lazlo books. “Thumb through those and see if Ladas happened to tuck any papers or notes away between the pages. Or if he wrote any notes in the margins.”
Her eyes widened at the brilliance of this idea. At once she began to go through the books, meticulously examining the pages. I didn’t think she was going to find anything, but she had made me nervous, watching my every move and waiting for me to say Ah ha!
I went back to studying the collection of art, artifacts and books on the shelf.
With the exception of his own work, Ladas’ taste seemed to mostly run to non-fiction. There were a couple of books on art and Cuba and the Vikings. Nothing that related to coin collecting or where to hide valuable objects from the cops.
“He did those.” Ingrid pointed to the framed pencil sketch I was holding.
“Really?”
“He was very artistic.”
So was Hitler. But…Ladas did have a good eye and a sure hand. Useful in his trade, no doubt. These little pencil and ink cartoons were very well done. There was a touch of humor in glimpses of a cat sleeping on a fire escape, an old bag lady with a shopping cart, and a younger version of Beck showing off a tattoo on his bicep.
I studied that tattoo unhappily. I hoped this wasn’t going to turn into some weird escapade where the secret to everything lay in Beck’s body art. That kind of thing worked great in fiction, but in real life? No. Especially if Beck was lying dead in a ditch somewhere.
“What about Beck?” I asked.
“What about him?”
“Was he going to Cuba too?”
“If he wanted.”
“Did he know about Cuba?”
“No.” No hesitation there. I glanced at Ingrid. She said defensively, “Elijah was going to tell him once everything was ready. He didn’t think Beck would want to go.”
Beck would be a liability. But there was that funny little sketch, so I thought Elijah was probably fond of his little brother, liability or not. And Ingrid or not.
“You were hoping Beck wouldn’t go, right?”
“He creeps me out.” She frowned down at the book she held. “Elijah had a wonderful singing voice.” It seemed like a non sequitur, but maybe she was mentally comparing the Ladas brothers. “He really was a special man.”
Understatement. I moved on to the framed photos. Unlike J.X., Ladas hadn’t worried about visitors seeing who mattered most to him. Probably because, judging by the photos, the person who mattered most to Ladas was Ladas. And, in fairness, he’d been a handsome guy. He looked good-humored too. Like a man who laughed easily—or at least he was laughing in most of the photos.
I moved on down the shelf. There were a couple of small bronzes and a large model of a Viking drakkar. One of those expensive models you pay a grand or more for, not something plastic that came in a kit.
I went back to examine the photographs of Ladas. In a couple of them the background looked like sails or rigging or ocean.
“Did Ladas own a boat?” I asked.
“Yes,” Ingrid said. “That was the first thing we thought of. We’ve been over it plank by plank. There’s nothing there.”
“Hmm.”
I had reached the end of the shelving unit. I glanced out the nearest window. The summer sun threw gold dust on the tree tops and a gauzy haze hung over the bay. I spotted a man crossing the street below, walking with swift purpose toward this building. A big, blond man. My heart jumped. Not dead in a ditch after all.
“Shit.” I turned to Ingrid. “Beck is on his way up here!”
Chapter Seventeen
Ingrid went white and dropped the book she was holding. “W-w-what?”
“How do we get out of here?”
“We don’t! There’s only one way in and out.”
We both stared aghast at the elevator.
Beck wasn’t the shiniest doubloon in the treasure chest, but even he was probably capable of deducing that if the elevator was up here, so were uninvited guests.
“We have to hide!” Ingrid darted down the room, grabbed open a door and jumped into what appeared to be a coat closet. She closed the door firmly after her.
I spread my hands in supplication and looked ceilingward. I’m not sure if I was talking to the Almighty or Ladas.
From downstairs I heard a door slam.
Maybe Beck didn’t know all the security codes. That was possible, right?
The elevator suddenly rumbled into life and began to sink.
Okay. So Beck did know the codes. Or Ingrid hadn’t bothered to reset them while we were still in the building. Which would be another clue to Beck that he wasn’t alone here.
I ran after Ingrid, yanking open the closet. At least, I tried to yank it open. She was hanging onto the inside handle. It opened a crack and then jerked shut.
“Don’t be ridiculous!” I hissed. “Come out of there.”
“Go away! Go away!” her smothered voice shot back.
“Ingrid, this is the first place he’ll look.”
“Go away! Leave me alone! Find your own place!”
Did she think we were playing hide and seek?
Someone whistled sharply from behind me. I spun around. There was no one there. The elevator was still rumbling as it sank to the ground floor.
The whistle came again. I looked about wildly, then realized the whistle was coming from the pocket of my Levi’s. My phone.
I fumbled it out and saw I had a text from J.X.
Where r u?
Oh for chrissake. Like it all wasn’t bad enough, his final words to me were going to be in textspeak?
From below I heard the rattle and clang of the elevator door opening and closing.
I shoved my phone away and dragged open the closet door again, Ingrid still clinging stubbornly to it.
“Leave me alone!” she whispered frantically. She clawed at me like a cat.
Cat…
“Ingrid, is there a fire escape?” I demanded.
“Go away!” Another effort to scratch my face.
Hastily, I closed her back into the closet and leaned against it, thinking. A building this old, yes. There had to be a fire escape.
Beneath my feet came a grinding of gears and then that telltale rumble of the returning elevator. I left Ingrid in the closet and went looking for the bedroom. I found it behind an arched brick doorway.
The room was unexpectedly small and the bed—mountains of jewel-colored silk pillows and gold satin brocade coverlet—took up most of the floor. There was a pale wheat-colored rug and a small amber chandelier. Another door led to a walk-in closet.
The only window was in a small alcove at the head of the bed.
I jumped onto the bed and went to the window, unlatching the shutters and raising the sash. Sure enough, in the most inconvenient place possible, was the fire escape. Funny how small and flimsy it looked up close. I started to climb out onto the platform. But the thought of Ingrid cowering in that closet, waiting for Beck to do whatever he was liable to do to her, stopped me.
I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t leave the little lemming to her fate.
I turned around, jumped off the bed and stepped out of the bedroom just in time to see Beck getting off the elevator. He looked straight at me, and his preoccupied expression—and God only knew what preoccupied that slab of raw meat—turned to one of rage.
“You!” he roared.
I don’t think until he saw me it had dawned on him that someone else was in the building. Hell, Ingrid and I could both have probably safely hid in that damned closet.
I whirled and ran for the bed and the window beyond. I jumped onto the mattress, bounced to the alcove and scrambled awkwardly out the window. I dropped onto the metal platform, which seemed to wobble alarmingly. I clung to the railing and started down the steps.
It was no use, of course. Beck would take the elevator and reach streetside long before me.
Except he didn’t.
The staircase jumped beneath me. I look
ed up and Beck was coming down after me.
“You think so?” he yelled.
Had we been having a conversation when I wasn’t looking?
I ignored him, focusing on not losing my footing as I fled down the next section of fire escape. The narrow rungs reverberated beneath my feet as Beck stomped and banged after me.
It was like some urban version of Jack and the Beanstalk.
My phone whistled again.
Not now, honey…
“You’re dead,” Beck shouted.
I didn’t have breath to waste and I wasn’t about to look behind me. If he wasn’t close enough to grab me, I wasn’t going to worry about it. There was nothing I could do anyway. I was moving as fast as I could, concentrating on not slipping, not stepping wrong, not missing a handhold.
I wasn’t thinking any further than getting safely to the ground. I didn’t have the keys to the car and I couldn’t leave without Ingrid anyway.
Hurry. Hurry. Hurry.
Where the hell was the ground? I was on Mt. Everest. I was in fucking outer space.
On and on.
But then suddenly I was out of rungs. The sidewalk was right below me. I jumped to the pavement, ignoring the pain flashing up my shins, and hobbled up the alley, looking for…anywhere. Anywhere there were people.
By people I did not mean the homeless guy urinating against the wall of the building. He gave me a hostile look for barging into his bathroom without knocking. I averted my gaze.
Otherwise there was nothing but trash cans and empty cardboard boxes. Or boxes that I hoped were empty.
The opening to the alley was ahead. I ran for it, and darted out onto a street just in time to narrowly avoid getting nailed as a blue Mini sped past. I saw Ingrid, hunched over the steering wheel.
“Stop!” I waved my arms. Yelled to her, “Ingrid! Ingrid, it’s me!”
She never glanced my way, never slowed. I doubt if she even saw me. In fact, I doubt she’d have stopped even if she’d hit me.
I watched her bumper sticker—San Francisco State University—grow smaller and smaller. I turned. Saw Beck, still in pursuit, growing larger and larger. I ran.
A restaurant, a coffee house, a bar…anything would do. Eight hundred thousand people in this city and I couldn’t find where any of them hung out. I spotted a dry cleaners and crossed the street. I dived inside. The air was warm and chemical scented.
“Where’s the back?” I cried.
An Asian girl watering a dead African violet pointed speechlessly to the back, and I ran through the floating racks of plastic film-wrapped garments. I shoved out the emergency entrance, raced down another garbage-strewn alley. There was a trash dumpster next to a concrete wall. With a burst of desperate energy, I climbed—it took three tries—onto the dumpster, climbed over the cinderblock wall, and dropped down into what looked like a construction site.
It had to be well after five by then, and there were only a few workers in hard hats to look on in astonishment as I picked my way across the bulldozer-furrowed yard and went out through the chain-link fence.
I was now completely lost. It seemed the least of my problems. I kept running until the stitch in my side grew too bad. Then I walked—with many glances over my shoulder—and tried to phone J.X.
He picked up at once. “Where are you?” He sounded…hard to say. He sounded like someone who had warned himself not to start yelling the minute I called.
“I’m not sure.” I looked around. Liquor stores. Some kind of clinic I didn’t want to know about. Single room occupancy hotels. A long way from the Fairmont, that was a fact. “I was on Market Street. Now I’m not sure.”
“What the hell are y—” J.X. stopped and said very calmly, “Can you look around and give me a landmark?”
“Wait. I think maybe I’m on 6th Street? I’m looking at a closed adult theater called Pussy Katz.”
He made a faint sound that might have been dismay or disgust. “Okay. Now listen. As soon as we hang up, put your phone away unless you want to get mugged. Is there a donut shop or some place where you can wait safely?”
I looked around. “There is a donut shop, actually. It’s called The Donut Hole.” I feared that was not artistic license.
“Good. Go have a donut. I’m coming to get you right now.”
Three donuts and one very bad cup of coffee later, I dusted the sprinkles off my lips and walked out of The Donut Hole to collapse into J.X.’s Honda S2000.
The car interior smelled comfortingly of apple-cinnamon air freshener and John Varvatos fragrance. We sped away into the evening traffic and into that yawning and abysmal silence I said, “All that you have to say has already crossed my mind.”
J.X. replied tersely, but right on cue, “And possibly your answer has already crossed mine.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“And yet I’m not going to strangle you.” He glanced at me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Or will be. After a drink.”
“Are you sure? You look like…” he paused either out of tact or because words failed him.
“I look like a madman chased me through every godforsaken alley in this godforsaken town. Fortunately my tetanus shots are up to date. Although I’m thinking I should have opted for the malaria and yellow fever inoculations too. You can reassure Izzie that Beck is alive and well.”
He threw me another look, and this time his expression was shocked. “What the hell, Kit?”
“I know. Believe me, I know.”
“I thought…I didn’t know what to think. You scared the hell out of me!”
“I’m sorry. Really. You have no notion how sorry I am.”
“I almost called the cops. I almost called Izzie.”
“Please don’t yell at me. Or at least, wait till I’ve had that drink.”
“You leave me an oblique message: Out with Ingrid. What am I supposed to make of that?”
I said wearily, “I have no idea. I don’t even know what I’m supposed to think. I don’t know why I let myself get dragged into it.” I proceeded to tell J.X. everything that had occurred that afternoon.
The car swerved twice during my recital. J.X. said very little, but I already knew that was a bad sign. The more quiet he got, the more upset he was.
He said at last, when I finally ran out of words, “If you were going to involve yourself in this, why didn’t you just accept Lorenson’s offer?”
Good question. “I didn’t like Lorenson, that’s part of it. He’s responsible for this whole mess. Partly. He used his precious collection to try to manipulate and control his family, and I don’t blame them for finally getting fed up. But I didn’t intend to get involved. Period. It just sort of…happened.”
“Because you like playing amateur sleuth.”
“No. I really don’t.”
He shook his head without answering.
“Don’t do the silent head shake at me. Please. That’s really annoying. And not fair because it wasn’t my intention to get involved in this mess. It’s crude and stupid and violent and not an interesting crime at all. It’s not anything like what I would write.”
He looked at me in disbelief. Did the silent head shake again. Said, “We have to talk to Izzie as soon as possible.”
“I know. But if we could just wait until I—”
“No.” His voice was harsh. “Kit, do you not understand you just turned yourself into an accessory after the fact? I can’t believe you would do something so reckless. Criminally reckless.”
“The hell. I’m not trying to hinder or prevent their apprehension. It helps all of us if I can figure out what Ladas did with the coins. And that’s all I’m trying to do. Beck still thinks I’m central to this, and take it from me, nothing that happened today would change his mind.”
“Ingrid confessed planning the robbery to you!”
“No. She had knowledge of it, sure. But plan it? She couldn’t plan her way out of a tea party. She’s an accessory,” I said. “An a
ccessory before the fact.”
“Jesus. Christ.”
“I’m trying to find a way out of this.”
“By getting more deeply involved?”
It’s not that I didn’t see his point. But I didn’t like being yelled at after my already awful afternoon. “You know, I hate to be critical of your friends, but it’s been a goddamned week since I found Ladas’ body in our basement. And the coins are still missing and Beck is still running around threatening to kill me. At least, I assume that’s what the plan is.”
J.X. sucked in a sharp breath. “I know you’re under a strain, Kit. But that doesn’t excuse you from—”
“Oh, spare me. Which reminds me of something else. What the hell did you say to Jerry?”
He didn’t answer for a moment. “You heard the phone message,” he said finally. I thought he sounded guilty, but he wasn’t much prone to guilt, so it was probably chagrin.
“I sure did. I was there when he called. What did you say to him? Because, again, I hate to criticize, but you didn’t help matters.”
“I told him anything he wanted to say to you could be communicated through me.”
I sat up straight. “You told him what?”
“That if he had anything to say to you—”
“I heard you. I just can’t believe you said something so…so over the top.”
“You don’t understand the psychology of a stalker.”
“I don’t even know that Jerry is a stalker. He could just be pushy. He could just be socially inept. Now you’ve pissed him off and he’s going to go write a bunch of terrible reviews of my books.”
J.X.’s jaw tightened. He said, “He is a stalker. I asked Izzie to pull his jacket. His juvenile records are sealed, which right there tells you there’s a problem. Even without those records, Knight has a long history of complaints filed against him for harassment and stalking—as well as one conviction.”
“He was convicted of stalking someone?”
J.X. said grimly, “His creative writing professor.”
“He wants to be a writer?” I think that might have been the most horrible news yet. On the bright side, he hadn’t asked me to look at his work, so there was still something to be grateful for.
