Even Money

by Stephanie Caffrey

  It was one of those dreams that stuck with me, even after I’d been awake a few minutes. I pondered its meaning while I fixed myself a pepper jack cheese omelet (more cheese than egg), but I came up empty. It made no sense whatsoever, apart from the obvious indication that I was nervous about our little investment club and hadn’t done a thing to solve Miranda’s death. So that was the mojo running through my veins when I woke up: do something to advance the ball, even if it was a little thing. Progress of any kind would make me feel better. All I had at the moment was a series of hunches possibly linked together in some way by a red BMW.

  It was only a little after ten in the morning—early by my standards—and so I contemplated what to do with the unusually wide swath of daylight that lay before me. Over a cup of coffee, into which I had playfully sprinkled a dash of cinnamon, I realized that I was probably overdue to check in on the unusual house that Carlos and I had visited several days earlier. What went on in that house was still a mystery. We’d managed to sneak inside, and then to our surprise we’d come upon a young man with blaring headphones who appeared to be engaged in some kind of dark magic with papers and scissors and glue. Oh, and there had been an iguana. The home had been listed to a Mrs. Vandenhoovel, she also being the titular owner of the red BMW, but Mrs. V was nowhere to be seen, and neither Carlos nor I believed she had any earthly idea that she owned a German sports car.

  The mysterious man at Mrs. Vandenhoovel’s house had been working there around noon on the day we paid a visit, and so I pegged it a pretty good possibility that he’d be there right about now as well. I didn’t want that. I wanted to snoop around without him, or anyone else, knowing I was there. One girl had already ended up missing, and I didn’t want to be girl number two. So I made a plan with Carlos to meet up around five and spent the rest of the day food shopping and dillydallying my way around my building’s gym. You know how it goes: hit the fly machine or the squat rack for two minutes then catch your breath for ten minutes. Repeat. Then take a long hot shower on the gym’s dime and maybe a steam for good measure, too. Time of workout: 2 hours. Calories burned: 23.

  I grabbed a snack at about four thirty and then headed out to meet Carlos. For once he hadn’t performed his song and dance for me, his customary faux reluctance to help out. He seemed interested or even eager to help me sort this thing out, probably because it involved money, his personal deity. Or maybe he just wanted to learn how to pull the scam himself so he could quit being a bouncer and escalate his status to the private jet and Bentley lifestyle he thought he deserved.

  In any event we met up on a street corner about two blocks from Esther Vandenhoovel’s house, which we hoped to find empty. Carlos was looking surprisingly spiffy. Absent were the big tattooed arms and NBA cap. In their place were a tasteful and not too tight, black collared shirt and jet black hair that was slicked down and neatly coiffed. I grabbed my clipboard and climbed out of my car.

  I gave him a twice-over. “What gives?” I asked.

  He looked a bit sheepish. “I thought we could grab dinner afterwards.”

  “Aha,” I said noncommittally. I had not filled Carlos in on my relationship with Alex, such as it was. Alex and I weren’t “exclusive” or anything like that, but I think we had reached the stage where I couldn’t just go out with a guy—especially a guy with twenty-inch biceps—without feeling a little guilty about it. And then there was the after. No man ever invited a stripper out to dinner just for conversation and food. There was always the after.

  “That’s a nice thought, Carlos,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”

  He made a face. “You’ll think about it? All you ever talk about is food, and now I’m saying let’s get some food.”

  I grinned. He had me there. “I’ll think about it. Let’s go. Shoo!” I said, pressing him gently on the shoulder to turn him in the direction of our destination.

  Carlos muttered under his breath for the next two minutes. He did look damn good all dressed up, I admitted. And lately I had been craving male attention, and so his efforts were especially welcome. But no, it wasn’t going to happen. Not tonight, anyway.

  “By the way, what’s with the clipboard?” Carlos asked.

  I smiled. “Haven’t I explained this to you before?”

  He shrugged. “If you did, I’ve forgotten it.”

  As we walked I regaled him with my theory on clipboards and the advisability of having one on hand any time you were snooping around. He seemed profoundly unimpressed.

  “Check this out,” I said, showing him the piece of paper attached to the clipboard. I had designed it myself, a phony form from an equally phony company. I hoped it was plausible enough on its face to dispel anyone who doubted me.

  “Silver City Properties? What the hell is Silver City Properties?” he asked, referring to the header on my fake form. It even had a logo consisting of mountains with a silhouette of the Strip in the foreground. I was quite proud of it actually.

  “We are,” I explained patiently. “It’s a fake company that manages houses and apartments. If anyone asks, we’re just checking in on one of our properties. Somebody called about a leaking toilet? You know, something along those lines.”

  “But it’s not our property,” he protested.

  “Oops, how silly of me! I must have the address wrong. It’s my first week on the job,” I said, using my best bimbo voice. It wasn’t much of a stretch.

  He sighed. “That might work,” he said, suggesting the opposite was true.

  “It’s just enough to put someone off. Don’t worry, though. The clipboard on its own will keep anybody at least a hundred yards away.”

  “If you say so, Raven. You’re the professional here. I’m just muscle, right?”

  I squeezed his arm. “And then some!”

  The ranch house with pale green trim lay ahead of us. The sun had descended halfway, so it wasn’t fully dark out yet. Even so, it didn’t seem that any lights were on inside. And there was no car in the driveway, either.

  “Coast looks clear,” he said. “Maybe this’ll be easy. In and out and then dinner.”

  I shook my head at him and flashed a tired smile. At least the guy was persistent.

  We walked up to the front door. “Remember. Act like we’re supposed to be here.”

  He chuckled. “You try to sound confident, Raven, but you’re paranoid as hell.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, piqued.

  He turned to face me. “Nobody gives a damn that we’re out here knocking on a door. You’re always assuming that some little old lady is spying on us from a hidden window across the street or that the cops are right around the corner. Nobody notices things like this. We’re almost invisible out here.”

  “It never hurts to be careful,” I said. “By the way,” I added, “remember outside of Sarah’s apartment last night? When we kissed?”

  He smiled. “Of course. How could I forget?”

  “That was because a little old lady was watching. She was staring at us, in fact. People do notice us sometimes, and we have to get them to forget us, to look the other way.”

  “You mean like in Star Wars?” he asked.

  “Huh?

  “Remember when those stormtroopers stopped Obi-Wan and the droids?” he asked.

  “Umm…” It had been awhile since I’d seen the original movie. A long while.

  “Obi-Wan waves his hand and says, ‘These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,’ and the stormtroopers let them pass.” His tone of voice was a little too excited for the occasion, the way many Star Wars fans get when they start discussing the movies. I had never taken Carlos for a Star Wars geek, but the man was full of surprises.

  “Yeah, I kind of remember that,” I said, vaguely recalling the scene.

  “So your clipboard is kind of like The Force. It makes people look the other way and then forget that they ever saw us in the first place,” he said, sounding satisfied with this shaky analogy.

  “If you s
ay so,” I said. “Can I ring the doorbell now, or are you going to tell me the rest of the plot? Maybe something about Darth Vader, perhaps? Or Han Solo?” It was a gentle ribbing, but Carlos didn’t like it. He was pouting as I pressed the bell. I pressed it again and then added a few solid raps on the door for good measure.

  “Nothing doing,” he muttered. He cast a casual glance over his shoulder to see if anyone was around, and then he opened the screen door and tried the latch.

  “Locked,” he said. No surprise there.

  “Back door,” I muttered. Carlos was already on his way, so I followed him, retracing our steps from a few days earlier.

  Nothing had changed in the backyard, which looked even less hospitable now in the waning daylight. It was a nice space, and I couldn’t help thinking that a little TLC would turn it into a fantastic little escape. Living in a condo with a Strip view was nice, but I liked to be outside, to have a view of actual trees, or at least cactus. I could picture myself settling down one day in a place like this.

  “You daydreaming?” Carlos asked.

  “A little,” I said, embarrassed. “Try the door.”

  We made sure no one was watching, and then he pushed against the door.

  “Not budging,” he said.

  “I guess it was too much to hope that it would be open for us twice,” I said. I was glancing at all the windows to see if any of them were open. “There,” I said, pointing to our right. The window to the immediate right of the patio was cracked open a couple of inches. The problem was that immediately beneath it was some kind of bramble or hedge of a thorny-looking plant.

  Carlos was already looking at it skeptically. “That thing looks nasty,” he said. “Like it’s some kind of man-eating plant. What are those called?”

  I chuckled. “I think those are only in the movies, Carlos.”

  “No, seriously, I think there’s a kind of plant that can eat a person alive,” he said, his tone dead serious.

  I smiled at him, the way a kindly nurse might smile at a 107-year-old man who claimed to have seen an alien. “Let’s keep looking,” I suggested. He went to the left, and I went to the right, keeping my distance from the nasty half cactus, half man-eater. We met up a minute later, right where we had started.

  “So they’re all closed?” I asked.

  “Looks that way,” he said.

  “Well, I’m not going in through that window,” I announced.

  “Me neither,” Carlos said. “Getting eaten by a cactus would be a nasty way to die.”

  “Did you check to see if the windows were locked?” I asked.

  He shook his head and then went back to check. I did the same.

  The three windows I checked were all locked, but the last one, a double-hung window covered with grime and cobwebs, felt kind of wobbly. It had been painted shut at some point, but the paint was wearing thin, and the lower pane had a little give in it when I pushed against it.

  Carlos swung around the back to join me. He stood up on his tiptoes to examine the window, and then he reached into his pocket to pull out his wallet.

  “Watch and learn,” he said confidently.

  He pulled out a credit card and then reached up to the window where he jammed the card between the two panes. It appeared to be stuck, which drew a smile from me. Carlos looked down at me sheepishly.

  “That kind of thing only works in the movies,” I said.

  “Gimme a minute,” he asserted, and fished in his wallet for another one. Actually, it appeared to be a rewards card for Bass Pro Shops.

  “You are full of surprises today, Carlos! I didn’t know you were an angler,” I said. First Star Wars, now Bass Pro Shops. “What other hobbies do you have that I don’t know about? Ballet? Grooming bonsai trees? Entomology?”

  “What’s entomology?” he asked, stretching up with his rewards card and fiddling around with the window. If he had any physical flaws, it was that he only stood about five foot nine, and so he could barely reach.

  “The study of bugs,” I said.

  Carlos sniffed. “No thanks,” he said, still straining to make himself as tall as possible. The window didn’t appear to be budging, despite his strength. “But ballet’s kind of okay, actually. Except for those guys in tights.”

  I chuckled. “That’s half the reason most women enjoy the ballet, you idiot. If they got rid of the guys in tights, what would they have?”

  Carlos grunted. “I thought maybe they liked the music and the dancing.”

  I snorted. “Maybe some people do. To each her own.”

  “There it goes,” he announced, sliding the card between the two panes. “That sucker was half painted shut.” He unstretched himself and returned to his normal five-nine frame and then began massaging his right shoulder with his left hand.

  “Great, now I pulled something,” he muttered. “Workers’ comp.”

  I snorted. “Workers’ comp? Are you kidding me? I should report you to immigration.”

  He rolled his eyes. “My family’s been in this country longer than yours, I bet. They used to own half of L.A.,” he said, his voice sounding winded from his exertion.

  “Then how come you’re just a bouncer?” I asked, genuinely curious.

  He paused for a second to think about it. “Stuff happened. That’s all. The system was rigged.”

  “Um hmm,” I said, not buying it. “Let’s get inside before you hurt something else.”

  “Fine. I’ll give you a boost.”

  He clasped his hands together and held them about a foot off the ground. I placed my left foot in his hands and then stood up straight. With my right breast pressed against his face, which I’m sure he hated, I slid the bottom window open and gingerly probed with my hands to feel around for something to grasp. There wasn’t much to hold on to, apart from the window itself, so I pulled against it and gradually snuck my head inside. It was a tight fit.

  Carlos was pushing my leg upward.

  “Slow down,” I said. “There’s really nowhere to go.” I looked around the kitchen, cursing myself. It wasn’t the first time I had tried to squeeze into a kitchen window, and the last time didn’t go so well. I decided I could snake my way down to the countertop. Yes, the same countertop that was covered in a not so thin layer of grime and God knows what else.

  With Carlos’s help I finally made my way inside and found myself facedown, pressed against the grime. It had a distinctive smell to it, as though the kitchen’s long-gone, previous occupant had done nothing but cook bacon all day long. But now the grease had gone rancid. When I had gotten my bearings, I slithered across the linoleum countertop and then planted my feet onto the floor.

  Carlos was right behind me, not needing a boost. In an impressive move he did a partial handstand on the sink and then stuck the landing on the floor. We were in.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “Nice,” I muttered, genuinely impressed. Carlos had just vaulted through the window in a crisp move that any Olympian gymnast would be proud of.

  He smiled and then started sniffing at the air. “Smells good in here, don’t it?”

  I shuddered at the thought. “Smells like bacon. Bacon that’s been in the fridge for too long. You know what I mean?”

  He shrugged. “Bacon is bacon, man. It doesn’t go bad. Let’s go.”

  I began to protest, but then he turned towards the room we had been snooping in a few days earlier. I headed through the rest of the house just to make sure no one was there. It was deserted, so I returned and found Carlos in the corner bedroom which had been converted into some kind of office.

  “It smells in here, too,” I observed, anticipating Carlos’s disagreement.

  “Naw,” he said. “Check this out.” He reached into the wastebasket and pulled out an empty bag of potato chips. “Sour cream and onion,” he announced proudly, holding the partially destroyed bag up in the air like an angler holding up a trophy largemouth bass. “This is the good stuff right here. The whole garbage can is full of this
stuff. This guy has class,” he pronounced.

  I sighed, sensing my blood pressure rising. Looking for the heaviest object within arm’s reach, I grabbed the lamp that was perched on the desk and pummeled Carlos over the head with it, leaving him collapsed on the floor in a pool of his own blood. Actually, now that I think of it, that didn’t happen at all. But that’s not to say I didn’t fantasize about it. Were all men like Carlos, I wondered, permanently trapped in adolescence? Or was I just lucky?

  “Well, it stinks,” I said. “But don’t move anything else unless we have to. We don’t want to let anyone know we’ve been here.”

  “Can I at least turn on the light?” he asked.

  I grimaced. It was getting to be twilight now, so visibility wasn’t great. But still, I didn’t want to attract any undue attention. “How about using our phones? They have those flashlight things on them.”

  He looked skeptical.

  “Just do it,” I ordered. “Please.”

  He looked at me, and for a second it looked like he wanted to pummel me with the nearest heavy object. But then he whipped out his phone and fiddled with it, eventually producing a piercing beam of white light.

  The room was split in half by a large rectangular folding table that looked like it was on loan from a 1940s public school. In the Soviet Union. On top lay a half dozen stacks of papers that might have, at one time, been actual piles, but now appeared to be nothing more than a loose mishmash of papers, many of which were handwritten sheets from a yellow legal pad.