The light on the phone was blinking. Claire Peters had left a voice-mail message that she was scared, that someone was lurking around the house and she felt she needed protection. I flashed for an outside line and called her.
“Peters residence. Juanita speakeeeng.”
“This is John Caine—”
“Oh, jess, Meester Caine. Please hold for the lady.” There was a murmur, as if a hand had gone over the mouthpiece, then Claire’s voice.
“John. Are you at the hotel?”
“I got your message,” I said. “What happened?”
“We’ve had a prowler. Someone came into the backyard.”
“Are you all right?”
“They’re gone, I think. But we would both feel better if you would come over.”
“Of course. Fifteen minutes.”
“Faster, if you can.”
I hung up and retrieved my briefcase from under the bed, worked the combination lock and opened it. Nestled between banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills, secure in its holster, lay my Colt .45 Gold Cup and five eight-shot magazines loaded with Black Talon hollow-points. The lady said she was frightened. A prowler, she said. Someone lurking outside.
I thought about it for a full ten count, then closed and relocked the briefcase and shoved it back under the bed. She already had an arsenal over there. If firearms were necessary, and I had no reason to believe they were, there was enough firepower at the house to bring down a couple of Bradley Fighting Vehicles. And it would be convenient to keep my ace in the hole.
Ignoring the elevators, I ran down the fire stairs to the garage level, got into Paul Peters’s Range Rover, and made it to Point Loma in less than ten minutes. The fury of the storm helped. Traffic was almost nonexistent. Few people, it seemed, wanted to test their abilities in this weather. It was a good night to stay home.
If you had one.
11
Juanita opened the door before I reached the porch. “I was waiting for joo,” she said. “Looking through the door.” She closed the door and locked it. I didn’t see it at first, but when she locked the dead bolt, her hand gripped a blue-steel revolver.
“What happened?”
“Mees Claire, she say somebody outside. In the backyard. I look out. There was nobody. Then she say other side, by the tennis court. I go look out that window. There was nobody. It start to rain hard, so I can’t see nothing else.”
“Did you call the police?”
Juanita shook her head. “There was nobody there. But Mees Claire, she still say there was somebody. I don’t know. She call joo. Then you call back and she go up to her room and lock the door.”
I looked at her hand. She carried the revolver with her forefinger outside the trigger guard, a sign she either didn’t know anything about firearms, or that she did and was very, very careful. She glanced down at the gun.
“In my country,” she said, “we had visitors in the night sometimes. Patrullas Muertes. Death patrols. We learned we must protect ourselves. My husband, the death squad come for him one night. He never come back. I had to leave the country and come here.”
“I’m sorry, Juanita.”
“Me too,” she said, her voice singsong. “It’s supposed to be better there now, but I don’t know. Mees Claire, she is very good to me. And I cannot leave her now.”
“Take me to her, please.”
“You go upstairs. I wait down here.”
Juanita, the survivor, the brave little guard at the gate. I nodded. “Come get me if you see or hear anything,” I said. “And call the police. Please.”
She pressed her lips together into a tight line. “I do not like the police.”
“It’s not like in El Salvador. They’re here to protect you, not to kill you.”
She shrugged, as if I didn’t know what I was talking about and she had no argument to convince me of my naivete. I turned and went up the stairs. Of the eight doors opening to the landing, only one was closed. I knocked.
Metal slid against metal as the door opened about an inch. Claire Peters peered through the crack, one emerald eye poised over a 12-gauge muzzle. The eye blinked once, and then the door swung wide. I watched the shotgun lower slowly until it pointed toward the floor. Claire wore what looked like a powder-blue sweat suit, except it was made of a feather-light cashmere.
“You were safe,” I said, edging past the gun.
“I thought so. But it’s nice to see you anyway.” She let me slide past into the room. Her bedroom. “Come in.”
“I’m in.”
“I noticed.”
“You, ah, know how to use that thing?”
“I shoot skeet.”
“Handy thing to know if a skeet ever breaks into your house.”
“Have to be tiny things, skeet. I’m loaded with number six.” She moved to the window overlooking the backyard. “Someone was out there. I looked and saw someone looking in, toward the house.”
“Did he … was it a he?”
“Of course it was a he. Who would send a woman to scare me?”
I’d known some women who would scare Rambo, but I let that alone. “What did he look like?”
“Dark. Wearing dark clothes. It was before it started raining hard. Right at dusk. I couldn’t make out any features, but he was standing next to the avocado tree.”
“How big was he?”
She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell. It was just a glimpse. Then I ducked away from the window and called Juanita.”
I went to the window. Nothing was visible in the dark beyond the blazing white pool of lights over the tennis court. “Do you have lights for the grounds?”
“Only the court lights. There’s the lights that shine up the trunks of the trees, but that’s just for landscaping. We rarely used the backyard after dark.”
“Is there a gate from the alley?”
“Yes. Back near the garages. But it’s always locked.”
“So what happened?”
“Juanita looked but said she saw no one. When she came back, I turned on the tennis-court lights and saw him again. Just for a split second, because when the lights came on, he ran.”
“Which way?”
“Back toward the garages.”
“Do you have a flashlight?”
“Juanita does.”
“You staying up here?”
“I’ll come down now. This is the best place to watch the whole backyard.”
“Juanita is a good guard. She let me in. She was watching the front of the house, waiting for me. She was carrying a thirty-eight.”
Claire’s eyes went wide. “She had a gun?”
“And she was going to stand there and protect you with it until I arrived. Whatever you’re paying her, give that woman a raise.”
She nodded. “I will.”
Claire followed me down the stairs. Juanita was no longer in the entry and we found her in the kitchen, humming tunelessly, taking a tray of cookies from the oven. There was no sign of the gun. She smiled her wide, white-toothed smile when she saw us, a study in contrast to our previous encounter.
“Could I borrow your flashlight?” I asked.
She nodded. “Here,” she said, wiping a hand on her apron and reaching into a drawer, handing me one of those black-aluminum five-battery flashlights that cops carry, the kind that could be useful as a club.
I stepped outside. The rain had stopped, but the trees dripped heavy drops of water and the gutter drains rumbled, a staccato drumming, covering any noise I might make. Or noise anyone else would make.
I went directly across the broad, sloping lawn to the bushy avocado tree and shone the light on the ground near its trunk. It had rained so hard that any tracks might have disappeared, but the intruder was sloppy, or unlucky, and there must have already been mud from recent irrigation. Near the redwood fence were two impressions of a hard landing.
I studied the footprints. People tend to land with their feet shoulder-width apart. It’s instinctive, not som
ething we have to learn, although the paratroops spend a great deal of time teaching us to do things that way. Whether this guy had training or not, his feet landed about eighteen to twenty inches apart, center to center. That made him narrow shouldered. The ovoid craters were not too deep, either, telling me the intruder was not heavy. I had the impression of a slight, small person. A female, or a young slender male.
Like the young gangster I saw with Stevenson.
That was a path I didn’t want to travel down just yet, but I filed it away for future reference.
The remainder of the footprints tracked across the lawn toward the tennis court. I followed them to the bright white lights and noted the clumps of earth littering an otherwise immaculate green surface.
So Claire had seen someone out here. It was not her imagination.
It would be handy for her husband if she made a report of a prowler, or several reports, and have the police find nothing. It would make her sound like a hysterical woman, seeing things in the dark. It could cloud the credibility of her claim of seeing her husband in Mexico.
Was that the basis of this exercise? Or was there something else?
Whatever it was, and whoever it was, it was over for tonight. As I started back across the lawn, the clouds opened up again and poured on me. By the time I reached the patio, I was soaked to the skin.
Juanita let me in.
“Mees Claire wants to see you.”
“I’m a little wet,” I said, handing her the flashlight.
“There’s clothes from the meester. He was about your size. Maybe shorter. If the lady say it okay for you, I’ll get some, if you want.”
I thanked her and she went off, happy to be busy. It is a good self-defense, being busy. It keeps your mind off other things. Uncomfortable things, dangerous things, lurking out there in the dark. Things that may come to your door one night and take your husband away from you so you’ll never see him alive again. Or, as it was for me, things that took place faster than you could react, taking the woman you loved away from you forever, leaving you in a hospital waiting room, waiting for someone to tell you that there was no hope, no chance for her ever to come back.
“Here you are,” she said, returning to the kitchen with her arms full of khaki trousers, polo shirts, and sweaters. “Mees Claire say you can have whatever you want. Meester not coming back, I think.” She handed me the stack of clothing and two big bath towels. “There is a bathroom in there,” she said, pointing to the service entrance off the kitchen. “You shower and change.”
I thanked her and went to change. When I came back, wearing khaki Dockers and a loden-green pullover, Juanita was taking another batch of cookies from the oven. The room smelled of flour and warm cookie dough.
“The pants are too short!” Juanita laughed. The waistline was fine, but Paul Peters had been some four inches shorter than I. “Otherwise you look nice. Mees Claire wants to see you. She is in her room.” Her eyes had a sparkle I hadn’t seen since the night she helped me get the lady into her own bed, alone.
With kitchen sounds behind me, I raced up the stairs in my bare feet. A Mozart symphony drifted down the stairs to greet me, the string section sawing away for dear life, overpowering the rest of the orchestra, just the way old Amadeus intended. For a guy so good with the keyboard, he did tend to favor the strings.
I knocked on her bedroom door.
“The door is open.” Claire’s voice came from the end of the hall, from the library. I followed the voice to the library and poked my head around the corner.
“Come in,” she said. Claire was seated at the end of a leather couch, facing a fireplace with a cheery little fire going. The room could have easily been part of an English castle. It had a warm, welcoming feeling.
“Come. Sit.” She patted the leather beside her. She was still wearing the cashmere sweat suit. It clung to her body. Her nipples were erect.
I sat on a leather easy chair across from her. “This is comfortable. Thank you.”
“You’re a lot taller than Paul,” she said, staring at my bare feet. “Would you care for a glass of wine?” She had a bottle opened beside her.
“No. Thank you.”
“Are you saying that because you think I drink too much and you wish to discourage me?”
“No. I just don’t care for any right now. I understand it may be rude to refuse, that the appropriate response would be to have accepted the drink, then casually sip it to make it last. But I don’t want to lie to you. I figure we can be friends if we won’t lie to each other.”
She stared at me as if she had never heard such a concept. Then she smiled.
“I want to thank you for coming so quickly. You don’t know how much better I feel now that you’re here.”
“There was someone outside,” I said.
“I know. Didn’t you believe me?”
“I just wanted you to know that the physical evidence supports you. I think someone wanted you to panic and call the cops, and they would not be able to find anyone. There are traces that someone had been out there, but when and under what circumstances are questionable. I’m on your side. The police are skeptical.
“Make a couple of calls like that and they’ll put you down as a nutcase. And then no one will believe your story of seeing your husband in Mexico. He’s dead. That’s that. Anything else is just a hysterical widow who’s been left with a lot of debts. Poor woman. Could happen to anybody. End of story.”
She leaned forward toward me, enhancing the intimacy. She knew something about violating space. “You think that’s what happened? You think someone’s trying to make me crazy?”
“I think it’s possible somebody wants to make you look crazy,” I said. “Or there’s another possibility.”
“What’s that?”
“It was just a prowler. Some kid on a thrill trip, or maybe a burglar who ran off when he found someone home.”
“That doesn’t make sense. Lights were on upstairs and down. And why go to the tennis court?”
I nodded. She was right.
“I want you to stay the night, John. I would feel so much better if you were here.”
“Okay.” I had been expecting that, and would have asked if she hadn’t.
“You’re the only one I can trust.”
“Me and Juanita.”
She smiled. “Yes. I hadn’t expected her to do that.”
“Do you know anything about her?”
“Just a little. Enough.”
“Where did she get the gun?”
“It was Paul’s. He kept it in his room. She put it back after. I checked.”
Brave. Determined. Neat, too. The perfect housekeeper. “You are in no danger with Juanita around.”
“Yes. I know,” said Claire.
“Of course”—I glanced at the shotgun, where it leaned against the wall—“you seem to be able to take care of yourself, too.”
“I’m fairly well protected in the event of a skeet invasion.”
“I can’t be a bodyguard and investigate your husband’s disappearance, too.”
“Maybe you can hire some help. How much would that cost?”
“I’ll make some calls tomorrow, look around. I’ll come up with somebody.”
“And in the meantime?”
“Have Juanita make up one of the spare bedrooms. I’m ready to turn in.”
12
The storm continued through the night and hung on with the rising of the dawn. I spent a warm, comfortable night burrowed under borrowed down, sleeping the sleep of the blessed. Not even dreams disturbed my peace. When I woke, the light coming through the windows was murky gray, an analogue to the sound of the rain hitting the roof and dripping from the eaves. I rolled out of bed, surprised how cold it was in San Diego.
I showered and dressed in the husband’s clothes, conscious of what the widow Peters might be trying to do, yet willing to accept the gifts. When I went downstairs, Juanita had breakfast waiting, a plate of sausage and scr
ambled eggs mixed with a fiery red sauce that looked homemade.
“Good morning!” she said. Some people’s cheerfulness in the morning was forced. Juanita’s was genuine. Like many people who had lived on the edge, she seemed to take each day of life as a gift.
“Good morning, Juanita. Is everything all right?”
“Oh, jess. Mees Claire is still asleep. She sleep late most mornings now. Not like before.”
I assumed that meant before her husband’s death.
“Does she go into the office?”
“No. Not now. There is not much to do these days, I hear.”
“Who runs the company?”
“Guy named Adrian. I don’t know his last name. He’s there every day. He’s a young guy. But things are pretty slow. Joo want juice?”
“No, thank you. Can you ask Mrs. Peters to give him a call this morning? I want to go to the office and look around. I couldn’t yesterday.”
“The audit?”
“That’s what they told me.” Of course Juanita would know. She operated in the center of the Peters household universe and everything was discussed in front of her as if she wasn’t there.
“It’s over. I hear Mees Claire talking last night on the telephone. Just before the prowler. There’s plenty trouble, no?”
“Sounds like it,” I said.
“Qué lástima,” she said, shaking her head slowly. “Mees Claire doesn’t need any more trouble. She is a good person.” Juanita looked at me, as if I had answers. I didn’t have any. I didn’t even know the questions. When I didn’t respond, she continued. “Okay, I’ll tell her. Where will joo be?”
“Out,” I said, instantly regretting the abruptness of my reply, knowing it came from my impotence. My plans were simple. I would go back to the hotel and call Sergeant Esparza. “Why don’t I go out there now if the audit is over. That way they can call you and get permission while I’m there.”
“Okay. Mees Claire will be awake by then.”
I ate the rest of my breakfast in silence. Juanita busied herself with laundry and other chores. When I finished, I took my dishes to the sink, rinsed them, and put them into the dishwasher. Juanita came in carrying my clothes. They were folded into a neat, compact stack a marine drill instructor would applaud.
Sand Dollars Page 7
