The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  She moved along the right side of the house slowly, keeping her silhouette small. She studied the path ahead of her to choose her way off the lot. When she began to get close to the house she climbed the brick wall between it and the next house. She rolled over to drop onto the next lawn and found herself bathed in light.

  She had triggered a motion sensor mounted on the next house. She ran for the street. A quick sprint took her to the front gate, and she jumped halfway up and scrambled over it. While she was climbing, she was far enough away so that the motion-triggered light went dark again. She dropped to the driveway and realized that she had misjudged her distance. She had gone far past the place where she had left her car. She ran along the descending road past about six big yards. She reached her car, got in, and started it. She left her headlights off in case somebody was looking out a window to see what had set off the light. As she came around the first curve, she met a black SUV parked on the other side of the street, facing her.

  She switched on her lights and saw that there were people in the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. She flashed past them without slowing. The roads were winding, so she was out of their sight in a second. But when she reached the next straight section, she looked in her mirror and saw the SUV coming down after her.

  The only strategy that occurred to Elle was to speed up. She was a good driver, but at high speeds this area offered only sharp, unexpected turns and narrow shoulders that could serve as runways into empty air if she made an error. She tried to remember the exact features of the road ahead but couldn’t form a picture that was complete enough to be useful. The night was dark and the roads were not well traveled late at night, so she was very aware of the headlights trailing her. Were the people in the SUV cops?

  If it was a police car chasing her, then any second the lights and siren would come on, and since she wasn’t going to pull over, a helicopter would arrive above her head shortly after that. She should never have driven past the Kavanagh house. They must have noticed a small woman driving by too slowly and followed her car to Trousdale Estates. While she had been taking her time looking for envelopes full of money in the house, they had been driving around until they spotted her parked car. All they had to do was wait until she emerged again. As she drove she reached into her fanny pack and took out the revolver. At some point they were going to catch her, and when they did, this thing would get her a very long prison sentence.

  She pushed the button to open her window and felt the hot wind flapping her hair and slapping her face. She waited until she was on one of the worst curves, where there were no houses because the hillside fell away for what looked like a thousand feet, and then hurled the gun out the window. She followed it with the box of ammunition and closed the window.

  She made it out to Beverly Glen, still driving as fast as she dared. She knew she was doing something that the cops expected suspects to do: drive toward the area where they lived. That was stupid, and the least she could expect of herself was to avoid being stupid. When the descending roads out of the hills landed her in Sherman Oaks, she didn’t slow down. She flashed through the red light at the Casa de Cadillac showroom on Ventura Boulevard and onto the fork to Moorpark Street, heading east away from her house. She considered pulling into the parking lot at the Sherman Oaks library and hiding back there, but decided against it. If she was going to risk everything on one strategy, it wasn’t going to be waiting to get caught.

  Moorpark was long and straight from here, and she could nudge her car up to eighty, blowing past traffic signals until she came to the one at Coldwater Canyon Avenue, which was too big to ever be empty. She stopped there and waited for an opening, then kept going to the alley just before the corner of Moorpark and Laurel Canyon Boulevard. She turned right between the gas station and the big apartment building, passing fast beneath the balconies overlooking the alley. She made it to the end and turned right again, this time backtracking to Whitsett Avenue, where she turned left and sped up to the light at Ventura Boulevard. She went through it on green and drove fast up the next alley that ran behind the businesses on Ventura. The alley ended at Vantage Avenue, and she turned right, then left at Maxwellton Road. Just before she reached Laurel Canyon Boulevard she turned onto the last alley. This one ran between the houses on Laurel Canyon and the ones on Mound View Avenue. On both sides it was lined with high walls interrupted only by the closed doors of garages. She turned off her lights and drove.

  About two blocks up the three-block alley she reached the back edge of a construction site where a house was being built on Mound View Avenue. There was a chain-link fence in three sections, all chained together with green fabric over them. She stopped and ran from her car to the fence. When she got there, she found that the sections could be moved, and her lungs seemed to fill with air for the first time since the burglary. She half lifted the right-hand section of the fence. She walked the section out of her way, drove her car onto the site, and walked the section of fence across the opening again.

  She backed her car behind a twenty-foot cinder block wall that had been left intact during construction and waited with her window rolled down so she could hear. It occurred to her that this was one of those times when if she’d had a gun she would have been in danger of using it. Throwing away the one she had stolen had taken away that decision, but now she wondered if she had made a mistake.

  Elle had no plan, so she started to work on one. If the black SUV came all the way up this alley, she would leave her car where it was and run. Maybe she could find a route up over the hills that she could follow on foot. Her car was registered in a false name, and right now it had plates that she had stolen and altered with black electrical tape. She had wiped it down before driving it, as usual, and she was still wearing her surgical gloves. She heard cars rushing along on the other side of the houses on Laurel Canyon, but Mound View remained silent.

  After about fifteen minutes, Elle stepped to the front of the construction site and looked up and down the street. It was empty. She returned to the temporary fence at the back of the lot, looked up and down the alley, and then walked the section of fence outward to create a passage so she could drive her car off the lot into the alley.

  She got into her car and backed it up almost to the place where the new swimming pool was going to be, then pulled forward and into the alley. She kept her lights off and made a sharp turn to head for the end of the alley. She pulled to a stop after about twenty-five feet and then prepared to get out and move the section of fence back into place.

  Her rearview mirror caught the black shape of a moving vehicle. It seemed to materialize behind her, its headlights off and coming fast. Elle stomped on her gas pedal, felt the tires spinning crazily and making her car fishtail on loose gravel, but then felt them dig in at a place where the pavement was bare and catapult the car forward.

  The driver of the SUV must not have seen the green-veiled section of fence without his headlights, or not have read the sight correctly because he could see objects through the green fabric stretched over chain-link, but somehow the frame of steel pipe didn’t seem to enter his consciousness. He hurtled into the fence section, the chain-link wrapping itself around the front of the SUV and the steel upper frame hitting his windshield.

  As this happened Elle accelerated, trying to stay ahead of the encumbered vehicle that was coming up on her.

  Since the three sections of fence were held together by padlocked chains, the SUV dragged the second and third sections out into the alley after it at high speed. The additional resistance increased the pressure of the first fence section against the windshield, and the frame popped the glass and pushed it inward into the front seat. One of the fence sections caught on the corner of a garage and held, and the SUV swerved into a cinder block wall and stopped.

  Elle turned right at the end of the alley onto Laurel Terrace, a road that hooked along the foot of a steep hillside through the neighborhood and back across Ventura Boulevard. She kept going onto Whi
tsett again and sped north toward Van Nuys. She never stopped until she had driven her car into its garage at home. Then she closed the garage door and turned off the engine. She rested her forehead against her steering wheel and sat for a few seconds in the dark, feeling the sweat that had accumulated on her body.

  She got out, walked across the few feet to her side door, and went inside. She took a bath and thought about what had nearly killed her tonight. She had given in to her curiosity and gone to look at Nick Kavanagh’s house, the scene of the murders. Amateurs were curious. Pros were not.

  4

  When Elle awoke at midday she spent time at home cleaning, doing laundry, paying bills, washing her hair, repairing her nails, and counting the money she had stolen last night. The total was under a thousand dollars, which was not enough to have risked her life for but was enough to meet her needs for now. She removed the false license plates from her car and bought groceries. When she had put the supplies away she allowed herself time to sit at her laptop and look at the reports of the crime at the Kavanagh house.

  The police still weren’t releasing the names of the women but had not been able to hide the name of the man who owned the house, since house ownership was public information. As night approached, the anxiety she had been feeling changed to physical restlessness, so she decided to go out. She felt more comfortable going out early instead of following her custom of waiting until late in the evening. The later it was, the higher the ratio of cops to bar patrons, and right now police scared her more than anything else.

  There were a few customers in the Pity when Elle arrived. The interior of the bar was a collection of remnants from its many dismal lives, all of which had ended in bankruptcy. There was a jukebox that had been made in the 1950s and was full of B sides of hits from the early 1960s. In the left corner high above the bar there were artifacts of a tiki-island motif, including a ukulele, a set of crossed torches, and a canoe paddle. There was a stuffed lake trout transported from some distant place, probably the Midwest, and time. The rest of the walls were dominated by small neon signs advertising obscure regional brands of beer, all of them extinct. Crossing the floor beneath the display, she spotted her friend Sharon, who locked eyes with her, gave a little wave, and then sat at a table. Already at the table were Ricki and Sal, women with names that sounded male but weren’t. Elle was relieved to see them, because these three women were among the few people in the city who knew how she made a living, and she didn’t feel like censoring everything she said tonight.

  Elle wove through the people crowded around the bar to get to them. Her progress looked at times like some martial art that involved getting oneself out of the way of the random movements of large people—sharp, high elbows; big feet; full drinks clutched in thick, clumsy hands. She emerged at the end and slid herself onto the open seat. A good burglar was not only fast but also limber.

  “Hey, L,” said Ricki. “Where have you been? Did you leave town?”

  “The opposite. I’ve been working.”

  Ricki nodded in sympathy. “Are you doing okay?”

  Elle shrugged. “My guidance counselor was right. I should have been a princess, but I’m fine.”

  Ricki said, “You know, I’ve seen a couple of places this week that might interest you.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah,” Ricki said. “I’ve been to a couple of parties in giant top-floor apartments in big old buildings. You walk in without passing a guard and take any elevator to any floor. No vicious dogs, no crawling in ventilator shafts. Sound good?”

  Elle shrugged. “Those lofts downtown are renovated for hipsters. They get to walk in and out through a lobby that used to be a bank, but they don’t have much to steal.”

  “The ones I mean are in those buildings along Wilshire in West L.A. The buildings are all white and old-fashioned. The apartments are big, and inside they look like somebody’s grandma’s house. I was at these two parties in places that take up the top floor or two of a whole building. You’d think you were in some sprawling old house, except that just when you forget you’re not, you glance at one of these big windows that look out over the city and remember you’re up in the air. They both had outdoor patios too.”

  “Sounds nice. Maybe I’ll work harder and buy one.”

  Ricki said in a quiet voice, “Maybe you should just make a visit. The one I was in last night has an indoor pool.”

  “Pools are hard to steal. You have to sneak it out a glass at a time.”

  “I was talking about money. This guy has collections—a lot of glass cases with old things in them—jewels, silver stuff from some king’s table, old pistols, and gold coins.”

  Sal said, “Does he have a patch over one eye and a parrot on his shoulder?”

  “No. He’s in financial services.”

  Elle said, “Did you by any chance get a look at the man’s bedroom?”

  “Of course,” said Ricki. “I was going to tell you. The room is beautiful, although the decorations are a little obvious. He’s one of those guys who have kind of a naughty side.”

  Sal said, “They all have kind of a naughty side.”

  “I mean artistically. In his suite he’s got a whole collection of Japanese netsuke with nothing but couples carved in ivory doing just about anything you can think of. Some of them are eight hundred years old. That’s what he said, anyway.”

  “That is a little obvious,” said Elle.

  “You want the address?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Why not?”

  “For one thing, if he had you in his bedroom, he’s going to remember you. And he’ll make the connections between you and his stuff, one of which is that you’re both gone.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. You’re pretty memorable. And anyway, I’d get caught trying to sell things like that. Or whoever I sold it to would, and they’d trade me for a reduced charge. Serious artifacts are either worth millions or too risky to sell, depending on who you are. I’m nobody.”

  Sal tapped Ricki’s arm. Sal, who covered most of her expenses by going from party to party, had spotted a couple of men who looked promising, at least for buying them a nice dinner. Since Ricki was modeling, she never ate, but she still drank, so they excused themselves and got up to make the capture. Desiree the barmaid used the opportunity to swoop in to take Elle’s order.

  “A double single-malt Scotch with one ice cube,” Elle said. “Thanks, Desiree.”

  As Desiree left, Sharon leaned closer and said quietly, “What’s bothering you, L?”

  She shrugged and looked around the room, scanning the crowd. “I had a kind of weird experience yesterday.”

  “Did you steal something that had a curse on it?”

  “A curse is being a person who believes in curses.”

  “Do you believe in bad luck?”

  “Only in the wrong-place-wrong-time sort of way.”

  “Did you have one of those?”

  “I guess so,” said Elle. “I was running low on money, so I picked out a house in Beverly Hills that had a lot of signs that nobody was home at the moment. I got in through an attic window and went straight to the master bedroom suite. The door was closed but not locked, just as you might expect when nobody’s home. But when I opened it I saw this big California king bed. On it were three dead people, all naked, and all shot once in the forehead.”

  “Oh my god.”

  “I backed out, still staring in at them. They were in a pile, sort of, like they were doing it at the moment they got shot. That freaked me out, of course. And then I noticed that on one side of the room there was a camera on a tripod. In one second it occurred to me that this threesome was taped.”

  “That’s the only reason I can think of to have a camera aimed at a bed.”

  “These people were dead. If they were being taped, they had not said, ‘Cut,’ and turned the camera off. It was probably still running, and if so, I was probably on it.”

  “Jesus. What d
id you do?”

  “I took the camera.”

  “Very good,” said Sharon. “So you’re home free. You destroyed the tape.”

  “Not a tape. A memory card.”

  “Who cares? You destroyed it.”

  “Well, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I went home and watched the recording. The camera had been running for at least twelve hours, maybe longer. It had been running since midafternoon or so the day before.”

  “On battery power?”

  “No, it was plugged in. But when I read about the camera I realized it probably would have run that long on batteries anyway. It was running when the people came into the room. The man had been taking pictures of some paintings and doing commentary, and just moved the camera when the others arrived but didn’t turn it off. It caught them talking and then flirting, and the sex, and the murder. A man walked in, shot all three in their foreheads, and left them where they were for the late afternoon, evening, and night.”

  “Just like that?”

  “The guy didn’t even cover them or move them, just turned and left. Then, many hours later, I came in and found them. When I came back in and turned off the camera and took it, the camera was recording me.”

  “So then you erased it.”

  “I made three copies of the recording and then erased the last part of the original. The part with me in it.”

  “Why keep copies? They prove you were there.”

  “Because they prove I was there twelve hours or so after the murder. It proves I didn’t arrive when it was still possible to kill anybody. And how could I destroy the record of who had actually killed them? That was on the same recording. The police need it. So I returned, put the camera back on the tripod, and left.”

  “I still say why, why, why?” Sharon said. “You were there and got away.”

  “Because no matter what, this was a triple murder. The police probably spent all of yesterday taking fingerprints, DNA samples, hairs, and fibers from every square inch of this seven- or eight-thousand-square-foot Beverly Hills home. Last night I drove by the house to see if I could tell what they were doing, and a plain black SUV followed me from there. After I made a stop in Trousdale Estates, they chased me all the way to Studio City.”