by Thomas Perry
“How did you get away?”
“It’s a long story, and it adds up to me not knowing exactly. They just kept their lights off and crashed in an alley. The point is that they must think I know more than I do.”
“What else do you know?”
“Nothing! I know small details that the police know by now too. I know that the two women wore wedding rings, but neither was married to this guy. I know the killer walked to the doorway. He saw this orgy going on, raised a gun with a silencer attached, and shot the man first and then the two women without pausing. Pop-pop-pop, just like that. It was over in a couple of seconds. I don’t know if the shooter was one of the women’s husbands, or a hit man, or just a thief who panicked. I didn’t really see him, I saw just the toe of a black shoe, a forearm, and a hand with a pistol in it that had a silencer.”
“Does this killer know you were there?”
“I wasn’t there until at least twelve hours after he left. A whole night passed with the bodies lying there before I arrived in the morning. How could he?”
“He might have come back in daylight to pretend to discover the bodies. I saw on TV that some killers do that. He could have seen you then.”
“Sharon, give me a break,” Elle said. “I don’t even have a drink yet.”
Desiree the barmaid was on her way from the end of the bar carrying about two gallons of drinks on a tray, and she arrived in time to put one of them in Elle’s hand. “Sorry, L. The bar is full of thirsty people tonight.”
Elle reached into her pocket and put two twenty-dollar bills on Desiree’s tray and said, “Next time you swing by here, bring me another?”
“Sure.”
“You know,” Sharon said, “maybe you and I should go on a little trip. You said you were light on money, but I can take care of the money and you can pay me back later.”
“Thanks, Sharon,” said Elle. “But I went out and got money last night, and I can get some more if I sell a few things. Where should we go?”
“I was thinking Australia. They speak English, sort of. It’s hot and miserable this time of the year—no, I guess it’s cold and miserable. And it has saltwater crocodiles, poisonous snakes and spiders, and enormous wildfires.”
“It sounds lovely.”
“Think about it. Who would follow you there?”
5
That night Elle went through two of her hiding places looking for guns. In the house she had a single-stack 9-mm Rohrbaugh R9 pistol and a .45 Glock. She also had a shotgun she kept loaded with double-aught buckshot and a .308 rifle with a scope that was zeroed at three hundred yards. Los Angeles was a crowded place without a clear view of anything three hundred yards distant—there would always be a building in the way—but if she ever needed that kind of weapon it would be a hard thing to get at a moment’s notice.
Her other arsenal was in the trunk of an old car she kept parked in the backyard and consisted of firearms she had stolen but planned to sell. Right now she had an Ed Brown signature edition .45 pistol worth about $3,000 and a Les Baer custom 1911 worth $3,200. The pistols were distinctive and expensive, and the military-style semiautomatic rifles she’d taken were illegal to own in California but not very expensive anywhere else, so they were needlessly risky. She tended to put off selling them until she really needed the money or the space.
She moved the pistols she wanted to sell into the trunk of her gray Volvo sedan and covered them with a layer of plywood and a carpet. Then she went inside. She picked up the Rohrbaugh R9 pistol. It held only six rounds in the magazine and a seventh in the chamber, but they were 9-mm, and this model had a barrel just over three inches and an aftermarket laser sight. She checked the three loaded magazines. She had found the gun in the house of a man who had long guns in cabinets in his bedroom and a pistol in nearly every drawer. That was the way the gun market went. People had no guns, or they had two dozen stored and a dozen more around to guard the others.
She stood between the big full-length mirrors in her bedroom and tested the various ways to carry the little pistol. The best was a wide elastic band that went around her stomach and had a pouch-like pocket to hold the pistol and a spare magazine. If she wore a loose top, the gun was invisible. All she had to do was lift the shirt with one hand and pull out the gun with the other.
Elle liked the laser sight. It would not make up for her lack of target practice, but it might slow an attacker by persuading him that his own death wasn’t an unlikely outcome of a gunfight. She didn’t like ranges much, partly because the men who were there either resented her or flirted with her. She suspected that the reason for both was that she looked about the age of the babysitter at home who kept turning them down. She’d even spotted a couple of men who put their wedding rings in their pockets before coming over to chat. Not having a wedding ring didn’t make them attractive.
She put away all the weapons she didn’t intend to sell, locked every latch and bolt that she could lock, and went to sleep.
The sun woke her. She lay there on her back for a minute trying to detect any feelings of fear or foreboding. One of the problems with being a thief was the fear that she could wake up any morning to the sound of police officers banging on her door to arrest her. But once again there was nothing. It was just another morning. She got up, walked around to check the locks and the glass. She took a shower and put on some clothes before she went out for the newspaper.
Most people her age had stopped getting physical newspapers, but Elle hadn’t, because she liked to have the paper serve as a subtle sign to older, suspicious people that she was solid and permanent, not a young squatter using the house to hide a meth lab, ready to bolt after the first explosion.
She was less surprised by how much coverage there was about the triple murder than she was by how little information was in the paper about the actual crime. There were photographs of the house, the winding street, and the grounds. There was an article about Nick Kavanagh’s life that had the sound of a pre-written obituary.
Kavanagh had gone to Stanford University. He had been a financial services person with four consecutive firms—first as a broker, then a wealth manager, then a vice president, and then a consultant—and then, presumably, a very rich retired person. He owned the Kavanagh Gallery, and he spent a lot of time socializing. The female victims were identified as though Kavanagh were the target and they were innocent bystanders. The blonde was Anne Satterthwaite Mannon, the wife of David Mannon, owner of the restaurants Bissou and Muzu. The brunette was Valerie McGee Teason, wife of Santo Teason, one of the innumerable directors in Hollywood that Elle had never heard of.
The three victims were described as members of an exclusive set that included a number of well-known people in Los Angeles, and a few of those people had expressed their shock.
Some of the details seemed to have been planted by the police to tamp down the scandal. The victims knew one another, just three arty friends talking art.
Elle wondered about the female victims. She was not in the habit of getting herself into exclusive relationships, let alone marriages, but it seemed odd that neither of the women’s phones had rung in their purses during all the time that the purses had been in the bedroom—during the talk, the sex, the murders, and the hours of growing rigor mortis, the phones were silent. No woman except Elle ever left home without a phone, and Elle did so only when she was up to no good. The women had husbands, but nobody seemed to have been calling frantically to find out where his wife was. No kids needed to be picked up at some game or lesson. And their host, Nick, had not had his phone ring either. He was a socialite and he owned a serious business, but no friends or customers or employees called him.
She tried to remember whether she had even seen a phone. She was pretty sure that when Nick had opened his belt—or the blonde, Anne Satterthwaite Mannon, had—the slacks, loose on his long, skinny legs, had slid to his ankles and there was an audible thump that she thought was a cell phone in a pocket hitting the floor. Why hadn’t an
ybody called him? Of course all of them could have silenced their cell phones, but none of them had checked for messages.
Elle was sure the police had noticed all of these things and more by now, but they weren’t likely to release their explanations. She wondered if they were withholding information to see if one of the two husbands knew too much. They always started with the husbands. Of course, nobody like the husbands of these women would sit through a police interrogation without a lawyer, and most of the time when a person of interest called a lawyer, he got demoted to a person of no interest until the police had something to scare him with, and he got to go home until then.
Elle read everything in the newspaper that had anything to do with the victims or their murder, but the lack of information only frustrated her. She was glad to see that there was nothing in the paper about the police chasing a suspicious gray car on the evening after the killing was discovered. But that didn’t mean they had forgotten or that they weren’t busy searching the city for her. And it didn’t mean that the killer hadn’t somehow found out about her, as Sharon had said, and started searching too.
She folded the paper to obscure the articles about the killing and left it in the kitchen while she prepared to go out. Today she was going to face an errand she had been putting off for months. If she and Sharon were going to leave town for a while, it would take more money than she had stolen from the house in Trousdale Estates. It was easy to steal something small but valuable in her hunting grounds—a diamond tennis bracelet, a pair of emerald earrings—and sell it to a wholesaler, who would resell it to a dealer far away. But she got at most 5 percent of fair market value and often found it difficult even to sell items over $5,000. The preference for the small and cheap was a problem, because now and then she got something valuable.
Right now, hidden in the battery compartment under the floor of her Volvo’s trunk, she had a necklace made of thirty matched yellow diamonds in the two- to six-carat range. It was probably worth $200,000 to $300,000 even broken up, but if she got $20,000 she’d be delighted. It would pay for a long vacation with Sharon. She also had the beautiful sapphire necklace she had taken from the same house. Her problem was that trying to sell things that were really valuable was dangerous. There was a price at which it made sense for a dealer to forgo any future deals with her by simply shooting her and taking the jewelry she was selling. This critical figure was not the same with all buyers, or even with the same buyer from month to month. There were buyers who would not have $20,000 on hand but would be eager to have the piece of jewelry. There were others who had plenty of money because they had done terrible things to get it and were not averse to doing more. Negotiating was all a matter of watching for tells and tics and listening for lies.
She had some cash now, but if she wanted to travel to a distant place and wait there until the murders had been solved, she would need much more. The money was essential to her safety. If she had enough, she could stop stealing for the next few months and avoid adding to her risks. The time had come when she had to sell some of the valuable items she had stolen. There simply was no other choice.
It took her five hours to drive all the way to the door of Steinholm’s in Las Vegas. There really was no fast and convenient way for a burglar to travel when selling. The airline could ship her luggage to the wrong airport or lose it entirely. One of the luggage bandits at the airport could choose it and whisk it off the carousel and out the door. At least with a car her fate was in her own hands, because there would be nobody to serve her or protect her belongings or be responsible for her safety. She kept the odds in her favor by taking the battery out of her phone before she left the house so nobody could use the phone to locate her and the merchandise.
Steinholm’s was a windowless cinder block building that had an old, worn white sign along the top with foot-high letters saying BASIC DESIGNS, and a phone number. She knew that putting up a sign that said something like PRECIOUS STONES WHOLESALE was probably a recognized method of suicide, so she could only respect Steinholm for putting up a sign that meant “Nothing you want.” Old Mr. Steinholm, that was. He had been a skilled diamond cutter and jewelry designer from Amsterdam. How he had ended up in this cinder block building on the outskirts of Las Vegas was unknown, but she suspected that when he’d bought it, the building had been nowhere near Las Vegas. The city had grown like cancer for all of those years and surrounded it, probably about the time when he died and his awful son took over.
At that point the legitimate parts of the business had been replaced by an expanded line of stolen gems that had been removed from their original settings and reset, which was about all Steinholm the Younger had the skill to do. He had also diversified into the purchase of other stolen goods, which led him seamlessly into gunrunning, drug sales, money laundering, and other pursuits. He was about fifty and had greasy blond hair pulled back into a ponytail and wraparound sunglasses that he wore even at night in the perpetual twilight of his shop.
Elle rang the bell at the loading dock behind the building and waited. After about two minutes, during which she felt thoroughly studied through security cameras and sunglasses, she heard a couple of electronic door locks buzz and make a mechanical click before the door opened. A current of cold air-conditioned air drifted out and enveloped her. The man at the door was Steinholm. He said, “Can I help you?”
She said, “You’ve known me for about ten years, Steinholm.”
He said, “Yeah, I know you, L. But the question is the same. Should I say, ‘What do you want?’”
“No, I guess offering help is fine. I brought some stuff. Want to see it?”
He stepped back and held on to the door so she could step in, then peered out past her and turned his head in several directions to be sure nobody was following her in. She noted that his T-shirt was an antique that memorialized the Sex Pistols and was uniformly dirty all over. He closed and bolted the door and led her to a larger room.
This had been his father’s workshop. There were workbenches and stools, magnifiers on stands, soldering irons, buffers and polishers, elaborate sets of very small tools, viselike contraptions. Elle knew that the authentic workshop was now just camouflage for the various real forms of commerce Steinholm had taken up after his father’s death. She wondered why the old man hadn’t taught his son his trade.
Steinholm sat on one side of a workbench and said, “Show me.” He leaned his elbows on the bench.
Elle sat across the workbench from him and said, “I have these.” She took a jewelry box out of her backpack and opened it up while she watched his face.
He was good at keeping his mouth, cheeks, and chin immobile, but his eyes shot to the diamonds and stayed there for a moment, then jerked up to her eyes and back. “How many?”
“Ten. For now,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“That I have more. And other pieces, of course.”
He snorted to himself and then inhaled through his teeth. “They’re part of a necklace, aren’t they?”
“Could be.”
“Of course they are. They’re all color-matched yellow and in graduated sizes.”
“Would you like to make an offer?”
“No. What else have you got?”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “Why don’t you want ten very highgrade diamonds?”
“The color. An insurance company somewhere has pictures of the necklace. The stones are distinctive, and yellow is not worth as much singly as white.”
“Suit yourself,” she said. “I’ve got six watches.” She removed them from her backpack and laid them out in a row. “Cartier. Rolex. Breguet. Vacheron Constantin. And two women’s Patek Philippes with diamonds.” She watched his eyes again.
“I’ll give you a thousand each.”
“The Rolex alone is worth about fifteen. The Cartier is more. The others—”
“I didn’t drive across the desert to your house. Six grand.”
She sighed. “Okay. I�
��ll take the six.”
“I’ll go get your money.” He went into another room. The old man used to carry a wide range of diamonds of all sizes in the vault just at the corner of the workshop. She had no idea what Steinholm the Younger kept there. Probably it wasn’t money, because he never went near it. When he came back he had a big wad of money in his left hand. He counted out the price—sixty hundred-dollar bills—onto the workbench in rows of ten.
She noticed that he had a bigger wad of money in his left jeans pocket. She avoided looking at it as she folded the six thousand into the inside pocket of her jacket. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll see you again before too long.” She slid off the tall stool and turned to go.
“Wait,” Steinholm said, and she stopped and looked at him expectantly. He said, “Let me take another look at those yellow diamonds.”
“Okay,” she said. “I understand why you don’t want them, though.” She took the box out of her pack and set it on the table, where he could see the stones. He took one out, examined it through his jeweler’s glass, and replaced it, then another and another. Finally he set the last one back and said, “No, I don’t think so.”
“Okay.”
“Are you going to sell them to somebody else?”
“I’m going to try,” she said.
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you five hundred.” He seemed to recalculate. “No, make that seven-fifty.”
“Thanks,” Elle said. “But I think I’ll keep trying.”
He gave a false smile that didn’t hide his irritation. “You think I’m lying, or that you know better.”
“Neither,” she said. “I’m just betting that I can find somebody who doesn’t know as much as you do.” She picked up the box. “See you next time.”