The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  He drove along Cabrillo Boulevard with the beach on one side and the lawns of hotels on the other. When he reached a parking lot on his right he pulled into it. She expected he was pulling off only to check his phone for directions to the freeway entrance to head back to Los Angeles, but he coasted into a space and stopped where they could see the ocean. They sat in silence. The moon was low, and its reflection had formed a silver strip on the surface that seemed to point toward them like a spotlight.

  “Whenever I see something like this I wonder if I’ll ever get to see it again,” he said. “Would you go for a walk with me?”

  “I’m not really dressed for it,” she said.

  “We can take our shoes off. I’ll roll up my pants, and your dress, while extremely elegant, is short enough so it won’t get wet.”

  She looked at him. More than once she had wished she knew the kind of guy who wanted to take her for a walk on a beach at night. She said, “Okay.”

  He got out of the car and took a few steps to sit on the hood and take his shoes and socks off.

  She stayed in the passenger seat to take off her shoes. Then she gave her purse a quick look to remind herself whether she had anything she didn’t want to leave in a car. She had makeup, a burner telephone with the battery out so it couldn’t be traced, false identification in the name Annie McDowell. She noticed her folding knife. It reminded her that Tim didn’t know or suspect the kind of trouble she had.

  She palmed the flat, razor-sharp knife, slid her hand up her right leg, and used the belt clip on the handle of the knife to secure it to the waistband of her underpants at her right hip, then covered it with the skirt. She patted the skirt from the outside and then tested to make sure she could reach the knife quickly if something happened on the lonely, dark beach that Tim couldn’t handle.

  She clutched her purse and got out.

  “I’ll put your purse and shoes in the trunk with my shoes,” he said.

  They stepped off the asphalt lot to the sand and began to walk, listening to the breaking of the waves on the wet sand about two hundred feet from them. There was no sea breeze now, just a steady current of cool air, the exhalation of the ocean.

  After a quarter mile or more holding hands as they strolled on the beach, they were far from the lights of the harbor. They passed the beach volleyball courts and then came under the giant mansion at the crest of the first cliff.

  “That’s quite a place,” said Tim. “I wonder who lives there.”

  “I actually know,” she said. “It belonged to an heiress named Huguette Clark. Her father owned copper mines. She died a few years ago in New York. I read about it in the New York papers and remembered seeing this place. Now I guess there are probably just guards and caretakers.”

  She knew much more about the building and the woman and her family. What she didn’t say was that she had briefly considered breaking in to see if there was anything to steal that hadn’t been taken out and locked up. But she learned that Miss Clark had not lived there in decades, so she abandoned the idea.

  They came to a fence-like outcropping of rusted iron jutting about two feet above the sand, and she used this as an opportunity to free her hand from his to pass on the other side of the barrier. They continued along the beach. Above them on this stretch were more cliffs, at first part of the estate. Somewhere up beyond that, unseen, were railroad tracks.

  He said, “This is nice. We could stay the night at one of the hotels along the beach back there and leave after breakfast tomorrow.”

  She patted his arm and said, as gently as she could, “I’m not saying that’s never going to happen. But tonight isn’t going to be the night.”

  He shrugged. “Just a thought.”

  As they walked farther the beach began to narrow. The night was calm but clear, and she could tell they were a distance from another human being. The beach was lighter than L.A. had been last night because the moon was waxing.

  The moon on the surf made her remember a night when she was fourteen. She and her cousin Nathaniel, who was twelve, had taken a bus to the beach at San Pedro and waited until dark for a grunion run, when the small, silvery fish would wash ashore and mate, and the females would leave their eggs and return to the ocean.

  She had read that the best nights were the second and third of a four-night run. The newspaper said the best hours predicted for that run were from 11:05 P.M. to 1:05 A.M. She remembered it was May 5. They left home in the late afternoon with a pair of cloth bags made from pillowcases, saved their peanut butter sandwiches to eat as late as they could stand, and tried to stay awake. When the run began Elle awoke to the sounds of people running into the water, laughing and splashing, and saw the thousands of six- to eight-inch silvery fish flapping and curling and slithering in the surf.

  She and Nathaniel filled their bags with fish and took the first bus back home when the buses started running in the morning. They nailed bottle caps to some old wooden laths and scaled the fish, gutted them, and fried them in the kitchen of the big old house. She and Nathaniel had brought enough to provide two meals for the whole household and for the family next door that occasionally had fed them when there had been no food in their house. May 5 was a warm memory for Elle. She remembered both of her aunts and her grandmother smiling and hugging her and Nathaniel, saying how proud they were. By August that year she was on her own and never lived at home again.

  There was a movement she heard but didn’t see. Tim’s arm had lifted behind her. Was he making his move to hold her and kiss her? She waited for a second, then started to turn toward him, but his big hands flashed in her peripheral vision and something jerked her backward toward him. There was a cord tightening around her neck. It was impossibly tight, hurting and choking. Then he was lifting her off her feet. She was being hanged.

  Elle knew she would lose consciousness in a few seconds. She reached to her hip and slid the knife off her waistband, flipped the blade open with her thumb, and brought it down to stab him, then jerked it out of his thigh, spun it, and brought it up beside her head to cut and slash his hands.

  One of his hands let go of the cord to try to wrench the knife away, and that let her drop to her feet. She brought the knife around hard to slash at his midsection as she turned. She was much shorter than he was and in a fighting crouch, so the knife slashed his thigh a second time instead of reaching his belly, but she could tell it cut deep.

  She launched herself away from him with eight fast, hard strides, but she could hear him coming after her. She turned and slashed at his hands and forearms when he reached out to clutch her, and he recoiled in pain. She could see she had cut through the gray sport coat and that the fabric was darkening. She saw that the spot where she had stabbed and slashed his thigh was darkening faster, and she wondered if she had nicked the femoral artery.

  He put his head down and charged toward her, but she danced to the side, spun, and dashed toward the hard-packed wet sand close to the surf. She could hear the hissing sound of his feet kicking sand as he came after her, and she ran hard. She reached the firm, wet sand; veered to her left; and dashed along above the surf.

  She knew the Biltmore hotel was around one of the bends ahead of her, up a rocky incline from the beach and across a narrow street. There would be people. If she could just stay ahead she might make it. Then she realized she no longer heard him behind her. She whirled to face him, bringing her left elbow around ahead of her and gripping the knife behind her body in her right hand to stab him.

  He was at least forty feet behind her. He had stopped, had taken off his shirt, and was trying to tear it into strips. He had tightened his belt around his thigh in a tourniquet above the wound she’d made. “You hurt me. I’m bleeding bad.”

  “What did you think I’d do?” she said. “Let you kill me?”

  He didn’t seem to hear her, as though her words had gone out over the ocean. Or maybe they didn’t matter. “Help me. Get me to a hospital.”

  He seemed to be weakenin
g, but he tore the shirt in two and tied one part of it around his left arm and the other around the right. His coat must have been discarded somewhere, and the white strips from his shirt were already darkening. She called, “Why are you trying to kill me?”

  “I wasn’t. You misunderstood.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He breathed deeply a few times. Then he began to run toward her again, moving fast on the hard sand.

  She pushed off and ran away from him along the beach. She held her head up and dug in with her toes, sprinting for her life.

  This time he appeared determined to catch her, and he seemed to be straining to accomplish it. But again she realized she no longer heard him, so she risked a quick glance over her shoulder. He had stopped. He sat on the sand and stayed there as though trying to catch his breath. He lay back on the sand and looked up at the sky. He called out to her, “Elle!”

  She hadn’t told him that was her name. She had called herself Annie McDowell. “Tell me why you tried to kill me,” she called. “Did someone hire you?”

  He seemed not to hear her. With difficulty he got to his knees, then his feet. He took a hard look at her and then began to walk. He was heading back toward the lot where the Tesla was parked. His walk had become unsteady. The right leg of his pants was wet with blood from the thigh to the ankle now. The bandages on his arms were doing nothing to stanch the bleeding there.

  She began to follow. “Was it one of the husbands? If you tell me I’ll try to help you.”

  He didn’t answer. His whole mind seemed to be taken up with the enormous task of walking back to the car. He kept to the hard, wet sand, but the slope into the surf was steep in some places and his steps would involuntarily bring him down toward the water, so he would have to correct his course. He had begun to stagger.

  To his left was the surf and to his right were fifty-foot cliffs. He had seen nobody within a quarter mile of him but Elle Stowell, and he knew now he couldn’t catch her or fool her into coming close to him. He didn’t know that the Biltmore was only about a hundred yards around a curve or that he was walking away from it.

  The next time he collapsed, he was on the wet sand at the edge of the ocean, with the waves washing in close to him. Elle sat down on the sand forty yards away and waited. In a few more minutes, she knew, she would be able to go to his inert body, pull the keys out of his pocket, and drive the Tesla back to Los Angeles.

  16

  Her heart was still pounding as she stood, looked down at his lifeless body, and turned to walk toward the car. The night now seemed bright from the moon, and the car parked alone on the lot seemed terribly obvious. She had recovered from the fight and the running, but she was still panting. She kept looking toward the crowded harbor, the end of State Street, the lights far down Cabrillo Boulevard. As she padded along barefoot she became aware of how disheveled she must look.

  She recalled that when she had first fought back against the strangling, her knife had hit an artery, and she had felt the warm blood spray the backs of her calves. Now her bare legs were covered with a paste of sand and blood. She diverted her course back down to the ocean, went in up to her waist, ducked down into the next wave, and let the force of the water clean her. She ducked under the next wave, then stepped up onto the hard sand, took her new dress off, wrung the water from it, and slipped it on over her head. She wrung more water out of her hair and shook her head to straighten it.

  At the car she opened the trunk and took out Tim’s shoes and socks and left them on the pavement, put her purse and shoes in the passenger seat, put a floor mat on the driver’s seat so she could sit on it, and then started the car. She turned on the heat and put the fan up to its most powerful setting, and then began to drive. She knew it was almost certain that Tim had not told her the truth about how he happened to have the car. But he had been lucky enough not to get arrested for car theft, so probably she would be too.

  It took an hour and a half to reach Los Angeles, and by then her short, thin dress and her hair were dry. She parked the car on a street in a residential neighborhood in Pasadena and cleaned the interior and the handles with alcohol wipes from her purse. She took the Gold Line train to Union Station at five A.M., the Red Line subway to Universal City Station, and finally the shuttle up the hill to the hotel.

  She went upstairs, took a shower, and laid out her ambiguous-sex burglary clothes and baseball cap. The surveillance cameras would record her, but she hoped to be able to keep her face below the brim of her cap and her hair under the crown. The latex surgical gloves she had were flesh colored.

  The wallet she’d taken from Tim’s body held his hotel key card, and the room number that had been written on the little folder in pen, 402, had been crossed out and changed to 1212. Clearly he had at some point decided his room should be near hers. If she had discovered it earlier this evening she would have dismissed it as part of his strategy to sleep with her, but now she supposed it was a way to kill her more conveniently.

  She folded her outfit and put it into her big purse, then dressed in shorts, a tank top, and sneakers and took the elevator downstairs to the gym. She stepped into the ladies’ locker room, put on her burglary outfit, and stowed her gym clothes in her big bag. She lifted the plastic trash bag full of crumpled hand towels out of the trash can beside the sink, put her bag of clothes in the can, and then put the trash bag back on top of it.

  Elle went across the hall from the locker room to the stairwell, climbed to the twelfth floor, found room 1212, and used the key card to enter. The closet held the clothes she had seen Tim Marshall wear, all hanging neatly. She opened his suitcase and found more clothes, but in a pocket on the outside of the suitcase was a second wallet. This one held cash and all the kinds of cards the other one had, in the name Paul Wolcott. She put the wallet in the back pocket of her jeans and kept searching.

  She looked hard at anything that had entered the room with Tim, but she found nothing else that was revealing, no weapons, no second phone, and no papers on which he had written anything. When she had finished, she left the room, entered the stairwell, and descended the twelve floors to the gym. She retrieved her bag, put on her shorts and tank top, and went into the gym to lift weights, jog on the treadmill, and do a few pull-ups. Then she walked to the elevator, rode it to the twelfth floor, and went into her room. After she had showered again she slept.

  At ten she was up, had packed, had cleaned the surfaces of the room with antiseptic wipes and then hand towels, and had placed a tip for the chambermaid on the desk. She called to have her car brought to the front of the building and stopped at the front desk to check out of the hotel.

  The next part of the day she devoted to disrupting any continuity between herself and the young blond woman who might have been noticed with Tim Marshall over the past few days. She returned her car to the rental lot and went to another, where she picked out a silver Honda CR-V, a small SUV that had little about it to make it stand out from the many thousands of others on the streets.

  She drove to the south simply because she had not hidden there before. She checked into a hotel in Marina del Rey at four P.M. and took a nap before a late dinner. She had the feeling that if she wasn’t actively investigating, then nobody was. But she needed time to recover or she was going to make new mistakes. Whatever she had done to put herself in Tim Marshall’s way had nearly been fatal.

  He had fooled her into imagining that the stakes were much lower than they really were, and from that moment on, she had stopped really protecting herself. She was alive now only because of luck. He had chosen a time and place that he thought were ideal for killing her, but he had actually chosen perfectly for her. The night and the solitude and the sand had made her more dangerous. When she’d been a teenager, one of the older thieves she’d met had told her, “If you’re going to knife somebody, don’t let him see the knife.” She had stabbed Tim at least twice before he had realized she wasn’t just pounding her fist against him in a futile attempt to stru
ggle. Once she had started the bleeding he might have still killed her, but he was not going to get through it easily.

  She tried to figure out her next move. The Paul Wolcott identification could be the real set. It looked real, and it had the right flaws. The photograph on the California driver’s license was not good. The real man had been much better looking than that. The Timothy James Marshall ID with the Alberta license and the Calgary address looked as attractive as she remembered him. That was a big sign of a fake. A forger could take all the time and care he wanted to get a good picture on a fake license, but the California DMV’s photographic computer was not there for pleasing the drivers. It clicked and you got what you got.

  The Canadian ID said he lived at Marshall Ranch, 4304 Route 11, Red Deer, Alberta. When she checked, it turned out that there was such a town, in spite of the fact that it sounded like something he’d made up. Still, choosing it was as suspicious as making it up.

  Paul Wolcott’s license said his address was in Riverside. That didn’t seem to be fake, because it didn’t make her think anything in particular and didn’t seem to be part of a story she’d heard him tell. It wasn’t a credential.

  She went to bed and the physical cost of the past two days made her sleep. Fighting with a man who was twice her size and in good condition had been a terrible strain. Every movement she’d made was at fighting speed and force. Every fifty-yard sprint to escape his reach was a dash for her life. And then as soon as she had abandoned the Tesla and caught the two trains and the shuttle bus, she’d had to run up and down staircases and perform a credible gym workout just to search his room while seemingly occupied with her own routines.

  Elle slept over eight hours before the steady wash of the waves was joined by the voices of people on the beach shouting and laughing. There was one woman in particular whose voice was seldom silent for longer than the break between “woo” and “hoo.”