I closed the door behind me and punched in the three-digit confirmation code. The door clicked again, and something that sounded heavier than a guillotine blade fell into place inside the door. Note to self: Do not attempt to shoulder the door open. No matter what’s behind you or how fast it is, punch in the code carefully and precisely, and when you’re on the outside, whatever the hell made that noise will be between you and your pursuer. I turned and took my first look around.
The hallway had vaulted ceilings and had been painted a dark terra-cotta. Since the only available light was coming from the lamp on the other side of the garage-width archway into the living room, it was pretty dim. To my right, a hall stretched off toward that wing of the house, which, I knew from the floor plan Granger had given me and the builder’s plans Anime and Lilli had found, housed an enormous home-office suite—an actual office, a secretarial space, and a casual den—plus a “fun room” with a soda fountain and one whole wall of transparent drawers filled with different kinds of candy, a china room, which I was assuming held dinnerware rather than an actual piece of the Middle Kingdom, a gift room, whatever that was, and three guest suites, each with bedroom, sitting room, and full bath. All of that, plus kitchen, dining room, breakfast room, and a few more guest suites in the other wing, was on the first floor. The Turner was in the den of Granger’s home office.
There were no lights on in the long hallway into the wing on the right, and the door was closed to the room in Granger’s office suite where the light in the window had come on, the room that housed the Turner. I knew from the plans that the hall elbowed back at about a thirty-degree angle just past the gift room, but it was too dark down there to see the turning. The house was the biggest I’d ever been in, big enough to have its own suburbs, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hear someone moving around in its Pacoima or Palmdale, but I was in its Beverly Hills, which was to say the entrance hall and the living room, plus the portion of the hall to my right before it angled away, and that area was either empty or inhabited by very, very quiet people. I extended my antennae, their acuity developed over all these years of being in places where I wasn’t supposed to be, and sensed no one.
Still, I waited, mouth-breathing, until my heartbeat had returned to normal. A couple of creaks, the kind of incidental noises you’d expect in a cooling structure on a windy evening, but nothing that made me want to reopen the front door and run screaming into the night.
And then there was a noise, the sharp bang of something hard hitting something hard, a bit muffled but not very far off, and since the entry hall was essentially an echo chamber, I had no way of knowing what direction it had come from. I invested two full minutes of complete motionlessness, ears exploring all the directions I thought were likely, and heard nothing more. Obviously, I couldn’t see any of the other rooms from where I was standing, but thanks to a pair of floor-to-ceiling windows flanking the door, I could see a slice of outside. I slid my feet over to the right-hand window, put an eye against it, and saw the culprit. Perhaps. A eucalyptus branch had come down, taking with it a good-size birdhouse on a pole, which had slammed into the brick edge of a reflecting pool. Hence, I thought, bang. I tried to remember whether I’d seen it when I was coming in, but I’d been watching the lighted windows and probably wouldn’t have registered it. I took a deep, deep breath, flexed my shoulders and shook my head to loosen my neck muscles, and turned my attention back to the job at hand.
Judging from my view of the outside and from what I could see in here, especially the clash between the medieval vaulted ceiling in the entry hall, the Spanish-style arch that opened into the living room, and the 1970s hallway running off to the left, this was what I think of as a Stage Five Los Angeles house, which is to say built in the 1990s or later by people with more money than judgment, a grandiose self-image, and a limited frame of reference. The general principles seemed to be (1) make it better by making it bigger, (2) select the most garish aspects of three or four mismatched styles, (3) throw them together in the dark and take them however they land, and (4) spend money on visible surfaces and economize on dreary details like structural support and materials that can’t be seen. Bingo, a monument to hubris for twenty or thirty years and a maintenance nightmare after that.
I gave it one last listen, turning slowly in a complete circle. Behind me, to the left, a curving stairway spiraled up to the second floor and possibly the third as well, hugging the wall of the tower. I went to its base and tilted my head upward, listening so hard I could hear the mosquito whine of my blood in my ears. Nothing.
I whispered into the phone, “I’m inside.”
“How much time?”
“It’s too big for twenty minutes. Half an hour at least.”
“I’ll start down toward you in about twenty-five minutes if I haven’t heard from you. Koreatown, here we come.”
“Can’t wait,” I said. “Now, shhhhh.”
“Shhhh yourself,” she said, but then she was quiet.
“Here goes,” I said, pretty much all breath. I slipped the phone back into my shirt pocket, suppressed an urge to cross myself, and moved through the entry hall toward the big arched entrance to the living room. My eyes had grown sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to let me see a framed drawing on the wall just to the left of the archway: two nineteenth-century British toffs in dark cloaks and top hats leaning forward on a dock to talk down to a boatman in a skiff, afloat on what was probably the Thames, most likely near Chelsea. James McNeill Whistler had made several quick sketches of a scene very much like this one, and I was looking at either a very good forgery or a part of the series. It was beautiful enough to make me pop a sweat but impossible to fence for anything like what it was worth, if it was genuine.
With my food-service gloves on, I felt secure in passing my fingertips lightly over it, looking, I suppose, for some faint residual warmth from Whistler’s genius. It put off a nice buzz, the kind you might feel from the door of a humming refrigerator, that made me think it might be authentic. But it hadn’t been among the pieces I’d been invited to take, and the last thing in the world I wanted to do was to discharge this wretched errand and still have something unresolved between Granger and me.
I had to take two steps down from the entry hall to go into the living room, and the shift in levels made me think again how much Granger had gone through to raise the floors two feet. He’d had to move the doors, the windows, the electrical, the heating and cooling ducts, and God only knew what else, all to make himself look a little bit taller. It spoke to his vanity, certainly, but more than that it represented a personality that essentially had been folded around, had been draped over, a core of obsession, a perspective that saw nothing untoward about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and months of messy inconvenience to bring his head two inches closer to the ceiling when no one was likely ever to notice.
And if he could do that to his floors, just to satisfy his desire to control by an inch or two the way people saw him, what alterations would he impose upon his wife? She had to reflect him as he wanted to be reflected, had to look at him as he wanted to be looked at; she had to seem to be the kind of woman he wanted people to think he would marry. A huge leap, probably an impossible one, for a little girl who’d been turned out by her own parents, who’d never graduated from high school, who’d daydreamed and drawn horses when left to herself, who’d been humiliated week after week on national television. When he was through humiliating her, he’d needed her to redeem herself in the eyes of Hollywood; whatever her shortcomings as an actress, she couldn’t be seen to have any as a wife, because she was Jeremy Granger’s wife. She had to go with the house and the Whistler and the fucking Turner and all the other glittering trappings he’d spread about his throne to reflect his glory. And he’d bent her to the task mercilessly, using the full weight of that obsession and, certainly, the heat of the fury that I’d seen briefly in his eyes.
I asked
myself how she’d stood it. On television she’d seemed frail enough to see a bright light through. Insubstantial, nowhere near enough mass, not enough steel to resist being shaped later into the terrified anorexic, shivering inside those designer gowns in the pictures Anime had rounded up for me.
Not for the first time, I thought how rewarding it would be to find a way to fuck up Jeremy Granger once and for all.
And here I was, in the very place that might give me an opportunity to do it.
The living room, with its single glowing lamp, was bright by comparison with the entry hall. Big enough for two high-school football teams to scrimmage in, it was a symphony in beige. Too much stuff: furniture, objects, bric-a-brac, framed pictures, that awful painted ceiling—it overwhelmed the eye, kept the gaze moving, almost in self-defense, until it struck a ravishing polychrome wood sculpture of the Madonna, probably Spanish from the seventeenth century, her robe the perfect blue we always hope the sky will be and never is, her eyes raised in sorrow to the sight, which the viewer supplied in his own mind’s eye, of her son on the cross. Far, far too beautiful to belong to Granger, but not stealable because of its bulk, and even harder to fence than the Whistler drawing.
I was on my way through the room when my eye was snagged by a painting over the smaller of the room’s two fireplaces. It actually made me break my stride. It depicted an elegantly coiffed woman in a pearl-covered stole whose body and tapering, prayerful hands might have been copied by a good modern craftsman from an old Flemish portrait. The face belonged to Suley Platz at her most beautiful, at the age of sixteen or so, before he’d turned her into a spectral mass of jitters. On an impulse I checked the painting above the other fireplace and found a similar treatment of Jeremy Granger, dressed in the lavish robes of a rich Flemish merchant. Putting the two of them together, they reminded me of nothing so much as the portraits of the rich donors who paid for the great altarpieces and who usually appeared in their own little panels, either gazing inward from the edges or looking up piously from the bottom at the work of genius their guilders had paid for. I’ve always thought of these as the world’s earliest PBS underwriting credits and wondered whether Granger, who was not even a little bit stupid, had been making a private joke.
Jesus. Six minutes gone already, and a huge house in front of me.
The dining room boasted, according to Granger, four important, or at least expensive, paintings, and for that reason it was one of two rooms in the house protected by the most serious of the place’s alarm systems, the other being the den, where the Turner resided. The company that had alarmed the house specialized in art museums, and to protect the works in these two rooms—which were apparently more valuable than the Whistler drawing—the company had installed full lockdown triggers and all the hardware that went with them.
The moment museum-security hardware senses that something is on the brink of being stolen, the problem ceases to be keeping someone out. It immediately becomes keeping the artwork in. Until recently, lockdown alarms had been triggered by mechanisms in the hanging apparatus, if the piece was a picture, or the pedestal on which a sculpture was mounted. If the piece was lifted when the alarm was engaged, the change in weight signaled a theft, and every door and window in the place slammed into lock mode. The insides of the doors leading out of the house sprouted new bolts. Bars shot across windows. There was no way out for either the artwork or the thief.
So thieves had taken the initiative, razoring canvases from their frames while using a support beneath the frame to prevent variations in the piece’s weight. In response, the alarm companies and the museums together had decided that the simple presence of someone in a room full of irreplaceable art—when the room should have been unoccupied—was sufficient reason to lock things down and bring in the cops. That was the system Granger had mandated in those two rooms of his house.
When I’d asked him why he couldn’t simply turn off the alarm while I was inside, he’d said the company’s computers made a note whenever the alarms were shut down completely, as protection against a lawsuit: someone is burgled and sues the alarm company, and the first thing the alarm company does is check to see whether the system was turned off at the time of the theft. Granger’s worry, and in his position it was one I would have had, too, was that Suley’s lawyers would certainly suspect that he’d stolen the Turner himself. Any indication that the alarm had been out of commission would be a big deal in court.
In order to allow the owners of the house to move around without ringing all the bells and whistles, summoning the cops, and causing a lot of embarrassment, there was a two-step override procedure for those two rooms, and it went as follows: Before entering a lockdown-armed room, I was to step on the square of flooring to the immediate left of the door, which had a pressure plate beneath it, listen for a faint click, and then go into the room. Next to the door would be an electrical switch plate with five normal-looking light switches on it. The fifth from the door would be in the down position, and I was to flip it up. That completed the override operation for the room I would be in, allowing me to walk into that room without setting off alarms triggered by other pressure plates beneath its floor and steal everything in sight for a space of twenty minutes. At the end of that time or when I left, I had to remember to flip the switch back down or the system would remind me with a series of buzzes, like a fancy refrigerator that’s been left open. If I did remember to hit the switch when I was finished, the room would silently rearm two minutes later.
I’d have to go through all this foolery to get the picture with no record of a system shutdown.
There was nothing I actually wanted in the dining room, but it presented me with the only chance I could think of to make sure the override worked, simply because it was the alarmed room closest to a mode of escape, which was to say the front door. If there was a problem with the override mechanism—if the house would go into lockdown anyway, regardless of whether the steps were followed or not—I desired fervently not to be the person who discovered it without a prearranged exit.
After another glance at my watch, I moved quickly to the front door, keyed in the “open” code, and pulled it ajar. For insurance I dragged a beautiful old English rosewood coat rack, its wood stolen from the now almost barren hardwood forests of Southeast Asia, in between the door and the frame as a doorstop, and then hotfooted it back through the living room to the entry to the dining room, where I stepped on the plate, listened for the click, went through the arch, flipped up the appropriate switch, and trotted through the entire room, pausing in front of a very nice impressionist pastel and even jumping up and down a little, to see whether all hell would break loose. When it didn’t, I returned the switch to its original position, counted to fifty to be on the safe side, and went back to the entry hall to replace the coat rack and close the door.
Okay. I knew how everything worked, and it had taken me eight minutes. Twenty-two minutes to go and all the real work still in front of me.
Moving as quickly as I could without making noise, with my penlight providing nice, focused, directional illumination, I bypassed the dining room via a center hallway and went into the kitchen, which had more counter space than my apartment at the Wedgwood had square feet. It was empty, as was the breakfast room between it and the dining room I’d already checked out. Nothing worth bagging in either room. I knew there was a big pantry off the kitchen and that the door at the far end of the pantry led to a stairway down into the basement, unusual in a Los Angeles house.
I don’t like basements in general, and when I got down into Granger’s, I didn’t like his either. Just an enormous space, maybe 6,000 square feet, with a cement floor, a huge gravity furnace, piles of retired furniture, and dozens of yards of plumb-straight shelves full of lightbulbs, cleaning junk, electrical components, tools, hoses, some painting supplies with their own ladder. Four six-shelf IKEA units were jammed sloppily with scripts, more dreams that wouldn’t come true.
No area had stains that looked as if servants had been bled out there.
Of course, not all violence is physical. I had only twenty minutes left when I checked my watch on the stairs back up to the kitchen, so I decided to skip searching the guest suites. I’d pass by them in the hallway and hit the rooms that made up Granger’s office, including the den with the purported Turner in it.
Out of the pantry quickly, ease through a pair of doors with only about a foot between them, the dead space meant to shield the ears of the exalted slumberers in the suites from the proletarian sounds and smells of food being cooked, dishes being washed by people speaking Spanish or Cambodian or whatever Granger’s part-time help spoke. No point in reminding the guests that there were people in the world who didn’t sleep in beds on which the sheets were changed every day by workers the guests never saw, whose voices the house was designed to silence.
Down through the hallway of those anointed ones I passed, moving on the balls of my feet, listening for all I was worth. With the penlight off, the only light was the faintest of moon shimmers through the open doors to the suites, already filtered through screens and smoked glass and semi-sheer curtains that seemed to be organdy. The entire wing felt empty, and it certainly sounded empty, except for a recurrent dry scratching—long fingernails on the inside of a crypt? teeth on bone?—that I quickly recognized as bushes scraping back and forth against the window screens at the command of the wind. Ahead of me I could see a pale oblong of light where the hall angled to the right, back toward the entryway and the living room with its solitary lamp.
Just for the hell of it, I looked into the candy room long enough to grab a couple of chocolate truffles by Knipschildt, $2.50 each for about an ounce and a half of candy and usually pretty far beyond my reach. Not bad, I thought, with my mouth full, for $20-a-pound chocolate, but of course, that was the point, to waste more money than most people would ever see, to eat cake, as poor, dim Marie Antoinette had when the people had no bread, and to revel in it. Marie Antoinette at least had the virtue of having been clueless. I ran through a quick mental survey of the very rich through history as the chocolate found its way into my system, and except for supporting artists and painters and starting the occasional public-library system, it seemed to me they didn’t amount to much more than a modest hill of toxic mold. Generation after generation of voracious swine, generally more belly than brain, whose idea of trickle-down was urinating on the faces of the poor.
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