by Alex Ames
The lady took a look around and saw the clerk hurrying out from his back office, the handset of his phone in hand. He closed the steel door behind him and ran to the door to watch the damage. Twenty seconds and counting.
The lady didn’t produce a key from her handbag but a set of picking locks. She positioned herself so that the clerk couldn’t see her doings from the shop door and started to work on the lock of Rip Delaware’s mailbox. Outside, people started gathering around the SUV stuck in the shop and inspected the damage. The lady could hear voices and shouts to call the police. Was someone hurt? Could someone reach in and shut down the motor, please? The clerk stepped out of the shop for a second and started dialing 911. Ten seconds.
The lock was harder than expected. The first two tries failed miserably. Breathe in, get calm for the third try. Twenty seconds were up, and the clerk was still on the phone. Someone had actually managed to kill the motor; the silence was deafening, and the lady feared that the clicking of the picking tool was giving her away. The clerk ended the call to the police and was just in the process of checking up on his store when an explosion, followed by a fireball, shook the far end of the parking lot. An old Ford Escort went in a blaze of fuel-induced glory. Everyone stared but the lady in the store. She imagined that she could feel the heat wave radiating at her through the walls; maybe it was sweat, running down her spine under the cheap beige flower blouse.
Fifth try, success, the mailbox was open. A small brown parcel wrapped in brown paper waited for the lady. She took it out, slipped it into her handbag, and produced a similar-looking parcel and put it inside, positioning it the same way as the first package. Forty seconds gone. The clerk had picked up the phone and had called 911 again, shouting for the fire truck.
The lady was at the mailbox with her tools, this time trying to lock the box again. The tools slipped for a second time, and a small curse escaped her lips. The clerk had finished his next call, and the Escort burned and burned, the interest fading fast. The clerk gave a look back into his shop and saw the middle-aged lady still fiddling with her box. She didn’t look suspicious, but her manner was strange because she wasn’t watching the unfolding of the two little catastrophes in the neighborhood. The clerk was suspicious by nature—it was in his job description—and he gave the lady a second look.
The minute was up, the game would be up any second, and I couldn’t get my tools into the right position to lock the box. If I abandoned the mission, the box would remain open, someone would notice, and Rip would be notified of the break-in attempt. The box had to be locked! I almost stomped on the floor from frustration and tried again. I didn’t dare to look over my shoulder; maybe the clerk was just glancing in my direction. I could hear his steps; his shoes made crunching noises of glass shards his soles had picked up from the mess next door. If he got a little closer to me or his back office door, he would see what I was doing. His steps were getting closer.
Just when I had decided to slip the tools back into my handbag and abandon the proper closing of the box, the Mountain entered the shop and growled, “Can I rent a fucking mailbox, dude?”
The Mountain’s appearance surprised the clerk and me. We both turned around, and I immediately knew that the clerk wouldn’t mind me for the next thirty seconds. The Mountain had to duck to get through the shop door, a giant in a puppet’s house. Together with his black leather coat, his burning eyes, and the long, unkempt beard, he looked like a bat out of hell. Or maybe an albatross out of hell.
I forced myself away from his spectacle and continued my box-locking activity while the Mountain scared the clerk by repeating his inquiry in his natural, booming voice. “Is this location actually safe? Reminds me of my old Beirut neighborhood.”
The clerk found words and told him to stay where he was, while he moved backward toward his safe back office. He never even glanced over to me, my lock pick tools in plain view now. The Mountain even waved with his hands for effect, and finally my lock clicked into place. I slipped the tool into the handbag and walked briskly out of the mailbox office past the Mountain, my role as an arthritic old spinster forgotten. No one noticed anyway.
CHAPTER FORTY
Rip Ripped
“Well, at least it is half a victory,” Bernie attempted to cheer us up.
The Acura was sparkling its million dollars’ worth of beauty in the cheap diner’s light between us, capturing and enchanting Mick, Bernie, the Mountain, and me. No one was allowed to touch it due to fingerprints; only Mick wore surgeon’s latex gloves to unwrap the parcel and transfer the Acura to its new wrapping.
“Now I understand that this one is not easy to hide, like swallowing…,” Bernie said. The Acura was the size of a small egg and had a cut that probably didn’t do your intestines well as the circumference of the diamond looked pretty sharp. “And I see now why Rip Delaware had to finger you to the police.”
I yawned. “And you know what’s so stupid? I could have called his bluff when he told the police. If I had kept my cool, I could have raised a stink, fingered Rip himself, and at least have had the police search him. But no, I had to panic and play the little poor victim!”
“In the Jody Foster version of your life story, we will make sure that she does it differently!” Bernie said dryly.
“Everyone done with marveling?” Mick asked around, then put the stone into the wrapping material that until recently had held the Propers’ family treasures.
I showed some dissatisfaction. “The Acura is fine, but where is the Metro Imperial?”
“Maybe Rip had two different clients for the stones. The Metro is already in new loving hands, and the Acura is still waiting for its new home,” Mick said.
“Yeah, maybe,” I said, playing cranky.
“Are you sure you want to risk this? Again?” Cousin Mick inquired.
“That is part of the plan, and the plan only works this way,” I assured him, determined and fearless on the outside but dead tired. We were parked on a side street of Rip’s housing community, and this time I had come prepared to get under water.
Mick sighed and shook his head, and we left the car. He studied the sign to make sure that we had parked legally and then came jogging back. I was dressed in wide orange cotton trousers and a long-sleeved, baggy, fashionable t-shirt, and Mick was in jeans and a dark blue polo shirt. He had tied back his hair into a ponytail, and we basically gave the image of a good couple strolling through the neighborhood. Rip was gone for the evening; that’s what Bernie’s scouts had signaled.
Mick and I made our way behind some of the apartment houses. A quick check around revealed no spotters or late-night dog owners, and we vanished into the bushes along the hillside. Ten minutes later, we were underneath Rip’s terrace. I quickly took off the fashionable upper layer of my clothes. Underneath, I wore tight black gym clothes. I got into my basic gear of dark light sport shoes that enabled me to climb best and allowed me to dive, and put on my light black cotton mask and the dark latex gloves. Mick looked around and up nervously several times. I didn’t wait for another word from him and climbed up silently.
No one was around, as expected. A quick look around the terrace showed no new additional alarms or else; a brief glimpse into the dark interior of the living room revealed no dangers here tonight. I lightly tip-toed to the edge of the pool and let myself slip in. I got out my little swim-goggles, a better suited piece of pliers, and the underwater Maglite, took a deep breath, and went down to the outlet from which I had retrieved the Propers’ gems. As Rip acted perfectly normal and had gone out again with his current girlfriend, I assumed that he had not found the gems missing from the hidey-hole, yet.
I unscrewed the lid and fished for the rat in the sucking water rush. I found it, pulled it out, pinned it under my knee, and stored the new package. There was some kind of filter mesh inside the outlet tube that probably was easy to remove when you drained the pool, and neither package nor dead rat were in danger of being swept away by the outlet’s current. I let t
he rat slip in again and screwed the lid back on. Easy piece of work.
I got out of the pool and gave a small whistle to Mick. His whistle tune returned the okay signal, and I packed my stuff, got out a large towel, and tip-toed back the way I had come, removing any wet spots on the teak wood deck with the towel.
Ten minutes later, we were back at the car.
“That was almost disappointingly easy,” Mick said as we were driving back. “Where to?”
“Back to my car, please. I have to be home when your call comes in, in case things move fast afterward.”
“Don’t forget to sleep, my little zombie-cousin,” Mick said.
Fowler Wynn’s LA office received the anonymous call at 9:30 in the morning. What we didn’t know was that all overflowing calls to the LA number were routed automatically to a headquarters call center in London, England, where a call manager took the call. As things got broken, gems got stolen, and ships went down all over the world, there were about one-hundred calls queued before ours, and it took some hours until a case manager was assigned to the tip-off of Mr. Rip Delaware, Van Nuys. The case manager duly routed the case to the LA office.
At that time, the incident manager in LA was at lunch with a client and came back around 2:00. He had twenty-five emails in his inbox and got into official case action around 2:30. Fowler Wynn, so it is said, had one of his famous super-shit-fits in the office which resulted in a broken chair and a frightened case manager. The second Fowler had taken action, things were moving quickly. Fowler called Henry, and Henry called Van Nuys PD, Beverly Hills PD, and then me.
“Cal, someone gave Fowler’s insurance a tip-off about Rip. He is holed up in Van Nuys, and we plan to hit him soon.”
“Yes!” I exclaimed through the phone. “That is great news!” I tried to sound as enthusiastic as possible while I had sat on hot coals most of the day. “Who called in?”
“We don’t know. It was an anonymous phone call by a male person.” He made it sound as if it that let me off the hook. “We don’t know the exact words as the call came in through London, but it basically said that it was a tip regarding the Hollywood jewelry thefts and that a certain Rip Delaware was residing at a certain address in Van Nuys. We will receive a transcript soon.”
“Okay, that’s great. I will be so glad if we catch that little rat,” I said.
“Listen, Calendar, would you like to accompany us to Van Nuys? I am driving over any minute.”
“I don’t think it would be a good idea, Henry. If he sees me, he will build up a larger grudge against me than necessary.”
“The Van Nuys police will want some kind of identification that he is the guy who was involved in the Beverly Hills theft of the Collins jewels. Can I ask you to come over to the Van Nuys PD later to make that identification?”
“Sure, where should I go?” What else could I say?
The “later” part turned out to be early the next morning. Not that I was complaining, still catching up with my sleep. It appeared that getting a search warrant and questioning Rip had taken longer than anticipated. At 6:00 A.M., my phone rang, and Henry summoned me over to the North Hollywood Police Station. Just to be on the safe side, I asked for directions.
The ride was uneventful as the freeways held only the very early morning manager traffic. I parked my car in the visitors’ parking lot beside the faceless architecture of the station. I registered at the front desk, and Henry picked me up and led me upstairs.
“Sleep well?” he asked and pecked me on the cheek.
“More or less. I expected your call sooner.”
“Yeah, I had hoped for better results so far. Your friend Rip is a cool customer and has just asked for his lawyer so far. We grilled him for an hour, but he is very polite, so we had to give up.”
“And the search of the house?” I asked.
Henry’s forehead crinkled. “No such luck. The detectives searched the house and parts of the premises but found nothing of relevance so far. He either hides it well or outside of his domain.”
I bit my lip in anger. Stupid, stupid, stupid! If only we had placed that call two hours later.
Upstairs in the detective’s area, I was introduced to the detective who had led the arrest and the search—Falk Doren, a large blonde hulk, who could have defended Norway singlehandedly against the Romans. I shook hands with Lucas Graves, who nodded gravely, and with Franco Timpani, the Hispanic Redondo Beach detective who investigated the Propers break-in. There was an assistant DA present, a woman whose name I didn’t catch; she just waved from her cellphone.
Falk Doren, as the MC of the morning, asked me officially to please identify Mr. Delaware.
“Couldn’t Lieutenant Graves do the honor? I mean, he was present when….”
“Yeah, but you make it even more official,” Doren said gravely.
I wondered what kind of strange circus this was all about, but maybe they wanted to cross the t’s and dot the i’s. Doren checked with two colleagues and after a thumbs-up led us into a room where we could look into an interrogation room, a one-way mirror, no doubt. Rip stood between four unlikely candidates and managed even to look amused.
“Are you sure you have him arrested?” I asked Doren. “He not only looks smug, he even looks optimistic.”
Doren shook his head. “If we don’t find anything, we have to release him. So the tip-off better be good.”
“Did the caller give any leads where to look?” I asked, steering him.
“We are waiting for an email transcript of the call, now that London is working again, but I doubt it.” He cleared his throat. “Do you recognize who you were with the moment you were arrested by Lieutenant Graves?”
“Yes, second from the left, that’s the guy I know as Rip Delaware.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s it?”
“What did you expect? Rip making a scene? He is a cool customer.”
There were some discussions among the detectives about how to proceed. Doren picked up the phone when it rang, said, “Thank you,” and fired up his computer and accessed his email. The printer started. “What you will see now is the transcript of the tip that the insurance office in London received that led us to the Adlon apartment.” Doren had printed it out with large font size, and we all gathered around the paper.
“Why is the caller-ID blocked?” Henry asked, annoyed. “Don’t the English trust their old colony?”
“Are you aware of the definition of ‘anonymous tip line’?” Doren looked at Henry.
“And, technically, California has never been a British colony,” Lucas Graves stated.
“Limes & Limes has an elaborate process to shield the call. The tip line receives the call, and the computer automatically transcribes the call into text. After the call, the agent has five minutes to check the transcription against the recording of the call, after which the audio is deleted automatically and non-recoverable. All that is left is the word,” I added.
“And you know all of this how?” asked Doren.
“The insurance guy Fowler has explained it to me” Graves said. “You should….”
“Shut up and read!” the woman DA said, and the boys behaved.
Inbound ID: 10005426788
LLU Route: ++1 213 555-34456100
April 2, 17:32:35 GMT
CA: Limes and Limes Underwriters. My name is Carl; how may I help you?
UIC: Is this Limes and Limes, the insurance?
CA: Yes, sir, how may I be of assistance?
UIC: I have information about a break-in that your insurance is covering.
CA: Sure, what can you tell me?
UIC: There has been a series of break-ins in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills area.
CA: I am not aware of that case personally, sir, but I will channel that information promptly. Would you mind giving me your name, or do you want to stay anonymous?
UIC: You will find some of the stolen goods at 16 Adlon Place in Van Nuys at the residence of Rip Delaw
are, also known as Robert Dearson.
CA: That gentleman has information regarding that particular break-in?
UIC: Not only that, he has the stolen goods hidden.
CA: Why are you calling this in?
Pause for about 3 seconds
CA: Sir? Are you still there?
UIC: Let’s say, I got wet feet! (Laugh)
CA: Sir? Are you still there? Can you give me more information? Sir?
Inbound terminated
April 2, 17:33:14 GMT
Henry pointed to the hidden paragraph. “He has it ‘hidden,’ but the caller didn’t say that it is on Delaware’s property. Or elsewhere!”
Graves said, “He gave us Rip, who we had lost track off after the Oscar party, but all in all he didn’t give us anything.”
Doren just read it through again, silently, chewing his lower lip.
I didn’t dare to say anything yet. Let them sit on it for a few more minutes.
Doren tapped his pen at the last line of the unidentified caller. “This thing with the wet feet….”
“Come on, just a guy who tried to sound cool and come up with a great exit line. You know, like: he used to be my partner, but today I am going to fuck him over,” Henry said. I could have kicked my almost-boyfriend for that remark but just nodded dumbly, like a bimbo may have done.
Graves looked at Henry again. My boyfriend didn’t earn many points with these hotshots. “The term is: ‘getting cold feet,’ not ‘wet.’ So it could be a word game?”
“No, no, you could read it differently,” Doren argued. Hooray for Van Nuys bravest. “Wet feet. See here. Could be a hint. Did we look at the pool?” He looked up and waved at another colleague working away on a computer on his desk. “Jamie, did we check out the pool more closely?”