by Dale Wiley
“I’m leaving the G-U-N in the backpack,” I said through clinched teeth.
She laughed and put the car in park.
I got out, grabbed the backpack—checking inside for the twelfth time to make sure the Walther’s safety was on—and threw it over my shoulders like the hippie I suddenly was. Tabitha locked up, and we decided it would be best if we waited a minute or two before high-tailing it back toward the street. I pushed her for a minute on a swing and chased her under a tree—closer to the street—and, when we were convinced no one was watching, we walked lazily away.
“How far are we?” I asked.
“Two blocks, maybe a little more,” she answered.
I felt a little strange, walking out in the road wearing a wig and strolling along with implements of crime and destruction strapped to my back. Tabitha looked smashing, even just in a sweatshirt and jeans, and I looked fairly normal, the lucky guy whose girlfriend is a lot hotter than he is. We probably wouldn’t be noticed. This was mainly because, sad as it was to say, we were young, clean and white. In DC, race is still the answer to every question and even more so in the suburbs. Had we been black, we would’ve drawn attention to ourselves no matter what precautions we would’ve taken. But in our present condition, with our present pigmentation, no one would think much of anything.
We were soon on Helper’s block. I had barely gotten to glance at the house before. Now I could see that it was a modern, gray stone affair, which almost disappeared when compared with the larger houses around it. Still, it was obviously worth a bundle, and I wondered how a young guy who worked for what had to be the poorest government agency was living in it without either being a crook, having a rich family, or was currently in debt counseling. Tabitha moved behind me, unzipped the backpack, and grabbed the remote opener Phillip had given her. She pressed the single button, and, ten seconds later as we were just stepping onto the lawn, the device found the right frequency, and the door hummed and opened. There was no car inside, which made me very, very happy.
Tabitha quickly closed the door behind us. We were now confronting the shiny masterpiece on the wall, which looked like a scale with buttons. She put the remote back in, drew out Phillip’s code breaker, moved toward the wall, and did what Phillip told her. She pressed several keys on her keypad, and we both watched as the LED display numbers spun like slot machines, not slowing down for nearly a minute. Then, one by one, they clicked into place. While she was holding the machine, I put on a pair of surgical gloves, and then punched the code into Helper’s alarm. I was shaking so badly I nearly hit a five instead of a six, which would’ve made all of his neighbors believe someone was invading.
But the lights on the console turned from green to red, and my blood pressure dropped twenty points. I took off the backpack and gave it to Tabitha. She put on her pair of surgical gloves, and I grabbed the lock picking kit. Neither of us wanted to say anything; we were still sure we were going to get caught. I checked the door first, hoping by some stroke of luck it would somehow be unlocked but it wasn’t. So I relived my high school days when no classroom door was a match for me or my friends. Actually, I would’ve loved to have seen any of them at that moment because they were all better at picking locks than I was, but I figured with real tools rather than clothes hangers and credit cards, I might be able to do some good.
Actually, the door was one of those flimsy, almost hollow types, which are more to keep the cold out rather than intruders. Helper was relying on his high-tech system to keep me away, and, if it couldn’t do the job, the door wasn’t going to be any problem. It clicked open on the third try, and I motioned Tabitha in and then followed.
We were standing in the kitchen on slightly sticky, off-white linoleum. The room was filled with fancy pots and pans and a wine rack filled with lots of wines with unpronounceable names. He had the obligatory framed pictures of spices, which all up-and-comers do. Tabitha was already in the living room, and I followed, noticing the framed Harings and Warhols. They were prints, not the real things, the kind of pictures everyone had. I kept expecting the old boy to surprise me, but he didn’t. He lived like a bland yuppie. There was an art-deco CD rack near the fireplace, filled with two Miles Davis albums, John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Squeeze. His magazine rack held Time, GQ, and Mother Jones.
But we were more interested in his papers, and we found none. He obviously had a housekeeper, I thought, but then I remembered how neat his desk was and wasn’t so sure—maybe he was just too organized. I always hated those people. There were no papers of any kind that I could see and certainly not any of the incriminating-to-him, getting-me-off-the-hook variety. We checked in his bedroom, replete with Ansel Adams photos and a waterbed, and found the same thing. It was time to go upstairs.
The house was made to look bigger from the outside; it appeared from there that the upstairs would be spacious, but it was actually fairly small and dull. There was a guest bedroom, which was in the process of getting new wallpaper, a storage closet, a bathroom, and Mark’s office, which was what interested us. It had recently been painted a brilliant white, which made me think of powdered donuts. There were small pictures, one to a wall, which were almost eaten by the white space around them. This was obviously the over-artistic effect he was going for, which almost made me laugh. They were black and whites of street life in Italy, similar to the super classy ones you find in Pizza Huts.
Mark was smart enough to keep the good stuff out of sight, so Tabitha powered up the computer. “He has a zip disk,” she said, almost triumphantly. I pumped my fist like we had scored a touchdown, still unsure what the hell a zip disk was.
While she clacked away at the keyboard, I went to the window. The back yard held more signs of the utter suburbanites who had lived here before. There was still a big dog house in back and a tire swing. Mark was trying to rid the house of its former existence but was doing it a piece at a time. The guest bedroom would be the next thing gutted.
Tabitha saw me idling by the window and suggested that I do something. I saw two main choices: search the file cabinet in the corner or comb through Mark’s desk. I decided to handle the latter first. I knelt beside Tabitha and examined his desk drawers. There were papers relating to this and that at the NEA but nothing major; Mark didn’t seem to bring much work home. And then I saw something interesting. In the third drawer, there was a thick manuscript, almost three hundred pages. The front page proclaimed in courier type, Shade of a Pale Tree by Marcus Helper.
I was willing to bet that it was a navel-gazing, novel-length display of purple prose, all about boring young people, repressed by their parents in boring places, who were now going home to make valuable new insights into their boring lives while not doing anything interesting enough to keep my attention—like all “serious” novels seem to be these days. Behind the manuscript, there was another stack of letters, all with Mark’s letterhead, addressed to various agents and publishers, all dated three weeks ago. Mark had written, Rejected in red ink across a couple, while most of the others weren’t yet defiled. I felt for him in this regard, as my few feeble attempts at writing had wound up being scorned by publishers everywhere.
I asked Tabitha if she saw any big word processing documents entitled “Shade” or “Tree” or something like that, and she told me she was simply copying everything to the zip disk. She had already gotten his Quicken financial records and was just checking to see if there was anything else she needed to grab.
I moved to the file cabinets and noticed the small locks on each of them. I was about to open the first one when I heard something downstairs. I froze.
“Mr. Helper? Mr. Helper? Are you here?” An older woman’s voice called from downstairs.
Chapter
* * *
Eighteen
Tabitha looked terrified, grabbed the zip disk out of the computer, and shut it off. I thought about reaching for the gun but knew whatever I was capable of, it was not killing old ladies.
Tabitha put the disk in the backpack and handed it to me. She moved to the window and opened it. She was pantomiming. The ledge was fairly large. She stepped out, looked down one last time, and jumped, grabbing onto a tree branch, which bent so far I just knew it would break. She let go at the last second, falling four or five feet and landing nicely, brushing herself off as she turned to watch me.
I waited until the branch catapulted back and quit shaking and then moved closer to the window, since I could hear the woman coming out of the bedroom. It wouldn’t be long until she was coming upstairs. I threw the backpack to Tabitha, thinking of Phillip’s equipment and not breathing until she caught it. Then I stepped gingerly onto the ledge.
Tabitha was mouthing something, and I was struggling to comprehend her.
“Close it,” she whispered.
I heard the woman moving up the stairs. I turned slightly, poised precariously, and tried to push the window closed. I could feel myself losing my balance. I stuck my arm out and tried to grab the tree limb.
And I missed.
I missed that branch entirely, although another one below it slapped me in the face. I yelled, “Oh!” rather loudly as I began to get near the bush below. It broke my fall, and I broke it, stuck in a dozen places by branches and twigs. The fall knocked the wind out of me, demolished the bush, and I thought, Oh, God, help my shoulder! All of the pain from the day before was back, doubled with new aches. I was sure the woman was racing downstairs to check out the back yard.
Tabitha pulled my bad arm, but she quit after I shrieked. She slapped me on the back way too hard and seethed, “Come on.”
I did, turning around momentarily when I realized I had lost my hat and my wig in the fall. I wanted to go back and get them and almost cried when I knew I couldn’t; I wanted to be a good burglar and not leave any clues. Screw that; we ran straight for the dog house, and I bumped my head trying to get myself in.
The dog house? Tabitha climbed in and I quickly followed, contorting myself a dozen different ways to get inside. I turned around enough that one eye could actually see something out of the doggie hole, and I imagined I was hurting Tabitha.
“Okay?” she whispered, somewhat forced.
“Why are we in here?” My eyes were now adjusting, and I could see her head, pinned to the wall by what could formerly be called my good arm, but what I now knew as my better arm. They both hurt so much. She motioned toward the hole, and I could see why.
The woman, probably the housekeeper, was now looking around the back yard. She went to the far side of the yard, checking over the fence, which came to her chin. I wanted to peek out, so I could see more, but Tabitha nudged me. She walked back, checking the damage to the bush. She saw the hat and wig, picked them both up, and examined them. A moment later, she realized she shouldn’t touch them for fear of destroying evidence and put them back down, trying to approximate their positions and doing a pretty poor job of it. She walked directly toward the dog house, taking the path we had taken.
Did she spot us? My heart stopped, and, for a long second, I believed the jig was up, but the woman kept on walking, presumably to check the other walls. She clucked her tongue and went back over to the bush. By this time, I was ready for the inspection to be over, because I was pointed in twelve different directions and none of them felt very good. The woman scratched her head, adjusted the hat and wig some more, and then ran around to the front, most certainly to call the police.
I edged back out, and Tabitha followed, shaking her wrist. She pointed toward the back fence, closer to the park, and I vaulted it cleanly, which was a first. She made it effortlessly, and I noticed to my chagrin that she was a good deal neater than me. We both sprinted through the yard and down the block, not caring now if we drew any attention as long as they couldn’t out-run us. We slowed down as we got closer to the park. Tabitha unlocked the car, and I dove in. She sped off, pinging gravel off the backs of several cars.
“I lost my hat and wig,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Well, my shoulder hurts even more, and now I’m sore as hell all over, but, other than that, I’m okay.”
“You’re alive.”
“Don’t remind me.”
After being carried by an adrenaline rush which had practically flown us to the car, Tabitha managed to calm herself enough to drive the car fairly well, which was a great deal more than I could’ve done. I was so high and exhausted that I didn’t have a headache, but every other nerve in my body was sending messages to my brain that I didn’t want to get: dull pain, sharp pain, scratches from the branches, a strawberry on my knee, which peeked out from under the new tear in jeans that weren’t even mine, and a big mother splinter in my right hand—through the surgical gloves, nonetheless—courtesy of the doghouse. I tried to lay back and do the yoga stuff I had learned in a short, George Harrison-inspired attempt at Eastern inner peace, but I was sure even nirvana still couldn’t do much to cure a shoulder separation. So I bit my lip and felt sorry for myself and waited for us to get back to the Watergate.
Tabitha parked the car in the garage, and we took the same secretive route back to the room. Our room was on the opposite end of the floor, and we took the distance like two veteran cops on a drug raid. Tabitha would move quickly down the hall to a nook where I could hide and then motion me to follow. I would get there, and she would move on. We covered the ground in four short bursts, and no one saw us.
It was nearly one o’clock now, and, when we got inside the door, I headed straight for the bathroom and washed the yellow gunk off of my eyebrows. Then I went to the mini-bar and grabbed one of those teensy bottles of Jack Daniels. I downed it in one long draw and got a long look from Tabitha. “We have work to do.”
“I’m in pain.”
“You’re in trouble, too,” she said as she grabbed the zip disk out of the backpack and put it in the computer. “No more whiskey. Order us some room service.” I did what I was told and then returned to watch her work.
“I got two kinds of files,” she said. “Word processing files and Quicken accounting files. There was a good bit of stuff on there, but I have no idea if it’s worth anything or not. How much do you know about computers?”
I explained to her that the extent of my expertise was plugging in—and this was often a struggle—turning on, turning off, pointing, clicking, and typing. I had literally no idea what a zip disk was. She told me it could hold almost a hundred megatons of information, and I nodded my head. I knew this was a lot. I nodded some more.
“I’m gonna print out all the word processing documents, and you can start looking through them while I’m looking at the accounting stuff,” she said. I knew at that moment that I was no longer in control of my destiny, that the shots were now being called by a legal secretary-turned-prostitute. Oddly enough, this made me feel a little better.
She started printing and explained that she found the novel and that it was almost three hundred pages long, so she would print it last. I started into the first pile she handed me.
It was about twenty pages, and it was all poetry. Mark considered himself somewhat of a bard, evidently, and wrote volumes, none of it very good. He wrote the kind of poetry that made you wish that rhyming and meter had never gone out of style, because he just dragged on about emptiness and blackness,
and divided
his lines
like this.
I had many friends who considered bad poetry to be a crime, but I was hoping to get something a little more concrete. The second batch contained more bad poetry, copies of the letters to agents regarding the novel, a personal essay about a break-up, which wasn’t half bad, and a resume, which left no clues that I could see but did allow me to know he had gone to all the right schools and had won more awards than Mother Teresa.
This was depressing. Tabitha ordered more paper from the concierge, and it came about the same time the food did. I hid in
the closet when both arrived and took a break from my Helper research to eat. By this time, the whiskey was rolling around in my stomach, giving me a slight buzz which didn’t make any of my pain go away, like it does in country songs, but at least sent my mind in other directions—to Stephanie.
God, I still liked her, and I wanted her to know all of this. I liked her brain, her body, and I felt great when I was around her. And she hated me. Literally, hated me. This thought weighed almost as heavily on me as the more serious things I was facing.
Tabitha at least believed in me enough to help. Still, it wasn’t Tabitha’s ex-boyfriend who was dead. And even assuming we could find anything criminal and end up with someone else in the slammer, I still wasn’t sure I would ever be able to pass muster again with her. This was just all too strange.
“Found anything?” Tabitha asked finally.
“Just some bad poetry.”
“How bad?”
I turned up my nose. “Jim Morrison bad.”
“I’m not much on poetry anyway. More of a fiction gal, myself.”
“Really?” I asked, kicking myself when I did.
Her eyes narrowed and she sneered. “Yeah. Not all whores are illiterate.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” I said softly and meant it.
She paused. “I know. Yeah, that’s actually why Stephanie and I became friends at the law firm. I was the only girl who could out-read her.”
“What do you like to read?”
“Mysteries. I think that’s partly why I helped.”
I nodded. “Well, Sherlock, found anything?”
She made a curdled milk face. “I’ve found a couple of things,” she said between bites. “Helper’s financial situation got appreciably better about a year and a half ago.”
I made some calculations. That wouldn’t have been long after he came to the NEA; he wouldn’t have had enough time to get a raise.