“Why not?”
“Because he was still looking for the painting when we were at his office. And he was real anxious to get it.”
“He could have been faking it, pretending not to know where the Bacon was when he really did.”
“I don’t think so. He got too excited when he thought we could tell him where it was. You can’t fake that level of anxiety.”
“Hmm. But he might have the rugs.”
“He might, indeed.”
The waitress dropped off the bill. I was about to stand up to go to the cashier, when my eyes lit upon a heart-stopping sight: Eli strolling in the front door, holding the elbow of our dear Aunt Reba. They were looking very intimate.
“Duck!” I said to Terry.
She obeyed, quickly sliding under her side of the table. I peered around the corner of the booth, my head low.
“Who is it?” she demanded in a whisper, but I shushed her with a finger to the lips.
The hostess approached Eli and Reba, then led them toward the other dining room. Terry started to sit up.
“Don’t let them see you!”
“Who?” She ducked again.
“Just go.”
I grabbed the check and we made our way to the cash register, bent over in a running crouch. Terry flew out the door and I hid beneath the counter, throwing the cashier our bill and a twenty. She took them without question and started to make change.
“Give it to the waitress,” I said.
“No problem.”
“Thank you!” I scurried outside.
When I got a few yards away from the front windows, I straightened up and ran down the block to Terry.
“What?” she bellowed at me.
“Okay, okay,” I said, catching my breath. “I haven’t mentioned this before, but I think Eli is dating Reba. No, I know Eli is dating Reba, because I just saw them go into the restaurant together.”
She gave me a look that would melt lead. “He’s representing her!”
“Yeah, but when he came to the police station after our arrest, he was reeking of Chanel No. 5!”
“Oh, so what? For that we had to leave the restaurant like we were dodging bullets?”
She was right. What had I been thinking? Suddenly I felt ridiculously foolish. “I didn’t want to embarrass them.” It was weak, but it was the only explanation I could think of for overreacting the way I had.
“You’re seeing conspiracies everywhere,” Terry said.
“Nuh-uh.”
“Yuh-huh.” She broke out laughing. “Do you actually think Reba would go out with Eli socially?”
I started laughing, too. “It did cross my mind.”
“Get outta here! I mean, I love the guy, but he’s a terrible dresser, he has a total potty mouth, and he’s way too poor for her!”
“You’re right,” I said, shaking my head. “Of course you’re right.”
“We didn’t need to run out of the restaurant, you moron!”
I wiped a tear from my eye. “I don’t know where my head is!” I admitted.
“You could probably locate it up your ass. Now let’s go back in there and say hello. Maybe Eli’s got some interesting scoop on Binion or something.”
“Okay.”
We went back in the front door. The cashier gave me a funny look. “Shouldn’t you be crouching?”
“Turns out that was unnecessary,” I told her.
“Well, good. That must be hell on your knees.”
I followed Terry toward the back of the room, until she finally stopped next to the servers’ station. She stood there, staring. I leaned over her shoulder to see what she was looking at, and what I saw took my breath away.
Eli and Reba were sitting on the same side of the short booth, their backs to us, and the two of them were making out.
Not billing and cooing, not smooching, not even kissing, but lip-smashing, teeth-splintering, tongues-down-throats making out.
I turned and ran, with Terry right behind me.
I raced past the cashier and flung myself out the door.
“Hurry on back, now!” she said.
We stopped running when we got to the bike, both of us sucking in air.
“I don’t want to say what’s the world coming to,” I said, “but what the fuck is the world coming to?”
“They were doing the tonsil tango!” Terry gasped.
“Snogging each other in public!”
“He had his hand on her boob!”
I winced. “It was like seeing your parents doing it!”
“I’ll never get that image out of my brain!”
“Well, it wouldn’t be in your brain if you hadn’t made us go back in again!”
“Oh, so this is my fault?” she fired back.
“I don’t know how it could be seen any other way!”
“Oh, you don’t?”
“No, I don’t!”
We took a breath simultaneously.
“I think we need to go talk to Priscilla,” I said.
We traveled south on Fairfax, took a left on Wilshire, and got to Eli’s office at six-thirty. Priss was coming out the lobby door just as we arrived.
“Hey, girls! How ya doin’? Eli’s not here.”
“Yes. We. Know.”
She frowned. “How’d you know?”
“We just saw him at Canter’s, in a liplock with our great-aunt!” I cried.
“Oh.”
“You knew,” Terry said, shaking her head. “When did this start?”
“She’s been calling a lot the last two days—”
“Yeah, and . . . ?”
“Well, at first she was making up excuses, like ‘Tell him it’s Mrs. Price-Slatherton, and I just had a wee question about blah blah.’ But then I’d go, ‘Oh, I can probably help you with that’ and she’d go, ‘Thank you, dear, but I really need to speak to Mr. Weintraub personally’ and then—”
“And then?” I prompted her.
“And then she dropped the pretense. ‘Let me speak to that big hunk of man,’ she’d say, or ‘Put the old sex hound on the phone’—”
“That’s enough!” we yelled.
“How long has this been going on?” Terry demanded.
“Oh, since you brought her in. She called that afternoon, and they must have spent two hours on the phone. I couldn’t get Eli’s attention for anything. They talk about ten times a day.”
Terry and I gawked at each other. What were we looking at here? A new step-great-uncle?
“Sorry, guys,” Priss said. “I didn’t think it was my place to blab.”
“No, it’s not your fault,” I said with a sigh. “We’re just . . . having a little trouble adjusting to the idea, I guess.”
“Well, I don’t see anything wrong with it. They’re consenting adults. If they want to fuck like bunnies, it’s nobody’s—”
“Ewwwww!” Terry and I both wailed. That image put us right over the edge.
“Sorry.”
“Look, Priss,” I said, “we really shouldn’t have even asked. It’s none of our business. Do me a favor, don’t tell Eli we know, okay?”
“Sure, I’d be happy not to mention it.”
“Thanks.” I promised to call her for lunch, then Terry and I hopped on the bike to head for home, our world rocked by a vision of senior-citizen horniness.
I thought I saw a yellow Volkswagen Bug following us for a good portion of the way, but I shrugged it off. Terry had told me I was seeing conspiracies everywhere, and in this case she was right.
The Bug turned off somewhere around Overland Avenue.
It was twilight when we got back to the house. We found a pile of calla lilies on the front porch, leftovers from the funeral.
“That’s nice,” I said. “Reba dropped off some flowers.”
“I’m surprised she had time between bonk sessions,” Terry said.
“Now, now.” I shook my finger at her. “It was a nice gesture.”
She made a face. “I d
on’t like having funeral flowers in the house. Seems like bad luck or something.”
“But they’re beautiful. It’s a shame to waste them.”
“Hey, let’s give them to Jane. We haven’t seen her in a long time.”
Jane Doe was the wild deer who visited our backyard. Before the arrival of Muffy and Paquito, she had been kind of an unofficial pet. We sometimes left raw vegetables out for her, but flowers were her favorite treat. Giving her the lilies seemed like a good compromise. We wouldn’t have fresh blooms in the house, but we might have a deer sighting. If she didn’t show up tonight, the chances were good she’d drop by for breakfast.
After feeding the pups, we changed into jeans and went out back, placing the flowers at the edge of the wooded area where the canyon wall rose at a sixty-degree angle. There was enough light there to see Jane if she appeared, but not enough to frighten her off. We stationed ourselves on the back porch in the shadows, a spot that gave us a perfect line of sight, and sat on our haunches waiting and whispering.
“So, you think we should confront Reba and Eli?” Terry asked.
“Oh, what for?” I said, sighing. “Priss is right. They’re grown-ups, they can do what they want.”
“But why didn’t they tell us? I feel so betrayed.”
“Maybe they want to see if it’s the real deal before they tell us. Or if it’s just—” I swallowed hard, “a sexual thing.”
“Eeeeyick.”
“Oh, listen to us!” I said. “We’re being really infantile about the whole thing. Seventy isn’t dead—far from it these days. And when we’re that age, do we want people looking at us and going, Ewww, you actually use that old booty?”
“Yeah. But maybe they don’t see us as grown-ups who can appreciate mature love.”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“Then maybe what we should do is say we saw them—”
“Say we saw them going at it like a couple of Viagra fiends?”
“What, then? Continue to live in denial?”
“Denial as a way of life is vastly underrated.”
“Shhh, listen.”
We heard the sound of twigs snapping. Was that Jane, making her way down the hill? She had the nimbleness of a mountain goat when negotiating the rocky ledge and a very sensitive radar for fresh edibles. But we had only just put out the flowers, so it might be a raccoon or a squirrel. We held our breath and waited for another sign that she was out there in the darkness.
Crunch. There it was, another delicate footfall. She was taking her time coming down the hill, cautious little woodland creature that she was. Ah, I thought, there’s nothing like the natural world to put all of our human craziness in perspective.
We heard another step, another barely audible snapping of twigs under a dainty hoof.
Then there was a great rustling of leaves and crashing of branches like a heavy animal was sliding down the hill, hurtling through the underbrush and slamming into a tree, thudding against the trunk.
“Uggghh!” it exclaimed.
That was no deer. That was a person!
We jumped up to our feet.
“Who’s there?” Terry yelled.
We heard someone thrashing in the leaves, twigs snapping like crazy. And involuntary noises of exertion as someone scrambled back up the hill.
“Ugh ugh ugh!”
“The flashlight!” Terry yelled.
We dashed through the back door into the kitchen. I grabbed the Mag-Lite flashlight, she ran into the living room and emerged with a baseball bat.
“Let’s rumble!”
The pups barked and chased after us and we lost a few seconds trying to keep them in the house as we flew out the door. I shone the flashlight into the trees, waving the powerful beam back and forth like a searchlight.
No one was there.
We ran across the yard and I shone the light further up the hill. We could see where the earth and leaves had been displaced, a shallow tunnel dug by the sliding person. There was a narrow groove down the middle that was probably caused by the heel of a shoe.
I aimed the flashlight at the top of the rise and saw a figure in dark clothes running across the ridge to the south. He disappeared into the trees.
Terry and I clawed our way up to the top, pulling on saplings and grabbing tree trunks to hoist ourselves up the steep incline. I slipped once and fell hard on my knee. Terry beat me to the top, using the bat for leverage and to whack away at the densest foliage.
But when we reached the top, he was nowhere to be seen. He’d probably traversed the crest and gone back down through someone else’s yard. I pointed the flashlight at the ground, illuminating some large footprints with a patterned rubber sole, like the sole of a running shoe.
“Well, hell,” Terry said at last. “We’ve got a prowler.”
“Or a murderer.”
We went back inside and debated whether to call the police. Terry made the counterargument, of course.
“It’s not like they’re going to come out here and make a plaster cast of the footprints in the dirt, then compare them to a national database of backyard intruders.”
“No, but if we tell them about Sergei, they’ll take it seriously.”
“Take it seriously? Get real. Are you forgetting the laughfest down at Parker Center? I’m not going to watch them spewing saliva while they hoot about The Case of the Killer Raccoon!”
“You know that wasn’t a raccoon, Ter.”
“I know it’s a little scary, but we’ve spent enough time with the police lately. Let’s not cry wolf until we really need them—”
“And when is that going to be? When Sergei actually makes it into the house and attempts to disembowel us or something?”
“Yeah, something like that.”
“Oh great. Listen, why don’t we just take our twelve thousand dollars and escape to Hawaii or somewhere until they catch him?”
“What? You didn’t even want to take that money, any of it! And now you’re proposing that we take it and flake off without even attempting to earn it?”
“Earn it? How do we do that, by getting killed? Let the police find their man!”
“That’s chickenshit, Kerry.”
“I never said I wasn’t chicken! Brawwwk! Brawwwk! Brawwwk! See? I open my mouth and out it comes—my native tongue. Anyway, I never said I wanted to die for this stupid case.”
“First of all, you’re letting your imagination run away with you. Someone was in our backyard. It’s a big leap from that to being stalked by a Russian murderer.”
“We can get a kick-ass spring rate in Maui. Whaddaya say?”
“No.”
I began to hula dance around the living room. “Come on. We’ll get new bikinis. It’ll be fun!”
She gave me a disgusted look and sat down on the couch, arms crossed.
I twirled my hands and gyrated my hips, singing in a Polynesian accent. “Oh we’re going . . . to a hukilau—”
“Shut up!”
“The huki huki huki hukilau . . .” I mimed along with the song. “We throw our nets, into the sea . . . All the amaama come a swimming to me—”
“You’re scaring the dogs! You’re scaring me.” Muffy and Paquito were sitting next to her, heads on their paws with their ears back.
“Oh, okay, spoilsport.”
I’d made my point. I bent at the waist to take a bow.
And then came the explosion.
It sounded like a shotgun blast and a car crashing through the front of the house simultaneously. Shattered glass rained down around me. Plaster exploded from the wall above the couch.
I threw myself on the floor. Terry dived off the couch.
She grabbed Paquito and I grabbed Muffy and we scrambled away from the front door, the dogs yapping in terror.
I grabbed the phone and punched in 911.
“Nine-one-one Operator. What’s your emergency?”
“Someone just shot into our house!”
It seemed like a
n eternity but it was only five minutes by my watch. We huddled on the floor in the alcove between the living room and the dining nook, clutching the dogs and trembling, eyes trained on the front door. Terry had the baseball bat next to her leg.
Finally a light shone in the blasted-out front window and we heard that blessed word.
“Police!”
We leaped to our feet and ran to the door, glass crunching underfoot. Terry unlocked the door and threw it open. Two officers stood on the porch, one blond, one African American. They looked capable and square-jawed, as tough as Marines, and they were instantly the best friends I’d ever had.
“Come in,” Terry said to them.
They entered, looking around.
“You ladies made the call?” the blond one asked.
We nodded.
“Are you all right? Were you hurt?”
We shook our heads.
“Are you two twins?” the black cop asked.
“Yes sir, we are,” Terry said, and I almost had a stroke. It was the first time in her life to give a straight answer to that question—scared polite, I guess.
The blond was the first to spot the hole in the wall above the couch. He went over to inspect it. “Heavy artillery,” he said. “You ladies see or hear anything before the shot?”
“Well, not right before the shot,” I said. “A few minutes earlier we had been in the backyard and we heard someone on the hill. We ran out with a flashlight and a baseball bat, but he got away.”
The black officer crossed to the back door, looking out into the yard. He spoke into a microphone under his chin. “Witness reports sighting of a man in the backyard.”
“We don’t know for sure it was a man,” Terry said.
“Oh, for once shut up with the feminist crap!” I said, exasperated.
The cops spun around at my outburst.
I almost told them about Sergei, but thought better of it. That was a conversation for when things calmed down. “It was a man, officers,” I assured them. “A man in dark clothes. She thinks we have to allow for women in every aspect of society and I guess that includes shotgun killers.”
“Possibly a woman,” the blond officer said into his mic. Obviously he’d been through sensitivity training at the Academy.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 25