Laney Profitt. I hadn’t heard her name in more than a decade. The car was a well-worn BMW sedan, maybe from 2004 or 2005, that had lost its share of arguments. Not a star’s ride.
“You just gonna sit here?” Laney Profitt said, putting a steadying hand on the car’s roof and leaning in. If I’d been a Breathalyzer, she would have blown go to jail.
“Sorry,” I said. “I was grabbing a little time to think.”
“Yeah. Jake doesn’t allow that in the house. You wanna back up or what?”
Up close, I could see that time had worn away at her as surely as it had at Jake. The quicksilver fluidity that had made her look different in every shot had thickened and calloused into a weary mask framing jumpy, anxious eyes. I said, “I’m a big fan.”
“Yeah?” she said. “You don’t look that old. Listen, Jake’s gonna be wondering where I am. Can you . . . ?” and she made little hand gestures to scoot me back up the driveway.
“Sure,” I said. I looked past her car and saw the traffic still streaming up Coldwater; no way she could back into it to let me out. “It’s going to take a minute or two, though. Lot of curves. How long have you known Jake?”
“I don’t know,” she said, turning to go back to her car. “How long have I known you?” She stumbled a little when she got to her door.
I backed all the way up the drive, which wasn’t any easier than I’d thought it would be. Whatever Jake had offered her to get her here, she wanted it pretty badly; the front bumper of her car was never more than a couple of feet from mine, and she was leaning over the steering wheel as though she could get at least part of her there a few seconds earlier.
The instant we got to the circle she pulled past me and jumped out of the car, leaving the door open. I really really didn’t want to see her run to the front porch, so I headed back down the driveway, trying to replay the thoughts I’d been working through when her headlights interrupted me. Obviously it was a defensive reaction, taking refuge in the Horton House situation so quickly, ransacking my brain to avoid thinking about Jake and his guest and the lower-depths world it seemed likely they shared, but sometimes the way my brain works surprises me, and halfway down I suddenly knew what I’d overlooked. The end of a once-prominent family. An almost-historic house, being torn down. What an idiot. I stopped right where I was and called Louie.
“I don’t got anything yet,” he said.
I said, “How long does it take a will to get through probate?”
“Depends on whether anyone wants anything,” he said. Then he said, “Oh, yeah, shoulda thought of that myself. I need her whole given name and the county where the will was filed.”
“Daisy Laurel Horton,” I said. “Los Angeles.”
I sat there, letting the car idle for a moment after he hung up. If he could get the information—and it shouldn’t be a major problem because wills in California are public documents the moment they go into probate—and if Itsy would talk to me, I figured that within twenty-four hours I’d have my cast of characters: family members, servants, lawyers, the crooks who hired Lumia and me, the kids the Bride of Plastic Man had dragged into that restaurant, and the names of the agents with whom she’d negotiated their services. With any kind of luck at all, they would have her name. It almost felt too easy.
No kidding.
I’d never met, or even seen, Itsy Winkle, but years ago a burglar on her string had told me a little about her one evening over coffee in a Ventura Boulevard restaurant, mediocre enough to be on Louie’s list of one-item favorites. The burglar lived downtown but had accepted a job in the Valley and, for some reason I’ve forgotten, couldn’t get into the house until eleven. Sally Everest was a gregarious, energetic young woman who honored her old-fashioned name by wearing her hair 1940s-style, just below shoulder length and curled under at the ends like a big band singer, and who bored easily. She didn’t want to just sit around watching her knee jiggle up and down, she said, waiting to commit to a burglary that had given her a case of the anticipatory willies.
So she’d called me. I was living at the time in a motel called The Viking’s Pyre, big on color illustrations from the 1920s by artists of the Howard Pyle school, in this case meticulously painted panoramas of extravagantly bearded, very dead Norwegian men, probably named Harald, being pushed out to sea in flaming and obviously expendable boats. The place’s owner was Danish and serious about it. I’d slept in cheerier environments, so when Sally called, I said sure, just no Scandinavian food.
She didn’t want to talk about the job—bad luck, she said—and we didn’t really know each other all that well, so when the topic of Itsy sort of wandered into the conversation she grabbed it like a life preserver.
“Everybody says she’s awful,” Sally said, “and they’re right. She is.”
I said, “Really.” Itsy at that time was still primarily a do-it-herself crook. She’d only just begun to branch out as an entrepreneur, assigning to other burglars the jobs that didn’t interest her personally but had good money attached. Thinking back on it, it must have been in the year just before she went to jail for braining the nice lady with the pearls. “What makes her so awful?”
“Well,” Sally said, “there are two ways to answer that because it’s really two questions, isn’t it? First question is what’s inside Itsy that makes her so awful, and the second is what is it in me that makes me dislike her so much? In other words, in my own personal experience—”
I said, “Pick one.” Our waitress was standing behind the counter like someone frozen in time, unable to tear her eyes from Sally’s hair.
“Well, on Itsy’s side, so to speak, there’s the way she looks. I mean, that’s enough to embitter anyone, right there.”
“I guess it would be,” I said, not wanting to admit my ignorance. It’s a character flaw that I’m trying to deal with. Still. “Yeah, sure, I can see that.”
We were sharing a booth, and Sally narrowed her eyes and leaned across the table toward me, practically a silent movie parody of someone who is speaking confidentially. She did everything except half-cover her mouth and talk past the back of her hand. “Is that woman looking at me?”
“Which woman?”
“The one who’s dressed like a waitress.”
I said, “She’s not just dressed like a—”
“All right. Our waitress, then.”
“Yes, she’s been staring at you since you walked in.”
She settled back in her seat. “Just wanted to make sure. It would be kind of deranged to think people were looking at you when you’re actually the furthest thing from their—”
“Itsy,” I said. “What’s so terrible about her?”
“You really are task oriented, aren’t you? Well, let’s see. She’s dishonest, she’s unpleasant, she’s manipulative, she just grabs an opportunity to be violent, she’s unfair to the people who depend on her, she’s a right-winger—”
I said, “Most crooks are.”
“She thinks people who don’t work for a living are parasites.”
“What about her?”
“I didn’t say it was a flawless world view. She also foams at the mouth about how her tax dollars are spent when she doesn’t hardly pay any. But that doesn’t keep her from stumping up and down that living room cussing a blue—”
“Stumping.”
“You know,” Sally said. “Stumping. The way she does.”
“Right,” I said. “My mind wandered. That waitress really has her eye on you.”
“Maybe she thinks I want the silverware.” She picked up a spoon, blew on it, and rubbed it on her blouse. She raised both eyebrows and lowered her lids, going for mysterious. “She should just know.”
“I think it’s your hair,” I said. “She should just know what?”
“I’m the silverware queen. You know the Mildenhall Treasure?”
“Sure,” I said. “That treasure from Mildenhall.” I am working on it.
“Biggest find of Roman silver tableware in history. Literally priceless, although I always think that’s nonsense, don’t you? I mean, priceless to who?”
“Whom,” I said.
“Yeah, whom. The farmer who dug it up used the utensils every day like he bought them on eBay or something, and the great dish—there’s a huge dish that’s so great they call it the great dish even in the museum catalogue—he used that to plunk down whatever kinds of birds they eat over there, partridges or something. I mean, can you imagine?”
“The mind boggles.”
“So, yeah.” She drummed on the tabletop with the handle of the spoon. The coffee was terrible. Each of us had choked down one cup and had chosen to let the second round get cold. She lifted the spoon and showed it to me, framed between her index fingers as though it were something I had just won on TV. “I specialize in silverware,” she said. “Especially eighteenth-century English, the work of Thomas Wallis One and Two, when I can get it, which is almost never. But even the prospect makes me go all creamy. Do you know anything about silverware?”
“Not much.” It sounded more authoritative than zero.
“Well.” She sat back, looking disappointed. “There’s silverware and then there’s silverware. A good tray from, say, Thomas Wallis, who died around 1790, will run you seven to ten thousand bucks. A serving spoon could bring five to eight hundred.”
Eight hundred seemed like a lot for a spoon. “This is pure silver?”
“There’s no such thing,” she said. “Well, there is, obviously, but it’s too soft to use for anything. Sterling, which is the purest kind that’s useful, is a little more than seven percent something else, usually copper. See, they call it sterling because—just yawn or something if I’m putting you to sleep.”
“So far, both eyes open.”
“So, okay, there wasn’t much silver in Europe until the Spanish started hauling hundreds of tons every year out of South and Central America.” She took a quick survey of the place, possibly to make sure no one was making notes. “Before that, it was pretty much for the church and castle crowd, and it was also used for money. Problem was countries would mix tin and other cheap metals in so they got more for their money than the money was actually worth. Except for the kraut straight-shooters in the Hanseatic League, which started someplace that’s now in Germany. They kept their silver money close to pure because their trade depended on it. The Hanseatic League began on the Baltic, which was then called the East Sea, so people outside the league referred to them as Easterlings and began to ask for payment in Easterling silver, which got shortened to Sterling.”
“Damn,” I said. “Who knew? So what’s the problem?
“Well, there are forgeries, some pretty good.” She glanced at the waitress and intercepted a full-bore, double-barreled stare, but then the woman looked away, blushing as red as a brake light. “Forgeries can be hard to spot.”
“So that’s it? That’s the problem? Forgeries? Seems to me that everything you swipe has a different problem, a tactical problem, I mean. In addition to forgeries, I’d figured the problem with silver would be weight.”
“Because I’m a woman?” she said, accompanying the words with a meaningful squint.
“No. Because it’s heavy.”
“I wish,” Sally said. “I’d love to score enough good stuff to have trouble carrying it out. Uh-uh, the big problem is noise. You ever empty your silverware drawer? Wake up the whole cemetery. See, there’s too much silver, in some ways. The Victorians, who had rules for everything, decided, around 1840, Thou shalt not eat anything with thine fingers, and all of a sudden, the whole kingdom went all dainty. The people who made silverware saw a boom market. Within a few years there was one knife for bread, one for butter, one for meat, a dozen kinds of forks, and God only knows how many spoons. That old thing about not knowing which fork to use? That’s a leftover from the Victorians. Thanks to the Industrial Revolution, there was a whole new class of really rich Brits who weren’t nobles, and they were a little touchy about that, so they invented all these new table manners tests so they could look down at anyone who might have grown up with a single fork. But in this day and age, for somebody like me, what the great age of British silver means is that we’ve got weight and noise and awkwardness, all at the same time, and the issue becomes how you carry a bunch of loose, noisy pieces when you’ve only got two hands. So you want to know how I do it?”
“Always. This is my favorite Jeopardy category”
“Burglar Jeopardy,” she said, and she clapped her hands. “I always take three of those long cloth shoe organizer things you hang inside a closet door, so that’s twenty-four slots per, and you can roll them up when they’re full. For the odd-shaped pieces, I’ve got knitted golf club covers. They’re perfect, narrow at the mouth and wide farther down. I used to use men’s running socks, but the merchandise slipped out once in a while, and you really don’t want it hitting the floor. So the stuff is all packed and muffled. Oh, and a Santa sack to throw everything into.”
“Have you ever done a job where you used all of it?”
“Three or four, and may there be more. What do you specialize in?”
“Getting away,” I said.
“Do it backward,” she said. She stirred her coffee with the spoon.
I said, “Absolutely. That was the first thing I learned: Imagine getting out before you go in. When you open a drawer, imagine putting everything back in the same place before you take anything out. Who told you that?”
“Henry Timmerman. He always said—”
“Sure. Henry. He was one of Herbie Mott’s guys.”
She looked at me until she was certain I’d finished talking. “You interrupt a lot,” she said. “Henry always said that when you interrupt someone you might have cut off the only thing you really needed to hear in the whole conversation. Do you have sisters?”
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. Guys with sisters, especially older sisters, usually learn not to interrupt women.”
I said, “Do you know a burglar named Lumia? Since your teacher learned from my teacher.”
“No. Pretty name, though.” She looked at her watch and said, “Getting near time.”
The waitress spotted the gesture and started toward us, but Sally held a hand up, just a request for a minute or two more. The waitress stopped as though she’d walked into a force field, and then she reached up and did a little air-primp to an invisible fall of hair at her shoulders, held up two thumbs, and smiled.
“I love women,” Sally said. “We’re so much nicer than men. Except for Itsy, of course.”
I said, “Of course.”
“If you’re ever over at her house,” Sally said, putting a twenty on the table, which was a tip of about 400 percent, “look out for a gun. Little, no more than five inches, but big enough to do it to you.”
“Where does she carry it?” I asked.
“Them,” Sally said. “They’re all over her. She bristles with them.”
15
No Swimming
“It’s the one with the drawbridge,” Louie had said, with the implication, You can’t miss it.
But I almost did. It was dark, for one thing, and for another, well, okay, it wasn’t literally a drawbridge, but it was a modern equivalent. And when I finally spotted it, it told me two things right off the bat. Itsy did not like drop-ins and she was doing extremely well.
The house was in a relatively undeveloped area of the northwest San Fernando Valley, above Chatsworth and near Box Canyon, well up on a narrow, hilly, scraggy sagebrush street that was being built as it rose, beginning at the Valley’s floor. Chez Itsy was five or six vacant lots above its nearest neighbor, with no one yet building above it. It looked to me as though she’d bought two lots and slapped the
house down in the middle, so even when the street filled in, as it inevitably would, she’d still have space on either side.
The clouds were hogging the entire sky, declaring victory over what the King James Bible, with characteristic condescension, terms the lesser lights of the stars and moon, and since the neighborhood still lacked streetlights, I once again found myself in a darkness that felt thick enough to bite off and chew. I spared a moment to ask why—after decades of wondering why people sought enlightenment but not endarkenment—I suddenly found myself unnerved in the absence of light.
Itsy’s house might have had something to do with it. It was a two-story postmodern cube that looked black, although up here pretty much everything looked black. It might have been dark blue or even gray. Not a gleam of light came from it. Surrounding it, and dimly illuminated by a thin neon strip set into the ground at its base, was a fence made of sharply pointed steel spikes about eight feet high, four inches in diameter, and six inches apart. There were no horizontal stabilizing bars, meaning nothing to pull yourself up by or wedge a foot into: a burglar’s defense against burglars. I figured each of the bars had to be anchored in at least a foot of concrete, and they looked like they’d been made personally for Vlad the Impaler.
The purpose of the light strip was to direct attention to the fence. The purpose of the fence was to direct attention to the gate. The purpose of the gate was to direct you to turn around and go home.
On the other side of the spikes I saw a stream or moat or water hazard about eight feet wide. It didn’t look deep, but it didn’t have to. Posted every eight or ten feet on the far side of the moat was a colorful placard on a stick, each with its own little light, the kind of signs that, in a critical phase of the election cycle, might have said vote for fenstermacher, except that what was on them was a picture of a middle-size fish with really significant teeth, a dentist’s daydream. I’m not an ichthyologist, but to me those teeth said piranha. There was also a sign that, I supposed, suggested something about the sense of humor of the house’s owner. It said no swimming.
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