Ronnie nodded. She hadn’t said much.
“Well?” I said.
“Yes,” Francie said. “But they’re lap dogs, little yappers.”
“The age-old question,” I said. “Which is better, a big dog that will try to kill you silently or a little pincushion that won’t shut up?”
Ronnie said to me, “And?”
“It’s moot,” I said. “Best is cats. Dogs take it personally but cats don’t give a shit.” The word brought to mind Itsy Winkle’s dark living room with its menagerie of stuffed cats. I shook my head to clear it.
Francie’s ugly room was a rented office in a building full of rented offices, in the middle of Van Nuys. The building was essentially a chest of drawers, each drawer containing a bunch of offices that were more or less the same as all the other offices. Francie had told us that all twelve of the place’s floors were absolutely the same, exactly like hers, and I immediately recognized raw material for a burglar’s nightmare in which everything would depend on my going through the right door, and only the right door, on my first try.
As Louie had explained it to me, Francie used an office for two, or at most three, clients and then put her stuff in her purse, wiped the place for prints, and moved on to a similar setup miles away. The people from whom she was helping her clients escape were usually heavily armed and short-tempered. This particular office contained a good-size steel desk, three folding chairs, and a lot of linoleum. The only thing on the walls was a big photographic blowup of a piece of wood with the word Home stenciled into it in bullet holes. It was, I assumed, Francie’s reminder to her clients of why they were sitting here.
From her side of the desk, Francie brushed the screen with her coral-tipped fingers. Suddenly we were looking at a dark world where solid objects were a queasy, semi-fluorescent green, the color range you see in military footage of rocket attacks at night. We were about six feet up and heading smoothly for a wall, but then we turned right and paralleled the wall for twenty or thirty seconds before rising up and over it and dipping down again, into a backyard the size of Pasadena. The camera stopped and hung, motionless as a hummingbird, looking at the yard below.
“Drone,” Francie said. “I had to bring in a guy from North Carolina to work the damn thing. Nobody within fifty miles would even think about it.”
“That’s Eric’s charm,” Ronnie said. She was barely audible. I looked over at her, and she cleared her throat as though to say something more, but just swallowed and looked down. Francie glanced at her and then at me.
The backyard was formally gardened within an inch of its life, green, glowing flower beds everywhere, foaming up along paving-stone paths that branched and curled like streams on a flood plain. The paths were the brightest things in the image because the stone had retained the largest amount of the day’s heat.
“He hates anything random,” Ronnie said. She blinked a couple of times, a dead giveaway of tension. “He’d pave the whole place but a realtor told him it would lower the value of the property. He would have paved me if I’d held still long enough.”
Probably hearing the strain in Ronnie’s voice, Francie pulled the tablet back to her side of the desk and said, “Do you want to take a break, maybe pick it up a little later?”
Ronnie used both index fingers to massage the bridge of her nose. Then she closed her eyes and rubbed them. “No,” she said, eyes still closed. “I’ll try to keep the drama private.”
Francie glanced at me again, and I shrugged. She pushed the tablet back toward us.
“Dog houses,” she said as the drone slid over the landscaping. “I’m pretty sure that insubstantial-looking stuff surrounding it is chicken wire, so even if the dogs wanted to rend you with their tiny jaws they probably wouldn’t be able to.”
“That’s just going to make them bark louder,” I said.
“He doesn’t want them pooping on his nice concrete.” Ronnie shook her head and said, “Sorry.” Then she said, “Wait. Stop. Go back a little.”
Francie backed it up, and we were looking at a cluster of kid stuff: two swings, what might have been a sandbox, a play house. Ronnie’s index finger followed the path of something straight and diagonal, “A teeter-totter,” Ronnie said. “What does that suggest?”
Shaking her head, Francie said, “I don’t know, what?”
I sat forward. “That there are two kids,” I said. “What’s a solo kid going to do with a teeter-totter? Sit on one end for a while and then go sit on the other?”
“Maybe it was part of a playground set,” Ronnie said between her teeth. “Maybe that was cheaper than buying them one piece at a time. If there’s any fault Eric missed out on, it’s not being cheap.”
“But on the other hand,” I said.
We all sat there. The room was made even smaller by the nose-clogging scent of imitation pine, pseudo-fresh air from a can. The only thing in its favor was that it smelled so little like the real thing that, clearly, no actual pines had been injured in its production. I breathed through my mouth while Francie moved the drone back and forth, not looking for anything, just dancing in place. Then I said to Francie, “We need more information. If there’s another kid, if he’s married someone who has one, or he rents one by the week, whatever it is, we need to know. This opens up whole avenues of complication, maybe even tragedy.”
Francie nodded. “I’ll see what I can—”
“Is there someone you can talk to?” I asked Ronnie. “Someone who might know something about him?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can trust . . . I might get traced.”
“That’s easy,” Francie said. “Hop a plane to Iowa City or someplace else you’ll never go again, buy a burner phone there, make the call, drown the phone in a public toilet, and fly back home.”
I said to Ronnie, “You don’t think you can trust her? Him?”
“Her.” She tilted her head back and turned it from side to side, probably trying to loosen muscle tension. “I have no idea. Things change all the time back there. It’s like a Medici court.”
Francie got up. She was wearing a coral blouse that picked up the blush undertones of her dark skin and she’d done something loose and spiraling to her hair. Wherever she was, she was an automatic finalist in the contest for the title of best-looking person in her zip code. When I’d first met her, two or three months earlier—when she’d taken a timely shot at a guy who was following me in a car—I’d been slightly overwhelmed by her intelligence and the physical package it was wrapped in. I’d taken her to dinner and kept that part of the evening secret from Ronnie, the only time I’d ever done that. I could sense Ronnie looking at me now, as I looked at Francie. I felt my face heat up.
Francie said, “I’ll put things on hold until we know something. No point in spending money on false assumptions.” She went to the wall and took down the HOME picture. “When you’re ready to start again, give me a call.”
Ronnie said, “Your hair is so beautiful. Does it have a name, the way you do it?”
“It’s a Senegalese twist,” Francie said. “Not as tight or as much work as a box weave, which look great but you gotta stay after it all the time and it’s murder to sleep on. This is, I don’t know, softer. A little less upkeep.”
“It’s gorgeous,” Ronnie said.
“Thanks,” Francie said, “It’s lower maintenance than some of the alternatives.” She opened the desk’s top drawer and took out a big leather purse and a couple of manila folders. She slipped the whatever-pad into the purse and put the folders on top of the picture. Then, from the purse, she pulled a package of alcohol wipes and went to work on the surface of the desk. The pine scent was so bad that the alcohol was a relief. “We’re done here,” she said to me. “Next time it’ll be a place in Hollywood. Probably. Got a view and everything.”
Passing me to open the door for us, using the hand with t
he wipe in it, she slowed, looking at my chest. She said, “Do you know you’ve got a spot on your shirt?”
20
Yousies-Mesies
Loose ends.
It wasn’t even eleven yet, so I couldn’t swing past Louie’s to get the business card and driver’s license, which would be ready at noon. Or, more realistically, a little past one, crooks being not much more obedient to the clock than they are to life’s other little strictures. It seemed to me there were a million things I could be doing, but I couldn’t think of any of them. Somewhere in my mind was a recurring image of Lumia, walking away under a series of overhead spotlights that grew dimmer as she receded. She was a little smaller at each pool of light, looking back from time to time as though all I had to do was call her, and she’d turn around and come back, with her prematurely gray hair and her silly name and her hiccups.
I could have called her back before she got into that car.
I must have looked a little lost because Ronnie said, “Knock, knock.”
“Sorry,” I said. We were on the sidewalk, only a few yards from the office building Francie had just vacated. The car was a couple of blocks away, in front of a meter I had packed with quarters, thinking we’d be an hour or more. I started walking. “I haven’t had much sleep.”
“She’s an attractive woman,” Ronnie said. “Francie, I mean.”
“You’ve met her before,” I said, feeling the side-step in the reply.
“But this was the first time I really looked at her. She likes you, you know.”
“She likes you, too.”
“Don’t be silly. I’m not accusing you of anything. I suppose I could even congratulate myself, the guy who loves me is attractive to other women, even knockouts.”
“Sounds like a two-edged sword to me.”
“Yes,” she said. “Doesn’t it.”
I stopped walking, so she had to stop, too. When we were looking at each other, I said, “You don’t have to worry about me.”
She blinked as though I’d made a sudden move toward her face. “I do, though. I worry about you all the time.”
“Well, it’s a waste of energy.”
“This may not sound like much of a compliment,” she said, “but I feel like I’ve missed every lifeline anyone ever threw me. Or maybe they threw them too far away for me to get to them. Maybe they did it on purpose, I don’t know. So I guess what I’m saying is that I worry about you because I love you and also because I need you so much right now.” She took the fabric of my shirt in her fists and pressed her forehead against me. Without raising her face to mine, she said, “It’s a really, really shitty feeling because it confuses two things, how much I love you and how much I need you until Eric is here. And how afraid I am that it might go wrong and I’d lose both of you. So, yeah, I go on red alert when I sense that some woman is interested in you.”
“All right.”
“All right,” she said, stepping back. “You’ve nailed it. It’s all right.”
“What can I say? No, wait. Here’s where it is, here’s where I am. If I look at that house from every angle and can’t find a way in the world to get out once I’m in, I’m not going in. I’m going to pass and look for a new way, a better way.”
“Fine,” she said. “Better than fine. Let’s go back to Ratville.”
“Let’s not. Let’s go to the Sheraton. We can get all our stuff packed—”
My phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but at least it wasn’t blocked. I held up one finger and answered it.
“Where are you?” It was a woman’s voice.
“Depends on who’s asking”
“It’s me, you idiot. Itsy. Where are you?”
I pointed to the phone and shrugged, and Ronnie took the front of my shirt between thumb and forefinger and led me, like a two-year-old, down the sidewalk.
“The Valley,” I said. “I’m in Van—”
“Do you know where Lumia lived?”
“No.
“Are you sure of that?”
“No, actually I’m not. I have a rare neurological disorder called Advanced Address Amnesia. I can never find the same place twice.”
“Then you have been here.”
“No, I have not, and if you have a point, get to it.”
“I want you to come over here. Now.”
“We all want something,” I said. “Don’t we?”
“You say you felt something for her. If that’s true, get over here.”
I put a hand on Ronnie’s wrist, and we stopped walking. I took a deep breath and said, “What’s the address?”
The address was a two-story apartment house in a charm-free block of Reseda, a flatland area that was once apparently covered from horizon to horizon with the spiky flowers called mignonettes in English and French, and resedas in Spanish. Since those flowery halcyon days, the San Fernando Valley has been paved remorselessly, and few places are more paved than Reseda, so the resedas are, at this point, a meaningless verbal indicator, about as accurate a description of the current reality as “pacific” is of the world’s biggest and stormiest ocean.
The Valley had a million apartment houses just like Lumia’s. I’d even lived in a couple of them: two stories of Confederate-gray stucco, flat roof, aluminum-frame windows, and an external stairway dead center in the building, leading to the upper floor. Not a moment’s thought had been given to charm or grace or even whimsy. Cost-effectiveness, 100; aesthetics, zero. From the spot where I parked the car, I could see that the door of the third apartment to the left of the stairway on the second story was wide open. The day was dull and gloomy, as though it had only partially won the battle with the night and was half-considering throwing the match and turning in early. Making way for Nyx.
Dark as the day was, the open doorway was a rectangle of black. I went quietly up the stairs, stopped at the top, and, from sheer force of habit, listened for a moment. What I heard was a low, unvarying, almost mechanical string of repetitive profanities, the sort of semi-conscious, anti-prayer monologue that comes to someone who expects to be disappointed and furious about everything in life and has been proved right over and over again.
Not much question about who it was. I made a point of scuffing my shoes as I walked. Itsy Winkle didn’t seem like someone it would be safe to surprise. Even so, when I got to the door I found myself looking straight into the barrel of the little gun I’d seen the previous night.
And there she towered, peering down at me over the gun, all knees, eyes, elbows, and predatory intent, seeming even bigger in a place that hadn’t been built to fit her. When she recognized me, the gun stayed right where it was, aimed at the bridge of my nose.
I said, “Hello to you, too.”
She said, and her voice was stretched thin with what sounded like rage, “Did you do this?”
Since I’d seen essentially nothing but the gun and those awful eyes, it took me a minute to figure out what this was, but then I took in the state of the apartment, which looked like a giant had picked it up and shaken it like a doll’s house. The floor was strewn with books, clothes, silverware, and all sorts of other stuff. “You think—” I said. “Why would I—” I stopped. “Right,” I said. “If I’d gotten here first, I would have suspected you.”
“Me,” she said. It was more a threat than a question. She even brought the gun up a few inches so she could site down it. Head shots require more precision than gut shots. It was remarkable how steady her hand was.
“Sure,” I said. “For the same reason you thought of me. The money she was given to do the job. It had to be here.”
“You think I’d steal that—”
“Of course I do. Why not? It’s not like she’s going to get a chance to spend it. Tell you the truth, if I’d known where she lived, I probably would have come after it. I’m running up expenses all over the
place, researchers, fake documents, will probates, hotel rooms, hired protection, you name it.” The gun came down a few inches. I said, “But if I’d been the one who searched this place, Itsy, you wouldn’t even have known that I was here. None of this mess. And not just professional pride, either. I’d never handle her things that way. I’d handle them the way she would have wanted me to.”
She let the gun hand drop to her side. “Probably true,” she said. “People do say you have skills.”
“If I come in there, are you going to shoot me?”
“Am I—no,” she said, slipping the gun into one of her leather pockets. “The moment has passed.” Her eyebrows contracted to a point where they almost met. “But why do you want to come in?”
“For the other reason you called me, if you decided to let me live. They tossed the place, but that doesn’t mean they found anything. Burglars are better than most people at hiding stuff, and you, if you’ll excuse me, are out of practice, so you thought of me. If you mentally reverse engineer a few hundred successful boosts, like I have, you come to realize that the average old bear has no idea how to hide anything.”
“And if you find it?”
“Fifty-fifty. Sound okay? I really am running up a tab on this, and you know she’d want me to find these assholes.”
I needed to get Itsy out of my way. It made me uneasy to have to keep walking around her, where I was within strangling reach of those fingers, while she teetered and creaked above me. So I cleared a space on the couch and searched every cubic inch of it before I asked her to sit down. The first objective was to restore some sort of order, see if I could look at the place as Lumia had. There wasn’t much I could do about the pile of hair, dirt, and mystery waste that had been shaken onto the carpet from the bag in the canister vacuum cleaner, but everything else could be sorted and categorized. Step one was to pick up each item that had been tossed and/or ransacked, pat it down, and then find an appropriate place for it, and I did all of it under the gaze of those startled and startling eyes. The process seemed to interest her, but I realized she was probably making sure I didn’t locate and pocket anything she might want. When I had a few piles of stuff, I said, “Pitch in a little, would you? No, no, stay on the couch. You’re a woman. As I hold these things up, you tell me where you think Lumia might have kept them.”
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