“You’re just going to sit here and read?”
I put the phone aside. “Why? Are you feeling left out? Is there something you need to share?”
“I don’t know,” Louie said. “They’re in your house, not mine. I thought you were going to scare them off or something.”
I picked up the phone again. “I changed my mind. This way, I know where they are.”
“And they know you know. At least they probably figure you do, since that’s what the camera is for, and all.”
“Then they’ll leave, eventually, when I don’t arrive and they start to feel silly. But in the meantime, I don’t have to think about what they’re up to. Anyway, I think I know where they’ll be later tonight.”
“Yeah, where?”
I did an imitation of being totally absorbed in my reading.
“How would you scare them, anyway?”
“I’m told there’s an alarm,” I said, “a really deafening WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP, that I can trigger from here.”
“You and me and three, four guys,” he said, “we could go wait at the bottom of that fire escape and you could set that thing off.”
“And somebody gets killed,” I said. “No. I plan to be completely and solely in charge of who gets killed.”
That earned me a dubious-looking squint. “Yeah, how?”
“Strategy,” I said. “Hey, it’s almost nine. A time your guy or girl is supposed to swap the thousand for the old man’s will. Are you supposed to be there?”
“Walter said no.”
“Do you want to go home or something?”
“No.”
“More pie?”
“Don’t even say the word,” Louie said. “Tell you what, though. Why don’t you get up and go back to your side of the booth before the rumors start.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “You’re much too old for me.”
“Hey, I’m not that much—”
“No,” I said, “but you look older.”
“What a guy,” Louie said. “Low blow to aim at someone who’s going gray, don’t you think?”
“I haven’t seen any gray.”
“Bullshit. I saw you sneaking looks at my hair in that other restaurant.”
“I wasn’t sneaking—”
“It’s not like it’s subtle,” Louie said. He used the hand with the fork in it to trace a vertical line down the side of his ponytail. “See? Silver threads among the gold. And a few weeks ago I decided to start a beard, one of those neat little triangular ones, like a jazz—”
“A goatee.”
“I know what it’s called,” he said. “Whadya think, I never had a beard before? But four, five days in, I had to shave it. Two white stripes went from the corners of my mouth straight down to my jaw. Looked like I drooled bleach.”
I said, “That’s really interesting.”
“Oh, fuck you. So I look older. So what?”
I said, “Exactly. That’s what I said, you look older.”
I went back to my reading.
“Cheap victory,” he said. “So what’s the book?”
“Sherlock Holmes.”
“Wow,” he said. “Great shit.”
“You like Sherlock Holmes? Victorian England, all of that? Want me to tell you some stuff about Victorian silverware?”
“Naaahhh.”
“It’s interesting. By silverware standards, anyway.”
“Yeah, well, to you, I’m sure it is. But if you go back to your side of the booth before you tell me, I can promise, it’ll be boring on my side.”
“Have it your way.”
“Thing about Sherlock Holmes,” Louie said, absolutely refusing to let me end the conversation, “outa all the private eyes I ever read about, he’s the only one ever lets a crook go. Got him dead to rights and let him walk.”
“Really,” I said to be polite. “Why would he do that?”
“’Cause he thinks the crook, underneath his crookness, is basically a good guy who just made a mistake. So old Sherlock lets him walk and start his life over. Says, like, you’re not really a bad dude, you shouldn’t be in jail. Not quite like that, but words to that effect. In longer sentences. You ever read a book where a detective does that?”
“I don’t read genre fiction,” I lied.
“Oh, pardon me. So what’s Sherlock Holmes?”
“It’s the one thing that doesn’t fit, as Herbie used to say. So it’s probably important.”
“Got it,” Louie said. “But you know, if you were listening to me, you would have realized that Old Sherlock letting the crook go doesn’t fit, either. But, no, you’re probably right, I should shut up.”
I said, “Which story is that in?”
“I don’t know. They all run together.” He looked at his watch. “So,” he said, “what’re you gonna do now?”
“Read this thing. Wait for the next text from your girl at UCLA. Eventually, I’m going to go barge in on a guy named Eduardo.”
Louie turned his fork so the tines pointed to his left and used the edge to scour the blue stickiness on his plate. “Who’s he?” He licked the fork.
“He worked for Miss Daisy. For a long time.”
“Not long enough to make it into her will.”
Starting to read the same sentence for the fourth time, I said, “I have a feeling he wrote himself in, on an informal basis.”
He said, “Are they still there?”
I stifled a sigh, exited Sherlock Holmes’s London, and brought up Anime’s app. They weren’t in sight, but the entrance hall was still there, and I derived some comfort from that.
“Well, at least they haven’t blown the place up,” Louie said. His phone rang. “Yeah? Yeah, at the popcorn counter. You got people with you, like I said? No, they gotta be out of sight, but where they can see you. Get it in gear. Have them buy a ticket and then hang around outside till you come out, then they should go in and buy some popcorn, okay?”
I found my car keys in my pocket, took one last look at my hallway—still empty—and put my phone in my pocket. I’d just thought of another errand I needed to do before I went to see Eduardo. I waved at Glinda.
“Just in case he tries to stiff you, that’s all,” Louie said into the phone. “If he doesn’t give you the will, or if it doesn’t look like a will by a guy named Horton, you signal your guys and get the money back right then and there.” He looked up at me as I asked Glinda for the check. “It’ll be easy,” he said. “And have one of your guys stay there and follow him, wherever he goes. Call me when you’ve got the will. Hang on.” He took the phone away from his mouth. “Where you going?”
“Got a couple of errands to run.”
“But the will—”
“When you’ve got it, call me. You can read it to me.” I made a little circular gesture to take in the table. “I’ve got all this.”
“’Kay,” he said. “See you.” Into the phone, he said, “Not you, bonehead,” and I got up and went to pay my bill.
29
Islands in a Stream
After six or seven years of drought, the rain was doing its best to make up for all that lost time on a single evening, as though it suddenly realized there had been a lot of parties to which it hadn’t been invited. Even at double-time my wipers were pushing rills of water ahead of them, and visibility was so bad I got off the freeway at the first exit and splashed a wet zigzag to the residential streets south of Ventura Boulevard, narrow enough and empty enough and well enough lighted to let me relax at the wheel.
Three blocks away, I called Eaglet.
“Now what?” she said. She sounded aggrieved.
“Am I interrupting something?” I steered around a puddle where, for years, there had been a gaping pothole.
“We’re playing charades. I’m up.”
> “Well, give them three guesses each and then come out and meet me.”
“Men,” she said. “Threatened whenever women have a good time without them.”
“Bring your gun.”
She said, “I don’t want to leave. I’m having fun for the first time in—”
“I don’t need you,” I said. “I just need your—” The phone buzzed to announce a call. I said, “Call you back,” and then I said to Louie, “Do you have it?”
“Sure. I’m looking at it now. Not real complicated.”
I glanced up to realize I’d allowed the car to drift to the right and I was inches away from sideswiping a big steel-gray Lincoln. “Hang on,” I said, “I need to get to the curb.”
“That’s okay. I’ll keep reading. Well, well.”
“Well, well, what?” I asked.
“Are you at the curb?”
“Not yet. Give me a couple of seconds.” I came to a stop in front of a driveway, figuring I was a member of a very small minority who were crazy enough to leave home in this downpour. “Okay,” I said, “What’s the Readers Digest version?”
Louie said, “Sorry?”
“The overview. Skip everything except who gets what.”
“Okay. Um, um, um, here we are. He leaves about two million three, lot of money in those days, plus the house and a horse ranch in Hollywood, if you can imagine a horse ranch in Hollywood, to his daughter, Daisy Laurel Horton. She also gets his library and his pictures and his furniture and pretty much anything else that wasn’t nailed down. He says, and this is a quote, I know it will not begin to heal the breach, but we will have eternity to find each other and be reconciled. Guess he knows something I don’t. Umm, there’s a hundred thousand for someone named Benjamin Rommel, who’s described as ‘brother of my beloved, departed wife,’ and—here’s an interesting one—twenty-five K and a sealed letter, it says here, to Vesper Lucius Codwallader of Kansas City—”
“His father,” I said. “I’d love to read that letter. They hated each other.”
“And then there are eight bequests of five thou each to some guys, locations unknown, the will says, who are described as ‘people to whom I did a wrong.’ He gives the states he thinks they’ll be in, if they’re still alive, and leaves another five K to the executor of the will to pay one or more private detectives to track them down. He lists scars for a couple of them, another, he says, is missing two fingers, one was partly scalped—which I’ll try never to think about again—these are, you know, like identifying characteristics: You’re looking for a guy named Butch who’s missing half his scalp. Jeez, what a bunch. They got first names like, well, Butch, and Lefty, Kid, Russian Bill, Curly Bill, Laughing Bill—lotta Bills—Burping Sam, and Cassius. Wonder how Cassius got into the gang. Also ten thousand to the widow of someone named Hermann Wendt.”
“Is that it?”
“No, no, take a deep breath, would you? Couple thou to the Policeman’s Protective League, a hundred K to the American Spiritualist Society, and—ho, ho, here we are.”
“What?” I said.
“You know, you take life too quick. You gotta learn to slow down and savor the moment, especially a moment like—”
“Louie,” I said, “I’m warning you.”
“So, like I said, here we are: a little annuity, a hundred fifty K to be paid at the rate of seventy-five hundred a year for twenty years to someone he calls his ‘dear companion,’ Ramona Dillingham. And for her daughter, Adelaide, an additional fifty thou flat when she turns eighteen, and a doll, described as the Triste doll from the French firm of Jumeau, complete with its wardrobe.”
I said, “Bullseye. Adelaide was his illegitimate daughter.”
“How do you know?”
“Because Adelaide was his mother’s name. He loved his mother and hated his father.”
“So this is about a doll?”
“This is about someone being stiffed on a will, someone whom the maker of the will loved and the rest of the family loathed, someone to whom he left something extremely valuable, inside that damned doll. He gave it that way so his family wouldn’t try to keep it away from the kid they obviously saw as his bastard. But the mistress, the kid’s mother, knew what it really was, knew what was in it, and when she didn’t get it, she started a chain of absolutely pure, livid hatred over being cheated out of something astonishing, and it’s been passed down for a couple of generations. I’m ninety percent sure that the Bride of Plastic Man—sorry, Paulette Codwallader Creighton—is Adelaide’s granddaughter.” According to Miss Daisy’s will, anyway.
“Works for me,” Louie said. “How do you think Horton’s family found whatever was in the doll?”
“It’s only a guess,” I said, “but I think Miss Daisy, who was only twelve or thirteen when her father died, was a little girl who liked to play with dolls, and she found this one tucked away somewhere. What’s in it has got to be a jewel of some kind.”
“This reminds me of something,” Louie said. “If I can think of it, I’ll call you back.”
When she came out she was carrying her big purse and an umbrella. She was also being trailed by Rina. Halfway down the walk, Eaglet turned and gestured Rina back to the house, but Rina came up beside her and took the umbrella, a move that I thought boded well for her future as a chess player. Eaglet looked at me and did a what can I do shrug, and I waved them both forward.
“Hi, Dad,” Rina said, really pouring it on. She’d been a little too interested lately in life on my side of the law.
I said, “Do I know you? Whoever you are, you’re getting wet.”
Rina said to Eaglet, “We try not to notice these little memory lapses. Sometimes he puts his shoes in the freezer.”
To Eaglet, I said, “Let’s swap.” I held up my Glock, wrapped in the towel I keep to wipe the inside of the windows.
“What could that be?” Rina said.
Eaglet took it, ostentatiously turning her back on Rina, who reciprocated by pulling the umbrella back. Eaglet backed up and Rina literally put her chin on Eaglet’s shoulder, watching wide-eyed as Eaglet pulled out her own gun, wrapped in toilet paper. When Rina saw it, she said, “Aha.”
I said, “Fully equipped?”
“Of course,” Eaglet said. “I’m working, remember?”
“Who was doing the charade?” I asked.
“Eaglet was,” Rina said. “It was The Old Man and the Sea but we were pretending not to get it.”
“You were not,” Eaglet said. “That wasn’t even what it was.” To me, she said, “Why do you want mine?”
“It goes with my shirt.”
“Not to my eye, it doesn’t.” She leaned forward, and Rina thoughtfully moved the umbrella to cover her. “Hey, did you know you’ve got a spot on—”
“Yes,” I said, “and it feels like people have been pointing it out to me since the redwoods were saplings, maybe twelve hundred years ago.” I took the gun, bigger than I’d expected. “Is this thing clean?”
Eaglet gave me the look I’d probably get if I’d asked an astrophysicist whether he’d passed eighth-grade algebra. “Of course it is,” she said. “And if you’re planning to use it the way I think you are, I’m counting on its being even cleaner and at the bottom of a deep, deep well by the time the sun comes up. And that’s going to add a bunch to your bill.”
I tried to ignore the intensity of Rina’s interest in the exchange. “If I’m right about tonight,” I said, “which I figure is about a forty, forty-five percent probability, money’s not going to be a problem.”
“Really?” Rina said. “Can I have a pony?” She handed the umbrella to Eaglet, leaned in, letting the rain stream down on her, and kissed my cheek. Then she took a handful of my hair and gave it an attention-focusing yank. “You be careful, okay? And I want to hear about this when it’s over.”
Eduardo’s house wa
s a tiny, bare-bones bungalow in the Silverlake area, maybe eight hundred square feet, worth maybe $3,500 when it was sold for the first time. Now it was the sole survivor of a once-extensive lower middle-class neighborhood, and its new neighbors were aspiration on acid, built from property line to property line, a collision of mismatched architectural motifs as vulgar as a row of gold teeth. If Eduardo owned the place and he hadn’t been borrowing against it for decades, he was sitting on a small fortune.
With my graduate degree in burglars’ architecture, it took me all of thirty seconds to assemble the floor plan. Front door dead center, living room to the right, from where I was sitting across the street, dining room to the left, kitchen behind the dining room, two tiny bedrooms with bath behind the living room and entry area. Your basic working family’s home, circa 1935.
No lights on in front. I got out, getting drenched instantly, and splashed up the driveway. No lights on in back, either. I called his number and got a ring and then voicemail, so I hung up and went to the front door and rang the bell. Nada. Dripping wet, I headed back to the car.
As I sat there—reassuring myself that I was in no danger of nodding off and keeping my eyes amphetamine-wide to make certain it was true—the phone buzzed again. I’d stopped paying attention to it, since it went off every time Bride of Plastic Man and Mr. Nose entered the camera’s field of vision. I gave it a look: nobody. There were more lights on now, so either they were still there or they’d left and hadn’t given any thought to my electric bill. Then it buzzed again, and I was looking at a text. It said, Closing time. Here’s London.
Another attachment. Settling in but not getting too comfortable, I opened it up.
I skimmed through the ocean voyage, the landing, his first impressions of this new Old World until I began to see, as he wandered London, that he was paying special attention to certain people, and that the thing they had in common was that they wore serious jewelry.
It is as though they consider thievery unthinkable in the peaceful and plentiful world they occupy. Perhaps this confidence is a testimonial to the long subjugation of the lower classes, but women wear in public jewels that would be locked in safes in the more volatile land of my birth. In a single afternoon on the Strand it is possible to see jewelry enough to support a family for years.
Nighttown Page 27