“No.”
“Because they cannot have these things.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ve read her will.”
“I signed it,” he said. “I was a—a witness. You must have seen my name. I wrote it very large.”
“Well, I saw it, but I have to confess that I didn’t look at the witnesses’ signatures, just hers.”
He gave me the kind of level look that can be produced only by a totally honest person and the occasional psychopath who can make himself believe he’s a totally honest person. “Why would you be reading her will? Do you represent her?”
“Who?” I asked.
“No, no, no, no,” Eduardo said. “You can stop bullshitting me right now or you can go back out into the rain.”
I said, “She, if you’re talking about her father’s illegitimate granddaughter, sent my friend. She believed there was something in the house that belonged to her.”
“What?”
I took a deep breath. “A doll.”
He sat back and put his hands flat on his thighs like someone who was about to lean forward. “The house is full of dolls.”
“So I saw.”
“You were in the house?”
“After my friend died.”
“We didn’t take any dolls,” Eduardo said. “We—we were loyal to Miss Daisy, but we knew about that woman, heard about her endlessly, and, I suppose you could say, we felt for her. She came there once and forced her way in. She said that Miss Daisy had stolen something from her, something Miss Daisy’s father had wanted to give the woman’s mother or grandmother. As you said, a doll. You have never heard such screaming. We knew Miss Daisy better than most people, and there was nothing about her that made us believe she hadn’t stolen whatever it was. Even if she didn’t want it, she would have kept it. It was who she was.”
I said, “I’ve gotten that impression.”
He nodded a couple of times, just sort of sealing the pact that we both knew she had been a nightmare. “What we took—wait, stay here.” He got up, rubbing at the small of his back, and left the room. I sat there, feeling a kind of empty-tank lassitude steal over me. This had been a long and unpleasant quest, crowded with miserable people, both living and dead. Eduardo seemed to be the only decent human being I’d met who had escaped the black hole of Horton House.
“Here,” he said, coming back in. “Read this.”
It was a typewritten document, dated almost two years earlier, on the stationery of a lawyer, the guy named Loeb whom Miss Daisy had put in charge of her will. It said, in essence, that she was formally making a present of the furnishings and artwork in Horton House, without reservation or exceptions, to Eduardo Chavez, Rosa Reyes, and Enrique Gutierrez, aka Henry, in recognition of the faithful care they had taken of her during her prolonged illness. The three of them, in short, were free to take anything and everything, with the single exception of the items in Miss Daisy’s room while she remained alive. After she passed, they were welcome to all that, too. Questions could be directed to the legal office where the notarized deed was on file.
“She didn’t really do it for us,” Eduardo said. “She was certain that the family would descend on the house while she was still warm, that’s what she liked to say, still warm, and pick the place clean. This way, it would already be clean when they got there.”
“Did you take the things from her room after she was gone?”
“I didn’t,” he said. He was looking straight into my eyes. “And I don’t believe Henry and Rosa did, either. None of us even wanted to go in there.”
My phone rang: Louie. I rejected it and said, “Just out of curiosity, how’d you divide stuff up?”
A very small smile; he’d been hoping I’d ask. “Mostly, we wanted different things. If more than one of us wanted something, we put out names into a hat. And it went on that way. It was very agreeable. And we traded a little, too.”
“Whose idea was the cheap furniture?”
“Ours. We still needed places to sit and eat. And Miss Daisy, when Rosa told her about it, she laughed and said her relatives would probably fight over that, too.” He shook his head. “Miss Daisy, she had so much hate.”
“There were three of you,” I said, “but when I was in the house, I only saw one bedroom behind the kitchen. Who stayed there?”
“We did,” he said. “Rosa and Henry, they were together, you know? Now, they’re married. So they slept there together two nights and I slept there alone one night, and we did that over and over. Taking turns.” He pinched at the cloth of his trousers, paying attention to what he was doing, and I had the sense that he was about to confess something and was avoiding my eyes. He said, “I didn’t like to sleep there. We were not alone.”
I said, “I’ve never believed in ghosts, but Horton House is different. Who was it?”
“Two of them,” he said. “The old man and Miss Collins, after she was gone.”
“Miss Collins,” I said. “The second bedroom upstairs?”
He nodded. “She was very old, so old you could see her veins through her skin. She was Miss Daisy’s nursemaid, brought into the house, she told us, when she was nineteen and just arrived from Ireland. She said the old man asked her to stay when it was clear that Miss Daisy was not—was never going to be like other people, and that it had been arranged that Miss Collins would be paid as long as she stayed, even after he was dead, until Miss Daisy turned twenty-one. When he did die, two of the old man’s relatives came in to take care of things until Miss Daisy came of age and threw them out. But she kept Miss Collins, although I think it was mostly to torment her. Miss Collins didn’t know anyone else in America. She had no money to go back to Ireland. This had been her only job, and Miss Daisy told her that she wouldn’t get a reference if she tried to leave. If anyone ever asked for one, Miss Daisy said she’d tell them that Miss Collins was a thief. Miss Collins told me all of this. She had no one to talk to, and I liked her. By the time I was hired, fifty years ago, she was already too old to get another job, and there was no one in America who would take her in. So she stayed. Every month or two Miss Daisy would kick her out, and Miss Collins would sleep on the front porch until Miss Daisy wanted her back again. She died eight or nine years ago, and Miss Daisy surprised all of us. She wept for days. She wouldn’t let us touch Miss Collins’s room. It’s exactly the way it was the night she died.”
“And you think Miss Collins haunted the house?”
“She and the old man. Sometimes in the dark I would see the old man, like a thick shadow, going up the last few stairs, right in front of his big picture, the one that hung there. He never did anything except that. He was never anywhere else. Miss Collins, we never saw Miss Collins, we just felt her, all three of us did. Just suddenly sadness was in the room, blown in like fog, nothing but sadness. Rosa would say, ‘Hello, Miss Collins. Please sit down,’ and some of the time that would make it go away.”
I said, “It’s the saddest place I’ve ever been.”
“It will not be a bad thing to knock it down. They should dig a hole there and fill it with water and salt and let it sit for years. Except it would breed horrible mosquitoes.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Why all the baby powder? When I first went in, I almost choked on it.”
He nodded. “Miss Daisy. She said other people stank. The stink of people made her sick.”
We sat with that one for a moment, and then I said, “Only two more questions.”
“Up to you. You go away, I will just watch television.”
“The bed she was in. It was filthy, it was lopsided, it was—it was terrible. Why?”
“She wouldn’t allow us to change it, although once in a while we did. We carried her to the toilet when she called us, but sometimes she didn’t bother. We tried changing it when she was in there several times, but she went crazy when she saw it. She ac
cused us of trying to steal from her.”
“Do you know what she was hiding?”
He continued to meet my eyes.
“Is that the last question?”
“No, but I’d like an answer if you have one.”
“We didn’t know. She gave us everything in the house, and we knew we could have the things in her room, too, when she was gone. So we left it alone. And, yes, when she was gone, Rosa and Henry looked. We found nothing.”
I said, “Her door had been kicked in. She’d propped a chair against it.”
“I did that,” he said. “Several weeks before she died. We smelled something burning, Rosa smelled it first, and we all thought the same thing: she is burning down the house. I knocked on the door, I banged on it. She called out for me to go away. I had to kick in the door. It was just some stuff, clothes and things, she was burning in the fireplace. She had crawled across the room—”
He stopped because I had stood up. I blinked down at him, as surprised as he was. I said, “I should be going.”
“Do you want to see the old man?”
“At this point,” I said, “I’m actually afraid to ask what you mean.”
“His picture.” He got up, too. “In here.”
31
On the Verge of My Great Adventure
I don’t know exactly what I’d expected: perhaps a blunt-featured, broad-shouldered bruiser just a step or two up from the professional wrestling ring, but Edgar Francis Codwallader, aka Henry Wallace Horton, Jr., wasn’t it. He was thin-faced and parsimonious-looking, with crooked, projecting teeth, and one eye conspicuously higher than the other, a feature he’d shared with another spindly desperado, Billy the Kid. It was hard to find in his face the student of whom Miss Greening had been so fond or the guy who read and liked all those fat English novels. If I’d had to choose from among the living someone he reminded me of, I probably would have gone with the flaking nascent lawyer, Walter.
I sat in the car, working things through, trying for alternative courses of action, and not looking forward to the rest of the evening. I was about to reopen Horton’s book when the phone rang again, and again it was Louie.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been talking to one of the ghosts of Horton House.”
Louie said, “The jewel. It’s a big blue something.”
“I know,” I said. “A sapphire. Or, at least that’s what he seemed to be focusing on in his—wait a minute. How do you know?”
“Because I’m looking at it, whadya think?”
“Hold it, hold it. Looking at what?”
“At the story I was talking about, where Sherlock lets the crook off. What the guy stole was some kind of jewel that was blue. See? The one thing that doesn’t seem to fit—”
“What’s the story?”
“The umm, hold on a minute, it’s a word I gotta look at if I’m gonna say it. It’s the, umm, hold on, hold on, here we are, ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.’ I thought a carbuncle was something you had an operation to get rid of.”
“It is, it’s like boils or a whole bunch of boils, all together.”
Louie said, “Ouch.”
“But it used to mean a red stone, a ruby or a garnet, usually.”
“This one’s blue.”
“A ruby and a sapphire are essentially the same mineral, corundum, so a blue carbuncle would be a sapphire. No, wait.” I closed my eyes and let the unsorted stuff in my mental dryer tumble around until the right thing fell past the window. “Jewelers also used ‘carbuncle’ to describe a stone that had been carved but not faceted, one where the shape was rounded. Jesus.”
“Jesus what?”
“That’s actually it. The rounded top, it really is the rock he’s planning to steal. In his book.”
“It’s a Christmas story,” Louie said.
“I don’t know what time of year it is in the period he’s writing about in his memoir, when he spotted the jewel. He doesn’t say anything about the season. Doesn’t feel cold.” I was paging through the old man’s journal on my phone. “August, he arrived in August and he doesn’t date things, but I’d guess this is October by now, late October at the latest.”
“Want to know the trick?”
“There’s a trick?”
“Yeah, the way the guy hides the rock in the story, he feeds it to a goose and then, when the coast is clear, the idea is to terminate the goose and take the rock out of its crop or craw or something that a goose has.”
“He’s living in a hotel,” I said. “Pretty fancy hotel, too. I doubt he had a goose.”
“I’ll tell you,” Louie said, “this is one of the dumbest conversations I ever had. But still, you’re looking for a sapphire, too, huh? Can’t be a coincidence, can it?”
“I’m not looking for it,” I said. “I’m ninety percent sure I know where it is.”
It was a little after eleven, and it seemed appropriate to arrive around midnight, so I had some time to spend with the old man’s book, and bang, there it was. He managed to meet Doyle at a gathering of the Eternal Life Society or whatever the hell it was, even got to talk to him for a while. Found out, he says—sounding amazed—that Doyle wrote mystery stories of some kind. I lost track of time while I was reading, and when I looked up I realized it was later than I thought, so I did a three-point turn to put Eduardo’s place behind me and headed, with no pleasant expectations, down the well-worn path to Horton House.
On my first drive-by it was obvious that there had been a couple of changes.
For one thing, someone had clearly felt there was a shortage of darkness, because the streetlight in front was out and there was a scattering of glass or plastic on the sidewalk beneath it. The hedge was so high that the missing light wouldn’t make much difference on the other side of its thick green border, but the approach via the sidewalk was now considerably less public than it had been before.
Second, the place was now surrounded by a chain link fence. It was eight feet high, which was a break because standard chain link goes all the way up to twelve feet, and above eight or nine feet it sways quite a bit beneath a climber’s weight. It’s not actually the sway that’s the problem, although it causes the problem. No fencing surface I can think of gives a climber more foot- and hand-holds than chain link; it absolutely begs to be climbed. The problem is that swaying on a fence made of metal links fastened to metal poles is noisy. The trick to climbing it, if you’re interested, is to do it straddling a pole with the pole separating your right and left appendages. The pole absorbs and tames most of the fence’s movement, making it the quietest place to climb. It also gives you a nice, stiff two or three feet at the top when it’s time to throw a leg over to the other side.
I went back to the car to put on my new shoes. The old ones were soaked through. I’d come full circle on the fast food wheel by stopping at a McDonald’s a few miles away, and while my food was being custom-cooked or salted or, at least, bagged up, I’d ducked into the restroom and put on a completely new set of clothes, all black, never worn before; there’s always one in my trunk. They’d been put into a plastic bag and stapled closed by the clerk from whom I bought them, and since then they’d been waiting for the next job. I’d still never actually touched the outside of the garments because I’d worn food service gloves to open the bag and put everything on. I put the gloves on again, just before getting out of the car. DNA is everywhere, but there’s no need to make it any easier than it has to be.
When I closed the car door, my feet warm and dry for the moment, I found that the rain had temporarily exhausted its spite, tapering off to a mist, drilled by the occasional sprinkle for comic relief. I hiked a block from my car and walked past the house, which was so dark it almost seemed to thicken the night surrounding it, a giant drop of black ink spreading in water. One pass confirmed something I’d been certain of, which was that Horton House back
ed up against an alley. Many of LA’s older places are built to face a street and turn their backs on an alley, providing a rear entrance for tradespeople, servants, and others not deemed worthy of the front door. Cops don’t patrol the alleys as often as they do the streets.
There was only one light in the alley, on a high pole halfway between the cross streets at the end of the block. The houses that had their backs to me were all dark. I picked the second pole in, checked the angle of Eaglet’s gun in the cargo pocket of my new black pants, pulled on the food service gloves, and started to climb. When I reached the top, before I committed myself to swinging a leg over to the other side, I stopped, breathed silently as I counted off two minutes, and listened.
I could hear the occasional car up on Pico. I could hear a cloud-muffled plane on the long downward diagonal to LAX. I could just barely hear a laugh track from some sitcom—a bunch of people, some of them undoubtedly dead, reacting uproariously to a joke they’d never heard; the dead live merrily on in sitcom laugh tracks. The hilarity was probably leaking into the night through a half-open window two or three houses away. I could hear something that sounded like the tack-tack of a dog’s nails on a hardwood floor, then three dogs, then a mess of dogs, and then it was raining hard enough to drown out any noise I might have made topping the fence, so I was over it and sheltering beside the dark slab of Horton House within a few seconds. The house chose that moment to emit a basso profundo creak, and I have to confess that I took several quick steps back into the rain.
And from that perspective, I registered a darker gloom, a hard-edged gloom, in the yard to the house’s left.
It was massive and angular, and I like to think the part of my brain that makes deductions figured out what it was before the attention hog in my conscious mind—which likes to take credit for everything—could put a name to it. It was a bulldozer. Or, rather it was the bulldozer, the forty-ton, steel-and-rubber manifestation of Miss Daisy’s willpower, potent even in death. Beyond it, its highest point going all ghosty in the mist, was a crane, from which dangled a very large, very heavy-looking wrecking ball. The bulldozer was low and squat, the crane-and-wrecking-ball setup thin and vertical. It was easy to see how they would work as a team, the Laurel and Hardy of destruction.
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