Void Moon (1999)

by Michael Connelly

  Until that last night at the Cleopatra.

  When Cassie got to the front door she looked up at the joists of the roof overhang and saw the old bullet camera was still in place. She was wondering if it still worked and got her answer when Leo answered the door before she knocked. She smiled.

  "Guess it still works."

  " 'Course it does. Had that there goin' on what, eight years now. Person put it there guaranteed it for life and I believed her. Nobody knew her shit better than her."

  He smiled.

  "How are you, Cassie? Come on in."

  He stepped back to let her in. Leo Renfro was in his early forties, with a trim, medium build. He had thinning hair that was already gray. It had been gray when Cassie met him almost a decade earlier. He'd told her then that it was from having to grow up too quickly. He'd practically raised Max, his stepbrother, after their mother died in a drunk-driving accident. Leo's father was an unknown but Max's wasn't. He was in Nevada State doing ten to twenty-five for armed robbery.

  Cassie stepped into the house and Leo pulled her into a fast, tight bear hug. It felt good to her. It felt comforting, like home.

  "Hey, kid," he said with a somber and loving tone.

  "Leo," she said and then pulled back with a concerned look on her face. "I can say your name now, right?"

  He laughed and pointed toward the back and started leading the way to where she knew he kept his office in a wood-paneled den off the pool.

  "You look good, Cassie. Real good. Like the short hair. Is that sort of a butch thing left over from High Desert? What was it I heard they call the lamb choppers up there, the High Dee Hoes?"

  He glanced back at her and winked.

  "You look good, too, Leo. Still the same."

  He looked back again and they exchanged smiles. It had been years since Cassie had seen him but Leo had barely changed. Maybe a little less hair but still deeply tanned and trim. She assumed he must still be following his regimen of yoga and then morning lap swimming to stay in shape.

  In the living room they had to step around a couch that was oddly placed at an angle facing the corner of the room rather than the fireplace. This caused Cassie to look about and she noticed all of the furnishings of the room were positioned strangely, as if the fireplace - the obvious center of the room - were not there.

  "Remind me to get your interior designer's number before I leave," she said. "What style is this - postmodern break-in?"

  "Hey, I know. I just had the place feng-shuied and this is the best I can do with it. For now."

  "Feng what?"

  "Feng shui. The Chinese art of harmonic placement. Feng shui."

  "Oh."

  She thought she remembered reading about feng shui. Something about it being the latest cottage industry in L.A. among the cosmically enlightened.

  "This place is doomed," Leo was saying. "Bad vibes in all directions. I feel like Dick Van Dyke - comin' in the door and tripping over the furniture. I should just get out of here. But I've been here so long and I have the pool right here and everything. I don't know what I'm gonna do."

  They came to the office. Leo's desk was at one end, next to the row of sliding glass doors that looked out on the pool. Lined along the opposite wall were dozens of cases of champagne. Seeing the stacks of boxes gave Cassie pause. In the past, the Leo Renfro she knew and had worked for would never have stolen property in his own home. He was a middleman who set capers into motion and arranged for the fencing of the merchandise afterward but he almost never came into physical proximity with it unless it was cash. Seeing the champagne right in his office made Cassie question what she was doing there. Maybe things had changed with Leo since Max. She stood in the doorway to the office as if afraid to enter.

  Leo went behind his desk and looked back at her. He didn't sit down.

  "What's the matter?"

  She gestured toward the lineup of boxes completely covering one wall. There must be fifty cases, she guessed.

  "Leo, you never kept the swag in your own house. It's not only dangerous but stupid. You - "

  "Relax, would you? It's all totally legit. I bought it - ordered it through the distributor. It's an investment."

  "In what?"

  "The future. You watch. The millennium celebration is gonna liquidate all stores of champagne. Around the whole fucking world. What's left will sky-rocket in value and I'll be sitting pretty. Every goddamn restaurant in town will be coming to me. You should see my garage. I'm hoarding five hundred cases of this stuff. Six thousand bottles. I double my wholesale price and take home a couple hundred K minimum. You want to buy in on it? I've got investors."

  She came into the room and looked out through the doors at the glimmering surface of the pool. It was lighted from beneath the surface and glowed like blue neon in the night.

  "I can't afford it."

  She could see the automatic vacuum slowly moving across the bottom, the water tube trailing behind it and the debris bag rising, undulating in the water like a ghost.

  She could hear the background hiss of the nearby freeway. It was the same at her house in Hollywood. She wondered for a moment if it was a coincidence that they both had places so close to the freeway. Or was it something about thieves. They needed to know the escape route was close.

  "You'll be able to buy in after we do this thing here," Leo said. "Come on, sit down."

  He sat down and opened the middle desk drawer. He took out a pair of half-cut reading glasses and put them on. There was a manila file waiting on the desk. Leo was all business. He could just as well have been preparing to go over a tax return with a client as the details of a hot prowl burglary. He actually had studied accounting at UCLA until he realized he wanted to manage money that was his, not somebody else's.

  Cassie came over and sat down in the padded leather chair at the desk opposite Leo. She looked up at a string of red coins that was hanging from the ceiling directly over the desk. Leo caught her stare and waved up at the coins.

  "That's the cure. The remedy."

  "Cure for what?"

  "For the feng shui. They're I-Ching coins. They make up for the lack of harmony. That's why I have them hanging right here. Where I do my work is the most important spot in the house."

  He gestured to his desk and the open file.

  "Leo, you were always paranoid but I think you're finally wigging out."

  "No. I believe it. And it works. Another thing is the stars. I consult the stars now before making a plan."

  "You're not instilling confidence in me. You mean you're asking some astrologer for a blessing on your moves? Leo, don't you - "

  "I don't ask or tell anybody anything. I do it on my own. See?"

  He turned and pointed to a row of books held between bookends on the credenza behind him. They all had titles that appeared to be taken from astrological circumstances. One title was Calendar of Voids and another book was called Investing in the Stars.

  "Leo, you used to just quote your Jewish grandfather who said things like 'Never pick up a penny that is heads down.' What about him?"

  "I still believe in him. I believe in it all. The important thing is to believe. Not to hope, but to believe. There is a difference. I believe in these things and so that helps me do what I have to do and accomplish what it is I want to accomplish."

  Cassie thought it was a philosophy that could have come from nowhere else but California.

  "That's the beauty of it," Leo was saying. "I'm covered from all directions. It's good to have any edge you can get, Cass. Max used to say that, remember?"

  Cassie nodded somberly.

  "I remember."

  A long pause of uneasy silence and sad memories went by. Cassie looked out at the pool. She remembered swimming with Max one night after they thought Leo was asleep. Then the pool light came on and they were naked.

  She finally looked back at Leo.

  He had opened the file on the desk. There was a quarter-inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills
in the file along with a page of neatly printed but indecipherable notes torn from a yellow legal pad. One of Leo's precautions. He always kept notes in a coded language that only he knew. He was studying the notes on the yellow paper.

  "Now, where do I begin?" he said to himself.

  "How about with the reason you said I won't like this one."

  Leo leaned back in his chair and studied her for a long moment.

  "Well," Cassie finally said, "are you going to tell me or is it written in the stars somewhere for me to read?"

  He ignored the jab.

  "This is the deal. It's in Las Vegas, which I already warned you about. It's a lot of cash, I am told. But it's a contract job and - "

  "With who?"

  "Some people. That's all you need to know. Everybody has a part. Nobody knows everybody else. Not even me. We got a guy watching the mark right now and he's just a voice on the phone that tells me things. I have no idea who he is. He knows me by phone but he doesn't know about you. See? It's safest that way. Different players hold different pieces of the same puzzle. Only nobody sees the whole puzzle, just the piece they hold."

  "That's fine, Leo, but I'm not talking about the bit players. You know who it is you're setting this up for, right?"

  "Yeah, I know them. I've done business with them in the past. They're good people. In fact, they're investors."

  He pointed to the wall of champagne cases.

  "Okay," Cassie said. "As long as you vouch for them. What else won't I like about this?"

  "What else? The big what else is that it's the Cleo."

  "Jesus Christ!"

  "I know, I know."

  He raised his hands as if surrendering in an argument. He then leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses. He put one of the ear hooks in the corner of his mouth and let the glasses dangle.

  "Leo, you expect me to go back into that place, let alone Las Vegas, after what happened?"

  "I know."

  "I'm never going to set foot in that goddamn place again."

  "I know."

  She got up and stood with her face just inches from one of the sliders. She looked out at the pool again. The vacuum was still moving. Back and forth, back and forth. It reminded her of her own existence.

  Leo put his glasses back on and spoke to her in a calming and measured tone.

  "Now can I say something?"

  She gestured for him to go on though she still didn't look at him.

  "Okay, let's remember something here. You called me, I didn't call you. You asked me to set up a job. You said you wanted it big and you wanted it soon. And you wanted it to be cash. Have I got all of that right?"

  He waited for an answer but she didn't say anything.

  "I'll take your silence as a yes. Well, Cass, this is that job."

  She turned to face him.

  "But I didn't say - "

  He held up his hand, silencing her.

  "Let me finish. All I'm saying is that I brought this to you for consideration. You don't want it, fine. I'll make some calls and I'll go with someone else. But, girl, you were the best I ever knew of on the hot prowl. You are a true artist, if ever I knew one. Even Max would have admitted that. He was the teacher but the student got smarter. So when these guys came to me and told me about this thing, I started thinking it was you all the way. But, hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything. Something else will come down the pipe and I'll call you then. I don't know when that will be, but you'll still be first on my list. You will always be first, Cassie. Always."

  She slowly came back to her chair and sat down.

  "You're the artist, Leo. A great bullshit artist. That speech is your way of saying I should do it, isn't it?"

  "I didn't say that."

  "You don't have to. It's just that, Leo, you believe in your stars and your I-Ching coins and all your other things. The one thing I have to believe is that that place, that night . . . that there was just a ghost or something in the mix. A jinx. And it was either on us or on that place. For six years I've been saying that it wasn't us, that it was that place. And now you . . . you want me to go back there."

  Leo folded the file closed. Cassie watched the stack of money disappear.

  "I only want you to do what you want to do. But I have to make some calls now, Cass. I need to set this up with somebody else tonight because the job has to be tomorrow night. The mark's supposed to check out Thursday morning."

  Cassie nodded and felt this awful sense that if she passed on this job there wouldn't be another. She didn't know if this was because Leo wouldn't trust her or because of something else. It was just a premonition. Her mind flashed on the scene of a beach and the surf coming up and wiping out letters drawn in the sand. They were gone before Cassie could read them but she knew what they spelled. Take the job.

  "What's my end if I do it?"

  Leo looked at her and hesitated.

  "You sure you want to know?"

  She nodded. He opened the file again and slid the yellow page out from beneath the stack of currency. He spoke while looking down at his notes.

  "Okay, this is the deal. We get the first hundred off the top and forty points on the rest. They've been watching this guy. They think he's got about five hundred K, all cash. In a briefcase. That pans out, that comes to two-sixty for us. I'd cut it sixty/forty, you on the big end. Better than a hundred and a half for you. I don't know if it's enough to disappear on permanently but it's a fucking A start and not bad for a night's work."

  He looked up at her.

  "Not bad for them, either," she said. "Two-forty for doing nothing."

  "Not nothing. They found the mark. That's most important. They also have somebody on the inside who will make things very easy for you."

  He paused for a moment to let the money and the details sink in.

  "You interested now?"

  Cassie thought a moment.

  "You don't know when the next one will be coming, do you?"

  "Never do. Right now, this one's all I got. But to be honest, I wouldn't count on the next one being this kind of money. Probably take two, three jobs to put this kind of bread together. This is the big one. This is the one you want."

  He leaned back in his chair, looked over his glasses at her and waited. She knew he had played it just right. He'd let her run out with the line but now was slowly reeling it back in. She was hooked and she knew it. A job with a potential payoff of more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars didn't come along often. The most she and Max had ever pulled on a caper was sixty thousand dollars they took off an assistant to the sultan of Brunei. It was pocket change to the sultan but she and Max had celebrated until dawn at the Aces and Eights Club in North Vegas.

  "All right," she finally said. "I'm interested. Let's talk about it."

  8

  LEO leaned over the counter where he was working and spoke without looking at his notes or at Cassie.

  "The mark is registered under the name Diego Hernandez. He's a pro, a TexMex out of Houston. His game is baccarat. Far as anyone knows he plays clean. He's just good at it. Spends a few days at each casino and moves on, that way he isn't taking too much out of one place and raising eyebrows too high. They tracked him from the Nugget to the Stardust and now the Cleo. Cleaned up every place he went."

  They were in the kitchen of Leo's house. Cassie sat at the kitchen table while Leo stood at the counter and made them peanut butter, honey and banana sandwiches. It was his specialty. He used seven-grain bread.