by Ed McBain
It sounded like science fiction, but no less so in Keller’s boyhood than cruise control, or auto-response telephone answering systems, or a good ninety-five percent of the things he nowadays took for granted. Keller didn’t doubt for a minute that right this minute some bright young man in Detroit or Osaka or Bremen was working on steering control. There’d be some spectacular head-on collisions before they got the bugs out of the system, but before long every car would have it, and the accident rate would plummet and the state troopers wouldn’t have anybody to give tickets to, and everybody would be crazy about technology’s newest breakthrough, except for a handful of cranks in England who were convinced you had more control and got better mileage the old-fashioned way.
Meanwhile, Keller kept both hands on the steering wheel.
Sundowner Estates, home of William Wallis Egmont, was in Scottsdale, an upscale suburb of Phoenix. Tucson, a couple hundred miles to the east, was as close as Keller wanted to bring the Taurus. He followed the signs to the airport and left the car in long-term parking. Over the years he’d left other cars in long-term parking, but they’d been other men’s cars, with their owners stuffed in the trunk, and Keller, having no need to find the cars again, had gotten rid of the claim checks at the first opportunity. This time was different, and he found a place in his wallet for the check the gate attendant had supplied, and noted the lot section and the number of the parking space.
He went into the terminal, found the car rental counters, and picked up a Toyota Camry from Avis, using his fake credit card and a matching Pennsylvania driver’s license. It took him a few minutes to figure out the cruise control. That was the trouble with renting cars, you had to learn a new system with every car, from lights and windshield wipers to cruise control and seat adjustment. Maybe he should have gone to the Hertz counter and picked up another Taurus. Was there an advantage in driving the same model car throughout? Was there a disadvantage that offset it, and was some intuitive recognition of that disadvantage what had led him to the Avis counter?
“You’re thinking too much,” he said, and realized he’d spoken the words aloud. He shook his head, not so much annoyed as amused, and a few miles down the road realized that what he wanted, what he’d been wanting all along, was not someone to talk to him but someone to listen.
A little ways past an exit ramp, a kid with a duffel bag had his thumb out, trying to hitch a ride. For the first time that he could recall, Keller had the impulse to stop for him. It was just a passing thought; if he’d had his foot on the gas, he’d have barely begun to ease up on the gas pedal before he’d overruled the thought and sped onward. Since he was running on cruise control, his foot didn’t even move, and the hitchhiker slipped out of sight in the rearview mirror, unaware what a narrow escape he’d just had.
Because the only reason to pick him up was for someone to talk to, and Keller would have told him everything. And, once he’d done that, what choice would he have?
Keller could picture the kid, listening wide-eyed to everything Keller had to tell him. He pictured himself, his soul unburdened, grateful to the youth for listening, but compelled by circumstance to cover his tracks. He imagined the car gliding to a stop, imagined the brief struggle, imagined the body left in a roadside ditch, the Camry heading west at a thoughtful three miles an hour above the speed limit.
The motel Keller picked was an independent mom-and-pop operation in Tempe, which was another suburb of Phoenix. He counted out cash and paid a week in advance, plus a twenty-dollar deposit for phone calls. He didn’t plan to make any calls, but if he needed to use the phone he wanted it to work.
He registered as David Miller of San Francisco, and fabricated an address and zip code. You were supposed to include your license plate number, and he mixed up a couple of digits and put CA for the state instead of AZ. It was hardly worth the trouble, nobody was going to look at the registration card, but there were certain things he did out of habit, and this was one of them.
He always traveled light, never took along more than a small carry-on bag with a shirt or two and a couple changes of socks and underwear. That made sense when you were flying, and less sense when you had a car with an empty trunk and back seat at your disposal. By the time he got to Phoenix, he’d run through his socks and underwear. He picked up two three-packs of briefs and a six-pack of socks at a strip mall, and was looking for a trash bin for his dirty clothes when he spotted a Goodwill Industries collection box. He felt good dropping his soiled socks and underwear in the box, though not quite as good as he’d felt dishing out designer food to the smoke-stained rescue workers at Ground Zero.
Back at his motel, he called Dot on the prepaid cell phone he’d picked up on 23rd Street. He’d paid cash for it, and hadn’t even been asked his name, so as far as he could tell it was completely untraceable. At best someone could identify calls made from it as originating with a phone manufactured in Finland and sold at Radio Shack. Even if they managed to pin down the specific Radio Shack outlet, so what? There was nothing to tie it to Keller, or to Phoenix.
On the other hand, cell phone communications were about as secure as shouting. Any number of listening devices could pick up your conversation, and whatever you said was very likely being heard by half a dozen people on their car radios and one old fart who was catching every word on the fillings in his teeth. That didn’t bother Keller, who figured every phone was tapped, and acted accordingly.
He phoned Dot, and the phone rang seven or eight times, and he broke the connection. She was probably out, he decided, or in the shower. Or had he misdialed? Always a chance, he thought, and pressed Redial, then caught himself and realized that, if he had in fact misdialed, redialing would just repeat the mistake. He broke the connection again in midring and punched in the number afresh, and this time he got a busy signal.
He tried it again, got another busy signal, frowned, waited, and tried again. It had barely begun to ring when she picked up, barking “Yes?” into the phone, and somehow fitting a full measure of irritation into the single syllable.
“It’s me,” he said.
“What a surprise.”
“Is something wrong?”
“I had somebody at the door,” she said, “and the teakettle was whistling, and I finally got to the phone and picked it up in time to listen to the dial tone.”
“I let it ring a long time.”
“That’s nice. So I put it down and turned away, and it rang again, and I picked it up in the middle of the first ring, and I was just in time to hear you hang up.”
He explained about pressing redial, and realizing that wouldn’t work.
“Except it worked just fine,” she said, “since you hadn’t misdialed in the first place. I figured it had to be you, so I pressed star sixty-nine. But whatever phone you’re on, star sixty-nine doesn’t work. I got one of those weird tones and a canned message saying return calls to your number were blocked.”
“It’s a cell phone.”
“Say no more. Hello? Where’d you go?”
“I’m here. You said Say no more, and . . .”
“It’s an expression. Tell me it’s all wrapped up and you’re heading for home.”
“I just got here.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. How’s the weather?”
“Hot.”
“Not here. They say it might snow, but then again it might not. You’re just calling to check in, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, it’s good to hear your voice, and I’d love to chat, but you’re on a cell phone.”
“Right.”
“Call anytime,” she said. “It’s always a treat to hear from you.”
Keller didn’t know the population or acreage of Sundowner Estates, although he had a hunch neither figure would be hard to come by. But what good would the information do him? The compound was large enough to contain a full-size eighteen-hole golf course, and enough homes adjacent to it to support the operation.
And th
ere was a ten-foot adobe wall encircling the entire affair. Keller supposed it was easier to sell homes if you called it Sundowner Estates, but Fort Apache would have better conveyed the stockadelike feel of the place.
He drove around the compound a couple of times, establishing that there were in fact two gates, one at the east and the other not quite opposite, at the southwest corner. He parked where he could keep an eye on the southwest gate, and couldn’t tell much beyond the fact that every vehicle entering or leaving the compound had to stop for some sort of exchange with the uniformed guard. Maybe you flashed a pass at him, maybe he called to make sure you were expected, maybe they wanted a thumbprint and a semen sample. No way to tell, not from where Keller was watching, but he was pretty sure he couldn’t just drive up and bluff his way through. People who willingly lived behind a thick wall almost twice their own height probably expected a high level of security, and a guard who failed to provide that would be looking for a new job.
He drove back to his motel, sat in front of the TV and watched a special on the Discovery Channel about scuba diving at Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Keller didn’t think it looked like something he wanted to do. He’d tried snorkeling once, on a vacation in Aruba, and kept having to stop because he was getting water in his snorkel, and under his mask. And he hadn’t been able to see much of anything, anyhow.
The divers on the Discovery Channel were having much better luck, and there were plenty of colorful fish for them (and Keller) to look at. After fifteen minutes, though, he’d seen as much as he wanted to, and was ready to change the channel. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go through, flying all the way to Australia, then getting in the water with a mask and fins. Couldn’t you get pretty much the same effect staring into a fish tank at a pet shop, or a Chinese restaurant?
“I’ll tell you this,” the woman said. “If you do make a decision to buy at Sundowner, you won’t regret it. Nobody ever has.”
“That’s quite a recommendation,” Keller said.
“Well, it’s quite an operation, Mr. Miller. I don’t suppose I have to ask if you play golf.”
“It’s somewhere between a pastime and an addiction,” he said.
“I hope you brought your clubs. Sundowner’s a championship course, you know. Robert Walker Wilson designed it, and Clay Bunis was a consultant. We’re in the middle of the desert, but you wouldn’t know it inside the walls at Sundowner. The course is as green as a pasture in the Irish midlands.”
Her name, Keller learned, was Michelle Prentice, but everyone called her Mitzi. And what about him? Did he prefer Dave or David?
That was a stumper, and Keller realized he was taking too long to answer it. “It depends,” he said, finally. “I answer to either one.”
“I’ll bet business associates call you Dave,” she said, “and really close friends call you David.”
“How on earth did you know that?”
She smiled broadly, delighted to be right. “Just a guess,” she said. “Just a lucky guess, David.”
So they were going to be close friends, he thought. Toward that end she proceeded to tell him a few things about herself, and by the time they reached the guard shack at the east gate of Sundowner Estates, he learned that she was thirty-nine years old, that she’d divorced her rat bastard of a husband three years ago and moved out here from Frankfort, Kentucky, which happened to be the state capital, although most people would guess it was Louisville. She’d sold houses in Frankfort, so she’d picked up an Arizona Realtor’s license first chance she got, and it was a lot better selling houses here than it had ever been in Kentucky, because they just about sold themselves. The entire Phoenix area was growing like a house on fire, she assured him, and she was just plain excited to be a part of it all.
At the east gate she moved her sunglasses up onto her forehead and gave the guard a big smile. “Hi, Harry,” she said. “Mitzi Prentice, and this here’s Mr. Miller, come for a look at the Lattimore house on Saguaro Circle.”
“Miz Prentice,” he said, returning her smile and nodding at Keller. He consulted a clipboard, then slipped into the shack and picked up a telephone. After a moment he emerged and told Mitzi she could go ahead. “I guess you know how to get there,” he said.
“I guess I ought to,” she told Keller, after they’d driven away from the entrance. “I showed the house two days ago, and he was there to let me by. But he’s got his job to do, and they take it seriously, let me tell you. I know not to joke with him, or with any of them, because they won’t joke back. They can’t, because it might not look good on camera.”
“There are security cameras running?”
“Twenty-four hours a day. You don’t get in unless your name’s on the list, and the camera’s got a record of when you came and went, and what car you were driving, license plate number and all.”
“Really.”
“There are some very affluent people at Sundowner,” she said, “and some of them are getting along in years. That’s not to say you won’t find plenty of people your age here, especially on the golf course and around the pool, but you do get some older folks, too, and they tend to be a little more concerned about security. Now just look, David. Isn’t that a beautiful sight?”
She pointed out her window at the golf course, and it looked like a golf course to him. He agreed it sure looked gorgeous.
The living room of the Lattimore house had a cathedral ceiling and a walk-in fireplace. Keller thought the fireplace looked nice, but he didn’t quite get it. A walk-in closet was one thing, you could walk into it and pick what you wanted to wear, but why would anybody want to walk into a fireplace?
For that matter, who’d want to hold a prayer service in the living room?
He thought of raising the point with Mitzi. She might find either question provocative, but would it fit the Serious Buyer image he was trying to project? So he asked instead what he figured were more typical questions, about heating and cooling systems and financing, good basic home-buyer questions.
There was, predictably enough, a big picture window in the living room, and it afforded the predictable view of the golf course, overlooking what Mitzi told him were the fifth green and the sixth tee. There was a man taking practice swings who might have been W. W. Egmont himself, although from this distance and angle it was hard to say one way or the other. But if the guy turned a little to his left, and if Keller could look at him not with his naked eye but through a pair of binoculars—
Or, he thought, a telescopic sight. That would be quick and easy, wouldn’t it? All he had to do was buy the place and set up in the living room with a high-powered rifle, and Egmont’s state-of-the-art home burglar alarm wouldn’t do him a bit of good. Keller could just perch there like a vulture, and sooner or later Egmont would finish up the fifth hole by four-putting for a triple bogey, and Keller could take him right there and save the poor duffer a stroke or wait until he came even closer and teed up his ball for the sixth hole (525 yards, par 5). Keller was no great shakes as a marksman, but how hard could it be to center the crosshairs on a target and squeeze the trigger?
“I bet you’re picturing yourself on that golf course right now,” Mitzi said, and he grinned and told her she got that one right.
______
From the bedroom window in the back of the house, you could look out at a desert garden, with cacti and succulents growing in sand. The plantings, like the bright green lawn in front, were all the responsibility of the Sundowners Estates association, who took care of all maintenance. They kept it beautiful year-round, she told him, and you never had to lift a finger.
“A lot of people think they want to garden when they retire,” she said, “and then they find out how much work it can be. And what happens when you want to take off for a couple of weeks in Maui? At Sundowner, you can walk out the door and know everything’s going to be beautiful when you come back.”
He said he could see how that would be a comfort. “I can’t see the fence from here,” he s
aid. “I was wondering about that, if you’d feel like you were walled in. I mean, it’s nice looking, being adobe and earth-colored and all, but it’s a pretty high fence.”
“Close to twelve feet,” she said.
Even higher than he’d thought. He said he wondered what it would be like living next to it, and she said none of the houses were close enough to the fence for it to be a factor.
“The design was very well thought out,” she said. “There’s the twelve-foot fence, and then there’s a big space, anywhere from ten to twenty yards, and then there’s an inner fence, also of adobe, that stands about five feet tall, and there’s cactus and vines in front of it for landscaping, so it looks nice and decorative.”
“That’s a great idea,” he said. And he liked it; all he had to do was clear the first fence and follow the stretch of no-man’s-land around to wherever he felt like vaulting the shorter wall. “About the taller fence, though. I mean, it’s not really terribly secure, is it?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, I don’t know. I guess it’s because I’m used to the Northeast, where security’s pretty up front and obvious, but it’s just a plain old mud fence, isn’t it? No razor wire on top, no electrified fencing. It looks as though all a person would have to do is lean a long ladder up against it and he’d be over the top in a matter of seconds.”
She laid a hand on his arm. “David,” she said, “you asked that very casually, but I have the sense that security’s a real concern of yours.”
“I have a stamp collection,” he said. “It’s not worth a fortune, and collections are hard to sell, but the point is I’ve been collecting since I was a kid and I’d hate to lose it.”
“I can understand that.”
“So security’s a consideration, yes. And the fellow at the gate’s enough to put anybody’s mind at rest, but if any jerk with a ladder can just pop right over the fence—”