Doing Hard Time (5 page)

The grounds were laid out among gardens, and no building was more than two stories high. The effect was more of a luxurious neighborhood than a hotel, and it was more inviting.

The Arrington was built on a large tract of land that had been assembled over several decades by the late movie star Vance Calder, to whom Arrington had been married before his death. Stone had helped Arrington turn what had been her home and property into America’s premier super-luxury hotel, and one of the provisions in the initial contract was that the hotel company would build her a new house on the property. After their marriage and her death, Stone had inherited the house.

The butler quickly directed the three hotel bellmen in distributing their luggage. In his suite, Stone unpacked and hung up his suits, then changed into cotton trousers and a short-sleeved shirt and took a glass of iced tea out to poolside behind the house.

He read the day’s L.A.
Times
while sipping his iced tea and soon fell into a doze in the comfortable high-backed wicker armchair. A moment later he was half-awakened by a splash behind him, then by the sound of someone doing laps in the pool. That would not be Dino, he thought, and probably not Mike Freeman, either. He swiveled the chair slowly around to face the pool and was greeted by the sight of a woman’s legs disappearing under the water. There had been a flash of her body above the legs, and it wasn’t wearing a swimsuit.

He watched until she surfaced and began breaststroking toward him, apparently not noticing his presence.

“Good afternoon,” he said finally.

She stopped dead in the water and her gaze found him in his chair. “Who are you?” she demanded. “And what are you doing here?”

“I am Stone Barrington, and I am sitting, drinking iced tea, and reading the newspaper. It’s clear what you are doing, but not who you are or why you are swimming in my pool.”

“
Your
pool?” she asked, with the withering certainty of someone who knows herself to be in the right.

“All right, I’ll repeat myself:
my
pool.” He nodded toward the house. “Right behind
my
house.”

“Well then,” she said, “I will get out of
your
water, if you will be kind enough to turn your back.”

Stone smiled. “Certainly not. I intend to enjoy all the fruits of
my
property.”

“Swine!” she said, then turned, swam to the steps, and regally climbed them, displaying broad shoulders and slim hips in all their glory. She walked to a chair where she had left her things, dried herself and her blonde hair slowly with a small towel, then slipped into a terry robe. Ignoring him, she turned to go.

“As long as you’re decent, you may as well join me for a drink,” Stone said.

She stopped and turned toward him “Oh, now I understand. You’re Arrington Barrington’s husband.”

“Widower,” Stone corrected her.

“All right,” she said, and began to walk around the pool toward him. “I’ll have a piña colada.”

Stone picked up the phone beside him and said, “Two piña coladas,” then hung up and rose to greet her, offering his hand. “And your name?”

“Emma Tweed,” she said, and her accent was British.

“Please sit down. Your drink will be here shortly. What brings you to The Arrington, Emma?” he asked. “And all the way from London?”

“I was tired of the London winter, and I was reliably informed that this is now the best hotel in the United States.”

“I like to think of it as the best hotel in the world,” Stone said, “but thank you.”

“How modest,” she said. “One would think that you had invented the place.”

“Well, it was my idea, but a large group of talented people invented it. I just offered guidelines.”

The butler appeared with their drinks on a silver tray and served them, then vanished.

She raised her glass. “To your guidelines,” she said.

“Tell me, why are you able to leave London at the drop of a hat? Do you not have to earn a living?”

“I earn a very nice living as a fashion designer,” she said, “but since I own my company, I am able to come and go as I please. Actually, I can work anywhere. You might say my work is portable.”

“How nice for you. What do you design?”

“Everything from underwear to clothes to home furnishings. By the way, I’m not really trespassing: I’m staying right over there.” She pointed at a house mostly screened by plantings.

“Ah, yes, that was Vance Calder’s guesthouse. I stayed there a couple of times when he was alive. This was his pool, too, so it’s easy to understand how you could think it belonged to your quarters. How long have you been here?”

“Since yesterday.”

“And what do you think of The Arrington so far?”

“I cannot fault it on any count,” she replied. “It is everything I was told it would be.”

“I’m pleased that you are pleased.”

“How is it that you are able to drop everything and come to Los Angeles? You’re a New Yorker, aren’t you?”

“Yes, and I’m an attorney there. The hotel is one of my clients, and I serve on its board, so you might say this is a business trip—at least, that’s what I would say if I thought you were an agent of the Internal Revenue Service.”

She smiled for the first time. “That’s something like what I’ll be saying to our Inland Revenue in the UK,” she said. She drained her glass. “Well, if you’ll excuse me, I’m due at the spa for a little work.” She stood up.

Stone stood, too. “Would you like to join some friends and me for dinner here this evening?”

“Thank you, that sounds very nice. What time?”

“Drinks at seven,” Stone replied.

“See you then,” she said, then turned and sauntered down the path toward her accommodations.

“It was my pleasure, believe me,” Stone called after her.

She seemed to laugh, then, without turning around, gave him a little wave.

“Wear something you designed,” he called out to her disappearing back. She gave the little wave again.

Stone went back into the house, and the butler materialized. “Mr. Barrington, your son just called but said not to disturb you. He’s stopping overnight in New Mexico to get a tire changed, and he will be a couple of more days before arriving.”

“Thank you,” Stone said. “We’ll be four for dinner, then.”
Unless I can get rid of Dino and Mike
, he thought.

It was nearly six o’clock, and Teddy was about ready to close up and go to Sally’s for dinner, when a black Lincoln Navigator with blackened windows came to a stop beside the gas pumps. He walked out to the car and stood by the driver’s window, which was impenetrable to his gaze. He rapped on the window with a knuckle. “Can I help you?” he shouted.

The window slid down. The first thing Teddy saw was a GPS antenna stuck to the inside of the windshield and a screen mounted on the dashboard. “You can fill this tank,” the man said. “With the premium.” He was large, bald, and his companion in the front passenger seat was on the beefy side, too.

“Yessir,” Teddy said, and as he turned away toward the car’s fuel filler he heard the driver speak to his companion in Russian. One of the many skills Teddy had picked up in his time at the CIA was languages. He had a gift, not so much for speaking but for understanding them.

“You see the rented trailer over there?” he said. “It appears our prey have stopped for the night at the motel, there. This little burg is a good place to deal with them,” the driver said. “We’ll get a room for the night, then tomorrow morning we’ll wait for them on the road, kill them, and bury them in the desert. No one will ever hear from them again.”

Teddy stopped in his tracks. “You fellas Croatian?” he asked. “That what you’re speaking?”

“We are Italian,” the driver said.

Teddy turned on the pump, unscrewed the fuel filler cap, stuck the nozzle in, squeezed the trigger, and locked it. Fuel began to flow. Teddy walked back past the driver’s window. “Scuse me, gotta take a leak,” he said to the man. “Your tank is filling up.” As he walked away from the car he heard the door open and the driver say in Russian, “He may have heard something. Take care of him.”

Teddy walked into the garage and found his duffel. He removed a small .380 semiautomatic pistol and screwed the silencer he had built into the barrel, then stuck it in his rear waistband, under his shirttail. He went into the john and waited, the pistol in his hand, facing the door, and after a minute he flushed the toilet. The door flew open, and the Russian passenger began raising his weapon. Teddy shot him once in the forehead and watched him collapse in a heap. He picked up the man’s pistol and fired it once into the wooden floor, then waited.

Another minute passed, and Teddy heard the other Russian. “Yevgeny!” he yelled.

“Come help me!” Teddy called back, in Russian.

“Can’t you do anything yourself?” the man yelled back, and Teddy could hear his footsteps. He aimed the pistol at a spot just inside the outside door and waited. A moment later the driver appeared, and Teddy shot him in the head. The man had been holding a pistol, too.

Teddy walked outside, returned the gas nozzle to its pump, got into the Navigator, and drove it into the garage. He got out, closed the garage door, and switched on the neon sign that said
CLOSED
over the pumps.

He was thinking fast now. With considerable effort, he hauled the two bodies to the rear of the Navigator, opened the rear door, and tossed the men’s luggage over the rear seat, then he muscled the corpses into the luggage compartment, tossing their weapons in behind them, and closed the door. Then he turned on the hose and washed their blood down the drain in the men’s room floor. He already had his plan worked out.

Teddy went next door to where the rental equipment was stored and started the backhoe. He had had some experience with the machinery when, back in Virginia, he had dug his own swimming pool behind his house. He drove the machine out the rear door of the building and into the piñon trees that grew wild behind the property, found a clear spot, and began to dig. After a couple of minutes’ work he had established a rhythm, and in about an hour, he dug the equivalent of his Virginia swimming pool in the sandy soil.

He left the backhoe idling, went back into the garage, started the Navigator, and drove it out to the hole. It was a little awkward among the piñons, but he maneuvered the SUV alongside his hole, then he switched off the ignition. He got back onto the backhoe and drove it toward the Navigator at a ninety-degree angle, then stopped eighteen inches from the vehicle.

He got the backhoe’s blade under the SUV and began to lift it from the side. Soon, the Navigator toppled over onto its side into the waiting hole. The noise of it hitting bottom was muffled by the vertical sides of the hole and the surrounding piñons.

Teddy turned the backhoe around and used the earthmoving blade to push the soil back into the hole, taking another half hour to fill it, then he drove the backhoe over it a few times to pack down the soil. After he had used a piñon branch to smooth the earth, there was nothing left to see.

He returned the backhoe to the building and hosed off the dirt and dust, then locked up for the night. He freshened up and changed his clothes in the men’s room, then walked across the road to Sally’s Diner.

The three young people were sitting in a booth, finishing their dinner. He waved to them. “Your tire will get in on the eleven-o’clock bus tomorrow morning,” he said to them, “and I’ll get it right on your vehicle.”

He sat down on a stool at the counter. “Evening, Sally,” he said.

“Evening, Billy.”

“You got any meat loaf left?”

“Sure, I do.”

“Any bourbon left in that bottle?”

“Enough for two,” she said, filling a pair of glasses with ice and pouring some. They both took a swig, and then Sally served both of them some meat loaf.

The three young people walked over with some cash for their check and left it on the counter. “Thanks, Sally,” Peter said.

“You kids may as well sleep late,” Billy said. “I’ll have your car ready by noon.”