Hollywood Hills (29 page)

Nigel carefully covered The Woman by the Water canvas with the mover's blanket and tore off strips of masking tape to secure the corners of the folds while Raleigh refilled Nigel's glass with tap water and a few ice cubes.

When Raleigh brought the water back, he didn't see that Nigel had moved one of the paintings. Flowers on the Hillside was leaning against the opposite wall, and when Raleigh stepped around the light stand, he accidentally kicked it and it fell over.

"Goddamnit!" Nigel screamed. "You clumsy fool!"

"I'm sorry," Raleigh said. "I didn't see it. You moved it." "Bugger all!" Nigel said, as he ran to the painting and picked it up, examining it under the floodlight.

"It fell on the back of the canvas," Raleigh said. "I didn't hurt it."

Nigel took deep breaths to calm himself and said, "All right." Then he took the water tumbler from Raleigh and drank.

When he put the tumbler down, he said, "We're bundling this piece now before you destroy it. Help me."

Raleigh spread the mover's blankets on the tile floor, and each painting was wrapped separately in a blanket and secured with duct tape.

When they were finished, Raleigh said, "I'm getting these paintings into your van before something else happens to make you have a fucking stroke like Marty Brueger."

Nigel saw that Raleigh's waning diffidence had morphed into mounting anger, and he was about to say, "No, I'll do it," but instead he said, "Okay, I'm sorry I blew up. Yes, take them to my van, but be as careful as you have ever been in your life. Lay them down on the floor of the van, near the rear door. I'll secure them in place when we finish here."

Raleigh picked up the blanketed bundles and started for the door, when Nigel said, "Wait a minute. You'll need the keys." He felt his pocket and said, "I must've left them in the van." Then h
e b
egan to fit the poster-board photograph of Flowers on the Hillside into the smaller gilded frame, having to make more adjustments before getting it shimmed snugly into place.

When Raleigh got outside, carrying a bundle under each arm, there was not much left of twilight. Darkness was falling fast on the Hollywood Hills. He had to lean both bundles against the front fender of the van in order to open the door. After he got it open, he picked up each bundle separately and crawled into the van twice, placing each painting on the floor, neither bundle touching the other.

When he was finished, he closed the van door and heard the phone ring. He thought, Mrs. Brueger!

Raleigh ran into the house, raced across the foyer to the wall phone, picked it up, and said "Hello?"

A voice said, "Hi. My name is Amber. May I please speak to the lady of the house?"

Raleigh said, "She's on the floor right now," and hung up. He looked at his watch and saw that it would be almost dawn in Tuscany. His nerves. His goddamn nerves were shredded.

There wasn't enough daylight left for Jonas Claymore to see clearly from his vantage point, peeking over the wall between two junipers. Jonas whispered to Megan, "What's up with that? Did you check out how careful he put that stuff in the van?"

Megan could make out the lettering on the side of the van and whispered, "Wickland Gallery. It's gotta be art or something."

Jonas said, "Whatever it is, it's gonna belong to us in about two minutes."

"You're going down there?" she said.

"Yeah, go start the engine. When I come over the wall be ready to move."

"They looked like pretty big things he was carrying," she said. "Whatever it was might not fit in the VW."

"We'll make it fit," he said, and in a few seconds he had squeezed between the junipers and pulled himself up and over the wall.

Jonas scrambled down the little hill that was planted with ivy to hold the soil. In a moment he was creeping along the cobbled driveway. When he got to the side of the cargo van, he grabbed the handle, opening the door as quietly as he could. He peered inside, and even in the darkening shadows he could see that Megan was right. The two bundles were too large to fit in the VW. He crawled inside and lifted one and saw that it was not heavy. He guessed that they were paintings. He thought that in a house like this they must be valuable. Maybe worth five grand, maybe even more. But they were too big to transport in the VW bug.

He was feeling frustration overload and crawled out of the van quietly, ready to scurry back to safety. But while standing outside the van, the tall young man saw that just above eye level on the roof of the van was a ring of keys, where Nigel had put them. He closed the van door quietly and grabbed them, easily locating the ignition key.

Inside the Brueger house Nigel Wickland was so overjoyed, he was actually whistling softly, and he just about had the smaller Impressionist painting shimmed into place inside the gilded frame.

Nigel said, "Raleigh, hand me that small screwdriver from my toolbox. The one under the --"

"Shut up!" Raleigh said. "What's that?"

"What's what?" Nigel asked.

"It's a car engine," Raleigh said. "It's your van!"

Raleigh bolted for the front door and switched on the driveway lights in time to see the cargo van stopped momentarily at the security gate until the electronic beam caused the gate to swing open wide.

"Hey!" Raleigh screamed. "Hey!" And he began running after the van, which sped through the gate and headed down the hill, followed by an old Volkswagen bug.

"Hey," Raleigh said weakly as the gate closed with him inside.

Raleigh stood there staring at the left taillight of the VW bug, the right one having burned out. The little car chugged down toward the flatland, growing smaller, its one eye winking at Raleigh Dibble as it descended in the darkness.

Megan Burke had an epiphany as she followed her partner down from the Hollywood Hills after his shocking theft of the van. She thought of how she had told Jonas, "There are some things I won't do." But she was doing them. First the old woman's TV and now this van. And she thought, I am a thief. I have become a common thief. My life is in ruins. Hollywood is killing me.

Nigel Wickland was standing in the foyer, looking forlorn and helpless, when Raleigh jogged back into the house.

Raleigh said to him, "Why did you leave the fucking keys in the van? Goddamn you, why didn't you put them in your pocket?"

Nigel's voice was a rasp when he said, "I told you I had left them in the van, you blockhead. Why didn't you bring them in?"

"The keys were your responsibility, not mine, you fop," Raleigh said. "Now what do we do? Now what?"

Nigel turned his back on Raleigh and walked back to the unfinished job. He stood under the floodlight, tall and gaunt, his white hair sparkling beneath the glow. Nigel Wickland had a dizzying moment when he felt like a doomed protagonist in a Shakespearean tragedy. And like Lear he screamed.

Raleigh's shock and terror were pushing him into a kind of somnambulate state, but Nigel Wickland's primal scream jolted him out of it. Raleigh froze in place, standing in the foyer watching Nigel Wickland collapse into himself and drop onto the floor on his knees. Then the gallery owner started to weep, and he reached for his inhaler and took two puffs, inhaling deeply and holding his breath until he had to exhale and weep some more.

Raleigh tiptoed past him to the butler's pantry for a fres
h t
umbler. He threw in some ice cubes and filled it under the tap. When he returned to the foyer, he put it down beside his crime partner and said, "More Vichy water?"

Nigel wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his coveralls and said, "We're finished, Raleigh. I think I shall shoot myself before going to the penitentiary. I'm too old for prison."

For the first time the roles were reversed and Raleigh Dibble felt that it was up to him to salvage something from this catastrophe. But what?

He said, "Shouldn't we call the police? The cops may get lucky and catch them before they get too far away."

Nigel stopped weeping entirely and let out a scary laugh, shook his head, and said, "You are really the most benighted human being I have ever met."

"It's not too late," Raleigh said. "The cops might get them." "It's too late," Nigel croaked. "Too fucking late."

"Nigel!" Raleigh said desperately. "Even if they get the paintings they'll probably just dump the van down on one of the boulevards and the police might get fingerprints or DNA or something, and locate them. And they might get the paintings back. I'm calling the police."

Nigel got to his feet then and said, "If you touch that phone, I swear I will kill you."

"But why not call them, goddamnit?"

"Because, you fucking fool," Nigel said, "the last thing we want is for the police to arrest the miserable scum who stole my van!"

Raleigh's mind was racing now as his panic grew. "But they might catch them before they dispose of the pictures and we could get them back and everything could be okay before Mrs. Brueger gets back from Tuscany and --"

Nigel interrupted, saying, "What do you suppose the police would do if they arrested the thieves and recovered the paintings?"

"They'd find out from the crooks where they stole them, and they'd come here and give them back."

"Think," Nigel said, "if that's possible. They would not bring them here. They would impound the paintings as evidence. They would need the owner of the paintings to testify in court that they were taken from her home. And the owner of the stolen van, who happens to be your partner, would also have to testify how and where the vehicle was stolen." His voice rose when he said, "So you see, Raleigh, it would all unravel like a filthy fucking ball of yarn that a terrier has dragged through a kennel full of dog shit!"

"You can still report the van as stolen," Raleigh said, his mouth dusty dry, "if you say it was stolen from your gallery or someplace other than here."

Nigel looked toward the garish floodlight, then at the poster-board counterfeit hanging on the wall, and then closed his eyes and said, "I've partnered with a madman. He is insane." Nigel opened his eyes and said, "For the reason just explained in the Queen's English, I cannot risk that the police might get lucky and arrest somebody. Because as soon as they make the vile cretin confess, it would all come right here to this house, where Leona Brueger would ask the police how it was that my van was stolen from her driveway on this lovely night. And then the cock-up would be plain even to the stupidest policeman. Even to Leona herself."

"What will you say if the van turns up somewhere? Maybe it'll be parked in a red zone and get impounded."

"Then I shall be notified and will pay the impound fee and pick it up, saying that I lent it to my wayward nephew and look what he did with it. The best thing that could happen now is if the thieves get in a fiery crash and kill themselves and burn the goddamn paintings to ashes." That made Nigel's eyes well, and Raleigh thought he might start bawling again.

"And what's going to happen to us if the thieves take th
e p
aintings to an art dealer here in town? Maybe to an auction house and try to sell them?"

"I believe that their provenance would be discovered soon enough," Nigel said, looking like a man on a gallows. "And the police would be called in without hesitation, and whether or not they caught the thieves, they would end up here at this house, and through Leona Brueger the police would quickly discover the switch. In which case I might decide to test the aging ammunition in my pistol. I'm too old for prison."

Raleigh sat trancelike while Nigel completed mounting the poster board into the frame belonging to Flowers on the Hillside. After that, he placed the framed poster board on the original hanger and said, "The work is finished and perhaps so are we."

"I'm getting sick," Raleigh said, and ran to the powder room off the foyer. When he returned, he was pale and beads of sweat had popped out on his upper lip and forehead. He wiped his mouth with a hand towel bearing the Brueger monogram.

He said, "Nigel, I'm desperate. I have one last idea. Please hear me out."

Nigel was putting his tools away and folding the light stand and didn't stop working when he said, "Go ahead. Impress me with your acuity."

Raleigh said, "What if we take the framed poster-board pictures and get rid of them? Burn them up somewhere or break them into pieces and drop them in a Dumpster. And I drive you home and come back here and call the police and say that home-invading robbers got in through an unlocked side door and put a gun on me and stole the pictures."

"Oh, that is brilliant!" Nigel said. "I'm sure they would believe a fucking domestic servant who has only been employed here for a matter of weeks. And who happens to have a prison record. Oh, yes, and I wonder what you would say when they asked you to submit to a lie detector? And in the hopefully unlikely event that the
y c
atch the thieves, it would make it ever so much easier to figure out what was going on here, especially after they were able to place my van at the crime scene. Oh, there would be such a jolly time at the station house when they brought you in handcuffed. Do you know what the joke would be for weeks to come?"

Raleigh sat down on a carved antique chair with a needlepoint cushion, his chin hanging almost to his chest, and said, "Tell me the joke. I'm dying to laugh."