King Maybe (3 page)

No problem, except for a little thump when my left palm hit the side of the house. With my knees locked and the rest of me deeply, deeply aware of the fall waiting patiently beneath me, I pulled my right hand away from the wall and felt in my pocket for the nail file, moving the razor aside to get to it. Beneath my left hand, the wall of the house vibrated very slightly, which my imagination translated into someone walking the second floor. I leaned a little closer to survey the master bedroom, which was still empty.

But probably not for long. So I folded the elbow that was resting against the wall so my weight was being borne by my left forearm, which put me closer to the screen, and went to work.
Slip
the bent nail file through the slit cut into the screen,
position
the downward-bent tip over the little triangle of metal that needed to be popped down over the tiny upright post in the center of the sill.
Press
my fingertip down on the midpoint of the nail file as a fulcrum, meaning that both hands were engaged for a moment, which the space beneath me saw as an opportunity to fill my imagination with a cavernous-sounding
Come on down
, giving me a short but intense bout of head-spinning vertigo. I had to focus very closely on the edge of the windowsill to stop the world's whirl, so I missed the moment at which Mr. Back Stairs came into the room.

But there he was, slope shouldered, thin necked, and round headed, with a prison haircut, an extra-long upper lip that looked red and chafed, as though it got a lot of wiping, and the permanently puzzled expression that distinguished the members of
Spinal Tap
. All those unthreatening characteristics were sharply offset by the baseball bat in his left hand and the small automatic in his right. He was coming into the bedroom very slowly, the gun extended and the bat over his shoulder, and his gaze was directed at the floor beneath the beds.

Anyone who (a) comes into a bedroom searching for someone, (b) thinks first of looking under the beds, and (c) is more than twelve years old is, charitably, someone it should not be difficult to outwit. Nevertheless, considering the gun and the bat, I rolled to my left to get clear of the window. In doing it I caught my right toe beneath a particularly ropy length of ivy, and my left knee bent beneath me as I fought to control the trip. I slammed both hands against the side of the house, got my knees straight and both feet on the wall, and hung there, as rigid as the hypotenuse of the world's sweatiest right triangle, gasping for breath.

I felt him hear me. Steps came closer, then stopped, and then a flashlight snapped on, pointed straight out the window. A bright circle brought the top of the wall out of the darkness, and right there, just below the perimeter of the circle was my left foot, in the black Chinese sneakers I use as work shoes. No choice: I pulled the foot off the wall and let it hang in space, my back and shoulders pressed against the house and all my weight on my right leg.

Which began to tremble.

A tap on the window glass announced that he'd put the end of the flashlight against it. He moved the circle of light up and down and then side to side, briefly illuminating my black-clad foot and the shaky leg above it, also in black, but the dark ivy apparently swallowed them up. It might also have been, I realized, that he was peering through the light reflected on the surface of the window, which had probably been cleaned by the same servant who didn't flush the toilet. Then the light started to move left, toward the front of the house, and as I released a huge sigh, I was dazzled by the gleam of the nail file, sticking straight out of the bottom of the window screen, bright as a politician's promise, winking at me as the light left it behind. When he brought the flashlight back in this direction, there was no way he was going to miss the nail file.

I was reaching slowly for it, keeping my hand below the windowsill and hoping he wouldn't sense the movement, when he turned the flashlight off. Until then the angle of the beam had told me which way he was looking, but now I had no idea, and there was nothing to do but freeze, one foot on the wall, one dangling down, one shoulder against the house and the other contorted forward to let me extend my arm, like someone playing a game of three-dimensional Twister, until I felt him walking again. A moment later a light came on, pale and diluted, that I figured had to come from the hypermasculine bathroom I had briefly explored. I got my left foot back against the wall, wiggled my way back to the window, and managed to snap the little triangle down over the post. There. The screen was officially locked from inside.

That meant one of two things, both good. First, if they hadn't actually been certain I was there, if they'd been reacting to some little trigger, perhaps a glimmer from my penlight against a window, there would be no evidence that anyone had been in the house until some point in the distant, Junior-long-gone future, when the Slugger opened his album and counted the perforations on his damn stamp. Second, if they
still
believed that someone was inside or had been inside, or if they'd been tipped off after all, I had just eliminated the master-bedroom window from the list of possible escape routes. It's always progress to eliminate the place where you are from the list of places people are likely to think you'll be. Then I heard the toilet flush, and the bathroom light went out. No one came back into the bedroom. This was the most secure I'd felt since their car pulled in.

So I screwed up.

I got both feet on the wall, extended my arms, and pushed my center of gravity back toward the wall. After all, it was only eighteen inches, and I damn near made it. In fact, I made it and went
past
it by about three inches and found myself teetering backward on the wall, windmilling my hands but . . . definitely . . . going . . . over. Instead I stepped back and let myself fall.

Dropped faster than I'd expected, but about four feet below the wall's top I managed to grab some ivy with both hands. There was a tearing sound as quite a lot of ivy got yanked free of the wall that its tendrils had so assiduously woven themselves into. Part of the bit I was holding on to pulled away, dropping me another eighteen inches or so.

Above me the light came on again in the bedroom.

I panicked. Hand over hand I scrabbled monkey style along the side of the wall toward the gate, one yank of ivy after another, not wanting to go down to ground level and trip the motion sensors I'd seen fill the yard with light when a car pulled in to the drive about ninety minutes before I'd entered the Slugger's house. I'd traveled four or five yards before I realized I should have gone in the other direction, toward the rear of the property, because they'd certainly assume I would head for the street.

And they had. Flashlights traveled the top of the wall, reflecting off the windows of the house behind me, and I figured it was just moments before the owners of that house would be out to see who was shining lights into their windows. Thus far, though, the place was dark, so maybe I was in luck and everyone who lived there was in their nineties and they'd all been asleep for hours, and maybe they were insomniacs who took sleeping pills of veterinary dosages and sank into a nightly coma or were under a witch's spell, and maybe they all bunked on the far side of the house, so even if one of them were pulled from his stupor by the demands of an aging bladder, he'd be way over there and wouldn't see or hear any—

Something bumped my leg, hard, from behind.

My feet were about two yards above the ground, and I turned my head, expecting to see a human face staring up at me, perhaps a human face attached to an arm that ended in a hand with a gun in it, but I didn't see anything at all. From the other side of the wall, the Slugger shouted, “HEY!” but I figured it was a lot more tentative than it sounded. I was a good fifteen feet from the window I'd gone out through, and he was still about eight, ten feet behind me, if the light was any indication.

Whatever it was, it hit my leg again, harder this time, and I looked straight down and saw my assailant, front feet spread wide, rump in the air, brown eyes looking up at me hopefully: a chocolate Labrador retriever, tail whisking back and forth like a windshield wiper, hoping desperately that this strange human traveling sideways along the wall would come down and play.

My phone started to vibrate again.

I like dogs that don't want to kill me, and I particularly like Labs, but this was not the time for a romp. I whispered a sharp
No
, and the dog sat down and regarded me critically. My stock with the dog was dropping, my phone had massaged my thigh for so long that it was beginning to hurt, and from the far side of the wall I heard a clank of metal on stone that it took me no time at all to identify as a ladder.

I decided to go hell for leather through the ivy in the direction of the front gate. For a second the dog stayed put, but then it made its will known: it barked. Just once, but quite loudly.

Once was enough. There was an urgent little windstorm of whispers from the other side of the wall, and the ladder clanked again, this time much closer to me. And a light went on in the house the dog lived in.

I let go of the ivy and fell, landing on my feet. The dog promptly jumped high enough to rest its front paws on my shoulders and lick my face, giving me a quality sniff of dog breath, but then it furrowed its brow questioningly and looked back over its shoulder, which meant to me that the front door was about to open.

I dropped to my knees and grabbed two huge handfuls of ivy and tore it upward, away from the wall, but only about eighteen inches of it came free, so I put a foot against the wall and yanked again. The dog barked joyously and took off for the door. I lifted the ivy in as intact a sheet as I could manage and crawled behind on hands and knees. I had my right side pressed against the wall, and I was facing the house the dog had run to.

Up until this point, I'd avoided tripping the lights, but now they came on with the intensity of klieg lights at a Hollywood premiere. Motionless, I peered between a couple of big leaves to see an old dude with fierce eyebrows and a nose like an eagle's beak step onto his front porch. He wore a shapeless white T-shirt and a pair of gray gym shorts and had something black and hard looking in his hand, and my stomach muscles did a little tango step at the sight of it. He glared in my direction and shouted, “You!” Then he pointed the black thing toward me.

I said, “Uhhhh,” and a couple of the many-legged things that live in ivy dropped down the back of my shirt and started trying to dig their way into my skin. The sheer shock of it choked off my reply, which was a good thing, because from above me and to my right a familiar voice said, “What, you old fart?”

“What the hell are you doing up there?” Eagle Beak said.

“I'm looking at my wall. Whaddaya think I'm doing?”

“I think you're shining your fucking flashlight through my windows, is what I think you're doing, trying to get a look at Lizzie in her nightie and making my dog bark in the goddamn middle of the night.”

“I got a burglar,” the Slugger said, “and he's in your yard.”

“Yeah?” Eagle Beak called back into the house, “Moron thinks we've got a burglar in our yard.” To the Slugger, he said, “You see any burglars down here? Jeezus peezus,
burglars
. Any burglars in this neighborhood, they'd be waiting in line for your autograph. Now, get offa that wall.”

“It's my wall.”

“Like fuck it is. Seven inches of it is on my property, and that's the seven inches you're hanging your big fat face over right now. And I'm tired of looking at it.” He raised the dark cylinder, and a supernova of hard white light erupted from the end that was pointed at the Slugger.

Above me the ivy shivered and trembled, and the Slugger said, “You blinded me, you old clown!”

“Shine lights in
my
window, will you?” Eagle Beak shouted. He wiggled the black cylinder, which I recognized belatedly as a Streamlight UltraStinger 1100, the agonizingly brilliant flashlight favored by cops in dicey areas all over the country. “Here, take a good look at this.” He made tiny circles with the Streamlight, and I heard a scrape of metal followed by a much
longer
scrape of metal, then a despairing scream cut short by a heartfelt yelp and a really rewarding compound sound, half the clatter of aluminum and half the dull thud of human muscle, both striking the unforgiving surface of flagstone.

“And
stay
down there!” Eagle Beak shouted. “Asshole!” He stepped back and slammed his door.

If it hadn't been for the whimpering from the other side of the wall, the night would have been blessedly silent. On the other hand, the whimpering had a kind of plaintive musical quality, a descending arc of tones in a minor key, lovely if heard from the right perspective. If it had had a beat, I might have danced to it.

“I
still
can't see.” It was the Slugger's voice, just barely not sobbing, and that was the cue I needed. I clawed back up the ivy until I was about halfway to the top and then headed right. When I got to Eagle Beak's gate, which was about three feet shorter than the wall, I climbed up onto it, stepped over, and then ivy-rappelled down to the sidewalk and took off up the street, away from the Slugger's collapsed gate. Turning the corner, I yanked my shirt away from me and shook off my passengers, one of which bit me by way of goodbye, and pulled out the phone, which was vibrating again, or possibly still. I put it to my ear, and Ronnie said, “Come uphill to Tigertail and turn south. I'm in your car, two driveways down.”

3

The God of Spring

I think it was the immortal Chuck Jones, creator of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, who invented the trope in which a character runs off the edge of a cliff and keeps right on running on thin air until it looks down, at which point it falls like a stone.

As busy as I'd been trying to stay alive in the Slugger's house, the moment I heard that car hit the gate, I had the unmistakable sensation that I'd just left the cliff behind and that there was probably a considerable drop beneath me. But I hadn't had time to look down and see just how far the fall might be.

Now I
did
have the time, and as much as I wanted to speed-walk up Tigertail and get into that car with Ronnie so we could motor out of the Slugger's orbit, I stepped back into a hedge instead and thought for a couple of minutes about the person who had just snatched my butt off the barbie.

The question was simple: Who the hell was she?

When I met Ronnie, she was a suspect in a situation I'd been forced into working on. My assignment was to make sure that my client wouldn't be charged with the murder of someone he'd had a lot of reasons to murder. The victim had been Ronnie's husband, and the first rule of murder when the victim is married is
look at the spouse
. So, during that first week we knew each other, even as we were falling in love, we were both lying for all we were worth, me trying to figure out whether she was guilty and her trying to look as innocent as lamb's fleece. It was, let's say, a layered relationship.

Eventually I figured out who'd killed Ronnie's ex, and that would have straightened it all out between us except that she refused to tell me
anything
about her past, including where she'd come from or what she'd been doing with all the crooks she'd been hanging around with back wherever it was. I knew they were crooks because she'd come to Los Angeles from some dreary East Coast town—Trenton and Albany had been claimed at various times—by being lateraled every thousand miles or so, like a living football, from a car thief to a drug dealer to a blackmailer, the last of whom she'd married.

I know it feels like it must have taken me some time to consider all this, but I was cranked up pretty good and my mind moves fast when it needs to. I knew I'd missed something in the past couple of minutes, and I was trying to dig that out when headlights swept the street, turning down from Tigertail, not up from the Slugger's. I stepped farther back into the hedge as my inoffensive, inconspicuous little white Toyota glided by instead of the Jaguar I'd been expecting, the one we'd stolen so we'd blend into the neighborhood better and which had undoubtedly been the heavy beast that had hit the gates. As it went by, my mind replayed Ronnie saying,
I'm in your car.

For a moment I thought about zigzagging surface streets, avoiding her completely, until I got someplace where I could call a cab. Just to give me some time to sort out what had just happened and what it might suggest.

Also, I realized I was shivering, a delayed reaction to what had nearly happened at the Slugger's. Ducking Ronnie for a while would also let me get that under control. But then I heard Herbie saying,
The longer you delay facing something important, the longer you give it to kill you
, so when I pushed myself out of the hedge and started uphill, figuring she'd turn around and pass me on the way back up to Tigertail, I still had no idea what I should say once I got into the car.

“So?” she said,
pulling away from the curb.

I sat back and worked on not shaking. “Piece of cake.”

“I ask because you look like the god of spring, with green stuff all over you, twigs in your hair, and bleeding knuckles.”

“Piece of cake,” I said again.

“And you're shaking.”

“Okay, it was a piece of stale hardtack laced with rat poison.”

“That's better,” Ronnie said. “I get all warm and fizzy when you confide in me.”

“I don't usually talk after a job,” I said.

“No shit,” Ronnie said, making a right. She headed uphill, toward Mulholland and the San Fernando Valley. We were in a neighborhood where even the weeds were expensive. I don't spend a lot of time in areas like this. Too much temptation and too many security cameras.

I said, “Where are we going?”

She turned and regarded me just a moment too long, given the number of curves in the street, and I hit an imaginary brake pedal with my right foot. “You're asking me?” she said. “We're going to that man with the little tiny nose and the Filipino folk dancers, right? You said he wanted the stamp tonight.”

“I'm not sure now. There are a lot of balls up in the air.” My phone vibrated. I pulled it out, looked at caller ID, put it to my ear, and said, “Fuck off, Jake.” Then I turned it off.

“What a relief,” Ronnie said. “It's not just me. One of the balls?”

“How'd you get my car?”

She drove for a moment, and then she said, using the exact same tone she'd used the first time, “One of the balls?”

“Yes,” I said.

She said, “How do you
think
I got your car? I drove the Jag back to where we borrowed it, left it there, and hiked up to where we parked this awful little Toyota. I have to say it's a real step down, going from the Jag to this heap. On the other hand, this has brake lights. I left about a third of the Jag's rear end in that gate I knocked down.” She drove a few hundred yards and repeated, “That gate I knocked down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “And thanks. I might not have made it out if you hadn't done that.”

“It was nothing. Really, nothing.”

“Just . . . you know, want to be sure you understand I'm grateful.”

Ronnie took us around a turn, stopped at an intersection, and then took us further uphill. “It's written all over your face.”

“I'm thinking.”

“My father always said, ‘Never interrupt a man who's thinking. You might prevent him from having his only idea.'”

“Your father said that, did he? Where did he say that?”

“I
knew
we were getting to this,” she said. “And let's not. Let's do what we were going to do, before I saved your ass and you got all crazy. Let's drop the stamp off like you planned and then . . . I don't know, go to the park and search for poisonous mushrooms, something that suits your mood.”

“You nailed the gate, swapped cars, and got back to the meeting point.”

“It sounds so impressive boiled down like that.”

“It
is
impressive. And amazingly fast thinking for someone who's never committed a crime before.”

“Are you going to
continue
to be awful?” she said. “Listen, if we're not going to that man's house—”

“Stinky.”

“To Stinky's house. I mean, if we're not going there, where
are
we going?”

“I'm working on that. So . . . about your criminal skills, if I were to get someone—say, a cop—to comb through the criminal records in Toronto—”

“I've never been to Toronto.”

“Or Ontario.”

“Or Ontario. Oh,
look
at my knuckles on the steering wheel. They're all white. Such a stressful line of questioning, when what would be appropriate is appreciation and maybe a kiss.”

“I appreciate you. Where was it, then? Montpelier?”

“This is a very peculiar reaction toward someone who just saved your—”

“And demonstrated an unexpected set of skills, at a speed that suggests well-worn neural pathways. Which, as we both know, are developed through repeated use. Trenton?”

“Fine, sure, Trenton.” She swerved the car violently into the oncoming lane and then brought it back. “Cat,” she said.

I hadn't seen a cat.

“So we're not going to Stinky's, so you're in this foul mood, because you didn't get it? The big hotshot burglar didn't—”

“I got it. I always get it. I'm a professional. And I flatter myself that I can
recognize
a professional.”

The word made her pause just a bit longer than she should have. Perhaps she hadn't expected me to be so blunt. “Whatever that means. Look. You got your stamp, you got out in a single, not badly shaped piece, with your fairly attractive face intact. You've got that stamp in your pocket, and you should be ready to hop on over to your fence's house—” She bit her lower lip. “That's what you'd call someone like Stinky, right? A fence?”

I just looked at her.

“You throw that term around a lot,” she said. “Fence this, fence that. ‘I'll just run this over to my fence.' Like that. You know?”

“So if I were to send someone to comb through the criminal files of Trenton or Albany under the name Veronica—wait, what's your maiden name?”

“This is territory we haven't covered,” she said. “And I
appreciate
that we haven't covered it. I know it's taken willpower on your part.”

“It has. What was it?”

She did a little warning drumroll on the steering wheel with her nails. “LeBlanc.”

We shared a moment of silence.

“You do realize,” I said, “that LeBlanc is not a name that really rings with credibility.”

She pulled the car to the curb, hard enough to put the front tire halfway up it. We were most of the way to Mulholland, in an area where the houses were sealed behind gates that made the one she'd driven through look like a saloon door. There were no streetlamps, and we were on a tight curve to the right, practically begging to be hit from behind. The top of the ridge, a few hundred yards ahead, was a curving, pillowy line of solid black against the diffuse glow of the Valley's zillion lights. “I come from a long line of LeBlancs,” she said between her teeth. “LeBlancs all the way down.”

“Down to where?”

She sighed heavily, a sign that she needed time to work on the answer and its tone. “Down to 1209
a.d.
? The Albigensian Crusade? When Pope Innocent III, of all the ironically named people, decided to kill every single Cathar in France because they didn't like the cookies the pope served at the altar. That was when we changed our name, because we'd been Cathars, and burning at the stake didn't seem like an option. Okay?”

“Changed it from what?”

“LeNoir,” she said. “Later anglicized to Leonard.”

“Anglicized when? That makes no sense at all. I mean, if your name is still LeBlanc—”

“LeNoir was an embellishment,” she said with fraudulent candor. She shook her head fondly at her own foolishness. “I can't resist embellishments.”

“You're telling me. So your family was Cathar?”

“Still is.”

“I thought all the Cathars were dead.”

“Yeah, well, don't tell the pope. Can we get going now?”

“And you? You're a Cathar?”

“To the center of my clean little bones.”

“So you believe that the world is the result of a war between God and Satan and that everything that's visible was created by Satan and is therefore evil?”

“Explains a lot,” she said, “when you think about it.”

“And that human beings are the genderless spirits of angels, temporarily trapped inside evil bodies designed in hell, sort of like good champagne in a paper cup?”

She squinted at me. “
What
kind of spirits of angels?”

“Genderless.”

“If only.”

“So, at the risk of abandoning this endlessly interesting digression, if I were to have someone probe the criminal files of Newark and Poughkeepsie—”

“Trenton and Albany.” A pause. “I might have said Newark.”

“For arrests and charges involving Veronica LeBlanc, of all the silly names, there'd be no record of—”

“For heaven's sake. If I don't even remember which
town
it was, if I can't say for sure whether I have a record, surely you can understand that it's because I've blotted it all from my memory, that something happened back there—”

“Wherever it was—”

“—so terrible that I've drawn a dark veil over it, even for myself, even blocked it from my dreams. There are areas of experience for a woman that a man can't even begin—Why are you grinning?”

“Because you're so fast, which is what gives you away, and because you know instinctively which buttons to go for. Problem is, I don't have many buttons.”

“Yeah, well . . .” She reached over and punched me in the vicinity of my heart. “You've got a big red one in the middle of your chest that says
off
,
and I just prevented someone from pushing it. Don't I even get a coupon?”

“I'm just dazzled by your chops. Makes me think about broadening the act. I could use a partner.”

“I thought we
were
partners.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “In the sense you mean, I suppose we are. In the sense
I
mean, we've barely even compared our credentials.” A car came around the bend, hugging the right curve, and gave us a couple seconds' worth of irate-sounding horn. “Could we move to someplace where the odds of being killed are a little lower?”

“Sure.” She started the car. “I suppose I'm flattered by the partnership offer, but I think it's probably a ploy, a conversational can opener to get at my past.”

“Could be.” I craned back to check the street. “You can go now.”

“I can go,” she said, “any damn time I like.”

“I don't know
who else it could have been.”

We were maintaining a polite truce as Ronnie took us on a prolonged up-and-down zigzag over the streets south of Ventura, plush by my modest standards but a trailer park compared to Brentwood, just on the other side of the hill. She was keeping an eye on the mirror to humor me while I tried to describe the events of the evening in a way that qualified as a life crisis.