Robert Crais: Free Fall

I put the scrapbook back as I had found it and finished going through his things, but there were no keys to a newly purchased Porsche, no hastily scrawled map to bags of money buried in the high desert, and no unexplained series of numbers for the Swiss accounts. There was only the thirty-six C. That’s the way it goes, sometimes.

I made sure the rooms were like I had found them, then I let myself out, locked the door, and went around to the drive. The German shepherd was gone. So was Allie. The other two were still on their backs. I said, “Allie get bored?”

The one with the radio said, “She said she was hot. She went in to cool off.”

The one with the little round glasses said, “What took you so long?”

“Pit stop.” Elvis Cole, Man of a Thousand Lies. “You guys know Mark’s friend, Jennifer?”

“Sure.”

“She come around lately?”

“Not for a couple of weeks, but she used to.”

The one with the glasses said, “She’s so flat. I don’t know what he sees in her.”

The one with the radio said, “Puh-lease, Brittany.” Brittany. Whatever happened to the women’s movement?

I said, “Mark said he’s got another friend. Have you met her?”

The one with the radio said, “We haven’t seen her.”

Brittany sat up and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You mean he’s available?”

I shrugged.

Michael Bolton started singing about how much being in love hurt and the one with the radio turned it up. Brittany lay back and stretched, making a thing out of lifting her ribs and showing her body. She looked thoughtful. Making plans, no doubt Devising strategies.

The one with the radio said, “Let me get Allie. She wanted to say good-bye.” Then she got up and went into the house. Brittany was mumbling to herself and Allie was probably mumbling, too. I left before they got back.

Women in heat are frightening to behold.

I let myself out through the little gate, walked back to my car, and drove two blocks to a 7-Eleven where I used their pay phone to call a friend of mine who works in the credit department of Bank of America. I gave her Mark Thurman’s name, social security number, and account numbers from both his Visa and MasterCard. I told her that I wanted to know if the charge totals for the month exceeded two thousand dollars and, if they did, how many separate purchases exceeded five hundred dollars and where and when they had been made. I also told her that I wanted to know if Thurman had applied for or received any additional credit cards during the past year. She asked me who the hell did I think I was, calling up out of the blue and asking for all of that? I told her that I was the guy who was going to take her to see Sting at the Greek Theater, then take her to dinner at Chinois on Main afterwards. She asked if tomorrow was okay, or did I want the information later tonight? She called me Chickie when she said it.

I drove back to the 405, then went south, back across the floor of the valley, then through the Sepulveda Pass and into the basin, heading toward Venice and Rusty Swetaggen’s place. I left the freeway at Wilshire and turned west to San Vicente Boulevard in Brentwood. It would’ve been faster to stay on the 405, but San Vicente was nicer, with interesting shops and elegant cafes and palatial homes that somehow seemed attainable, as if the people within them got there by working hard, and were still the type of folks who would give you a smile if you passed them on the sidewalk. Sort of like the Cleavers or the Ricardos.

Bike paths bordered the east- and westbound lanes, and an expansive center island with a row of mature coral trees divided the traffic. Bicyclists and joggers and power walkers flock to San Vicente for its pleasant surroundings and two-mile straightaway from Brentwood to the ocean. Even at midday, the bike paths were crowded and runners pounded along the center island. A man who might’ve been Pakistani ran with a dust mask, and a red-haired woman with a Rottweiler stopped to let the dog piddle on a coral tree. The woman kept her legs pumping as she waited for the dog. Both of them looked impatient.

Brentwood became Santa Monica and the nice homes became nice apartment buildings, and pretty soon you could smell the ocean and pretty soon after that you could see it. Santa Monica has rent control, and many of the apartment buildings had little signs fastened to their walls that said PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF SANTA MONICA. Protest by the apartment owners.

San Vicente ended at Ocean, which runs along a sixty-foot bluff separating Santa Monica proper from the sand and the water and Pacific Coast Highway. Most of the joggers turned back at Ocean, but most of the riders turned left to continue on the bike paths that run along the top of the bluff. I turned with the riders. The top of the bluff sports green lawns and roses and a comfortable parklike setting. There are benches, and some of the time you can sit and watch the ocean and the volleyball games down below on the beach. The rest of the time the benches are used by the thousands of homeless who flock to Santa Monica because of its mild climate. Santa Monica encourages this. The People’s Republic.

A block and a half up from the Venice boardwalk I aced out a flower delivery van for a parking spot, fed the meter, and walked two blocks inland to Rusty Swetaggen’s place between a real estate office and an architectural firm where they specialized in building houses on unbuildable building sites. You could eat at Rusty’s during the day and people did, but mostly they went there to drink. The real estate salespeople were all politically correct women who believed in Liz Claiborne and the architects were all young guys in their thirties who dressed in black and wore little round spectacles. Everyone was thin and everyone looked good. That’s the way it is in Venice. Rusty Swetaggen is a short, wide guy with a body like a bulldog and a head like a pumpkin. If you didn’t know that he owned the place, you’d think he was there to rob it. Venice is like that, too.

Six years ago, Rusty and Emma’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Katy, took up with a guy from the Bay Area who introduced her to the joys of professional loop production and crack-inspired public sex performance. Katy ran away and Rusty asked me to help. I found her in the basement of a three-bedroom house in the San Francisco hills, sucking on a crack bong to kill the pain of the beating that her Bay Area hero had just given her because she wasn’t quite enthusiastic enough in the multiple-partner sex she’d just been forced to have in front of a Hitachi 3000 Super-Pro video camera. I got Katy and all copies of the fourteen sex loops she’d made in the previous three days. None of her performances had as yet been distributed. I destroyed the tapes and brought Katy to a halfway house I know in Hollywood. After eight months of hard family therapy, Katy moved back home, returned to high school, and began to put her life on track. She met a guy named Kevin in a support group during her second year of college, and fourteen months later they were married. That was seven months ago, and now she was finishing a business degree at Cal State, Long Beach. Rusty Swetaggen cried for a week after I brought her back, said he’d never be able to repay me, and refused to let me or anyone who was with me pay for a drink or for anything else that he might provide. I stopped going to Rusty’s because all the free drinks were embarrassing.

Rusty was sitting at the bar, reading a copy of Newsweek , when I walked in. It was twenty-six minutes past two, but the place was still crowded with the lunch-hour rush. The real estate salespeople and the architects were vying for bar space with a lot of businessmen sporting bow ties and very short hair. The real estate people were getting the best of it. More practice, I guess. I pushed in beside Rusty and said, “I can’t believe a guy with your money hangs around the job. I had your bucks, I’d be on the beach in Maui.”