Robert Crais: Stalking the Angel

I parked under the big oak, walked over to the door, and rang the bell. Hatcher was twisted around in his T-bird, watching. I rang the bell two more times before the door opened and a woman wearing a white Love tennis outfit and holding a tall glass with something clear in it looked up at me. She said, “Are you the detective?”

“Usually I wear a deerstalker cap,” I said, “but today it’s at the cleaners.”

She laughed too loud and put out her hand. “Sheila Warren,” she said. “You’re a good-looking devil, aren’t you.” Twenty minutes before noon and she was drunk.

I looked back at Hatcher. He was grinning.

Sheila Warren was in her forties, with tanned skin and a sharp nose and bright blue eyes and auburn hair. She had the sort of deep lines you get when you play a lot of tennis or golf or otherwise hang out in the sun. The hair was pulled back in a pony tail and she wore a white headband. She looked good in the tennis outfit, but not athletic. Probably did more hanging out than playing.

She opened the door wider and gestured with the glass for me to come in. Ice tinkled. “I suppose you want to see where he had the damn book.” She said it like we were talking about an eighth-grade history book.

“Sure.”

She gestured with the glass again. “I always like to have something cool when I come in off the court. All that sweat. Can I get you something?”

“Maybe later.”

We walked back through about six thousand miles of entry and a living room they could rent out as an airplane hangar and a dining room with seating for Congress. She stayed a step in front of me and swayed as she walked. I said, “Was anyone home the night it was stolen?”

“We were in Canada. Bradley’s building a hotel in Edmonton so we flew up. Bradley usually flies alone, but the kid and I wanted to go so we went.” The kid.

“How about the help?”

“They’ve all got family living down in Little Tokyo. They beat it down there as soon as we’re out of the house.” She looked back at me. “The police asked all this, you know.”

“I like to check up on them.”

She said, “Oh, you.”

We went down a long hall with a tile floor and into a cavern that turned out to be the master bedroom. At the end of the hall there was an open marble atrium with a lot of green leafy plants in it, and to the left of the atrium there were glass doors looking out to the back lawn and the pool. Where one of the glass doors had been, there was now a 4 ? 8 sheet of plywood as if the glass had been broken and the plywood put there until the glass could be replaced. Opposite the atrium, there was a black lacquer platform bed and a lot of black lacquer furniture. We went past the bed and through a doorway into a his dressing room. The hers had a separate entrance.

The his held a full-length three-way dressing mirror and a black granite dressing table and about a mile and a half of coats and slacks and suits and enough shoes to shod a small American city. At the foot of the dressing mirror the carpet had been rolled back and there was a Citabria-Wilcox floor safe large enough for a man to squat in.

Sheila Warren gestured toward it with the glass and made a face. “The big shot’s safe.”

The top was lying open like a manhole cover swung over on a hinge. It was quarter-inch plate steel with two tumblers and three half-inch shear pins. There was black powder on everything from when the crime scene guys dusted for prints. Nothing else seemed disturbed. The ice tinkled behind me. “Was the safe like this when you found it?”

“It was closed. The police left it open.”

“How about the alarm?”

“The police said they must’ve known how to turn it off. Or maybe we forgot to turn it on.” She gave a little shrug when she said it, like it didn’t matter very much in the first place and she was tired of talking about it. She was leaning against the door-jamb with her arms crossed, watching me. Maybe she thought that when detectives flew into action it was something you didn’t want to miss. “You should’ve seen the glass,” she said. “He brings the damn book here and look what happens. I walk barefoot on the carpet and I still pick up slivers. Mr. Big Shot Businessman.” She didn’t say the last part to me.

“Has anyone called, or delivered a ransom note?”

“For what?”

“The book. When something rare and easily identifiable is stolen, it’s usually stolen to sell it back to the owner or his insurance company.”

She made another face. “That’s silly.”

I guess that meant no. I stood up. “Your husband said there were pictures of the book.”

She finished the drink and said, “I wish he’d take care of these things himself.” Then she left. Maybe I could go out and Hatcher could come in and question her for me. Maybe Hatcher already had. Maybe I should call the airport and catch Bradley’s plane and tell him he could keep his check and his job. Nah. What would Donald Trump think?

When Sheila Warren came back, she had gotten rid of the glass and was carrying a color 8 ? 10 showing Bradley accepting something that looked like a photo album from a dignified white-haired Japanese gentleman. There were other men around, all Japanese, but not all of them looked dignified. The book was a dark rich brown, probably leather-covered board, and would probably crumble if you sneered at it. Jillian Becker was in the picture.

Sheila Warren said, “I hope this is what you want.” The top three buttons on her tennis outfit had been undone.

“This will be fine,” I said. I folded the picture and put it in my pocket.

She wet her lips. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”

“Positive, thanks.”

She looked down at her shoes, said, “Ooo, these darn laces,” then turned her back and bent over from the hip. The laces hadn’t looked untied to me, but I miss a lot. She played with one lace and then she played with the other, and while she was playing with them I walked out. I wandered back through to the kitchen and from there to the rear yard. There was a dichondra lawn that sloped gently away from the house toward a fifty-foot Greek Revival swimming pool and a small pool house with a sunken conversation pit around a circular grill. I stood at the deep end of the pool and looked around and shook my head. Man. First him. Now her. What a pair.

Whoever had gone into the house had probably known the combination or known where to find it. Combinations are easy to get. One day when no one’s around, a gardener slips in, finds the scrap of paper on which people like Bradley Warren always write their combinations, then sells it to the right guy for the right price. Or maybe one day Sheila flexed a little too much upper-class muscle with the hundred-buck-a-week housekeeper, and the housekeeper says, Okay, bitch, here’s one for you, and feeds the numbers to her out-of-work boyfriend. You could go on.

I walked along the pool deck past the tennis court and along the edge of the property and then back toward the house. There were no guard dogs and no closed-circuit cameras and no fancy surveillance equipment. The wall around the perimeter wasn’t electrified, and if there was a guard tower it was disguised as a palm tree. Half the kids on Hollywood Boulevard could loot the place blind. Maybe I’d go down there and question them. Only take me three or four years.

When I got back to the house, a teenage girl was sitting on one of four couches in the den. She was cross-legged, staring down into the oversized pages of a book that could’ve been titled Andrew Wyeth’s Bleakest Landscapes .

I said, “Hi, my name’s Elvis. Are you Mimi?”

She looked up at me the way you look at someone when you open your front door and see it’s a Jehovah’s Witness. She was maybe sixteen and had close-cropped brown hair that framed her face like a small inner tube. It made her face rounder than it was. I would have suggested something upswept or shag-cut to give her face some length, but she hadn’t asked me. There was no makeup and no nail polish and some would have been in order. She wasn’t pretty. She rubbed at her nose and said, “Are you the detective?”