Steve Martini - Double Tap

The only thing left was to figure some way to get rid of the maid, and so he did. Early one afternoon he called the house, knowing that the owner would be at the office. Only the maid would be there. He identified himself, using a false name, and said he was calling from the Isotenics security department. He explained that since security was no longer providing protection at the residence, they had been ordered to obtain information regarding any employees who worked there or who had keys to the house. He then proceeded to ask a number of questions regarding references, where the maid had worked previously, where she had been born, a list of residences where she had lived or worked for the five years immediately preceding her employment in the house. The poor woman tripped over a number of these, hemming and hawing, making it clear by her vague responses that she couldn’t answer many of them, at least not truthfully.

He finally administered the coup de grâce. He asked for her Social Security number and date of birth and told her it was just for their records so they could run a background check for security. He couldn’t be sure from the silence on the other end of the phone but he figured she must have shit a brick, knowing that if they ran this information through a government computer they would discover that she was in the country illegally. Knock on any dozen doors in posh areas of Southern California and chances are that if a maid answers she will be speaking English, if at all, with a southern accent, and it won’t be from Georgia.

Two days later, in the middle of the night, Madelyn Chapman’s Mexican maid grabbed her few belongings, stuffed them into a small suitcase, and disappeared. She didn’t even bother to ask for her final paycheck. The new replacement worked for a large domestic-services firm and worked a normal shift, eight hours. She always left the house by four-thirty. He had watched her today as she went out the front door, turning her key in the dead bolt to lock it from the outside.

He turned and looked out toward the ocean again. The surfers had taken no notice. Their attention was riveted on the burgeoning set of cresting combers rolling in behind them.

He reached into his jacket pocket, plucked out the brown leather driving gloves, and slipped them on his hands as he walked. He glanced quickly up at the windows of the two adjacent buildings. The house on the left was dark. The larger apartment building to the right was angled back from the beach and followed the natural curve of shore so that once he’d gone ten paces, no one looking from the apartment’s upper windows could see him.

Within seconds he reached the cover of the seawall and one of the arched doors leading up to the patio above. The door itself was made with heavy planks of wood with a garden latch on the inside for a lock. He slipped the thin blade of a Swiss army knife into the crack between the door and its frame and lifted the latch. In three seconds he was inside with the garden door closed behind him.

He had a set of picks for the lock on the back door but preferred not to use them because they would leave scratch marks, tool impressions, one more piece of evidence that he didn’t need to leave behind. It took less than a minute to find what he was looking for: a ground-floor window that wasn’t latched. It was not a high-crime neighborhood, as the lackadaisical habits of many of the residents showed.

Within seconds he popped the screen, slid the lower half of the window up, and nimbly slipped inside the house. He closed the window but left the screen propped against a small bush outside. There was still enough light from outside so that he didn’t need to use the penlight in his pocket. He found himself in one of the lower level guest bedrooms. In the corner on one wall, near the ceiling, was a small white sphere of plastic. It looked like an oversized egg with a flat side against the wall. On the side facing out was a recessed area, curved and white, perhaps an inch in length, aimed out at the room. It was a motion detector. His eyes were riveted on the tiny light under the recessed area as he froze stone still and counted silently in his head. When he reached thirty, the light still hadn’t flashed. The system was off.

He took a deep breath and started looking around the room. It had three doors, one leading to the closet, another to a bathroom. This was open. He could see the claw-foot tub inside.

He moved to the third door, which was closed, pressed his ear against the wood, and listened for a moment. Then he turned the knob and let it open just a crack as he peered into the hallway. He listened for sounds of movement upstairs, the creaking of floorboards, footfalls, the sounds of a television. He heard nothing except the hiss of conditioned air flowing from the register high on the wall behind him.

He slipped his shoes off and held them in one hand, then stepped silently into the hallway. Walking on the tile floor in stocking feet, he made no sound as he moved past two closed doors and entered the kitchen.

The place looked like the inside of a spaceship: curving stainless-steel appliances, a refrigerator, a freezer, and a sleek square commercial cooker with a gleaming copper hood. He allowed the gloved finger of one hand to brush over the maker’s name on the front of the stove as he passed by: the label read Morice .

A short hallway led past the pantry to the three-car garage. There was only one car inside, a late-model Mercedes.

He went back into the house. In the other direction were the living room and a large formal dining area. An equally spacious elliptical entry was graced by an intricately carved oval table of dark hardwood, something from the primordial rain forests of Africa or South America. It was laid over with a thick piece of glass, smooth and clear, not a single fingerprint or smudge on it. A staircase curved around the walls of the entry leading up to the second story. Under the stairs was a curving arc of display cases, each framed by a glass door and a cylinder lock, the kind you would find in a public museum housing rare artifacts. He assumed that just such pricey items were inside: shelves filled with art glass reached from floor to ceiling, ending as the stairs dropped down below head height. The shelves, though built-in, had the look of something that was added-not part of the architect’s original vision but functional for the owner.

He set his shoes down on the carpeted floor by the foot of the stairs. He couldn’t be sure if there were sections of hardwood or tile upstairs, and until he was certain the house was empty, it was best not to make a sound.

As he passed through the entry, he took care not to allow himself to be captured by the lens of the security camera outside. It was mounted on the ceiling of the porch and aimed back at the double front doors, each of which had a fan-shaped window at the top.

He hugged the doors, stooping slightly to stay under the windows, and slipped through the entry. He found himself in another large entertaining area with a conversation pit and fireplace. There were more items of glass art here, on tables and adorning shelves. Beyond this was a still larger room, this one with mirrors on two walls. It was filled with exercise equipment: two stationary bikes, a treadmill, a weight machine, two different types of ellipticals, a StairMaster and one of those multistations for working every muscle group in the body. These were devices that until now he’d seen only in commercial fitness clubs. Taped to the mirror on the wall was a business card with the phone number and name of a professional trainer. He began to worry. This was something new, unexpected. What other changes might have been made? What if the owner or some later hired help had gone through the drawers upstairs and cleaned them out?