Питер Робинсон - No Cure for Love

“Did she go to the police?”

“Not at first. She just warned him, like that was it. No more. Nada . Goodbye. That’s all she wrote.”

“And?”

“And one day while she’s at work he, like, breaks into her house. You know what he does?”

Sarah shook her head.

“He steals a pair of shoes, that’s all.”

“Shoes?”

“Uh-huh. Navy pumps. Is that weird, or what? But wait for it. Not only does he steal a pair of her shoes. The next time he phones, do you know what he tells her?”

“What?”

“He tells her he’s had the fucking shoes bronzed, that’s all. Bronzed! ”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Cross my heart.”

“What happened next?”

“She calls the cops. What she should’ve done right from the start, you ask me. They slap a restraining order on him. Like, he isn’t supposed to go within two miles of her or something. This is a while ago. I hear we’ve got better laws now.”

“Did he obey the order?”

“Dream on. Two days later he breaks into her house again. This time while she’s there. First he shoots her in the head, then he takes her clothes off. Then he gets undressed, puts his arm around her and shoots himself in the head. The cops find them huddled naked and dead together on the sofa like some modern-day Romeo and Juliet. Isn’t that just so bizarre?”

Sarah shivered. Even the sweater wasn’t warm enough to keep out the chill of Lisa’s story. Kiri finished and Jack started with the sixties music again. This one Sarah recognized; it was Led Zeppelin doing “Whole Lotta Love.”

“Anyway, don’t worry about the letter, honey,” Lisa said, resting her hand lightly on Sarah’s arm. “I mean, this was different. The guy knew her. They’d dated. It wasn’t just like, you know, some pervert writing out of the blue. That happens all the time. See you later, sugar, I just have to go and dance to this song.”

And Lisa dashed off inside the house. Sarah finished her rum and Coke and chatted with a few other guests, her mind hardly on it at all, then looked for Stuart to take her home.

Not being able to drive was a hell of a drawback in Los Angeles, she had found, but the idea of getting behind the wheel of a car — especially on the freeways — terrified her even more than the inconvenience of calling cabs or relying on friends.

She wasn’t “big’ enough yet to merit a limo and driver from the network, so Stuart would often give her a ride to the studio. He lived in Brentwood, which, while it was practically in the opposite direction, wasn’t very far away. If Stuart couldn’t make it, she would call a cab.

The show’s producer wanted Sarah to learn how to drive — at least enough to look comfortable behind the wheel of a police cruiser on TV. Stuart had taken her out in the desert a couple of times for lessons, and she’d learned the basics, like how to turn on the ignition and put it in “Drive,” which was the gas pedal and which was the brake, but that was as far as she had got. The roads out there had been empty; she couldn’t imagine herself ever driving in traffic.

Led Zeppelin rocked on. The bass and drums were so loud that Sarah worried the vibrations would shake the house loose and send it careening down the hillside the way mudslides often did in the canyons.

The whole setting was ridiculous anyway: a house propped up on stilts near the top of a steep slope. How could Jack live up here, perched so precariously? Sarah didn’t think she could.

Still, it seemed that no matter where one lived in Los Angeles, there was danger from the forces of nature. Impermanence was a fact of life that insinuated itself into people’s psyches in odd ways. Sarah had often thought that explained some of the general craziness of the place. Nothing’s permanent, so don’t get hung up on anything.

Since she had been living in LA, there had been fires, heavy rains and a major earthquake, and she had heard people say that the four seasons in Southern California are called flood, fire, earthquake and riot. Yet here she was, standing on the deck of a stilt-house high on a canyon side probably within spitting distance of the San Andreas fault. Crazy.

Talk about floating on air. It was bad enough feeling as if she were forever wobbling on stilts, constantly feeling that someday someone would come and pinch her and say, “It’s all been a mistake, love, you’re not really a star, you’re just a snotty-nosed little girl from Yorkshire and all this has just been an illusion, now it’s back to the meat-packaging factory where you belong.”

Bad enough feeling it, let alone living it. Suddenly she felt an attack of vertigo coming on; she had to get back to solid ground. Brilliant, our Sal, she thought, catching Stuart’s eye across the deck, now Los Angeles is a metaphor for your insecurities.

Before she left, she looked again at the Christmas lights across the canyon and shivered. “This was different,” Lisa had said of her friend. “The guy knew her.” Then she turned and looked at the party crowd. Could it be someone close to her, someone who knew her, someone who knew her real name and her address, like Jack and Stuart? Then she tried to dismiss the idea from her mind as ridiculous. Jack and Stuart were the only real friends she had here. They weren’t perverts. They couldn’t be.

“What are the chances of an ordinary person becoming the target of the kind of person you’ve been talking about? Someone like me, for instance.”

Arvo scanned the sea of faces for his questioner and noticed that she was a good-looking redhead in a green silk blouse. She had a southern accent. Arvo straightened his tie, the one with the Salvador Dalí melting watch design.

Tall and tanned, with the physique of a long-distance runner rather than a sprinter, and smartly dressed in a lightweight wool suit, Arvo was generally thought attractive by women.

He was thirty-five years old, had thick brown hair, perhaps a shade too long over the collar, and a boyish smile enhanced rather than hindered by slightly crooked teeth. He also had good bone structure, including high cheekbones and a strong jaw, which he had inherited, along with his unusual first name, from his Estonian mother.

His brown, expressive eyes always gave the impression of being interested in whatever people were saying to him, but if you looked closely you could see a diamond glint of toughness at their center. They were eyes that had seen violent death and faced danger; they were cop’s eyes.

Arvo didn’t know what he had acquired from his Welsh father, except perhaps his crooked teeth and his public-speaking abilities. The Welsh, his father had told him, had a tradition of great oratory.

That was no doubt why the lieutenant had chosen him to speak on “Assessing Erotomaniacs and Love Obsessionals’ to a National Law Enforcement Convention in the Pasadena Hilton that morning.

The LAPD Threat Management Unit was the only such department in the country. As the unit could only operate within the Los Angeles city limits, its members always seemed to be advising out-of-town police departments, acting as consultants to the FBI, the Secret Service or the CIA, and giving talks like this. Arvo had even appeared on a PBS TV special, where he had been so nervous all he remembered now was how hot the studio lights had been.

“It’s a subtle difference,” Arvo answered carefully. “In most cases, both erotomaniacs and love obsessionals target unattainable objects, almost always people they have never met. Senators, congressmen, movie stars and suchlike. Erotomaniacs generally believe that the person they have chosen is in love with them. For the love obsessionals, though, that doesn’t matter. They’re in love with whoever they’ve chosen and they believe that that person will probably come to love them in time, if they do the right things. The danger to ordinary individuals is far more likely to come from what we call “simple obsessionals”: that is, someone they know, someone they have been intimately involved with and spurned. A past lover, for example.”