Dead silence.
He reached into the inside breast pocket of his coat. I flinched, but all he did was take out a retractable ballpoint pen, which he clicked. He scribbled something on a business card and held it out to me. "I can be reached at this number at any hour."
The guy on my right moved forward, took the card, and passed it to me. No name. No address. Just the handwritten number. The attorney continued, his tone pleasant. "In the meantime, we'd prefer that you'd keep this conversation confidential."
"Sure."
"No exceptions."
"Okay."
"Including Mr. Phillips."
Cheney Phillips, undercover vice cop. I said, "Got it."
I felt cool air on my face and realized the limo door had been opened. The guy on my right got out, extending a hand to me. I appreciated the assist. It's hard to hump your way across a seat when the sweat on the back of your knees is causing you to stick to the upholstery. I hoped I hadn't wet myself. In this situation, I didn't even trust my legs to work. I emerged somewhat ungracefully, butt first, like a breech birth. To steady myself, I put a hand against the car parked next to mine.
The guy got back in the limo. The rear door closed with a click and the car eased away, gliding soundlessly out of the parking lot. I checked for the license plate, but the number had been obscured by mud. Not that I'd have had the plate run. I didn't really want to know who these guys were.
Under my jacket, the back of my turtleneck was cold and damp. An involuntary spasm scampered down my frame. I needed a hot shower and a slug of brandy, but I didn't have time for either. I unlocked my car and got in, slapping the lock down again as if pursued. I peered into the backseat to make sure I was alone. Even before I started the car, I flipped the heater on.
I sat in a back booth at Frankie's Coffee Shop, as far from the windows as I could get. I kept searching the other patrons, wondering if one of them was tailing me. The place was moderately full: older couples who'd probably been coming here for years, kids looking for some place to hang out. Janice had spotted me when I came in, and she appeared at the table with a coffeepot in hand. There was a setup in front of me: napkin, silverware, thick white ceramic cup turned upside down on a matching saucer. I turned the cup right-side up, and she filled it. I left it on the table so she couldn't see how badly my hands were shaking.
"You look like you could use this," she said. "You're white as a sheet."
"Can you talk?"
She glanced behind her. "Soon as the party at table five clears out," she said. "I'll leave you this." She put the pot down and moved back to her station, pausing to pick up an order from the kitchen pass-through.
When she returned, she was toting an oversize cinnamon roll and two pats of butter wrapped in silver paper. "I brought you a snack. You look like you could use a little jolt of sugar with your caffeine."
"Thanks. This looks great."
She sat down across from me, careful to keep an eye out in case customers came in.
I opened both pats and broke off a band of hot roll, which I buttered and ate, nearly moaning aloud. The dough was soft and moist, the glaze dripping down between the coils. Nothing like fear to generate an appetite for comfort foods. "Fantastic. I could get addicted. Is this a bad time for you?"
"Not at the moment. I may have to interrupt. Are you all right? You don't seem like yourself."
"I'm fine. I have a couple of things I need to ask." I paused to lick butter from my fingers, and then I wiped them on a paper napkin. "Did you know Lorna was supposed to get married in Las Vegas the weekend she died?"
Janice looked at me as if I had begun to speak a foreign language and she was waiting for subtitles to appear at the bottom of the screen. "Where in the world did you hear such a thing?"
"Think there's any truth to it?"
"Until this very second, I'd have said absolutely not. Now you mention it, I'm not so sure. It's possible," she said. "It might explain her attitude, which at the time I couldn't identify. She seemed excited. Truly, like she was wanting to tell me something, but was holding back. You know how kids are.... Well, maybe you don't. When kids have a secret, they can hardly keep it in. They want to tell so bad they can't stand it, so most of the time they just blab it right out. She was acting like that. At the time, I wasn't picking up on it consciously. I did notice, because that's what popped in my head the minute you said that, but at the time, I didn't press. Who was she going to marry? As far as I know, she didn't even date."
"I don't know the man's name. I gather it was some fellow from Los Angeles."
"But who told you? How did you find out about him?"
"His attorney got in touch with me a little while ago. Actually, it might have been the guy himself, playing games. It's hard to say."
"Why haven't we heard about him before now? She's been dead ten months and this is the first I've heard of it."
"Maybe we've finally started fishing in the right swamp," I said. "You want me to ask the girls if she said anything to them?"
"I'm not sure it matters. I have no reason to believe the story's fabricated. It's a question of filling in some blanks."
"What else? You said there were a couple of things."
"On the twentieth of April – the day before she died – she closed out a savings account she kept down in Simi Valley. It looks like she withdrew approximately twenty thousand dollars, either in cash or check. It's also possible she moved the money to another account, but I can't find a record of it. Is this ringing any bells with you?"
She shook her head slowly. "No. I don't know anything about that. Mace or me didn't come across any substantial sums of money. I'd have turned it in, figuring it might be evidence. Besides, if it was Lorna's money, it'd be part of her estate and we might have to pay taxes on it. I don't cheat the government, not even the tiniest little bit. That's one thing I taught her. You don't fool around with the IRS."
"Could she have hidden it?" I asked.
"Why would she do that?"
"I have no idea. She might have closed out the account and then tucked the money away someplace until she needed it."
"You think someone stole it?"
"I don't even know if there was really any money in the first place. It looks like there was, but I can't be sure. It's possible her landlord might have taken it. At any rate, it's a detail I need to pin down."
"Well, I sure never saw it."
"Was she security conscious? I didn't see a lot of locks and bolts at her place."
"Oh, she was awful about that. She left the door wide open half the time. In fact, I've often thought somebody might have got in while she was jogging, which is why there wasn't any sign of forced entry. The police thought so, too, because they asked me about it more than once."
"Did she ever mention a safe in the house?"
Her tone was skeptical. "Oh, I don't think she had a safe. That doesn't seem like her at all. In that crappy little cabin? It wouldn't make any sense. She believed in banks. She had accounts everywhere."
"What about her jewelry? Where did she keep that? Did she have a safe-deposit box?"
"It was nothing like that. She kept a regular old jewelry box in her chest of drawers, but we didn't find anything expensive. Just some costume stuff."
"But she must have had good pieces if she went through all the trouble and expense to insure them. She even made a point of mentioning her jewelry in her will."
"I'll be happy to show you what we found, and you can see for yourself," Janice said.
"What about those home security devices where people hide their valuables – you know, fake rocks or Pepsi cans or phony heads of lettuce in the vegetable bin? Did she have anything like that?"
"I doubt it. The police never found anything in the house that I know of. I'm not sure about outside. I know they searched the yard around the cabin. If she had something like that, they'd have found it, wouldn't they?"
"You're probably right, but I may go back over there tomor
row and take a look. Feels like a waste of time, but I don't like loose ends. Anyway, it's not like I have any better ideas."
I went home to bed and slept fitfully, pricked by the awareness that I had work to do yet. While my body teetered toward exhaustion, my brain synapses fired at random. Ideas seemed to shoot up like rockets, exploding midair, a light show of impressions. By some curious metamorphosis, I was being drawn into the shadowy after-hours world Lorna Kepler had inhabited. Night turf, the darkness, seemed both exotic and familiar, and I felt myself waking to the possibilities. In the meantime, my system was operating on overload, and I didn't so much sleep as short myself out.
At five twenty-five in the evening, when I finally opened my eyes, I felt so anchored to the bed I could barely move. I closed my eyes again, wondering if I'd picked up a superfluous three hundred pounds in my sleep. I checked my extremities but found no evidence of massive overnight weight gain. I rolled out of bed with a whimper, pulled myself together with minimal attention to the particulars, and headed out my front door. At the first fast-food establishment I passed, I picked up an oversize container of hot coffee and sucked on it like a baby, effectively burning my lips.
By six, when ordinary folk were heading home from work, I was bumping down the narrow dirt lane that led to Lorna's cabin. I'd been driving with a constant eye on my rearview mirror, wondering if the fellows in the limousine were following. Whatever their tailing methods, they were experts. Since I'd started this case, I'd never been aware of being under surveillance. Even now I'd have been willing to swear there was no one watching.
I parked my car nose out, pausing as I had the first time to drink in the mossy perfume of the place. I set my empty cup on the floor and removed my flashlight and a screwdriver from the glove compartment. I got out of the car, pausing to assess the weather of the night. I was faintly aware of the ebb and flow of the freeway in the distance, a dull tide of passing cars. The air was soft and cold, the shadows shifting capriciously as if blown by the wind. I moved toward the cabin, stomach churning with uneasiness. It was amazing to me how much I'd learned about Lorna since I'd first seen the place. I'd reviewed the postmortem photographs so often, I could almost conjure up a vision of her as she'd been when she was discovered: softened, disintegrating, returning to the elements. If there were ghosts in this world, surely she was one.
The night was foggy, and I could hear the intermittent moaning of a foghorn sounding on the ocean. The night breeze had a saturated feel to it, rich with the scent of vegetation. I swept away the dark with the beam of my flashlight. The garden Leda'd planted was tangled and overgrown, tomato volunteers pushing up among the papery stalks of dead corn. A few onion sets had survived the last harvest. Come spring, even left to its own devices the garden might resurrect itself.
I stood in the front yard and studied the cabin, circling the outside. There was nothing to speak of: dirt, dead leaves, patches of dried grass. I went up the porch steps. The door was still off its hinges. I tapped to see if it was hollow, but it clunked back at me, dense and solid. I flipped on the overhead light. The dingy glow of a forty-watt bulb defined the interior spaces in a wash of faint yellow. I did a slow visual survey. Where would I hide twenty thousand dollars in cash? I started at the entryway and worked my way around to the right. The cabin was poorly insulated, and there didn't seem to be a lot of nooks and crannies. I tapped and poked, sticking the tip of my screwdriver in every crevice and crack. I felt like a dentist probing for cavities.
The kitchen seemed to suggest the greatest possibility for hiding places. I took drawers out, measured the depth of cabinets, looking for any discrepancies that might hint at an opening. I crawled along the floor, getting filthy in the process. Surely the cops had done exactly this... if they'd known what to search for.
I tried the bathroom next, shining my light up behind and inside the toilet tank, testing tiles for loose ones. I pulled out the medicine cabinet, peering down into the lathing behind it. I scrutinized the space in the alcove where she'd kept her bed, checked the metal floor plate in the living room on which the wood-burning stove had rested. There was nothing. Whatever Lorna did with her money, she didn't keep it on the premises. If she'd had jewelry or large sums of cash, she hadn't stuck it in a hidey-hole. Well, let's correct that. Whatever she'd done with her valuables, I didn't know where they were. Maybe someone else got to them first or maybe, as Cheney suggested, she'd used the money some other way. I finished up the search with a second survey, feeling dissatisfied.
By chance my gaze dropped to the Belltone box. The housing had been popped loose, and I leaned toward it, using my screwdriver to explore the space. For an instant I prayed a secret compartment would open up and a wad of bills would spill out. Optimist that I am, I always hope for things like that. There was nothing, of course, except the tag end of electrical wire. I'd never actually seen the working mechanism of a doorbell, but the wire seemed odd. I stood and stared at it for a moment and then leaned closer, squinting. What was that?
I went outside, down the creaking wooden steps. The front porch was hiked up on concrete supports, elevated about three feet, the space narrowing down to nothing where the ground sloped upward at the back. The intention must have been to keep moisture away from the floor joists, but the net effect was to create a cinder-strewn crawl space that had been screened with wooden lathing. I crouched beside the lathing and stuck my fingers through the holes. I gave a pull and a small section lifted away, allowing me to peer at the space underneath the cabin. It was pitch black. I raked the area with the beam of my flashlight and was treated to the bouncing of daddy longlegs as they warned me away.
There was a flat piece of plywood on the ground with a few garden tools laid on top. I stood up again, aligning my sights with the approximate location of the Belltone box. I adjusted my position and shone my flashlight up along the joists. I could see where the green wire came down through the floor. It was stapled along the joists at long intervals, running toward the edge of the porch close to me. I was going to have to inch my way under, not a happy thought given all the spiders lurking in the dark.
Gingerly I got down on my hands and the balls of my feet and duck-walked my way under. The spider kiddies viewed me with alarm, and many of them fled in what must have been spider fear and panic. Later they would have horrified conversations about the unpredictability of humans. "Eeew. All those fingers," they'd say. "And those big nasty feet. They always look like they're about to squish you." Spider mothers would console them. "Most humans are completely harmless, and they're just as scared of us as we are of them," they'd say.
I craned my head, sweeping the underside of the porch with the beam of my flashlight. Right at eye level a leather case had been stapled to the wood. I used the flat end of my screwdriver to force the staples out. The case was dusty and mealy where the leather had begun to deteriorate. I humped my way out from under the porch. I dusted my hands off, brushed gravel and dirt from my jeans, then flipped off the flashlight. I moved back into the cabin to examine my find. What I was holding looked like the carrying case for a little portable radio or tape recorder, complete with holes in the end into which an earphone or a mike could be plugged. There was a slit along one end for the volume control. It had to be a surveillance setup, not sophisticated by any means, but possibly effective. Somebody had planted something similar in my apartment a couple of years back, and I'd discovered it only by accident. In the meantime, the voice-activated recorder had captured my end of all phone calls, all incoming messages on my answering machine, both sides of any conversations I'd had on the premises.
Someone had been spying on Lorna. Of course, it was possible she'd planted the device herself, but only if she'd had a reason to keep an audible record of her conversations. If that were the case, I couldn't believe she wouldn't have planted the recorder inside the cabin, where reception would be good and the tapes easier to replace. Something like this, tacked to the underside of the cabin, was bound to pick up a l
ot of ambient noise.
Gosh-a-rudy, I thought, now who do I know who'd have access to all kinds of surveillance equipment? Could it be Miss Leda Selkirk, daughter of the PI who'd once had his license yanked for an illegal wiretap? I flipped my flashlight back on and turned the lights off in the cabin. I unlocked my car and turned the key in the ignition, easing the VW down the bumpy road toward the street.
I parked out in front of the Burkes' half-darkened house.
When Leda answered my knock, I was standing with the decrepit leather case dangling off the end of my screwdriver like the skin of some strange beast. Tonight, her midriff was bare. Here it was the middle of February and she was wearing an outfit that might have been suitable for a belly dancer: wrap-around sarong-style pants with wide legs in a thin floral fabric reminiscent of summer pajama bottoms. The top was a similar fabric, different print, with no sleeves and one button appearing right between her quite weensie breasts. I said, "Is J.D. here?"
She shook her head. "He's not home yet."
"Mind if I come in?" I pictured her playing dumb, a reaction ranging anywhere from denial to duh.
She looked at me and she looked at the leather case, apparently unable to think of a thing to say except, "Oh."
She stepped back from the door, and I went into the darkened hall, following as she led the way toward the kitchen at the rear. A glance to the left showed Jack, the sticky-fingered toddler, lying in a stupor on the couch, watching a cartoon video. The infant slept, slumped sideways in a well-padded portable car seat while colored images flickered across its face.
The kitchen still smelled like the sautéed onions and ground beef from dinner on Monday, which seemed like ages ago. Some of the dishes piled in the sink looked the same, too, though several other meals' worth had been piled on top. She was probably the type who waited until everything was used before she ventured into the washing process. "You want some coffee?" she asked. I could see a fresh pot on a Mr. Coffee stand, the mechanism still spitting out the last few drops.