Fields Where They Lay, page 26
I closed that door as they opened the one at the end of the corridor, one sound covering the other, and then I froze. The floor in here hadn’t been swept since the last site manager rode off into the sunset, and it was gritty, even under the soles of my sneakers. And, since there were no windows, it was also pitch black.
Well, almost pitch black. The thin strip of light beneath the door, once my eyes had adjusted, was enough to tell me that, even if they’d removed the files, they’d left the filing cabinets. Since moving a filing cabinet is by several orders of magnitude the easiest way to move files, the little serpent of anxiety that had coiled in my chest uncoiled, blew me an aggrieved raspberry, and slithered off to find someone else to frighten. I pulled out the penlight and went to take a look.
Correspondence, invoices, construction junk, licenses, office supplies, sponges, rubber gloves, hair tonic—who still used hair tonic?—paperback books, mail to and from the city and the county. And then, in a drawer by themselves, the documents I was seeking: contracts.
I flipped through a couple of the ones that were filled out and then reached past them, to the very back of the drawer, for the blanks: a lawyer’s opium dream, unclouded by details and people and negotiation, of what the relationship between the mall and its “commercial lessees” should be. I grabbed one and scanned straight down to the pertinent section.
And there it was, the legal equivalent of the little key Morris Stempel had used to open that sealed can of M-rations for Madame Loiseau. There it was in literal black and white, what the whole damn thing was about, even if I couldn’t quite put all the pieces together in the right order yet. It was the Christmas gift that kept on giving. I would have been happy just to have so many things finally made clear—the shoplifting, for example—but it also did me the vast favor of eliminating from the pool of people who might have killed Bonnie all the vendors in the bazaar, all the employees of Boots to Suits, and all the people who worked in the few outlets that belonged to chain operations.
It was the however improbable old Sherlock talked about, just waiting for me to figure out where to look for it. And now I’d found it.
28
Christmas Gifts for People We Hate
“What time is it?” Anime Wong said on the phone, cranky as a hibernating bear whose alarm clock had gone off in January.
“Almost nine. Come on, it’s a brand-new day. Get up, stretch, run in place, open your clear young eyes to the wonder of—”
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” she said. “I’m doing subtraction. I’ve been asleep two hours and . . . jeez, what’s twenty-nine from sixty?”
“Thirty-one. Are you telling me you know the minute you go to sleep?”
“I know the minute I put my head on the pillow, and if this is nine, that was two hours and thirty-one minutes ago.”
“Come on,” I said. “You’re a kid. You’ve got your whole adult life to feel tired.”
“Gee, what a rosy glimpse of the future. What?”
I said, “What what?”
“What do you want?”
“You and Lilli.”
“Why?”
“Expertise.”
A muffled sound that might have been her actually saying, “Grrrrrrrrr,” just like it’s spelled. Then she said, “When?”
“Around noon.”
“Where?”
“Edgerton Mall.”
“Ohmigod,” she said. “What’s the name of this chapter, ‘Christmas Gifts for People We Hate’? I thought they turned Edgerton into an animal shelter.”
“Will you be there?”
“Grrrrrrrr,” she said again. I could hear her sitting up in bed, or on a couch, or wherever the hell she and Lilli had gone to sleep. She yawned in my ear. “Have you ever heard anybody actually say, ‘What the—’?”
“Not without a few words following it, no. What the heck? What—”
“What I thought,” she said. “It’s all over the place in comic books and graphic novels. Usually with an apostrophe or one of those other squiggles after the h in the. Like ‘What th’?’ You can’t even say it out loud.”
“Well,” I said, “not meaning to disrupt your belief system, given how much thought you’ve put into this, but graphic novels are not real life.”
“I guess that’s one of the things I’ll understand when I get older, right?” Anime was going on fifteen.
“None of the things you’re supposed to understand when you get older are worth understanding,” I said. “Take it from me. You already know everything you’ll ever need to know. You’ll pick up some extra facts, sure, but you’ve already got the world down cold.”
She paused, probably in replay mode. “Is that a compliment?”
“Up to you.”
“So Edgerton at noon, right? Where?”
“At Santa’s throne,” I said, and as Anime hung up I heard her say, “Yeah, sure, where else?”
Motel 7 was one of those ideas that had probably sounded great at first. I chose it because I had neither the time nor the inclination to go to the Wedgwood and listen to the echoes in the empty apartment, and also because Motel 7 was only a few miles from Edgerton and I knew it to be relatively vermin-free. The one time I’d stayed there, back during the grey stretch of gloom I think of as The Motel Period, the guy who owned the place gave me a very compressed ten minutes on how he’d gone back and forth between naming it Motel 5 and Motel 7—5 suggesting extra savings and 7 clearly indicating higher quality. He’d had a global franchise in mind but it never happened, and he’d been bitter ever since for not having gone with Motel 5.
It wasn’t a story I wanted to hear again, so I was a little short with him as I checked in. The rooms, he insisted on telling me, wouldn’t be cleaned until after eleven, but when I cross-examined him he admitted that only two of them had been slept in this week and the others had been made up for days. I literally plucked the key from his hand while he was enlightening me on the difficulty of managing a cloud of maids when you never knew how many rooms there would be to clean. He’d branched off into a plan to spice the place up with French maids’ uniforms when I let the glass door close mercifully between us.
Nine-eighteen as I pulled my overnight kit out of my trunk and realized I didn’t have a new razor. I get a little crazy if I don’t shave. Well, I thought, maybe being a little crazy would be an improvement. Being sane hadn’t gotten me anywhere until about an hour ago. I had one errand, a two-stopper, to run before going back to Edgerton, and I figured that it would either take an hour or be completely impossible, so I set my phone to erupt at ten-thirty and play “Satisfy Me” by Anderson East, since I didn’t have any actual Stax/Volt on my music list. Then I dialed Ronnie again, listened to it ring, disconnected, and went to sleep with my shoes on.
At quarter to eleven, I was squinting into the morning sunshine of a bright blue Southern California Christmas Eve day. My quick shower had been more successful at getting me wet than at clearing my head, but a Venti or a Gulperino or whatever Starbucks persists in calling its biggest cup of coffee had taken me from weary and fuddled to jumpy and fuddled. It felt like an improvement. And for what seemed like the first time in months, I had a plan of sorts.
One of Shlomo’s kids, he’d said, had become a lawyer, and the other was in real estate. Since I figured real estate was at the heart of the problem anyway, that was the one I picked.
One of the most frequently bemoaned aspects of the age of social media is the loss of personal privacy. People in my line of work take a different view, which is that it’s not being lost anywhere near fast enough. Still, it took me less than two minutes on my phone to find Stempel Estates Realty (the “estates” was a nice nose-in-the-air touch); the full name of its owner, Philip Harold Stempel; and Philip Harold Stempel’s office and home addresses, plus a picture of his Woodland Hills house from the street. Two minutes, and I was groggy. If this trend keeps up, people might just as well put their stuff out on the lawn every night.
I’d been feeling for a while that I was overdue for a wish come true, so it was pleasant to see the bright, cheap-looking little pennants hanging limply in front of Stempel Estates Realty, indicating that it was open for business for at least a few hours on Christmas Eve. Shlomo had said that both of his kids had essentially gold-plated themselves, and that was certainly consistent with the approach Philip Harold had taken to the building that housed Stempel Estates Realty. A basic stucco box, it had been fitted out in front with a grand portico, complete with columns that might have been salvaged from Tara. If you drove around to the side, as I did, looking to see how many cars were parked there, you were looking at the back of the original, unadorned cube with its cheap aluminum track windows. The fancy front wasn’t even the same color as the rest of it.
The winter sun glinted off two cars parked in back, one a highly polished black Cadillac SUV sporting the plates PHIL RE, undoubtedly standing for real estate, and the other a dusty, bird-spattered Kia. As long as I was idling back there, I called the business number and got a woman who had majored in perky, who identified herself as Rhonda, and who said that Mr. Stempel was in a meeting and the place would be open until one.
So. Straight south to Ventura, across the boulevard into the high-rent district, and a couple of blocks northwest to Woodland Hills. I figured I was four or five miles and four or five hundred thousand dollars away from Shlomo’s house or, as his sons called it, the teardown. But the teardowns on these blocks had been reduced to kindling some time ago, and what we had now was the architectural equivalent of a pocket yanked inside out: big, mostly new, mostly ugly structures that had been inflated to cover every legal square foot of the lots on which they stood and which gave off (to me, anyway) the sad miasma of striving and dissatisfaction. One after another, they seemed to say, This is everything in the world I have now, and I’m not sure I can hang onto it.
Philip Stemple owned, or at least was making payments on, a Mediterranean fever dream, an apricot-colored assemblage of arches topped off with a slightly crooked tile roof that put me in mind of a slipped toupee. As I slowed, a little black Mercedes convertible backed out of the driveway at a high rate of speed, did a quick three-point turn, and zipped past me, giving me a glimpse of a dissatisfied-looking woman whose skin had been stretched as taut as a tom-tom and whose expression suggested that she had long ago stopped expecting moments of grace that didn’t have a price attached to them.
I kept on going, all the way around the block, and then eased back up Philip Stempel’s street, which was lined spottily with tall eucalyptus trees, where they hadn’t been cut for construction. I parked two houses down and went up Stempel’s driveway, walking as though I held the title to the property. The gate was set back from the front of the house, probably to let more than one car park in the drive, which is always a mistake. Here’s a tip: if you’re thinking about building or remodeling, put the gate flush with the front of the house. Otherwise, you locate one of the property’s most vulnerable spots in a cul-de-sac, out of sight from most of the street, creating an ideally secluded entry point for someone to whom you would refuse entrance, if you had a choice in the matter.
It took me about five seconds and a short running start to go over the gate and roughly three minutes to get in through the back door. It was 11:22 a.m., and I was due at the Edgerton to meet Anime and Lilli in less than forty minutes.
Still, I stood there and listened. There might be a maid, there might be a cousin visiting from Cleveland, there might be (there had once been) another burglar, so I gave those possibilities the long, careful moments they deserved, and then I went straight to it. I’d had some time to think about the theft of Morris Stempel’s dog tags, and it seemed almost certain to me that the act had something to do with the pressure Shlomo’s sons were exerting on him to sell the house, and that the tags had been stolen so close to Christmas so that they could be either held for ransom or, more plausibly, returned to him as a gift in some persuasive fashion.
What those assumptions suggested to me was that the dog tags, which had no intrinsic value, wouldn’t be locked in a safe or hidden away. They’d be somewhere close at hand, ready to be used as a bargaining chip or a present with strings as thick as ropes attached to it. I went through the house quickly—it had an airless quality, as though they never opened the windows, and there was plastic sheeting on the living room couch, adding a petroleum pong to the stuffiness. I didn’t look at anything except tables with chairs pulled up to them, where someone could do paperwork. In the upstairs room that I presumed was Philip’s office, I found them, but I’m half-ashamed to admit that what drew my attention wasn’t the shape of the tags but the distinctive gleam of gold.
He’d had them gold-plated.
There were two of them, identical. Stempel, Morris L. said the first line, followed by a line of numbers that I presumed comprised his serial number and then T44, which I thought indicated the year he’d been inoculated against Tetanus, and the letter O, probably his blood type. Down in the lower right corner was the lethal letter J, for Jewish. The letter that could have gotten him killed.
The tags had been worn down, dented, and scratched, and all that wear showed through the gold plating. When I picked them up, the weight took me by surprise, and I took a closer look at the chain, which was also gold.
They were resting on top of a Hanukkah card depicting a stylized menorah. I opened the card to find the words, “Dear Dad,” followed by a blank expanse of paper, a prayer for inspiration if I ever saw one, and obviously an unanswered prayer since Hanukkah had ended on December 14 and the card was still undelivered. I set aside the card and dog tags so I could look at the document beneath them. It was an offer for a house at an address in Tarzana, and it was for $1,820,000, a lot of zeroes.
So Philip had been doing client drive-bys on the house without telling his father—the house, Shlomo had said, that sat on two lots—and he’d gotten an offer he simply couldn’t resist, and this whole charade—borrowing his grandfather’s dog tags, which he probably thought his father wouldn’t notice, gold-plating them, and hanging them on a heavy gold chain—was his way of presenting the offer.
I sat in Philip’s chair and tried to see it from his point of view. He was obviously morally tone-deaf. He had no idea what kind of person his father actually was, probably projecting his own values on Shlomo to come up with an offer that he thought would represent an irresistible windfall to his parents. He’d been uncertain enough, though, to dress it up with the presentation of the gold-plated dog tags, a little schmear of sentiment to mask the dryness of the underlying business transaction. I wondered whether Philip had even considered turning his commission over to his parents, too, and then I decided that there wasn’t a chance. Anyway the issue at hand was what to do with the dog tags. Take them or leave them?
The tags gave off a kind of emotional sizzle, the intangible aura that Herbie had trained me to spot, even at a distance: Look for the one thing they can’t bear to lose, he’d said in various ways over the years, and then don’t take it. In the end, I went with his advice, as I had so often, and trusted Philip to return them. I used my phone to take a few pictures of the whole setup—tags, card, offer—to show to Shlomo later. At least he’d know where the tags were.
As I got up, I heard a car and looked out the window to see the little black Mercedes pulling in. I was halfway down the stairs when the motor that opened the gate began to grind, which meant she was coming in through the back, so I went out the front. I was most of the way to my car before I heard the house’s rear door swing shut.
29
Foreshortening
Noon on Christmas Eve day, and the place was as full as I’d ever seen it. The music was back on, the colored lights were blinking in obsessive-compulsive fashion, and a group of what looked like high school kids in white choir robes was being herded up onto a temporary platform that had been laid down over the dirty water in the reflecting pool. Fortunately, the fountain had been turned off. The kids shuffled aimlessly, apparently waiting for someone to kill the PA system so they could sing. Most of them seemed nervous, and I wanted to go tell them that they looked great and everyone would love them, but I knew they’d disregard it as the nattering of some weird old guy, and also, it wasn’t true. After the first thirty seconds, no one would listen to them.
But I was, happily, wrong. The overhead recording of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” came to an abrupt end—not quite abrupt enough for me—and a middle-aged woman in a matching robe, augmented by a bright red-and-green scarf that hung to her waist, lifted both hands and waited, eyebrows raised, surveying the kids until they were all facing her attentively. Then she marked the downbeat and the kids’ faces changed somehow and they all began to resemble one another, mouths open, eyes on the woman with the scarf, and with a fluid movement of her hands, she brought them together to the breath that supported the first note, and as it rang out, the kids looked like people somehow sharing a dream. By the end of the first long, slow lines—
The first Noel
the Angel did say . . .
—the sounds of chatter and movement began to die away, and all over the mall people turned to look. And in the absence of noise, the great hollowness of the mall took the sound of the kids’ voices and purified it, deepened it, gave it the resonance of a cathedral, and the kids heard it, too, and some of them closed their eyes.
