Fields Where They Lay, page 9
After several years of somewhat variable celibacy I’d met Ronnie Bigelow, whom I suspected of murdering her husband. We’d both misrepresented our motives for the first week or so, and we fell in love even though neither of us had any idea who the other actually was. I still had no idea who she was. I’d learned in the year and a bit since we met that Ronnie was a little like the joke Christmas gift that comes in a giant box with about twenty wrappings: every time you peel one off you find another. She had something fast and loose about her, a matched set of devious instincts and quick thought processes that said crook. Somewhere back there in Trenton or Albany or Ontario or Coeur d’Alene or wherever the hell she’d come from, there had been something dark and slippery, and apparently she had decided to take it to the grave unshared, at least with me.
So it was a little like living with someone who had an extra shadow, but somehow I trusted her more than almost anyone else in the world. If someone had taken spiritual X-rays of us, say, the previous afternoon, they’d have shown some tightly closed drawers where dodgy facts were neatly folded and tucked away out of sight, but the trust area would have been as clear as mountain water.
And look what I had just done.
Just to be on the safe side—and also to get a little more accustomed to my new discomfort with myself—I did circles, loops, and switchbacks for fifteen or twenty minutes until I knew no one was behind me, and then I drove to the Wedgwood. When I opened the front door, Ronnie got up from the couch, where she was reading something about Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife to two kings, imprisoned by the second, mother to a third, and smarter than all of them put together. She hugged me, sniffed, said, “Korean, huh?” and went back to the couch.
“I had a little problem,” I said. “The guy who hired me today to look into shoplifting in the mall he owns sent somebody to follow me and he got all upset and took a shot, and I called Louie to see whether there were reinforcements anywhere. There were, and I bought us both dinner. The, um, the other driver and me.”
“What about the bad guy?”
“He collided with the cops.”
“Virtue always triumphs,” she said.
This was not a comfortable thesis. “Christmas is driving me crazy,” I said. “Why don’t you make it easy on me and just tell me what you want.”
“Oh,” she said. She looked past me as though she was thinking about fleeing the room. She closed the book, a finger marking her place. “I don’t want to—I mean, there’s plenty of time.”
“Three days. Actually, two now. This is our first real Christmas together. I want it to be something you’ll remember.” I heard Francie DuBois say, “See you,” and suddenly I could smell her scent on me, and I blushed.
“Just, just, I don’t want anything, okay? I’m happy the way things are.” She was so eager to escape the room she got up from the couch.
Determined to make up for whatever I’d just done, I said, “Whatever you want. I’ll find a way to get you whatever you want.”
“What I want?” she said, and there was a catch in her voice as though she was either angry or on the verge of tears. “Gee, I don’t know.” She shook her head. “A . . . a set of matching cheese graters? A pair of sweat socks? Who the hell cares?”
“Ronnie,” I said. Her voice had scaled up a couple of tones.
“Look at this place,” she said. “Look at you, look at that roomful of books in there. It’s all Christmas.” She wiped her cheeks with the heel of her hand, not gently. “You know what? You’re Christmas. Leave me alone—no, no, that’s wrong. Skip me, buy something extra nice for Rina, something special for Kathy. Get yourself a new front left tire, I don’t like the way that one looks.”
“A new front tire,” I said.
She was crying. “Wrap a ribbon around it, show it to me first, I’ll go, Oooooohhhhhh and then you can get Louie’s guy to put it on your car. I need to go to bed.”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll, uhhh, I’ll be right in.”
“No,” she said, brushing past me. “Give yourself some time. Read something. I’d just, I’d just like to be alone for a little while. Okay? Just a little while.”
“Fine,” I said. I called out to her back, “I’ll be in the library,” but she was gone. I stood there in my beautiful 1920s living room with the Christmas lights of Los Angeles sparkling at me through the art deco windows, and then I went into the library and sat in my favorite chair and looked at my books without reading any of them and loathed myself until I figured she’d had time to stop crying and, maybe, fall asleep.
PART TWO
AND THEY WERE SORE AFRAID
11
Some Reins and a Bit
I’d told Francie I thought it was about 50/50 whether Vlad would eventually try to kill me, but privately I put it at closer to 20/80 in his favor. So after I’d spent most of the night stewing about what I’d done and said in the Korean restaurant, about the lies of omission I’d told both Francie and Ronnie, and most of all about my disinclination to clear it all up, I choked down two cups of coffee and got to the mall in time to be waiting at the employee entrance for Wally Durskee. I thought I might use Wally’s magic room to get a look at the potential cast of assassins.
“The cameras are mostly inside the stores,” he said as his surveillance screens flickered into life. “That’s where the merchandise is, you know?”
“What are the black screens?” Two in the bottom row of eight were dark.
“Those are on the second and third floors where Gabriel’s used to be.”
“That’s the store that split last Christmas, right?”
“Yeah, you know, used to be in what’s now the bazaar area and the two floors above it. You can see the bazaar there.” He indicated the last screen in the third row and the first two in the fourth. They were bright and I could see a few vendors moving around as they set up for the day. “The screens in Gabriel’s aren’t actually black,” he said, indicating two that looked pretty black to me. “I mean, they’re not dead, they’re on, but there’s no light. If you look at this one, see that pale area that’s flat along the bottom? That’s the escalator coming up from the bazaar.”
“Got it.”
“I’ve got cameras covering all the escalators,” he said. “People like to fake accidents on the escalators and sue.”
“What about the common areas? You know, the food courts, the ground floor, the perimeters on the second and third levels. Suppose a fight breaks out or—”
“Got it.” He pointed to a line of screens that were relatively dim. “If something happens, I can use these and the ones on the escalators. Probably have to redefine the field of vision.”
“As complicated as that sounds, I’ll bet it’s child’s play to you.”
He almost flexed. “I can make these babies do tricks, yeah.”
“Let’s make it a challenge,” I said. “Suppose you wanted to find people who were looking for someone.”
“Who?”
“It doesn’t matter. The president. Where would somebody station himself to spot the president at the main doors, and, no, there won’t be a bunch of TV lights trailing along, this is just an attempt to duck all that and shop in peace, buy the family some actual surprises that won’t show up on the network news. So where would someone, or two or three someones, stand to spot the prez at the entrance to the mall?”
“At the doors,” Wally said. He smoothed the skin in front of his hair. “There are two of them. He’d wait there.”
“Good. And to watch from farther away? Maybe someplace that’s invisible from the entrance doors?”
“Second or third levels, about halfway on the east side ’cause both outer doors are on the west. But you can’t watch both doors at once, you know, ’cause they’re at opposite ends of—”
“And so?” I said, furrowing my brow.
“You’d need two guys.”
“There we are,” I said. “I knew you were the guy to ask.”
“But I don’t have cameras there. I mean, I couldn’t look down.”
“No problem. I don’t want to look down at the doors. I want to look at the places those guys would be standing.”
“Watching the watchers,” he said with an air of total concentration.
I mimed a little knockout punch. “That’s exactly it.”
“Lookit,” he said. “Numbers fifteen and seventeen.”
“Wait, wait, numbers . . .”
“Next-to-last screen on the right in the second row, first one on the left in the third,” he said. As my eyes found those monitors, there was a dizzying zoom on both screens and we were looking at two dim rectangles, empty but for the railing at the edge and the mostly dark shops behind it. “Fifteen is the second floor and seventeen is the third.”
“Perfect,” I said. “Keep them focused there until we’ve been open for a while.”
A look of cunning took charge of his face, as though he was trying to see something far, far away. “This about the shoplifting,” he said. “You think somebody’s giving signals or something.”
“I do,” I said, although I hadn’t figured out how, and it wasn’t what I was looking for right then anyway.
°°°
By ten-fifty I had a headache from lack of sleep, and the mall had been open for almost an hour. I said, “Zoom in. Number fifteen.”
“Gonna get grainy.”
“I can live with grainy.” I blinked away the sand in my eyes and took a better look. The man standing at the second-floor railing, looking down toward the left-hand door, was medium-height, but if he’d been a mobile home he would have been a double-wide, and it was all muscle. He had a very short nose and a very long upper lip, which made it look like his mouth had been installed by someone with no previous experience. He was dressed like a juvenile delinquent from the fifties, an imitation Brando in a plain white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up to expose biceps that had cost him a lot of pain, plus tight jeans with a thick black belt.
“Boy’s been lifting,” Wally said.
“Prison is a great gym,” I said. I pulled out my phone, framed the long-lipped Brando fan on the monitor, and shot it. I got some parallel lines running through it, so I said, “Can you freeze that as a still image?”
“Ummmm,” Wally said.
“I’m getting these lines.”
“Those are moiré patterns,” Wally said without even looking, instantly making me ashamed of myself. “Both the images, on the screen and on your phone, they’re just dots, and the lines are overlapping patterns of dots.”
I said, “Huh. Well, it’s good enough.”
Wally said, “Number seventeen.”
“Thank you,” I said, rubbing at my eyes. And there was another one, an over-sharp dresser, more in the Tip Poindexter mode: white sport coat, black shirt, slacks the color of camel’s hair although probably a less expensive wool-something blend—a sartorial homage to the father of the feast but sufficiently down-market to avoid arousing envy in the original. He had a receding hairline, a nose sharp enough to pop a kid’s balloon, and the abnormally small, deep eyes I associate with Vladimir Putin. As I watched, the one with the pointed nose shot an arm out to clear his cuff off his watch, a gesture so theatrical that just the sight of it made me want to go out there and tip him over the railing and onto the big Christmas tree two levels below. Movement on the other screen caught my eye. The double-wide was looking at his watch, too. I took a picture of Putin-eyes and said to Wally, “My phone is going to ring.”
My phone rang.
“How’d you do that?” Wally said, and I wanted to hug him. I would have been far too cool to ask that question if our roles had been reversed.
Into the phone, I said, “Where are you?”
“Downstairs,” Vlad said. I could see him on the first floor, in one of the top screens. “Where are you?”
“Closer than you think.” Vlad brought his head up and did a quick scan of the upper levels. “Did you bring anyone with you?” I asked.
“No.”
“So there’s nobody on the upper levels looking for me?”
“We were on good terms when we hung up last night,” he said. He was turning in a slow circle. “It would be wise for you to keep it that way.”
“You just told me a lie. Goodbye.”
He stopped moving. “I have a present for you. And your money. You don’t want your money?”
“Not all that much,” I said. “You can keep the present, too.” I hung up.
“Who’s that?” Wally looked worried.
I yawned, part exhaustion, part nerves. “Buddy of mine.”
“You hung up on him.”
“He gets off on it,” I said. I looked up at the screens. “Our watchers are gone.”
“The one in the T-shirt got a text or something while you were talking. Checked his phone and left.”
“And the other one?”
“I don’t know, but he’s gone, too.”
My phone rang. I picked it up and said, “Go to the food court. Wait in front of Tito’s Tortilla Heaven.” I looked up at the screens. “The tables should all be empty. Take a seat and wait. When you’re there, I’ll come meet you. Nobody with you, nobody even on the same level of the mall, or you won’t see me.” I hung up again.
“Mexican food,” Wally said. “Gives me the gas.”
“You want anything from one of the other places?”
“Coffee, black,” he said. “From the Bottomless Cup. You get free refills, that’s why they call it—”
“Got it,” I said, and I took one more look at the screens before I opened the door.
In yet another economy move, the mall wasn’t heated at night, and a damp chill was putting an unpleasantly gelatinous edge on the holiday spirit. I stepped out of Wally’s eyrie and headed for the escalator at the northeast end of the building, which would be out of Vlad’s field of vision if he was sitting at any of the tables in the food court one level below. I kept well back from the third-floor railing, as much out of the light as possible, and as I reached the escalator I spotted the double-wide Brando push his way through some incoming shoppers to exit via the northern outer door, probably on Vlad’s orders. I didn’t see the other one, Mini-me, but I figured that with one down, my odds had improved. On the ground floor a tall, skinny guy dressed as an elf began to ring a bell as the hungover Santa—Dwayne, Wally had said his name was, Dwayne Wix—settled into his crimson throne as though half of him expected a lethal jolt of electricity and the other half expected his head to fall off and shatter on the floor like a pumpkin.
Today Vlad sported a white turtleneck—a garment I didn’t even know was still being manufactured—under a wool/silk beige blazer with gold nautical buttons shaped like tiny anchors and tobacco-colored slacks. His boots were very thin alligator with three-inch heels, and they zipped up. Taken as a whole, the outfit represented a style period that, so far as I knew, hadn’t actually happened yet.
“Here you are,” he said. This time he didn’t stand to greet me.
“I guess I am.” I sat and waved hello to my friend, the woman behind the counter, who looked behind her as though I’d mistaken her for someone else, which in fact I had. It was a different woman.
“Do not get used to thinking you can summon me and I will come.”
“The last thing I want to do,” I said “is summon you. Especially if you’ll come.”
The corners of his mouth went down, which meant he could control them in both directions, although I have to say that his scowl was more convincing than his smile. I said, “Do that too much and you’ll look like the Queen of Hearts.” I got up.
“Where are you going?”
“Coffee. You want anything?”
“No. And I am in—”
“Okay. Be right back.”
“Wait,” he said, and I kept going.
I could almost feel the steam pouring off him as I walked away. It gave me a stupid, junior-high surge of satisfaction, coupled with a sensation that my back was very large and unprotected. I also figured my rudeness made it a little more likely that he might someday prevail on someone to put a few holes in me. But I just hated every cubic inch of him, and I guess I let it show.
When I came back and sat, he said, “Who is the other one for?”
“Me,” I said. “Do you have the money?”
“Of course.” He reached inside the blazer, treating me to a brief twinkle from a big diamond on his pinky. My mother always says that a man who wears a ring on his pinkie has no character. Mom is big on character, and look at me. Vlad’s hand came out of the jacket holding a standard number ten envelope, the ones I always think of as money size, and plopped it down with a nice thwack. It was pretty thick, but he reached in and took out a second. “Hundred-dollar bills, two hundred and fifty of them. The twenties you asked for would have been ridiculous, twelve hundred and fifty of them.”
“Damn,” I said. “I wanted to throw them around my room and burrow through them like Scrooge McDuck.”
“When you will—excuse me, please, when will you give me my answer?”
“Tomorrow night. Christmas Eve,” I said, picking it out of the air. “Seven-thirty. Here.”
“I do not want to come back here.”
“And I don’t blame you.” I put one envelope in each hip pocket. “But if I’m going to take delivery of all that money from you, I want a lot of people around.”
“Ah,” he said, and his facial muscles did something that was probably supposed to make him look pleasant. “We will think of something else. Here, I almost forgot.” He dipped into his blazer yet again and came out with what looked like a postcard, printed a dark chocolate brown on shiny coated stock. It said Sam’s Saddlery: Fine Leather Goods on it, which I immediately registered as the shop Bonnie had told me not to swipe from, a small third-level store, shoved up against the dark hulk of Gabriel’s, that didn’t seem to do much business.
