Crashed (2 page)

But Janice wasn’t aware I knew any of this. And if she had been, she wouldn’t have been amused at all.

“Where’s the streetlight?”

She gave me her bad-news smile, brave and full of fraudulent compassion. “Right in front. More or less directly over the end of the sidewalk.”

“Illuminating the front door.”

“Brilliantly,” she said. “Don’t think about the front door. Think about what’s on the other side.”

“I am,” I said. “I’m thinking I have to carry it seventy-three feet and nine inches to the van. Under a streetlight.”

“You always focus on the negative,” she said. “You need to do something about that. You want your positive energy to flow straight and true, and every time you go to the negative, you put up a little barrier. If it weren’t for your constant focus on negative energy, your marriage might have gone better.”

God, the things women think they have the right to say. “My marriage
went
fine,” I said. “It was
before
the marriage went that was difficult.”

“You have to be positive about that, too,” she said. “Without the marriage, you wouldn’t have Rina.”

Ahh, Rina, twelve years old and the light of my life. “To the extent I have her, anyway.”

She gave me the slow nod women use to indicate that they understand our pain, they admire the courage with which we handle it, and they’re absolutely certain that it’s all our fault. “I
know it’s tough, Kathy being so punitive with visitation. But she’s your daughter. You’ve got to be happy about that.” Janice put down her glass and patted me comfortingly on the wrist with wet, cold fingers. I resisted the impulse to pull my wrist away. After all, her hand would dry eventually. She was working her way toward flirting, as she did every time we met, even though we both knew it wouldn’t lead anywhere. I was still attached to Kathy, my former wife, and Janice demonstrated no awkwardness or any other kind of perceptible difficulty turning down dates.

“Of course, I’m happy about that,” I said. And then, because it was expected, I made the usual move. “Want to go to dinner?”

She lowered her head slightly and regarded me from beneath her spiky bangs. “Tell me the truth. When you thought about asking me that question, you anticipated a negative response, didn’t you?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “It’s the ninth time, and you’ve never said yes.”

“See what I mean?” she said. “Your negativity has put kinks in your energy flow.”

“Can you straighten it for me?”

“If your invitation had been made in a purely affirmative spirit, I might have said yes.”

“Might?” I took a pull off the beer. “You mean I could purify my spirit, straighten out my energy flow, sterilize my anticipations, and you still might say no?”

“Oh, Junior,” she said. “There are so many intangibles.”

“Name one.”

The slow head-shake again. “You’re a crook.”

“So are you.”

“I beg to differ,” she said. “I’m a facilitator. I bring together different kinds of energies to effect the transfer of physical objects. It’s almost metaphysical.” She held her hands above the table so her palms were about four inches apart, as though she expected electricity to flow between them. She turned them so
the left hand was on top. “On one side,” she said, “the energy of desire: dark, intense, magnetic.” She reversed her hands so the right was on top. “On the other side, the energy of action: direct, kinetic, daring.”

“Whooo,” I said. “That’s me?”

“Certainly.”

“Sounds like somebody
I’d
go out with.”

“And don’t think I don’t want to,” she said, and she narrowed her eyes mystically, which made her look nearsighted. I’ve always loved nearsighted women. They’re so easy to help. “Some day the elements will be in alignment.” She pushed the glass away and got up, and guys all over the place turned to look. In this bar, Janice was as exotic as an orchid blooming in the snow.

“A brightly lighted front door,” I said, mostly to slow her down. I liked watching her leave almost as much as I liked watching her arrive. “Seventy-three feet to the curb. Carrying that damn thing.”

“And nine inches.”

“Seventy-three feet, nine inches. In both directions.”

“And you have to solve it by Monday,” she said. “But don’t worry. You’ll think of something. You always do. When the child support’s due.”

She gave me a little four-finger wiggle of farewell, turned, and headed for the door. Every eye in the place was on her backside. That may be dated, but it was true.

And, of course
, I
had
thought of something. In the abstract the plan had seemed plausible. Sort of. And it had continued to seem plausible right up to the moment I pulled up in front of the house in broad daylight. Then, as I climbed out, wincing into the merciless July sun that dehydrates the San Fernando Valley annually, it seemed very much less plausible. I felt a rush of what Janice would undoubtedly call negative energy, and suddenly it seemed completely idiotic.

But this was not the time to improvise. It was Monday afternoon in an upscale neighborhood, and I needed to justify my presence. Sweating in my dark coveralls, I went around to the back of the van and opened the rear door. Out of it I pulled a heavy dolly, which I set down about two feet behind the rear bumper. I squared my shoulders, the picture of someone about to do something difficult, leaned in, and very slowly dragged out an enormous cardboard refrigerator carton, on one side of which I had stenciled the words SUB ZERO. This was no neighborhood for Kelvinators or Maytags.

Back behind the house, the dogs began to bark. They were all bassos, ready to sing the lead in “Boris Godunov,” and I thought I could distinguish four of them, sounding like they weighed a combined total of 750 pounds, mostly teeth. Christ, I was seventy-three feet, nine inches from the door, not even standing on the damn lawn yet, and I was already too close for them.

Kathy, my ex-wife, has taught Rina to
love
dogs. It doesn’t matter how obscure the opportunity for revenge is; Kathy will grab it like a trapeze.

Grunting and straining, I tilted the box down and slid it onto the dolly. I’d put a couple of sandbags in the bottom of the box, mostly to keep it from tipping or being blown over, but it took some work to make it look heavy enough. Once I had it on the dolly, I tilted it back and made a big production of hauling it up the four-inch vertical of the curb. Then I walked away from it so I was visible from all directions, pulled out a cell phone, and called myself.

I listened to my message for a second and then talked into the phone. With it pressed to my ear, I turned to face the house, looked up at a second-story window, and gave a little wave. The cell phone slipped easily into the top pocket of the coveralls, and I grabbed the dolly handles, put my back into tilting it up onto the wheels, and towed the carton up the slate path.

At the door, I positioned the box so the side with SUB ZERO
on it faced the street. Then I got in between the box and the door and pushed open the flap I’d cut in the closest side of the box—just three straight lines with a box cutter, leaving the fourth side of the rectangle intact to serve as a hinge. The flap was about five feet high and three feet wide, and it swung open into the box. I climbed in. From the street, all anyone would see was the box.

The door was fancy, not functional. Heavy dark wood, brass hardware, and a big panel of stained glass in the upper half—some sort of coat of arms, a characteristically confused collision of symbolic elements that included an ax, a rose, and something that looked suspiciously like a pair of pliers. A good graphic artist could have made a fortune in the Middle Ages.

My working valise was at the bottom of the box. I snapped on a pair of surgical gloves, pulled out my set of picks, and went to work on the lock. The temperature in the box was about a hundred degrees, the gloves quickly became wet inside, and—appearances to the contrary—the lock had muscles. But I didn’t feel cramped for time, since I doubted anyone would suspect a Sub Zero refrigerator of trying to break into a house. After nine or ten warm, damp minutes, the lock did a tickled little shimmy and then began to give up its secrets. I dropped the final pin, tested the knob, and put on a bathing cap to cover my hair. Then I climbed out of the box, opened the door, and stepped inside.

I read continually about burglars who experience some sort of deep, even sexual pleasure at the moment of entry, as though the house were a long-desired body to which they had finally gained access. For me, a house is an inconvenience. It’s a bunch of walls surrounding something I want. In order to get what I want, I have to put myself inside the walls, and then get out as fast as I can. I figure that the risk of being caught increases by about five percent each minute once you get beyond four minutes. Anybody who stays inside longer than twenty to twenty-five minutes deserves a free ride in the back of a black-and-white.

The alarm was exactly where Janice said it would be, blinking
frantically just around the corner from the front door, and the code she gave me calmed it right down. The dogs were going nuts in the back, but that was where they seemed to be staying. I gave it a count of ten with one foot figuratively outside the door just to make sure, but all they did was bark and howl and scrabble with their toenails at a glass door somewhere on the far side of the house. When I was certain none of them was toting his fangs from room to room inside, I went back out onto the porch, used the dolly to tilt the carton, and wheeled it inside. Then I closed the door.

Getting in is more than half of it; in fact, I figure that a safe entry is about sixty percent of the work. Finding what you want will burn up another twenty to thirty percent, and getting out is pretty much a snap. Usually.

The house was a temple of gleam. Entire quarries in Italy had been strip-mined to pave the floors, and many young Italian craftspersons had probably died of dust inhalation to bring the stone to this pitch of polish. I was in a circular grand entry hall, maybe thirty-five feet high, dominated by a massive chandelier in what might have been Swarovski crystal, dangling by a heavy golden chain. To the right was a circular stair curving up the wall of the hall, with a teak banister that had been sanded, polished, stained, polished, varnished, polished, and varnished again.

Not for the first time, I asked myself what Mr. and/or Mrs. Huston did for a living.

Despite the museum-like grandeur of the entry, there was a homely smell that took me back years and years, to my grandmother’s house. I needed a second to identify it as camphor, the active ingredient in mothballs. We don’t use mothballs so much any more, maybe because we have fewer natural fabrics, but they were being used here. The odor suggested a certain strained fussiness, not an attitude that would be comfortable with Rottweilers leaving piles on the rugs.

The camphor seemed to come from my right, where a set of steps led up to the living room, so perhaps the mothballs were intended to protect the carpets. Straight ahead, a set of five steps led up to the rest of the first floor, accounting for the high front windows. The piece I had been sent for was all the way upstairs, in what Janice had described as the marital theme park.

As I climbed the curving stairway, the dogs reached a new pitch of frenzy, and I began to think about accelerating the process. Some neighbor might get pissed off and call the cops, and the cops, in turn, might wonder why the Fidos were so manic. I took the stairs two at a time.

The master bedroom was bigger than Versailles. Three things about its occupants were immediately obvious. First, they were sexually adventurous and willing to pay for it. The ceiling was mirrored, the bedspread was some sort of black fur, a shelf recessed in the wall above the head of the bed held a garish assortment of toys, lubricants, and, for all I could tell, hors d’oeuvres. There were at least a dozen little bottles of amyl nitrate under different brand names, and a crystal bowl of white powder on a mirror, with a razor gleaming beside it. Over against one wall was an actual gynecologist’s table. The stirrups had sequins on them.

The second thing that was apparent was that they both thought Mrs. Huston was a knockout. There were at least a dozen large color photos of her, blond, a little over-vibrant, and seriously under-dressed, along the wall to the right of the bed. She didn’t look like someone who puts mothballs on her carpets, if only because they’d aggravate carpet burn. Of course, it was an assumption that the woman wearing, in some of the pictures, no more than a coat of baby oil, was Mrs. Huston, but if she wasn’t, the relationship was even stranger than the bedroom would suggest. The odd energy she was projecting in some of the pictures might have owed something to the bowl of white powder on the shelf. Even without the energy, even without the
baby oil, she had a kind of raw, slightly crude appeal that probably interested men whose tastes were coarser than mine.

The third obvious thing was that—while they might have been unanimous in their admiration of Mrs. Huston—they had very different tastes in art. On the far wall were five, count them if you can bear to look at them long enough,
five
of those flesh-puckering big-eyed children painted in the 1950s by Mr. Keane or Mrs. Keane: waifs of the chilly dawn with dreadful days awaiting them, days they will meet with eyes as big as doorknobs, but not as expressive. It had always amazed me that Mr. and Mrs. Keane went to court to establish which of them was responsible for these remorseless reiterations of elementary-school bathos. If I’d been the judge, I’d have yanked their artistic licenses in perpetuity and sentenced them to a lifetime twelve-step program in which all twelve steps consisted of spending fourteen hours a day watching real children through a foot-thick pane of glass.

By contrast, on the wall directly opposite the door was the Paul Klee painting that was the object of Janice’s client’s lust. Even at this distance, I hated it, although not as much as I hated the Keanes. Full of thin angular shapes and flat 1950s colors that looked like they were inspired by Formica, it looked to me like something painted with a coat hanger. Klee despised color in his early career, so I didn’t feel so bad about despising the ones he’d used here. I looked back at the Keanes, thinking that when I came back to the Klee I’d like it better through sheer contrast, but it didn’t work. It still looked like a watch-spring’s daydream.