Fidelity (20 page)

Kylie said, “Don’t worry anymore. I love you. Call me when you can.”

“I will.,,

She got out, closed the car door, and trotted toward the back door of Marlene’s. When she reached the building, Forrest saw her halfturn in the small semicircle of light. She stood still for a second, staring into the shadows on the street. It looked as though she were staring straight at him, although he knew she probably couldn’t see him in the dim light. Then she hurried inside.

He let out an audible breath in relief, then drew in another. She was a vulnerable little creature, and he had just seen her return to safety once more. Her safety made him safer, and that was what mattered.

Ted Forrest turned the car around and drove back the way he had come, made two turns, and emerged on the highway five blocks from Marlene’s. As soon as he was beyond the town limits, he accelerated as much as he dared. He was alone now, so he could afford to push the speed limit a bit. He opened his window to let the cool air blow on his face. He supposed he might have picked up a lingering scent of her perfume, and the wind would help get rid of it.

As he approached his house, his heart began to pound. He could still see cars parked along the length of his driveway. He had made it back in time. Guests were still inside. He drove up the driveway and around the house into the garage, slipped out to the path, and walked quickly. He cut through the rose garden to the French doors into the library. He reached out to touch the handle, and felt relief once again. Nobody had noticed the doors were unlocked and relocked them. He slipped inside and set the locks.

He moved into the foyer just as people began to stream out of the living room. He smiled and joined the fringe of the group, as though he were already in the middle of a conversation. He saw Collier and his wife Susanne, and said, “Suzy. Nice that the old boy brought you over here for once.”

“It’s part of my training program,” she said. “I’m trying to link music and good food in his subconscious so when I mention a concert, he’ll begin to salivate and take me.”

“Well, good luck with that. He’s smart enough to get the concept, but too loyal to let his old friends like me look dumb.”

“He’s a great guy, isn’t he?” She kissed Collier’s cheek.

Forrest felt a twinge of jealousy. When had Caroline ever said he was a great guy, let alone kissed him in public? He patted Collier’s arm in a way that gave the Colliers his permission to move on, and let the next set of guests take their place. One by one, they returned his smile, and he said something to acknowledge that he knew them and remembered the last time he had seen them. He let them know that for a few seconds, at least, he was paying attention to them exclusively.

His interest bordered on affection because each of them was bolstering his credibility as a host. But he was also aware that as each couple passed him, they were moving toward the front door and heading off into the night. Each time the door behind him swung open, it brought closer the time when he would have to be alone in this house with Caroline. As the time approached, he spoke with the stragglers in a kind of desperation, giving them the impression that he truly did not like to see them go.

The last one in the foyer was Dr. Feiniger, the president of the group. He was an old, wiry-looking professor who was almost a head shorter than Caroline. Feiniger thanked her for the special evening. Forrest was aware of his bristly little beard, the hair on the rims of his ears, and the springy wild hairs sprouting from his eyebrows. Dr. Feiniger kept talking, and Forrest used the opportunity to step out of the foyer into the hallway that ran along the center of the house to the back stairs.

“Ted!”

He considered pretending he had not heard her, but there was the sound of her footsteps coming after him. She had freed herself of the professor. Forrest stopped, took a deep breath, and turned to face her.

She stood six feet from him in the narrow hallway. It was her customary distance, just far enough away so he could not touch her unexpectedly, but near enough so he could not walk away from her. “Where the hell were you? Where did you go?”

He had to make an effort to unclench his jaw. He spoke carefully and quietly. “Caroline. I did my best to be gracious and help host your event. After dinner you made it clear that I was not wanted. I came back in time to say good night to your guests. Now I’m going to bed.”

“Oh. So now this is my fault?”

“It can be my fault, if you like. Good night.” He turned and stepped toward the back stairs.

“Ted.” There was an unexpected tone-softer, perhaps conciliatory.

He was curious. He looked back at her. “What?”

“Jesus, Ted. You should see yourself. That look of hatred on your face.” She held out both hands to him, her eyes beginning to fill with tears. “Can’t we just talk?”

“Not tonight.” He went up the back stairs, entered his closet, found some pajamas, and carried them to the nearest guest suite. After he got out of the shower, he heard Caroline slamming doors in the master suite, so he moved to another guest room farther down the hall.

Jerry Hobart got into his car, took out his pistol, checked the load and the safety, then slipped it into his jacket pocket. It was after midnight again, and he could go back to searching for the missing information. He was impatient to find it, but he knew he had to use this opportunity to spring the traps first and see who was watching them.

He drove to Van Nuys and turned toward the building where Kramer Investigations had its office. He knew it would be foolish to go inside right now, but he wanted to see who was waiting for him to try. At night he could make it difficult for anyone to see him well enough to remember him, but he might be able to identify some of the people who wanted to cause him trouble.

He drove to the neighborhood, parked on a street three blocks away, and walked toward the office building. He approached from the side where he had seen the movie theater from the roof of the building. As soon as he was on the street outside the theater, he pretended to be waiting for someone while he studied the office building. He saw no lighted windows in the Kramer Investigations office, or in any of the windows near it. He surveyed the parking lots and the curbs nearby. There were no cars of the models that the police used as unmarked vehicles, and no windowless vans. He saw no men loitering in the area, and no signs that anyone was watching the office from a building in the vicinity. He abandoned the safety of the theater entrance and walked closer to the office building.

He was trying to make himself a bit more obvious, to see if he could draw any watchers to move out of position to new spots where they could control him. He walked purposefully in the general direction of the building, but he could detect no movement. He walked past the front entrance, kept going to the end of the block, and turned left, away from the office building. As he walked along the side street, he looked behind him occasionally to see if anyone had followed.

Hobart saw nothing. As he walked the next two blocks, he kept up his vigilance, but still could not see any indication that the area was under surveillance. He tried to evaluate his visit to the building. It could be good news. If the police didn’t see any reason to watch the office, then maybe they were not taking his breakin seriously.

Of course, the police didn’t have to be sitting in the office all night with their feet on the desks to watch it. They could have a webcam set up on one of the computers in there and watch it from a computer in the nearest station. As he walked away from the building, he decided that the problem was complicated enough so he could never eliminate the possibility that the office was a trap. Even though he could see nothing out of place, he had an instinctive feeling that something was wrong.

Hobart got into his car and drove toward the Kramer house. When he reached the right street, he repeated the steps he always followed to avoid an ambush. First he drove past the house to see if it appeared inhabited, then drove on, looking for occupants in every vehicle parked within view. Then he widened his search for three blocks in every direction to find a small truck or a van that could contain surveillance equipment. All along his route he looked at the windows of buildings that had an unobstructed view of the Kramer house.

Hobart spent a half hour at his search. If there were people watching the Kramer house tonight, then they were very good at it, and very patient. He could detect nothing on his second time past the house that indicated it might be occupied or under surveillance. If there were cops nearby, then they had done a spectacular job of hiding. Cops always brought chase cars in a situation like this. It did them little good to see some guy in the dark trying to commit a crime if they let him drive off afterward. They always had a couple of big plain cars nearby. They couldn’t bear to go without them.

Then it occurred to Hobart that the chase car could be very close without being visible. The garage door at the Kramer house was shut. If the cops were in the house, the car could be in the garage, all ready to go after him if he ran, or to transport him in handcuffs if he couldn’t.

This time Hobart parked his car on a dark street three blocks from the Kramer house. He didn’t want to have anyone look out a window and notice that the car parked there the night when he had been in the Kramer house was here again. But in Los Angeles, people didn’t know what went on three blocks away. As he got out of his car, he caught a glimpse of a low shadow moving up a driveway to the back of a house: A foraging coyote had waited to be sure of his intentions.

Hobart respected coyotes. When he was young, he used to see them in the desert if he stayed out alone after full darkness set in. They were always aware of him before they showed themselves, always sure of the limits of his capabilities. They stayed just far enough away so he couldn’t harm them if he wanted to. He would see one walking beside the road, a skinny canine with pointy ears and muzzle, then trotting across the pavement to get from wherever it had spent the day to a different area that didn’t carry the scent of coyote.

Now Hobart’s business involved prowling the city late at night trying to find a way into a building to get at somebody inside. While he was out, he often came across coyotes. They were in the city doing what Hobart was doing: foraging for a way to stay alive. They had thrived in the city. They traveled from one place to another by trotting along the empty concrete riverbeds that ran from the Santa Monica Mountains along the north rim of the valley all the way to the ocean. They slipped between the iron bars of fences to drink from swimming pools. He often met them as they scavenged in alleys among open Dumpsters and garbage cans. Now and then he would see one trotting along a suburban sidewalk with a dead cat in its mouth.

They always detected danger, and always appraised it accurately. They didn’t run from a man on foot until he was less than forty feet away. If one of them was going up a street at his characteristic tireless trot and a car appeared suddenly with its size and noise and blinding headlights and speed, the coyote would merely divert his course up over the curb and onto a lawn, where he would wait for the car to pass. The coyote knew that no matter how nightmarish the car was, it wasn’t able to jump off the pavement and chase him up the lawn and around the house.

People had been poisoning and trapping coyotes for two hundred years, but there were more coyotes than ever. A coyote would approach the bait and sniff around it, and it would know. A coyote seemed to smell not just the food, but the small quantity of extra chemical that didn’t belong, and something else, too. Maybe it was only that the smell of human beings was stronger than it ought to be near a day-old chunk of meat. But maybe what the coyote smelled was the malice, some ingredient in the mixture of smells that revealed the excitement of the trapper. It could be the minuscule shot of adrenaline that made it into the sweat on the trapper’s hands while he was thinking about how clever he was and imagining the death of the coyote. Even though the coyote was hungry, his ribs visible through the mangy fur along his sides, he would nose the bait and move on. He didn’t let his optimism tell him that everything must be safe just because he couldn’t see anyone watching him.

Hobart approached the Kramer house through the neighbor’s back yard. He moved to the back wall and sat down quietly on a plastic lawn chair near the pool. He remained there for a time, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood. Entering a neighborhood meant crossing invisible lines of force, stepping on the territories of various dogs, cats, and other animals, making tiny noises that disturbed people’s sleep and violated the tranquillity of the place. It was necessary to remain still and let any ripples he had stirred up settle and leave the surface smooth again.

People and animals had a sense of duration, a feeling for how long things took. When he had waited much longer than any intruder would, he stood and quietly climbed the cinder-block wall into the Kramer yard. He crouched at the corner of the yard, with the thick foliage at his back so he didn’t stand out, and stared in the windows of the house, looking for signs that it was occupied. There were no windows that were open, no lights that he could see in any room.

It was past one o’clock, but anyone who was waiting in the house would still be fairly alert. There might be a radio on to keep them awake, or they might be walking from place to place to look out various doors and windows to spot him. Hobart saw no signs, but he waited ten more minutes in his corner before he put on his ski mask and gloves and approached the back of the house.

He moved along the windows, peering in at different angles to try to pick out a light, and then searching for objects that had not been in the living room on his last visit-a coat or a magazine or a coffee cup-but he saw none of those things. He moved from the big windows to the garage, and looked in the window. Emily Kramer’s car was still inside, but that meant nothing except that she had not driven herself when she had left. No cop would use it as a chase car. He moved back along the wall to the living room again, trying to decide.