Keeper of the Keys (9 page)

Not much had changed, sad though, because what had been shiny and new in his childhood had turned shabby. Out back, the wooden lattice over the concrete patio had missing pieces, although, with a heavy, untrimmed wisteria, it actually appeared almost charming. Someone had tried painting the concrete below, but the paint was faded, chipped.

His bedroom, apricot-colored, no longer blue like he remembered it, now held a bunk bed. Apparently the boy had friends over, and an obsession with moving vehicles. Car stickers crawled randomly up and down the walls.

In the kitchen, blue Formica showed cracks from hot pans that should never have been set down on it. His mother used to shout at him if he came near the counters with something hot. He looked under the sink. She used to hide things there. Once she told him she kept twenty dollars in a can down there in case a crazed drug addict came knocking.

Bleach. Cleanser. Sponges in shreds.

But in the master bedroom, he found something that made this entire mad journey worthwhile. He easily discovered the wife’s stash of jewelry fatheadedly hidden at the back of her dresser. She had a few pathetic gold pieces, some mementoes worth nothing—really, if you judged people on such things you had to feel life was sad and paltry. But what caught his eye in that room was the crooked slat in the wide-planked flooring.

He recalled the slat, and his mother pushing on it.

She always had a hiding place. She called them her “safes.” Protectors, safes…he supposed it was common for single mothers to think this way.

He punched the unnailed side. The slat flew up.

Below, a dark, cobwebby hidey-hole exposed itself. He reached inside.

Back in the living room, he asked the children if they might want to go out for ice cream.

With pleasure he recognized as socially unacceptable, he pictured in his mind the fear their parents would feel, coming home and finding the children gone.

Sadistic, yes, but also just plain righteous.

He had come home to an empty house. He had known fear.

“No,” said the boy regretfully. “We’re not allowed to leave the house.”

He didn’t press and said his good-byes to the children, who appeared relieved to see him go. Did they somehow understand him to be an anomaly, not an acceptable part of a typical afternoon?

They seemed like nice kids, and he would have enjoyed teaching their parents a damn good lesson. Of course, the whole idea was nuts—he would have been caught. What on earth was wrong with him?

Pulling open the front door, since the children remained inert in front of the television, he felt satisfied with his activities of the day. He didn’t want undue attention. He pictured the parents coming home, their panic. It would be enough that he had come in, looked around, taken nothing, at least, nothing they knew they had.

“Who should I say came over?” the little boy asked as Ray prepared to leave.

Ray cracked the door open long enough to say, “Clint Eastwood.”

He did not have a cowboy hat to tip, so he merely nodded and let himself out, fingering the object he had found, which was now safe in his jeans pocket, and locked the door before pulling it shut.

On his way back home, he stopped in downtown Los Angeles, waiting patiently at a hydrant until someone on the street left a spot, then whipping into it, cutting off an Acura and an Infiniti, because unlike them, he didn’t give a damn if they scratched his car. What he gave a damn about was getting the goddamned space.

He breathed a few times, locking the doors remotely, ignoring the bitter invective spewing noisily from the Acura, accompanied by a hand pounding on the car door for emphasis. Two doors down, a dusty shop quaintly spawned in the days when even radios had sex appeal held a jumble of cheap electronics.

“Can I help you?” said the clerk in a three-piece suit, as unsuited to his surroundings as an arguing attorney at the beach instead of the bench.

“I need a cassette player.”

The clerk chewed his mouth. “Hmm.” He gestured for Ray to follow, and Ray did, down past aisles of plastic parts, earphones, wires, gadgets for every conceivable purpose, and some probably inconceivable.

He showed Ray car cassette decks.

“Portable,” Ray said.

The clerk’s brow furrowed. “Man, why you want one of them old things anyway?”

“You don’t have any?”

He put up a hand. “Of course we do. Just not much call for them these days. Wait a sec.” He turned his back to Ray and disappeared through a door at the back of the store.

Ray browsed the aisles, finding himself interested in a number of things that might be useful at some point, including miniature lighting fixtures for his models. He piled a few things on the counter. By the time the clerk returned with a very old-fashioned boom box that would run on batteries, he had managed to run up quite a bill.

“You’ll need headphones.”

“I have some.”

Outside the store, the Acura had disappeared. At Ray’s old hydrant spot, another car waited to fill another empty parking space, nature abhorring a vacuum. Ray put his purchases into the trunk of his car, slammed it shut, and drove off. The other car, with only inches to spare, slipped in behind him.

Back to Topanga, speeding, braking, tailgating, cursing. It was five in the afternoon and Ray was out of control, weeping and shouting in the car, not knowing what he was even shouting.

A cold shower. Ignore the phone messages and the computer. He pulled on running shoes and went outside and ran through the hilly neighborhood like the wind.

It worked. He came back to himself.

Calm now, walking back up the drive, he thought of the innumerable anonymous tenants who had lived on Bombardier Avenue over the past decades. Someone else must have found the loose board, used the opportunity it presented.

But he had proof they had not. He had seen his mother putting that board into place. He had been watching her. He always watched her with the jealous attention of the only child. That house hadn’t been renovated in thirty years. He had established that personally. The board merged with a thousand other rickety things that developed, and never merited special attention.

He went inside, found the museum plans where he had left them by the front door, and pulled a black cassette tape out of his pocket, turning it over and over in his hands, scrutinizing it. No label. Normal bias. Sony. At the bottom he could see where the white part of the slender tape met brown. Someone had rewound the thing, but the tape was loose.

In the kitchen, he located a pencil and wound the tape tight, using exaggerated care.

He kept headphones in the entertainment unit in the great room. Not wanting to be interrupted, he went around the house locking doors and even arming the alarm. He put the headphones on, adjusted them for fit, then plugged them into the cassette player. Static, then:

“You know why I’m calling,”
what sounded like his mother’s voice, reedy, younger, said.

“Did I scare you?”
said a male voice.

“Yes! Yes, you scared me. I looked outside—”
She paused, sounding terrified, and said,
“Please don’t do this. You’re ruining our lives. I’m begging you—”

“You can fix this. I’ll never call you again. Never follow you. You know what I want.”

“Next time I’ll call the police!”

“Oh, no you won’t.”

Click.

Ray listened all the way to the end of the tape, flipped it, and listened to the other side. Static.

He listened to it again. Then he stopped and started it, writing all the words down.

6

T
he morning presentation wowed them. After Ray and Denise offered up their goodies and Martin wheeled out the rest of the irresistible feast, the museum people stopped just short of signing the deal on the spot. Ray ignored Martin privately while putting on an attentive face. Afterward, Martin flew through the office making more noise than usual, playing up how normal everything was. The rest of their coworkers cowered and ran away when they saw him coming.

“You have a phone call,” Suzanne said to Ray when the meeting finally broke up, “on hold.”

Back in his own office, he picked up the phone. “Yes?” He spent most of the next hour coddling Achilles Antoniou, who had a million questions and doubts.

Once he hung up, consumed with the voices he had heard on the tape from the house in Norwalk, while he should have been noting changes that had been suggested during the meeting, he thought about weapons. He sketched the knife his mother kept sharp. He drew a gun going off. Now this was confidence. This was power. You could destroy somebody like Martin, who was a plague on the world, in an instant.

He drew a noose.

Twenty-eight miles from her office in Santa Monica brought Kat to the house on the eastern edge of Torrance near the 110. She noted the mileage in her book, then stepped out into the blazing afternoon. The moment she closed her car door behind her, her ears reeled from the freeway roar and she imagined filthy, invisible particles rushing on the wind, forcing their way into her lungs.

After taking photographs, she walked around the house for a closer inspection. Mildew on the window ledges. A thirty-year-old-roof that had seen too much sun, too much rain, and no repair, ever. No sprinklers and a scarred, scorched lawn showing recent signs of visiting dogs. A one-car garage that probably started out as a shed, and still looked it. This was a neighborhood in transition, as it had been since the day it was jerry-rigged into existence. Nobody wanted to live here, so close to the freeway. They chose this place because houses here, in the under-a-half-million-dollar range, remained affordable to people who had sold other houses in scarier areas of L.A.

She got out her disto, shot it around the perimeters, and wrote down her measurements in a thick notebook that worked both as a record and as a useful reference.

She made one last stop for the day in Gardena, this time to act as second to her boss on a particularly contentious evaluation. Feeling bedraggled, finding the water in her bottle had reached an unsavory warmth, she drove north on the 405 back to the office, cranking up the a/c.

But the always feeble a/c in her Echo had crapped out. Was the whole system, the whole interlacing network of televisions and freeways and air-conditioning systems going down? Was this the end of the world? The traffic reporter sounded cool enough, maintaining that chipper air of a guy with bad news, but hey, folks, not so bad this time. He told of a four-car accident on the 405 near Rosecrans with minor injuries, “everybody on the shoulder, CHP in attendance,” then broke for a cheerful advertising ditty. Jaws clenched, hands glued to the steering wheel, radios spewing poor advice, everyone kept their windows up and their air-conditioning blowing.

The ordinary twelve-mile-an-hour afternoon traffic, worsened by the action just north of her, got hellishly worse because someone as stressed out as she was but less resilient chose that moment to have a heart attack or stroke or something. She breathed in and out and reminded herself about wisdom and compassion, and her own stress eased. Three highway patrol cars in front of her began their halting, swerving dance that was designed to slow traffic even more. They stopped about three hundred feet ahead of her and everyone else on the freeway stopped, too. Minutes later, a helicopter punched through the smog and landed on the road in a whirl of dust.

While she watched for the poor soul to get airlifted, windows open to the smoggy oven, Kat was reminded of the fierce summer days of her childhood in Whittier. The highway patrol cleared them for takeoff at last. Traffic, now permanently logjammed, snailed along. Defiant, she pulled her shirt off. The man on the left of her stared at her expensive push-up bra and gave her a thumbs-up before dropping back in the next lane.

The woman now on her left, driving an AWD Audi two-door, who also perhaps lacked freon or whatever the current additive was, hair neatly secured by a clip, in a blouse so soaked it left nothing to the imagination, was inspired. Catching Kat’s eye, the Audi woman pulled her shirt off, revealing a modest gray sports bra. Fuck ’em if they can’t accept a hot woman, they tacitly agreed, giving each other respectful nods.

Traffic slogged along. The two misfit women in fact drew very little attention from the people locked inside their atmosphere-controlled, tinted-windowed vehicles.

Why did Kat love Los Angeles? Because the spicy salt waves of the Pacific rolled in over the town, washing away all sin, cleansing and hopeful? Or was it just plain stubbornness?
Miserere,
but I’ll take life anyhow, she told herself, and popped Andrea Bocelli into the CD player.

Kat called her home phone for messages. Nothing from Leigh. She called information and had them dial Ray Jackson’s house. No answer there, either. Grimly purposeful, she called his office, but was told he was on a conference call and couldn’t be disturbed.

Frustrated, Kat decided to drive to Topanga to meet this mystery man Leigh had married, right after she made her last check-in at work.