The main point here was description, so communication was one-way and Don didn’t have too much to carry — just the microphone clipped to his turned-up collar and the power pack in his pocket. Forward he went, murmuring, to a pair of French doors, and on into the house.
“Freeze!”
Boy had written Fr before he got his wits about him. That was a different voice, female and harsh. Mayjune, the housekeeper?
“Don’t move! Don’t turn around! You don’t want to see me!”
The housekeeper, check. And Don was caught.
When Don spoke in a normal voice, as he did now — “I’ll go quietly” — it about took Boy’s head off. He scrabbled at his ear to remove the tiny speaker but stopped when he heard the woman say, “You won’t go anywhere. Not till the police get here. You hit an electric eye on top of that wall, and I’m holding a gun on you. So it isn’t that easy, is it?”
“I’m just a reporter!” Don bellowed into Boy’s quaking ear.
“Don’t lie to me! Don’t you think I know what you’re up to? You can tell her, you can tell all of them—”
Yes? Yes? Boy waited, pencil poised. A siren sounded, separately, in both his ears.
The woman spoke again: “Hear that siren?”
“Yes,” Boy said. “Home, James,” he told the driver.
“The name’s Hubert.”
Don’s voice roared through Boy’s head: “I’m turning around. I want to explain—”
“Don’t! You’ll be sorry!”
“I just want you to know I’m— Aaakkk!”
A police car hurtled by, siren roaring, but the bug-eyed Boy couldn’t hear it. By the time his ears recovered from that last shriek, the limo was halfway to Venice, and from the speaker embedded in Boy’s ear came only a gurgle, a grumble, a rush, a slosh.
Mayjune. Don Grove, with one look at her, had swallowed the microphone.
ARMED RESPONSE, said the hexagonal sign mounted on the brick wall just above the front doorbell. But why offer a doorbell if you then threaten to shoot anyone who uses it? “America,” Boy decided. He pressed his pale, fat thumb to the button and, of course, nothing happened. All bluster, these people.
“What?”
Bending to speak into the grid from which that aggressive word had rocketed, Boy, at his most British, plummily answered, “Alasdair Smythe here, of Lloyd’s.”
“Don’t want any.”
“Afraid it’s not your choice, old bean. The insured has passed over.”
A brief silence and then, “What?”
“Are we going back to square one, old crumpet? The animal Skeeks, insured by Lloyd’s of London, is no more. I am the claims examiner.”
A longer pause this time and then, “Wait.”
Boy waited. The sleepy hills of Bel Air reposed around him, the curving roads dotted with grubby gardeners’ trucks, the residents presumably all within, on their Stair Masters. Behind this high brick wall, with its wide electric gate, a gleaming blacktop drive angled up a grassy slope toward a lesser Tara. And down the drive, in an electric cart, came a burly, sullen fellow in tan uniform and dark sunglasses, pistol in holster on hip. The armed response, at last.
Dismounting from his trusty cart, this hollow threat approached the gate, gazed through it at Boy and said, “You got ID?”
“Of course.”
Of course. Boy could prove himself to be anybody you wanted. After brooding over the impressive Smythe ID, the armed responder wordlessly opened the gate, then offered Boy a lift to the house several feet away.
In front, on the lawn, a man in shorts and Gold’s Gym sweatshirt juggled Indian clubs, not very well; as Boy watched the man hit himself on the head. “Stop,” bade Boy, and he stepped off the cart before it halted. Ignoring the indignant words from behind him, he approached the juggler. “William Kampledown, I believe.”
The man hit himself again with several clubs, which then fell to the ground. He stared openmouthed at Boy. “What did you say?”
The background information on Bill Terry, long known but not previously found useful, had arrived from Florida. Boy said, “Wanted for manslaughter in Canada. The plastic surgeon who made you comical instead of recognizable is now a well-paid consultant for a television network.”
“It was all a mistake,” the man said, kicking the fallen clubs in his agitation. “I was drunk. Somebody else was driving. It wasn’t me anyway. I never heard that name before.”
“And now you’re Bill Terry, drinking to forget, a TV star beloved by millions, though not as beloved as Skeeks.”
“What the hell is going on out there?”
Boy turned in the direction of that squawk and saw, on the rose-trellised porch of the pocket Tara, an apparition: Atop a slender body, a perfectly ordinary cheerleader’s face had been given to South American tribesmen to shrink. Then it had been shellacked and had zircons placed in its eye sockets. Scary but sexy. “Ah, madam,” Boy began, approaching her, “I am—”
“Not selling insurance, I hope.”
“Of course not, madam, I am—”
But she was glaring past him at the man on the lawn, snarling at him. “What are you standing around for? You have to be able to keep those goddamn things in the air by next Wednesday, when The Bill and Tommy Show starts to tape!”
“Maybe we can get some with helium in them,” die man suggested.
“All the helium we need,” she answered, “is in your head.” Switching her glare to Boy, she demanded, “What does Lloyd’s of London want from us?”
“We are the insurers of—”
“Well, we’re not the owners. We’re not putting in any claims.”
On the lawn, Bill Terry once again flung Indian clubs about. Boy said, “I take it I am addressing Ms. Sherry Cohen. Ms. Cohen, Lloyd’s would like to extend its condolences at—”
“Save them,” she suggested.
Something short in bib overalls that was either a depraved cherub or the Nicaraguan bantamweight champion now came out onto the porch and whined, “Well, are we playing Scrabble or not?”
“Be right there, Tommy,” Sherry Cohen said, her irritation at once deliquescing. She couldn’t have gazed on the tiny tot with more ardor if he’d been a T-bone steak. “We’re just saying goodbye to the insurance man.” The zircon eyes swung around in the snake head. “Goodbye.”
“Madam, if I could—”
“I’ll ride you to the gate,” offered the armed responder as woman and child swept into the house and Bill Terry continued to bean himself.
“I believe I can find it,” Boy said.
Back at the Galaxy nest, Boy went over what had been learned. None of the businessmen of Shunbec International had been in Los Angeles at the key moment, all being under subpoena in Texas for something or other to do with business legality. Bill Terry, Sherry Cohen and Mayjune Kent were all without alibis, and no one else could have been close enough to the animal at the appropriate moment to do him in. (A trainer normally accompanied Skeeks between Dungowrie and the studio, but Skeeks had been on a two-month hiatus in filming, so the trainer had been gone for a week on safari in Tanzania.)
“These are our suspects,” Boy announced to his motley crew. “We want to know where they were, minute by minute, over the past three days. We want to know what stores they went to, whom they visited, what doctors are their friends. We want their credit card receipts. We want to know which of these three dispatched the lovable pooch, and we want it by nine tomorrow morning, because the cadaver will be limoing Kirk-ward by 11.”