I saw my car down an aisle to the left, almost by itself now that most workers had left for the day. Standing next to the attendant’s booth, I pulled my arm from Marovich’s grasp and, stepping away a few feet, offered him my hand.
“It’s been interesting,” I said. “Be careful on the road. No one down here remembers how to drive in the rain.”
He smiled, took my hand, held it in a warm grip, reluctant to let go. “Don’t think too badly of me. I only wanted the same thing your Mike wanted, just to get the bad guys off the street.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said. “But don’t expect a Christmas card.”
Chapter 34
Jennifer’s San Pedro house was a small restored bungalow, about halfway up a steep hill lined with similar restored bungalows. There was good art on the walls, expensive, deep rugs on the hardwood floors. The view of the Los Angeles harbor from her living room windows reminded me of the view from my San Francisco house, minus a couple of bridges.
I walked quickly through the front of the house, using only the light from the large bay windows to find my way around, and staying in the shadows.
I knew Jennifer hadn’t been home for a few days, but the house had the sharp pine scent of recent cleaning-hired help. There were only two bedroom doors, ergo, no live-in, so I moved without worrying about the noise made when I stepped across the bare wood spaces between rugs.
Jennifer’s son’s room was orderly, smelled slightly of rodent piss. I could see the place on his desk, next to a bag of feed, where he kept his hamster when he was at home.
When I looked into the child’s room, I felt for the first time like the thief in the night I was. While I would almost relish being caught and forced to explain why I had jimmied Jennifer’s dining room window and climbed through, I had very different feelings about the boy learning that his space had been invaded by a stranger. Without going in further than the doorframe, I shut his door and crossed to the second bedroom.
Jennifer’s room was larger than her son’s and had a better view of the harbor below. Everything was tidy, feminine in a business-like way.
Old houses never have enough closets. Jennifer had broken through a bathroom wall into some sort of back passageway, and converted that space into a walk-in closet. I went into the closet, shut the door, and turned on the light.
All of her clothes were arranged by function, length, and color, with work suits filling an entire side rack. She preferred two suit labels-both expensive-and wore a size four. Her shoes also were sorted by color and function: sports shoes, boots, flats, neat little pumps that coordinated with her neat little suits-all of the pumps from the same shoemaker.
I photographed the shoe rack, made a close-up of the color gap between black and gray, then took a shot of the rank of jacket sleeves. When I put my camera away in my bag, I tucked a pair of her pumps in beside it.
Jennifer had a desk in a comer of the dining room. There was no Rolodex, so I turned on her computer, found the tools file, and loaded her address book from the disk. She had none of the key players listed by name, which I found strange: Why wouldn’t an attorney have the district attorney’s office number in her files? I typed in the number for Marovich campaign headquarters and asked for a search. The tag came back: she had listed the number under pizza. I printed the file, made a back-up disk, and got the hell out.
A smooth caper; I was back in my car within five minutes from the time I had climbed through her window. As I turned off her street, a private patrol car turned in. The driver looked at me, but probably dismissed any thought of someone who did not fit the burglar profile in his training manual.
Down on Gaffey Street, outside a club, I stopped at a pay phone and called home again.
I need to go by my office,” I told Casey. “Tell Mike.”
Up the Harbor Freeway hitting eighty, slowed on the Hollywood to seventy, over the Cahuenga Pass and into the Valley in thirty minutes, easy.
I dropped my film at an all-night, one-hour developer a block from my office, and tipped the clerk twenty bucks to deliver the prints to me on her break.
There were a lot of cars in the office lot and people walking around outside my building. Lighting was good. But I parked in the fire zone next to the front door and asked the security guard to escort me down the long hall to my office, to come inside with me and look around. When I was satisfied that everything was as it should be, I thanked him, bolted the door behind him, and set to work.
Guido gave me some advice by phone before he hung up in frustration and drove over. Mike arrived at about the same time, with both of the kids. I put them all to work and rewarded their diligence with not-very-burned microwave popcorn and canned soda.
It was fun. Everyone had a task. Michael and Casey began repacking the tapes Casey had just finished filing, getting ready for the movers again. Mike and Guido bent together over a computer image manipulator. The only difficulty we encountered was agreeing on the music to play on the radio: Michael wanted headbanger, Casey preferred the Russian classics that sent Mischa into raptures, Mike held out for country, and Guido wanted, as always, jazz. We compromised on reggae.
My assigned area was Jennifer. Guido had brought along a fun new piece of equipment that made prints from videotape. I ran through miles of fire videos that Jack had given me, isolated a shot of Ralph Faust: Ralph looking like Prince Charming weeping over Cinderella’s tiny slipper-a size six, navy blue pump on his palm.
I made a series, zooming in closer with each print, Ralph holding the shoe with the fire as background, his hand with the shoe, the shoe alone, the scuffed heel only.
I was still playing with variations when the pictures I had taken in San Pedro were delivered. I sorted through them, picked four, put them on the stack accumulating on the table beside me. Onto the stack I added the pictures I had taken outside Kelsey’s trailer, Jennifer stopping to dump gravel out of her shoe. I played with the sequence, then I laid them all in a line on the floor. At the end of the line, I arranged the stolen shoes to match the angle of the first shot.
“Mike?” I said. “Where is that shoe I gave you at the fire?”
“Evidence locker somewhere. Why?”
“Can I have it?”
“Not a chance.” He came to peer over my shoulder. “Jesus. Good match. Where’d you go shopping?”
“Jennifer’s closet.”
Mike’s face turned a dangerous red. “Just don’t tell me about it.”
“Not much to tell.”
I asked Guido to make a tape of the prints. When he finished, I changed the angle of the shoes a few times, having him tape each alteration.
You walk a mile in your shoes and they begin molding to your feet, show where the toes and bunions are, bend over your instep in a particular way. The shoe on Ralph’s hand, the shoe on Jennifer’s foot, the shoes on my crappy office carpet all had the same characteristic big toe bump. Like a fingerprint.
I was editing the tape, fiddling with the sequence and form, when Mike summoned me. He had commandeered a tape player.
“See this?” Like a proud new father, he started the tape. He had taken the shot of Jennifer’s coat sleeves hanging in her closet, superimposed it over her shoe rack, manipulated the scale using the computer, so that the black sleeves lined up with the black shoes, the gray sleeves with the gray shoes, the navy blue sleeves with empty space. Over the space, he had laid the image of the battered navy blue pump in Ralph’s hand.
“I’m impressed,” I said.
He shrugged. “I do this shit all the time. It’s the way you put together any case. Except, I hang tight until I get a warrant so I can actually use what I find. Question is, what are you going to do with this foot thing when you’re finished?”
“I’m going to blackmail Jennifer.”