‘What now?’ Walt said.
‘I’ll go on out there and take a look.’
‘Alone?’ There was a certain amount of anxiety in his voice, which I interpreted as a desire not to be left in Santa Barbara with Eunice.
‘We need you here,’ I said placatingly. ‘And don’t tell her where I’ve gone.’
He gave me a sharp glance. ‘I won’t.’
We drove in the hired car out to Orpheus Farm, where I showed him where I’d hidden the radio tape recorder between three rocks, with its aerial sticking up through the branches of a scrubby bush. The nearest neatly railed paddock was only feet away; the house, about four hundred yards. We picked up the radio and parked a short distance down the road.
‘Supposing he sees us?’ Walt said, watching me wind back the reel.
‘He’ll only think we’re watching the farm routine, to know when to pinch Moviemaker. The radio will pick up the bug in his office from at least a quarter mile, but it gets fainter after that. It has to work on the air-vibration system. Not such a good amplification as electricity. Do you ever use them?’
‘Bugs?’ He shook his head. ‘Not often. Cameras with telescopic lenses are better. Catch the claimants walking around on their paralysed legs.’ Satisfaction echoed in his voice. Like me, a rogue hunter to the bone.
Smiling to myself, I switched on. Cutting in and out, Culham James’ various conversations filled three-quarters of an hour of tape time, but nothing he said was of any use to us. I rewound the reels again and we put the radio in among the rocks, Walt agreeing that he would come back after sunset and listen to the day’s take.
He drove me then to the Los Angeles airport, where I hopped on a plane to Las Vegas, arriving mid afternoon. The desert hit like a gust from an oven when they opened the plane doors, and from a nearby building the usual lighted numbers proclaimed to the populace that in the shade, if they could find any, it would be 108.
The air-conditioning at the edge of town motel I booked into was turning itself inside out under the strain, and the Hertz man who presently took my money admitted that this was a little old heatwave, sure thing. Had to expect them, in July. The inconspicuous Pontiac he hired me was this time, however, a cooled one. I drove around for a while to get my bearings, and then took a look at Pittsville Boulevard.
The high numbers ran two miles out of the town, expensive looking homes along a metalled road with the desert crowding in at their rear. The Clives’ house was flanked by others on both sides: not near enough to touch, but too near for the invisible stabling of stallions. The place on Pitts wasn’t suitable, as Yola had said.
It was low and white, with a flat roof and a frame of palms and orange trees. Blinds and insect screens blanked out the windows, and the grass on each side of the drive was a pale dry biscuit colour, not green watered like its neighbours. I stopped the car in the roadway opposite and looked it over. Not a leaf moved under the bleaching sun. Ten minutes ticked away. Nothing happened in the street. Inside the car, with the engine stopped, the temperature rose like Christmas prices. I started up again, sucked in the first cold blast from the air-conditioner, and slid on along the way I was heading.
A mile past the Clives’ house the metal surface ended, and the road ran out across the desert as a dusty streak of gravel. I turned the car and went back, thinking. The comparative dead-endedness of Pittsville Boulevard explained the almost total lack of traffic past the Clives’, and also meant that I couldn’t drive past there very often without becoming conspicuous to the neighbours. Keeping a check on an apparently empty house, however, wasn’t going to get me much farther.
About five houses along on the town side of the Clives’ there was another with water-starved brownish grass. Taking a chance that these inhabitants too were away from home I rolled the Pontiac purposefully into the palm-edged driveway and stopped outside the front door. Ready with some of Walt’s insurance patter, I leant on the bell and gave it a full twenty seconds. No one came. Everything was hot, quiet, and still.
Strolling, I walked down the drive and on to the road. Looking back one couldn’t see the car for bushes. Satisfied, I made the trip along to the Clives’, trying to look as if walking were a normal occupation in a Nevada heatwave: and by the time I got there it was quite clear why it wasn’t. The sweat burnt dry on my skin before it had a chance to form into beads.
Reconnoitring the Clives’ place took an hour. The house was shut up tight, obviously empty. The window screens were all securely fastened, and all the glass was covered on the inside with blinds, so that one couldn’t see in. The doors were fastened with safe-deposit locks. The Clives had made casual breaking-in by vagrants nearly impossible.
With caution I eased round the acre of land behind the house. Palms and bushes screened a trefoil-shaped pool from being overlooked too openly by the neighbours, but from several places it was possible to see the pools of the flanking houses some sixty yards away. Beside one of them, reminding me of Eunice, a woman in two scraps of yellow cloth lay motionless on a long chair, inviting heatstroke and adding to a depth of suntan which would have got her reclassified in South Africa. I moved even more quietly after I’d seen her, but she didn’t stir.
The rear boundary of the Clives’ land was marked by large stones painted white, with desert scrub on the far side and low growing citrus bushes on the near. From their windows, brother and sister had a wide view of hills and wilderness; two miles down the road neon lights went twenty rounds with the midday sun, and the crash of fruit machines out-decibelled the traffic. I wondered idly how much of Uncle Bark’s illicit proceeds found their way into Matt and Yola’s pocket, and how much from there vanished into the greedy slot mouths in Vegas. The stud fees went around and around and only Buttress Life were the losers.
On the way back to the motel I stopped at every supermarket I came to, and bought two three-pound bags of flour from each.
From a hardware store I acquired a short ladder, white overalls, white peaked cotton cap, brushes, and a half-gallon can of bright yellow instant drying paint.
Chapter Fourteen
Walt listened to what I had to say in a silence which hummed down the telephone wires more eloquently than hysterics.
‘You’re crazy,’ he said at last, sounding as if he seriously meant it.
‘Can you think of anything else?’
After a long pause he said grudgingly, ‘Nothing quicker.’
‘Right, then. I’ll fix everything this end and give you a call in the morning. And let’s hope it works.’
‘What if it doesn’t?’
‘Have to try something else.’
Walt grunted gloomily and hung up.
I spent an hour at the airport, and then went back to the motel. The evening oozed away. I played some roulette without enthusiasm and lost backing black against a sequence of fourteen reds; and I ate a good steak listening to a girl singer whose voice was secondary to her frontage. After that I lay on my bed for a while and smoked, and kept the blues from crowding in too close by thinking exclusively of the job in hand.
At two I dressed in a dark green cotton shirt and black jeans, went downstairs, stepped into the car, and drove along Pittsville Boulevard to 40159. The town itself was wide awake and rocking: the houses along Pitts were dark and silent. With dimmed lights I rolled quietly into the Clives’ driveway and stacked the bags of flour close to the front door. Then, holding the car door but not shutting it, I eased the Pontiac back along the road and parked it in the driveway of the same empty house that I had used in the afternoon. Again, not wanting any neighbours to remember hearing a car door slam, I left it ajar, and walked back to the Clives’.