“That’s a start,” he said with obscure satisfaction.
It was a clear chilly spring night; they could see their breaths. Amalia looked up at the apartment house, said in sepulchral tones, “Six-six-six is the devil’s number.”
“We’ll chance it.”
There were no lights on in Danny’s apartment on the second floor of the tall narrow stucco row house; Ballard didn’t even bother with the intercom outside the black wrought-iron gate. Instead, he huddled in front of it, his arm moved, the lock’s tongue clicked back, and he swung the gate wide.
“Hey, I’m impressed!” exclaimed Amalia. Ballard showed her his hand with a pair of keys in it. “Shit, another idol shattered, another dream turned to smoke.” Then she slapped his shoulder. “I bet you got those keys from Beverly.”
Ballard lied glibly. “I water his plants when he’s away.”
He checked the mailbox, then led the way up to Danny’s landing. The stairs continued on to the apartment above, where the Chinese landlady lived.
“Holy shit!” exclaimed Amalia.
Danny’s apartment had been tossed by people who didn’t care if anyone knew it or not. The living room faced the street with the kitchen behind it, separated by a counter. Newspapers and magazines had been thrown all over the place, all cabinets opened and their contents strewn around the room. The couch had been overturned, but not the chrome and canvas bucket chairs.
“Pros,” said Ballard, “tossed it during the day.”
“How do you know that?” She moved past him into the living room, sat down in one of the bucket chairs by the dining table.
“The landlady lives upstairs and works days. She’s always home at night. She would have heard the racket.”
“And about them being pros?”
“No vandalism and no thievery. They were looking for something — or somethings — specific.” He swung an arm toward the big-screen TV set and accompanying VCR in front of the windows overlooking the street. “Not gone, not busted up.”
“Maybe they stole other things you don’t know about.”
“We’ll see,” he said. “I know this place pretty well. At least this tells us he didn’t just decide to take off for a week or two of vacation on his own.”
“And you like that,” she said. “He’s your friend, but—”
“No, I don’t like it. But it’s a fact. I like facts.”
Amalia watched him work, fascinated. He started in the front room, mainly just looking, turning a few things over. After the first couple of minutes, she quit asking questions: he answered only with grunts or nods or head shakes. The TV was indeed intact, and the VCR, and none of the cabinets had been smashed. No way to tell if any of the tapes had been taken.
To Amalia the kitchen was a terrible mess. Ice trays in the sink. Cabinets opened, dishes taken out — but not, she had to admit, dropped on the floor and smashed. Silverware drawers pulled out. Surprisingly, the garbage had not been touched, but the stack of supermarket bags had been thrown about. No sign of the legendary Beverly. Was that good or bad?
Danny used the front bedroom to store sports equipment relating to his various outdoor activities: definitely a man’s apartment. The pattern held. Everything dumped out and gone through, wet suits turned inside out, but nothing cut up or smashed.
In the bathroom the top had been removed from the toilet tank, and the medicine cabinet stood open. Its bottles and tubes were on the floor where they had landed after being swept from the shelves.
Danny slept in one of the back bedrooms overlooking a postage-stamp backyard. The mattress was on the floor, the covers a swirl under the window, the pillows in a corner. Everything in the closet had been jerked off the hangers, but none of the jacket seams had been slashed. The dresser drawers were on the floor, their shirts and underwear and sweaters and socks tossed out in heaps. The bookshelves had been stripped and their volumes, mostly in French, were scattered across the floor. She wished being in this man’s apartment wasn’t making her so irrationally obsessed with Beverly.
Again Ballard grunted in satisfaction.
The other back bedroom that was Danny’s office had suffered the most. The room was knee-deep in paper; every filing cabinet had been rifled, as had all the desk drawers. Ballard pointed out an empty place on the desk.
“See? Took his computer but left the printer and the monitor. And...” He checked under the papers. “Yeah. Took his floppies, too.”
After almost an hour they finally left, Ballard pulling the door shut behind them. Outside, he unlocked his car. Some fog was in, making their world more intimate.
“I’ll drive you home,” he said. So he could then go and see Beverly?
She said, “Telegraph Hill,” then, when he started to open the car door for her, added, “Pants on fire.”
He completely missed the obvious allusion, instead looked at her as though she’d read his mind. A little chill went through her; in that instant she realized that his pants were on fire, all right, but for her, not for Beverly.
He had exactly the kind of Anglo-Saxon good looks as the fisherman millionaire she had cut out of a magazine when she was 12 and had framed next to her bed. The man of her dreams, forgotten over the years, because dramatically dark little girls with stern, peppery personalities weren’t the ones who attracted rugged blond men from the sprawly three-story Victorians in West Petaluma. Not when she was in high school. And not since.
Over the years she had come to settle for less: sort of slick, sort of good-looking guys, empty as blown-up paper bags, failures at living — like the unemployed bartender who had shared her bed two nights before.
But here was that Anglo-Saxon of her childhood dreams, and he wanted her. And she wanted him, too. He was a liar, weren’t they all, but did it really matter? Yes, with this one it did.
“Danny doesn’t have houseplants,” she said.
“That’s what they were after,” he said with a quickness that would have made O’B proud. “Danny was growing weed.”
When Maybelle Pernod finished her once-a-week watering of the big split-leaf rhododendron beside Jane Goldson’s reception desk, it was after eleven. She waddled out of DKA, locking the doors and setting the alarms behind her.
Usually when it was late she treated herself to a cab, but this week she was short. She’d been buying for the apartment. Not that getting home by bus scairt her. God was watching out for her. An extra hour to get home along dangerous streets don’t bother her any.
A horn honked. Stopped just beyond the parked cars on Eleventh Street was a dark sedan, the hulking driver getting out.
“HgnMaybel!” he called.
She hurried across the sidewalk to wriggle in her big bottom and ample hips. Warren got in behind the wheel and started them away. She gave a great sigh of relaxation. The Lord had sent Kenny in a nice car to save her from that dangerous trip along dark streets.
“Why you come pick me up from work? You think this old lady cain’t get home her ownself?”
“Hnigh on hna hntown.”
“A night on the town with these aching feet, chile?”
Warren slipped the big Dodge into a parking place three slots from the street door of Maybelle’s walk-up at Larkin and Eddy. He had lousy luck picking bridge lanes at the toll plaza, but had phenomenal luck finding parking anywhere in the city.
Maybelle was proud of her little shrine to Jesus under the front window, her lace curtains and her rug on the floor, her kitchen with fridge and stove and even an oven to cook Sunday dinner. Warren sat on the new couch bought by that week’s paycheck and talked to her through the open bathroom door as she got made up, telling her about baby-sitting the overbearing mother of a spoiled computer genius whom somebody apparently was trying to kill, and about Bernardine’s unlikely passion for him.