Hobart looked up, stood on the desk, and lifted one of the acoustic ceiling tiles out of its suspended metal frame. He stuck his head into the recess above the frame so he could see whether anything was hidden on one of the other tiles. He took out his Maglite to illuminate the dark space, and found it was clear.
He climbed down from the desk instead of jumping, so the sound wouldn’t reach the ears of anyone downstairs. Then he went on with his search. He looked inside and under each of the desks, the drawers, the tables and chairs for anything that showed signs of being hidden rather than stored. He moved heavy furniture and checked the floors for tiles that had been lifted. He went into the storeroom and examined the supply cabinets. He knew that a good way to hide a few pieces of paper was to open the wrapping on a new ream, put the paper in the middle and then glue the wrapper back together, so he opened all the packages of copier paper he could find.
After three hours he had narrowed the search to the inner-office filing cabinets. It took him a few seconds to recognize that Phil Kramer had an idiosyncratic filing system. The obvious file drawers, the ones that an average-sized man could reach without kneeling, were full of old time sheets and phone bills and rent receipts. The bottom drawers were devoted to guns and ammunition. This year’s files were in the rear of the middle drawers, behind what looked like junk mail, opened, flattened, and put into file folders.
The sight intrigued Jerry Hobart. It proved to him that Phil Kramer had been suspicious and secretive, and had routinely hidden even things that few intruders would care about. If Phil Kramer had wanted to hide a few sheets of paper in these cabinets, he could have slipped them in with the junk mail, or stapled them into the middle of one of the innumerable contracts and reports stored in the back of each drawer. It made him wonder how anyone as suspicious and secretive as Phil Kramer could have put himself alone in front of a gun on a dark street. Hobart glanced at his watch. It was after midnight, and he judged that he would have to be out of the building by five A.M. He had a bit under five hours left for the filing cabinets. He began the process of leafing through each file, finding nothing that seemed important, then putting the contents back and pulling the next file. After two hours of this, he heard a faint noise from the hallway.
Hobart heard it again. It sounded distant, but he closed the cabinet carefully, stepped quickly across the room and turned off the light switch. He stood just inside the door and listened. He heard the sound again, this time louder. It was the squawk of a radio. He felt a chill in his spine. This wasn’t a time when he could talk his way past a couple of cops. He was a convicted felon carrying a .45 automatic in an office that belonged to a detective who had been shot in the head just over a week ago.
Hobart pulled out the gun, disengaged the safety, and waited for the man coming along the hall to notice the damaged doorjamb. He heard footsteps coming closer, and the radio hiss, and the voice of a woman who sounded like a dispatcher. It stopped suddenly. The door swung inward toward Hobart. He held his pistol at chest height and watched the uniformed man step in to search for the light switch.
Hobart was surprised. This wasn’t a cop. It was a young Hispanic man about twenty years old wearing a baggy navy-blue uniform with a patch on the shoulder that said something about Ready Security. Hobart’s thumb reengaged the safety catch on his gun, and he set it in the potted plant by the door.
The boy’s ear caught the sound of movement, and he reached toward the revolver in his holster, but Hobart was already in motion. Hobart’s left hand gripped the boy’s wrist while his right plucked the gun out of the holster and tossed it behind him. His left arm curled around the boy’s neck and tightened.
The boy tried the predictable moves he had been taught: stamping his heel on what he thought would be Hobart’s instep, trying to throw his head back into Hobart’s face, jabbing his elbows at Hobart’s midsection, trying to deliver a hammer punch to Hobart’s groin. His flailing was quick and wild, but he simply wasn’t strong enough. Hobart’s stranglehold tightened, the struggling became urgent, and stopped, the boy’s hands now simply trying to grip Hobart’s thick forearm to wrench it away from his throat so he could prolong his consciousness for a few more breaths. Finally, the hands went limp, and Hobart was holding the unconscious boy upright.
Hobart loosened his grip tentatively to see if the boy was faking, but there was no swift move, no wriggle. The boy had been choked out. Hobart lowered the boy gently to the floor. He picked up his gun and the boy’s and stuck them in his jacket pockets. Then he un plugged the receptionist’s telephone at the wall and the receiver and used the cord to hog-tie the unconscious boy. He took the boy’s radio and keys, closed the office door, walked down the hall to the elevator, and rode it to the ground floor. He let himself out the back door with the keys. As Hobart trotted down the street to his rental car, he accepted the fact that he would have to make one more stop tonight.
13
Hobart drove back along the Ventura Freeway. Even though the drive was short, it was always safest late at night to be on the freeway instead of a residential street, or even a major boulevard. Late at night was when the ratio of police to civilians was highest, and the police were convinced that only cops and robbers were out.
He pulled off the freeway at Reseda, wishing he didn’t have to do this. But now that he had broken into the detective agency, everybody involved with the agency would know within a few hours that someone was searching for something. He had to try to finish this tonight. By this time tomorrow night, she would be scared, and it might be very difficult to find her.
If his visit to the office made the newspapers, it was almost certain that Forrest or someone who worked for him would figure out what had happened and why. The more he thought about it, the better he felt about his decision to leave the young security guard alive. Killing him would have put the small-time office breakin on the television news and in the L.A. Times. As it was, there wasn’t much to re port, and the detective agency, the security company, and the landlord would all have an interest in keeping it quiet.
Hobart went up Reseda Boulevard and then east along Vanowen to the street where he had studied the house in the early evening. He drove around the block and parked on the next street. He sat in his car for a few minutes, considering what he was about to do. He had brought a knit pullover ski mask with holes for the eyes and mouth, just in case he needed it to get out of the detective agency, but he had left it in the car when he had seen that it was best to go in during the early evening. This time he put it under his coat. It was after four in the morning-not a bad hour to go visiting-but he wished he had more time. There were only about two hours before sunrise, when there would be lots of cars out and people on their way to work. At least some of the people in this neighborhood would be up cooking breakfast before then.
Hobart got out of his car and walked quickly up the street and around both corners, then stopped at the Kramer house. He walked beside the house to the back yard and all the way to the far corner. He looked over the back fence to find his car and verify that he had parked where he thought he had. Then he stared at the back of the house.
He looked in the big set of sliding doors that he had seen earlier. A lamp had been left on in the living room, so he could see the layout clearly: two couches and two armchairs arranged to face each other across a big knee-high oval-shaped coffee table, and outward from there, a few chairs and tables with lamps along the wall between the windows. On the second floor above the living room he could see a light on in one of the bedrooms in the back, and the wavering, changing glow of a television screen illuminating the ceiling. She must be having trouble sleeping.