As he passed the two chauffeurs, he gave a friendly wave. He didn’t know who either of them worked for, but he approved of servants who knew what they were doing. They had let off their passengers at the front entrance, then parked far down the drive to leave the most desirable spaces for people who had driven themselves. Now they were on their feet watching the house for signs of their employers, and not smoking inside their cars.
He reached the open gate and pulled onto the road, giving his car some gas. The sensation of speed raised his spirits, and he found himself thinking of Powers’s wife Jan. At the time of their fling twenty years ago, he had anticipated that he would feel remorse. Powers had been his friend since early childhood, and Janice was practically still a bride at the time. She had barely turned twenty. It was true that he did occasionally feel he owed Powers some guilt. But the surprise was that the strongest and most sincere feeling he had was joy at having Powers’s wife. It was a victory over Powers, better than any other kind of victory there was, and he still felt it strongly every time he saw them together.
He had also anticipated the probability that there would be awkwardness between him and Jan after they had been in bed together. Since he and Powers would be friends forever, the awkwardness might be a problem. It didn’t turn out to be the sort of problem he had expected. He had been younger then, and not known himself very well yet. The awkwardness was real and it had lasted for two decades so far, but it wasn’t exactly unpleasant. Jan had trouble meeting his eyes, and if he touched her hands they would sweat, and she always tried to avoid being alone with him, even for a minute. He found her discomfort interesting, even flattering.
The part he didn’t anticipate showed how little imagination he’d had when he was young. It had never occurred to him that being close friends with her husband meant that through the years he would be forced to watch her age. Already she wasn’t the beautiful, tempting young bride he had seduced. She was forty and beginning to show a broadening of the hips, a few wrinkles ruining her forehead and upper lip, and a slackening of the skin of her neck.
The girl he remembered was better. Powers had been in New York on some kind of business. Ted Forrest recalled that there was some meeting connected with property that Powers had inherited, some legal papers to sign. In the morning, Forrest watched Caroline drive off toward San Francisco to shop, then made a telephone call to Powers’s hotel in New York. Powers was out doing whatever he was there for, but the hotel clerk made it clear he was still registered. Then Forrest drove to Powers’s house for a surprise visit to the little woman.
He had a new Corvette. When he pulled up to the house he stopped directly in front of the door so when she opened it she saw the car, a waxed and shining image of speed and freedom. He told her that her husband had asked him to be sure Janice got out of the house while he was away and had some fun. Forrest talked about Powers as he drove her to a restaurant above the ocean at Half Moon Bay. They had a bottle of wine with lunch, and he kept filling her glass as he told funny stories. By then none of the stories included a mention of Powers.
They drove a few miles to another spot he knew that had the best view of the ocean. When they arrived, he extravagantly rented a room on an upper floor with a balcony, so she could see it. And the view really was spectacular. The horizon line of the deep blue Pacific seemed so high it appeared to be over their heads. As they were on the balcony sipping drinks he had made from the minibar, he put his arm around her waist. She gave a slight jump with an almost-silent intake of breath and stiffened a bit. He kept his hand there and waited. He could tell she was thinking, trying to decide what to do, what to say. He gave her ten seconds, then kissed her.
As he thought about that day, the rest of it came back to him. He remembered her saying no a couple of times, feebly. And he remembered rolling over in bed and reaching into the pocket of the pants he’d left on the floor to get the condom, then seeing the shocked, almost-angry expression on her face. “You brought that?” she said. “You knew?”
He said, “I hoped.”
After that, she was different-better, really, because she’d had to stop pretending she didn’t know that this wasn’t an accident. The sex was certainly better-spiteful, selfish, greedy. They stayed as late as they dared. On the ride home she told him that she hated him, and that she would do everything possible to be sure she and her husband never saw him again. But it was a long, long ride home, and by the time he turned to go up the driveway to her house, they were agreeing when they should meet again. It lasted a couple of years, and then it ended, by another agreement, when she was pregnant with her first child.
Ted looked at his watch. He could be sure that Caroline’s ordeal would last at least another couple of hours, and probably three. He took out his cell phone and dialed. This time it rang only once.
“Hi,” he said. “I escaped.”
He could hear the sweet young voice say, “I’m so happy. How long can you stay?”
It was good to hear somebody say things like that again.
18
Jerry Hobart lay on the bed in his hotel room. The lights in the valley below Universal City had come on, and the sky above looked black. He wanted to get back to sleep, but now that Forrest had called him, he couldn’t. It wasn’t the call, but the wave of deep hatred he had allowed himself to feel for Theodore Forrest that had made him alert and restless, and kept him thinking. Why had Forrest even called-to get Hobart’s assurance that he wasn’t goofing off? He must know that if Hobart had already killed Mrs. Kramer, he would have let Forrest know he was ready to get paid. Forrest was just calling because he was impatient, and he imagined that his voice would speed things up.
Rich people thought that telling someone to do something was the same as doing it. And Forrest was a member of the class that wasn’t used to waiting for things. They didn’t wait for anything they wanted to go on sale; they didn’t save up for anything; they didn’t wait in lines. Rich people had a bizarre, unshakable belief in the magical power of their own neediness.
Hobart had been awake all night rummaging through the detective-agency office, tying up the night watchman, and then scaring the shit out of Mrs. Kramer, and he had not yet caught up on his sleep. He resented the fact that Forrest had cut his rest short.
He had wondered why Forrest would worry so much about this detective in Los Angeles that he wanted him killed. Two hundred thousand for having somebody popped was probably not a problem for a man like Forrest. Very rich people had complicated finances, so it was easy for them to pay out money without having anybody else notice it was missing and wonder where it went. But what would induce a man like Forrest to take the risk? Paying a shooter was a risky way to solve a problem. If Hobart was caught or killed, then police would spend the next few months examining every phone call he had made or received, attempting to figure out the source of every dollar he had. They would look at every credit-card transaction to piece together all of his movements for the past year. They would do their best to make a list of everyone Hobart had seen or talked to in that period. Why would a man who didn’t have to take risks accept that one? The only answer Hobart could think of was that Phil Kramer had known something ugly and dangerous about Forrest that he might decide to reveal.