“I promise.”
There were no restaurants along Benedict Canyon, or any other kind of business as far as I could tell, so I drove all the way back down to Sunset and parked at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I stood around staring at the big banana leaves on the wallpaper at the Fountain Coffee Room while they put together half a tuna sandwich and a cup of tomato soup to go. It cost twenty-eight fifty, plus ten bucks for the valet, but that included a bottle of water and a sprig of parsley, so for Beverly Hills, it was a bargain.
I drove back up the canyon to Wallingford. When I had resumed my stakeout under the live oak tree, I called her and said, “You still in there?”
“I am. You back out there?”
“I am.”
“So everything is fine.”
“Don’t kid yourself.”
During the afternoon, I spotted two new kinds of birds: a woodpecker and a couple of blue jays. Three vehicles drove by. A Bentley exactly like the one I was sitting in, a grocery delivery van, and a truck with a landscaping company name painted on the door. Not much traffic in the middle of the afternoon on Wallingford Drive.
I placed a call on my cell phone. Simon answered after the second ring.
I said, “Simon, my good man, I am a trained investigator. Although you have refused to admit your former association with Her Majesty’s Diplomatic Service, based on how you handled yourself when Fidel Castro tried to run us down, not to mention certain other clues, I suspect you have some experience in providing security.”
“Alas, as has been mentioned previously, one couldn’t say.”
“This is not frivolous cuRíosity. I need help protecting Olivia Delarosa.”
“It would be my pleasure to assist you.”
“The opposition appears to be professional. I need to know you’re fully qualified.”
There was a pause, and then, “I am qualified.”
“All right,” I said. Then we discussed a strategy.
At 5:05, Olivia drove her car out through the gates. She waved at me, then turned right, heading for Benedict Canyon Drive. I started the engine and rolled along behind her, all the way to Venice.
She parked on the street and waved me into her driveway. It was nice for her to worry about me parking the Bentley on the street. We met at her gate, and she gave me her keys. After I had checked out the apartment, I let her in. She changed into a pair of cutoff blue-jean shorts and a loose T-shirt that had the words “Lella Lombardi Lives” printed on the front. Only a true racing fanatic would know about Lella Lombardi, the sole woman to ever score points in a Formula One race, especially since Lombardi had been dead for more than twenty years and hadn’t driven in a grand prix in nearly forty.
Olivia said, “I usually go for a walk on the beach before dinner.”
“Sounds good.”
It was nearly sunset. The afternoon heat radiated up from the sidewalk. I stayed between Olivia and the street and kept my eyes moving constantly to observe a regular pattern around our parameter. The M11 was ready beneath the loose shirt tail at my hip.
She said, “If they see you with me, they won’t try anything.”
“Be fools if they did.”
“But we need them to come forward. How else are we going to find my mother and clear you of those charges?”
“I’m not letting you walk around out here alone.”
“Of course not. But maybe if you followed from across the street, they wouldn’t notice.”
“Olivia, these guys are very well trained. They could snatch you in five seconds, maximum. I might not be able to get to you until it’s too late.”
She put her hand on my arm for a moment. “You’d get to me. Please, just go across the street and be inconspicuous.”
“I’m not comfortable with that.”
“It’s not your decision.”
She was right. In the personal-security business, you tried to stay as close as the client would allow, but ultimately the safety level was up to the client.
I crossed the street and fell back about fifty feet. Olivia traversed the neighborhood to South Venice Boulevard, and then followed that over the canal bridge and across Pacific Avenue and Speedway. At the beach walk, she went right toward the pavilion. I hung back as far as I dared.
As always, all the Venice Beach stereotypes were on full display: kids with multicolored spiked hair, every form of piercing and tattoo imaginable, guys holding hands with each other, girls who looked like guys holding hands with each other, bodybuilders pumping iron on Muscle Beach, kids whipping past on skateboards, guys playing pickup games on the basketball courts, girls in next-to-nothing string bikinis playing volleyball, girls in next-to-nothing string bikinis gliding along on Rollerblades, and homeless people bundled up in everything they owned, as if it were ten degrees below freezing.
Black clouds towered above the Pacific, stretched across the horizon like a massive wall and moving our way.
I tried to figure out why a classy girl like Olivia would choose that kind of neighborhood. Then I remembered where she had grown up. There were a lot of similarities. Venice Beach was not what most people would consider upscale. Except for the blocks closest to the ocean, it had a blue-collar quality. Maybe Olivia felt comfortably at home there, as if she were back in Pico-Union, except with a beach and without the gang violence. Plus, of course it was only fifteen or twenty minutes from Beverly Hills, depending on the traffic, so that was convenient. And I had to admit, strange as they were, the people in her neighborhood kept things interesting.
Olivia turned inland at the pavilion, followed Windward past Pacific Avenue and the little roundabout, took Grand up to Dell, and then cut across the canals. Nothing suspicious happened whatsoever, but the looming clouds had reached the shore by the time we arrived back at her apartment. Darkness fell upon us suddenly.
I paused at the gate outside her front courtyard. “You should get the remote lock fixed on this thing,” I said.
She said, “I told the landlord that a month ago.”
Inside her place, we sat around in her living room for a while, listening to the rising wind, reading magazines, and drinking a nice merlot. At about eight o’clock, she went into her kitchen to make dinner. Meanwhile, I walked around her apartment, checking locks on windows, closing drapes, and trying to memorize everything in case it was pitch-black the next time I was there.
Dinner was a stir-fried beef lo mein, with egg drop soup. It was some of the best I’d ever had. As we sat down to eat, I said, “So, you’re also a chef. Is there anything you can’t do?”
She smiled. “There’s not a lot of difference between cooking and working on a car or writing computer code. It’s all about learning how things fit together.”
“You make it sound like there’s no art involved.”
“Do I? It’s hard for me to tell the difference between art and craftsmanship, I guess.”
“Doesn’t instinct come into it? Something indefinable, beyond just doing it by the numbers?”
“You’re the artist, Malcolm. You tell me. All I know is I don’t have much trust in instincts. What if the things we believe are really only things we hope? How would we know unless they can be measured or tested or proven somehow?”
My own vast emptiness came to mind, the random chaos that sometimes seemed to swirl around me, when even my most cherished memories betrayed me, unconnected ideas coming from all directions and trailing away again before I understood them, everything I tried to cling to vanishing through my fingers. I thought about trying to pass my broken fingers through a wall, while Haley ran screaming out into midair.
I said, “You have to have to have some kind of solid ground to stand on. Something that isn’t open for debate. If that ever disappears, there’s nothing left but madness.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exactly.”
“But I also think if you go through life requiring that of everything, you’ll miss what’s most important.”