The battered Volvo in the sunlight was more daunting than Robinson’s doom and gloom. I looked at it, looked away, walked on over to the five-car garage, and lifted door number four. Immediately, Sugar Ray and Max appeared, wagging their tails. Door number four, they knew, led to the big Chrysler station wagon, the only car in which they got the occasional ride. “Sorry, guys,” I said. “Not this time.” Still, they hung around, looking bright-eyed and hopeful and eager to be of service.
I went into the garage. To my left was the empty slot number three, where the Volvo used to live, before it died. Beyond that, in slot number two, was the Porsche that I mostly used when going up to my land in Oregon, and in slot number one was the two-tone-tan Rolls that I almost never drove anywhere, not certain I could live up to it. Also, the space around the driver’s seat was too small for me, and I’d been assured I would harm my investment in the thing if I started making structural changes. So there it sat, a thing of beauty and a toy forever, unused. (The fifth space was filled with the power mower, tools, sacks of cement and fertilizer, pool-cleaning equipment, and all the other usual stuff.)
The station wagon was my best bet for this trip because it was just about the biggest and heaviest passenger car on the highway; this here Country Squire could eat Impalas for breakfast.
I drove out the back way, Sugar Ray and Max smiling good-bye, and went down and around to Sunset, where I turned east, headed back through Bel Air into Beverly Hills, turned left again off Sunset, wound around and up through the increasingly steep streets, and eventually came to the stone wall and locked gate of Ross’s half-timbered fake Tudor mansion, on the right. A well-known comedian used to own the place, and when Ross bought it, he kept all the security gizmos because they appealed to his dramatic side.
I stopped the Chrysler with its nose not quite touching the chain link gate, and got out to go over and open the little door of the combination mailbox and call system. This was how the tape was delivered. I picked up the telephone receiver, pushed the button, and waited.
Nothing. Was he really not home?
Still with the receiver to my ear, I looked through the chain link diamonds at the slope of a somewhat shaggy lawn, the ornamental plantings, the blacktop drive, and the huge, sprawling pseudo-English house that was actually about the size of a normal English village. There was no one in sight. A small closed blue van was parked at the top of the drive: the poolman. The uncertainties of private enterprise were recorded mutely on the side of the van, just above the yellow letters reading POOL SERVICE. The original company name had been painted out in a different shade of blue from the van body, and the new name had been thickly and sloppily painted on in garish red: BARQ. Barq Pool Service. Terrific name. The owners’ initials probably: Bill, Artie, Ray and... Quincy.
If the poolman was there, Ross must be there, to have let the guy in. Irritated, I pushed the button again. Come on, Ross, don’t be so damn coy. I wished for a moment I knew Morse code, so I could spell out my name on this button, but then I realized Ross surely didn’t know Morse code either. I tapped out a jazz sequence anyway, to see what would happen, and nothing did.
Was it possible he really wasn’t home? Maybe he let the poolman in and then went out. Or maybe the poolman has his own key; that wouldn’t be unheard of. All these houses in Beverly Hills and Bel Air and the other rich communities along the hills, they’re all armed with walls and gates and electronic alarms and guard dogs and actual private security guards (of which I had been one for a while), and yet there’s a constant stream of people going in and out of those houses all the time. The poolman, the gardener, the house cleaner. Appliance repairmen, painters, interior decorators. Plumbers, electricians, carpenters. Delivery men.
Everybody but Sam Holt, apparently. If Ross was there, he wasn’t about to answer this buzzer, so at last I gave up and got back into the wagon. The street was too narrow for a U-turn, so I went on up to the next cross street which, with a Dead End sign, climbed up to the right into pine woods, through which I caught a glimpse of something oval that gleamed like a yellow spaceship in the sun. To the left, this street descended toward Sunset and Bel Air and home, and that’s the way I went.
But I felt frustrated, incomplete. Had Ross been there? It was possible, if the work was going slowly and the deadline was really close, that he’d leave the house entirely for a few days, get completely away from normal life and normal temptations, and when that happened, I knew where he always went.
The place in Malibu.
I drove on past my turnoff to the back way into the house. Malibu was half an hour farther west.
11
Malibu is a peculiarly Los Angeles sort of idea. A narrow strip of land along the ocean’s edge, it is backed by steep precarious hills, with most of the slender flat band between ocean and hill given over to a six-lane highway, generally without dividers, called Route 1. Stores and fast-food joints are shoehorned between the road and the hills, while restaurants and luxury vacation homes are lined up like houses on a Monopoly board between the traffic and the tides. From time to time the sea reaches out a crooked finger and plucks some of the houses away. From time to time one of the unstable hills falls over onto the shops and, occasionally, the highway itself. The whole place is insecure and transitory and ephemeral, and besides that the traffic is dreadful and the houses are too close together. And yet...
And yet.
Real estate values are through the roof. If you can talk about real estate in a place where at any moment the ocean may foreclose your house or a mountain fall on it or a runaway tractor-trailer dropkick it into the next wave, then the values are through the roof. If the wind doesn’t take it.
The expensive houses are expensively furnished, as though it doesn’t matter that all that leather and chrome and steel and high design and original oils and museum-quality statuary may be edifying the off-shore fish next week. Famous names are on the ownership papers if not always on the mailboxes, and I admit I almost bought a place in Malibu myself at one time — the second year of PACKARD, that was — before my sensible Long Island upbringing saved me. It’s the stars who grew up in Omaha and St. Louis who live in Malibu; if you had my background, with photos in Newsday every winter and spring of beach destruction from Fire Island all the way along the coast to the Hamptons, you, too, would find Malibu a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
Ross’s place was a few miles north of where Sunset ends at Route 1; from his deck you can see the surfers farther north, up toward the point. After I made the turn, I stopped at a Dairy Queen on the right and phoned my house to tell Robinson I’d be a little longer than anticipated.
“I had gathered that.” I could tell he was concerned about me, which he expressed by becoming more disapproving than ever.
“I’m just checking if Ross is at his Malibu place,” I said. “He didn’t call, did he?”
“No. There have been three calls, none from Mr. Ferguson. Mr. Novak—”
“Tell me all that when I get back.”
“Miss Quinn telephoned,” he insisted. Robinson likes very few people on this Earth, but he does like Bly Quinn, and at times acts as though his primary job is to protect her from the likes of me. So he wasn’t about to let me off without hearing Bly’s message, no matter what else might be going on.
“What did she have to say?” I asked, since he was going to tell me anyway.
“She wished you to be reminded of your dinner engagement this evening.”