Emmet moved in the shadows. “You know something? I don’t think Horton kilt your sister.”
“How come, Em?”
“He was too happy. He loved it here in California. He didn’t have any of the anger he did when he was little. It was the drugs, maybe, but those are good drugs they gave him. I mean, the police is usually right about this kind of thing, but I don’t believe Horton did it. I just don’t.”
Jim waited a moment. “Mom’s been gone a day now. She didn’t tell me where she was going. Did she give any hint to you where—”
“Not to me, she didn’t,” said Edith. “Your mom don’t say much; she just asks questions and listens hard. She doesn’t exactly converse in the normal sense. She wanted some old pictures of Horton, so we gave her a batch. She said she’d return them.”
Weir couldn’t track Virginia with his logic, and his imagination wasn’t up to it, either. The more he turned it over, the less good it seemed to do.
He sat with Edith and Emmett a few more minutes, checked his watch, then offered his condolences again and left.
He stopped at a pay phone on Harbor, called Peninsula Travel, and asked for Trish. Trish had sent the Weir family on vacations for as long as Jim could remember. At the funeral gathering, she had worn a hat with black silk flowers sewed to the crown, one of which had fallen off in the punch bowl.
Trish confirmed that Virginia had flown from LAX to Dayton, Ohio, last night at 9:00 P.M. Stopover in Chicago, one-way, no-return flight booked.
“I was hoping she had a man to see,” said Trish. “She told me this trip was a secret.”
“It’s safe with me,” said Weir. “Thanks.”
He hung up, fished out the right change, called PacifiCo Towers, and asked for C. David Cantrell. Three different secretaries moved his call along. A few seconds passed, then Cantrell was on the line.
“This is Jim Weir.”
“Yes.”
“Nice work on Goins. His parents are sitting in a rotten little apartment in Costa Mesa, wondering what they did wrong. I know you did it.”
Cantrell was silent for a moment, then he hung up.
Thirty minutes later, Weir was sitting in the back of Raymond’s patrol car, one block away from Cantrell’s beach house. Mackie Ruff was up front with Raymond, his profile visible to Weir through the mesh partition. Mackie repeated his instructions back to Ray for the third time: Come down the sidewalk, go right to the front door of Cantrell’s house, knock, and if I don’t get an answer, start pounding on the thing. When the security goons come running, make a scene. Any kind of scene, just make one for about a minute. Then walk away. At exactly five-eighteen, come back and do it all again. “How’s that?” he asked.
“Perfect,” said Ray. “Go.”
“I get to keep this fancy synchro watch?”
“You’ll get more than the watch, Mackie. Go.”
When Mackie had taken a shot of courage from a vodka bottle in his oversized coat and gotten aimed in the proper direction down the sidewalk, Weir joined Raymond in the front of the car. The garage-door opener was in his hand. Across his lap lay a briefcase containing the basics: Becky’s video recorder, a flashlight, wire cutters, latex gloves, a slim-jim, and a copy of the day’s newspaper. Raymond drove slowly down the alley. Weir slipped down again into the foot space. He felt the car roll to a stop and watched Raymond shift it into park.
“I can see both security cars, Jim. Both the goons are eyeing me. I’m going to stay here for a minute, write up a report. When I see them move, I’ll tell you.”
“I’m ready.”
“I’ll be behind the garage at five-eighteen. Until then, all I can do is cruise, so you’re on your own. If I see security decide to go inside for a look around, I’ll honk twice and meet you here.”
The engine idled. Raymond scribbled something in his Citation Book, looking up every few seconds.
“Contact,” he said. “One goon out, heading for the front. Goon two is on the radio. Like clockwork, Jim — there he goes. Hold on now...”
Weir took hold of the briefcase handle and tried to get his legs up under him as best he could.
“Go,” said Raymond, and Weir went.
Ten feet from the garage door, he hit the control button and the door started up. How long to take out the alarm, he thought, a minute, thirty seconds? Briefcase in hand, heart in his throat, he walked calmly into the open garage and hit the Close button on the overhead switch. When the door was down, he went to work with the slim-jim. The lock was an ancient single-slide that wiggled open in less than twenty seconds. Inside, Jim found the security system and cut the wires. A silent job, he thought, probably plugged straight into PacifiCo security and the Newport cops. His breath was coming short and fast; he could feel a wash of sweat working down his back. He put on the latex gloves and stepped back out to the garage.
Standard in all respects, he thought: no windows, a big old toolbox sitting along the plasterboard wall, garden implements hanging from hooks, a workbench with power tools neatly boxed at the far end, a stain of oil on the concrete floor, a lawn mower and gas can in one corner, two bicycles propped against the house, one trash can beside them. Calm. Calm. Calm. He pulled off the lid and looked inside — some empty deli containers, a few soft-drink cans, and, nicely, an empty bottle of Cristal champagne. He swung the camera into place, set the Times against the door, and took an establishing shot. At the end of it, he lowered the camera over the top of the trash can and got the champagne. How I’d love to print that bottle, he thought. He checked his watch: 4:20. Fifty-eight minutes to exit time.
He shot the kitchen and found nothing. There was no carving block on the counter, and no carving knives in the drawers. Cleared out? How did he trim the barbecue steaks, slice the bread?
He skipped the big living room downstairs and climbed slowly to the second floor. He could hear Mackie Ruff on the porch, arguing in his shrill voice that C. David Cantrell owes something to the homeless. The security men were trying to talk him down, but Mackie was turning up the juice.
He made the landing and checked the first two rooms off the halclass="underline" neat, unused, unpromising. The third was the master suite, consisting of a large bedroom that opened onto an enclosed deck outfitted as an office. There was room on the desk for a word processor, but Cantrell didn’t have one. Why not? Jim stood for a moment in the middle of the room, listening to the ocean rumble to shore outside. I made love to your wife, Ann Cruz, in a lovely room overlooking the sea. The bed was to his right. He studied the fluffy comforter, the pillows, the polished mahogany four-poster. Because it was not satisfying in all the ways I require, I struck her twenty-seven times with a Kentucky Homestead kitchen knife (freshly sharpened six-inch blade). The pillowcases were light blue with little sailboats on them. For a moment, he understood why Raymond wanted to kill this man. I understand, Raymond. I understand. But that’s not the way it’s going to go down. He checked the drawers of both nightstands. The usual. He stood up and shot the room and the newspaper. It was 4:30.
Jim moved across the carpet to the office. He sat down in the wooden chair, which rolled with difficulty on the thick Berber. Idea. To the right of the desk, he found what he was looking for: four indentations still clearly left in the weave of the carpet, indentations left by wide rollers bearing weight. A computer stand? He shot the carpet, aware that the marks probably wouldn’t show up on the tape.
He set the camera on the floor, then opened the top drawer of the desk. Neat. Cantrell was orderly, even in his home office: boxed paper clips, a roll of stamps — T. S. Eliot — pencils and an electric sharpener, a small cardboard box containing keys of various purpose, all with labels attached by safety pin — “front door spare,” “Mercedes trunk,” “Christy’s footlocker,” “garage door,” “gate padlock.” A Smith .357 K-frame wrapped in an oiled cloth sat behind a box of shells. Jim opened the box: six shells missing from their holes. He could see the lead tips inside the cylinders of the revolver. Hoisting up the camera, he filmed the drawer, closed it, and moved to the next.