“What did you find?”
“Not him. He’s not here. There’s nobody in the house. The maid seems to get the weekend off. I’ve been in every room. Time for you to come in.”
“How? I’ll never fit.”
“Come around to the end of the house by the garage. I’ll show you.”
Paul went around the house to the far end, and when he arrived, Sylvie was already taking the strips of glass out of the louvered window. He pushed the last three out, handed them in to Sylvie, and climbed through the empty window frame into the shower. They replaced the glass and stepped out of the shower.
“Where should we start?” he said.
“The kitchen’s right down here.” She led him down a short corridor into the kitchen.
He shone his flashlight on the long granite counters, the copper pots hanging on the walls, the giant sinks and stove. “Nice.”
“Let’s find the money,” she said.
The kitchen was rich in places for hiding things: the refrigerator, inside pots and pans, in the removable backs of electronic devices, in cabinets and drawers. They found nothing, and moved to the next room. Paul stood on the dining-room table to see if anything could be hidden in the chandelier. They looked underneath tables and sideboards. In the living room, they pulled back runners and moved paintings to search for secret compartments, took out drawers. They checked inside the piano, then moved on.
It was nearly dawn before they finished. They had found seven thousand dollars in cash, a few thousand dollars’ worth of watches and other jewelry, two loaded pistols, and a short-barreled pump shotgun. They had not found the million dollars that Scott Schelling had promised them.
“What do you think?” Sylvie asked. “Do we give up and go?”
“He’s not going to get Wendy Harper for free. He made an arrangement, and he’s going to pay us.”
41
WHILE THEY HAD a drink in Scott Schelling’s suite, Jill Klein introduced Scott to a whole set of grievances against her husband. Fifteen years ago, Jill had been a young, extremely pretty woman who worked for a subsidiary called Carbondale Industries in Chicago. Ray Klein told her he had come to the moment in his life when he wanted only to step back from running the conglomerate and enjoy life with a woman like her. He told her he would always cherish her and be faithful to her. Every one of his statements had been a deliberate lie.
“Now he’s got another new girl—about the hundredth one—but this one is much worse. He’s promoted her to vice president and travels with her, like a corporate wife. It’s the most public humiliation yet. I hate him.” Then it was as though she remembered something she had forgotten to do. She put down her drink, stood up, and began to take off her clothes.
When they were in bed, he saw that what she was doing was avenging her humiliation. Anger made her passionate and eager. She wanted to be more excited, more enthralled by Scott than she had ever been with Ray Klein because that was part of her revenge: to show some impartial, invisible universal arbiter that Ray was not as good at making love as the first man she picked out at a party. And there was another comparison at work in her mind, too. Her sex had to be wilder, more erotic than the illicit sex that Ray had with Martha Rodall. And Scott could tell there were other feelings, too, ones that Scott did not have enough experience or enough empathy to interpret.
Scott had been afraid of Ray Klein, terrified of the power that Ray Klein had over him. But tonight Scott was in a hotel room having sex with Ray Klein’s beautiful wife. It was the antidote to the cowardice and the shame and resentment, and it was intoxicating. He and Jill had become complicit in deceiving Ray Klein—not just in fooling him, but in dishonoring him, mocking Ray Klein’s brute power over them. What could Ray Klein ever do to Scott that compared with this? While they were in bed, Scott already knew that the next time he was forced to defer to Ray Klein, to tolerate his dominance, Scott would be thinking, I fucked your wife. And he knew that Jill was looking forward to having thoughts on the same topic.
While Jill dressed, he said, “Am I going to see you again?”
“You must know I’ll see you again.” Her tone was peculiar. It was not affectionate, not even warm. There was an edge to it, and his ear caught the tone.
“When?”
“When I can.”
“I want it to be soon.” He could hardly believe he had said that, but he meant it. He wanted not just to have one night with Jill Klein. He wanted to be able to repeat this night as often as possible. He wanted her to belong to him.
She touched his face, leaned close and looked at him, but did not kiss him. “If I have a chance to do this again, believe me, I will.”
“Let me give you a phone number.” He took a piece of hotel stationery and wrote while he talked. “This is the cell I carry. It’s a number almost nobody has because I use it only for emergencies. Call when you think you might be able to see me.”
She took it, folded it and put it in her purse. “Fine. Now I’ve got to get out of here.”
At nearly three A.M., Scott Schelling escorted Jill Klein out of his room and down the hotel hallway to the elevators. When he pressed the button, the nearest elevator opened immediately, they stepped inside and the doors closed with a quiet, rolling sound. Jill Klein gave one of her semaphore smiles, embraced Scott and kissed him. Scott knew that hotel elevators usually had cameras in the ceilings, but he decided it was best to acquiesce. The mouth-breathers who looked at the tapes certainly wouldn’t know who Scott Schelling was.
Scott didn’t want to seem timid to Jill Klein. Everything she did was flagrant. While she kissed him, her hands moved below his belt, and he had to break off the kiss. “If you do that, I can’t very well walk back through the lobby with you.”
She laughed. “I’ll be good.”
“I just mean right now, not in the future.”
“No? Then next time I see you, I think I’ll be as bad as I can possibly be.”
“When will that be?”
“I’ll try to call you tomorrow. If I don’t, then find an excuse to skip the European conference in a couple of weeks. I’ll fly to L.A.”
“Good. You have my cell-phone number, right?”
“How could I lose it this soon?”
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. The lobby was nearly deserted at this hour. A uniformed man with an electric machine buffed the floor, but he paid no attention to them. A night clerk looked up as they passed the main desk at a distance of seventy feet, and then returned his eyes to the magazine he was reading.
Schelling and Jill Klein went out the main entrance, and Schelling’s eyes were already sweeping the parking lot and the street beyond to spot anyone who might be watching them. As far as Schelling could tell, tonight he was in luck: There were no visible watchers. The valet-parking attendant and the doorman were sitting on a bench a few paces away beside the cabinet full of keys. The parking attendant jumped up eagerly and took the chit from Jill, then ran down the ramp under the building and came back up with her car. Scott had asked him to park the car below, even though there had been spaces in the open lot when she had arrived. He handed the attendant a ten-dollar bill.
He opened Jill’s door so she could slip behind the steering wheel, then leaned in to kiss her.
She turned away. “Don’t be stupid. I’ll see you soon enough.” She drove out of the lot and turned toward the central square in front of the old Palace of the Governors. After two blocks he saw the lights of her car turning north toward the road to the Klein house.