"It's a little slow, Danny. No parking space, you know." Danny knew; that was why the store was such a bitch to rent. But he said:
"How many?"
"Well, we had about fifteen last night. Not all at once, of course."
"Christ!"
"Well, but we're going to do it a different way now. Dennis and I worked it out that we're going to get some of the people in regular clothes, they're going to follow the group here from wherever they're on the street, and they'll get converted and come up and get some of the black stuff for their faces—"
"Hey, that's okay," Danny said, pleased for the first time. "Only use different ones each night." He sat down on a low, black-draped bench with a table at one end, off someone's pile of discards for the trashman in Beverly Hills. "I expect it to go slow at first," he conceded. "I'm worried about the people getting ripped off, though."
Robinson said, "I tell you what we could do, Danny. We could sort of double up the people with the cans, so they could watch each other."
"Yeah," Danny said, brightening. "That's a good idea. And don't use the old buddy system, either, because the other thing they can do is watch each other to see if anybody's dumping money out of the cans before they turn them in." He got up, cheered. "It's gonna work out fine, Robinson," he said. "The way I see it, we got to build slow, say another two weeks to get the image across. There's not going to be much action right at first. Then we pick up the tempo. I'll get you some name people to come in here every night. We'll give away prizes. Maybe a group to play a little. Yeah," he said, getting up to leave, "you're doing a piss-poor job, all right, but that's about all I thought you'd do right now. Hey, Joel! Get the hell out of the beer and drive me home!"
Before you got to Danny's house there was a sharp dip in the road, with a sign that said:
RUNAWAY VEHICLES Emergency Deceleration Strip 600 Feet Right
Danny was fond of that sign. He owed his house to it. Once, in a moment of weakness, he had showed the house to a retired printing broker from Montclair, New Jersey, and it was all "go" until the client saw the sign. "I don't like the looks of that," he declared, and Danny had risen to the cue.
"First big snow," he gagged, "and you'll wind up in Brentwood." And then, when the client didn't call back, he realized that a printing broker from Montclair might not know snow was a joke in Beverly Hills. It worked out just great; Danny had turned down two million dollars for what he'd offered the printing broker for six hundred thousand. But after that he never joked about snow.
But the house became His Place.
Before that fact became clear to him, Danny had lived in eighteen or nineteen houses in half a dozen years, one fixer-upper after another. Each one might have been the right one. Some he thought really were, especially at first; the split-level in Malibu, the old ranch house in Pacific Palisades. When he bought them he meant to live in them. Forever? Perhaps not forever, but indefinitely. And so he neglected some simple little tricks his accountant taught him later on, and when it became clear to him that none of them was actually the place for Danny Deere he had tax problems. The capital gains were there for any auditor to find, with only the most marginal off-the-books profit to show for his work and time.
That was no good, so Danny spent a week with his accountant and at the end of that time he understood what he had to do.
From then on his life style became more lavish and more mercurial. He didn't buy single old houses to fix up. He bought two at a time. He specialized in properties that had been farms, or family compounds, or whatever eccentric or practical thing would produce two livable structures on a single piece of land. When he found one such he bought it. He moved into the better of the two structures while the other was being rehabbed; then into the second while the first was done; then separated the two by ivy, a trellis, a wall, a hedge—whatever. And he sold two properties for more each than the two together had cost.
The prices went steadily up. There were only 156,361 square miles of land in California, far the bulk of it desert, mountain, buried by freeway or out in the boonies, and for the pitiful few million desirable acres there were ten million people anxious to own a piece of it. Danny's prices went up faster than his competition's, because he was smarter. Every client he showed a house to taught him what clients looked for. A swimming pool. The stranger the shape the better, and, really, it cost very little more to pump concrete into the shape of the state of California, or of Texas, than to make it square. Tennis courts. Even for the people who were obviously decades past the playing of tennis. Privacy. There never was any, really, for most of them, but if you planted enough hedges and put up enough slat fences you could produce the illusion. It all paid off. An acre and a half he bought in January for eighty or ninety thousand dollars, plus the fifty or sixty thousand in real money that he paid for cement and paint and plaster and plantings, plus the wages of the people who put them in, sold in two sections in October for a hundred and fifty thousand each. The big problem became what to do with all his money, but the course in accountancy helped with that, and Danny was growing rich. Of course, he lived free for all that time, in one fixer-upper or another, but that was only the least part of the profits.
And he fell in love—not with a woman (he gave that up after his third wife), but a house.
It was more than a house, it was an avocado plantation, and there were thirty acres of it.
Growing avocados had not been a very good idea, because they didn't grow well in California outside of one little belt far south of Los Angeles. But they didn't grow badly, either. Marginal. That was the word for the avocado farm. It was also, unfortunately, the word for the house that was on it, because it was falling apart. The whole thing had belonged to some movie star of a day even before Danny's own. She had been a smart enough movie star to buy land when she had the money. And when she stopped having the money she began selling the land as she needed to replenish the bank accounts, and this last parcel was all that remained free of the developers. It had been her home, although she hadn't lived in it for twenty years. No one had, and the place was a disaster.
But to Danny ;t was a beautiful ruin, a Coliseum among ruins, the wreckage of a Chartres. Its architecture was silent-movie-star hacienda. It was peeling pink stucco and crumbling wide, tall arches over a veranda of grass uncut between the flagstones. It looked like hell. But it was built for the ages, and under the rot it was sound. It had two swimming pools, not one—an oval jobber just outside the house, with a diving board on the sleeping porch outside the master bedroom for mornings when it was just too much trouble to walk downstairs for a dip, and a deep rubbly one in a fern grotto fifty yards away. Neither had water in them, only tree branches, dried mud and broken bottles. Neither would hold water as they stood. One was cracked, and the other seemed to have been bulldozed open, perhaps to avoid breeding mosquitos.
When Danny first saw it he was alone. The movie star's lawyers had given him the key and instructions to sell, and he had taken the first look by himself. He spent an hour outside, visualizing what the place must have looked like, what it could look like again, before he went in the house; and then he knew it was his own.