The master bath was as big as the bedroom. It had no fixtures on the marble tub—perhaps they had been gold and long since pulled out and sold? But the bath had a long clerestory window, and sitting on the pot you could look out at the tops of the avocado trees and a distant smudge that might have been the Pacific. It had a "rumpus room"—the lawyers' letter actually called it that—in the basement. The billiard table smelled discouragingly of mildew, but the cabinetry was sound. It had a private projection room, of course, and a wine cellar, of course, and a wing for the servants, of course; and it also had a gatehouse, and a rusted but solid wall around the central core of the property, topped with ornamental steel daggers. You could not see the house from the road. Two hours of driving around the area convinced Danny of that; the house could not be seen at all, from anywhere, unless you got past the gatehouse. And that you would not do without getting past the Mexicans who lived there.
There were supposed to be four resident aliens in the family, a momma and a poppa and two kids old enough to help out in the avocado grove. When Danny walked in on them the first time without warning, the new padrone inspecting his tenants, there were three battered vehicles in the gravel space behind the gatehouse, and beds in every room.
The census was right: two adults, exclaiming with pleasure at the sight of him; a boy and a girl, sitting on either end of the home-built seesaw in the yard, not moving the whole time he was there. He was not surprised at the discrepancy between vehicles and human beings. They had opened the gate for him, and that left plenty of time for a dozen others to make themselves invisible in the avocado grove. Danny sat down on the steps of the gatehouse and regarded them seriously. "Ese," he said, "you hear me? If I buy, I will keep you on, perhaps. If I keep you on, I will never enter your house—unless it is to throw you out for not doing the work you are paid to do. Or because you make too much noise, or become in trouble with the law. Perhaps you will have some, ah, friends visiting you. If so, there may be odd jobs for them sometimes, to be paid in cash, so there is no nuisance with the authorities."
Manuel looked at Elisaveta and then back at Danny, and said prayerfully, "We hope very much you will buy the ranch, sehor."
And so he had. Not easily. Thirty prime acres came to a lot more money than he could put his hands on at that stage of his life. It took every penny he had, even the bearer bonds in the safe deposit boxes, even the petty cash out of the office till. It was fifteen years back, but even at 1967 prices thirty acres of Los Angeles real estate— however dilapidated, however much on the wrong side of Sunset Boulevard, however anything—meant serious money. He put up the down payment, with the rest on a suicide note. If he didn't make the payments on schedule he lost it all. And then he scurried, selling hard. Six acres to this one, five and a half to this other; the eleven-acre strip along the boulevard to his worst enemy, who happened to think that shopping centers were the big new place to put your money. They all knew he was wriggling on the hook. They priced their offers accordingly. But he knew what he had to have, and he knew what the land was worth. He did not sleep for ninety-six hours, but at the end of that time he had sold twenty-five acres for what the entire parcel had cost him. He didn't make a profit in cash on that deal. His profit was the house.
Danny had ways of making that profit really handsome. He found contractors, good ones, who had their own reasons for preferring to get paid in cash, off the books. For six years every house he fixed up paid a tithe to Rancho Deere. For plastering and painting, for landscape gardening and carpentry, out of every dollar's worth he spent, a nickel or a dime went into his own home. It helped with the taxes on the other houses, no small item, because the profits were getting serious. When you came right down to it, Danny realized with some embarrassment, he could have made a hell of a lot of money even if he'd been strictly honest. Everybody else was. California real estate was generating more millionaires than oil. It didn't even take capital. There were people he knew who had run up a couple thousand dollars on the tables in Vegas and parlayed it into millions; all you had to do was buy, hold for a little while and sell, because the prices were always insanely leaping up. And they didn't have the problem he had, of what to do with the profits he didn't want to display.
On the other hand, they probably hadn't found as intelligent a way of dealing with them as he had.
Nobody pushed the button that raised the gate as Joel turned into the little drive. He turned to frown at Danny, shrugged and blew the horn. "I guess they're out," he said, opening the door.
"You guess they're out. You got a brain I can't believe," Danny snarled. "Come on, get a move on."
Joel ducked his head and hurried to unlock the gate. He jumped back in, pulled the car past it, and then ran back to lower and lock it again while Danny scowled at the house. There should always be someone there; what the hell did they think he kept them around for? But the house was silent. Joel trotted back in and eased the limousine around the gentle curve that led to the house itself.
There was a car in front of it.
There was never a car in front of Danny Deere's house unless he specifically invited someone, and that not often, and certainly not when he wasn't home! He began to sputter with anger. Then, as they drew closer, he saw that the car was not empty.
Four men were sitting in it, all looking directly at him with empty, uncaring eyes.
"Oh, my Jesus," Danny said. "Joel, let's get the hell out of here—"
But someone had thought of that. Without seeming to look at what he was doing, the driver of the car backed it around in a gentle curve, blocking the driveway. There was no way past it, and the door nearest the limousine opened and one of the men got out.
Danny rolled up his window and shrank back into the seat. "Joel! See what they want."
The man opened the door and leaned in. "What we want, Mr. Deere," he said, "is to talk to you a little bit. Why don't we go in your house?"
Danny stared at him while his mind ticked through possible alternatives. None appeared. "Say," he said genially, "why don't we all go in my house?" Cracking wise could be a mistake, he thought.
How big a mistake he only realized when the limo's rear door opened and the oldest and ugliest of the men hopped out. He was wearing a pale green outfit that looked like a jogging suit, and made him look like a watermelon. The face was tantalizingly, then frighteningly familiar. Danny knew it well, though he had never seen it except on TV ... and had had no intention of coming anywhere near it in the flesh.
Buster Boyma.
The mobster stood rocking on the toes of his pale green boots, studying Danny's home as though he owned it and was thinking of selling. Or owned the world. "Oh, God," said Danny, but only under his breath. He scurried to the door and held it, quaking.
Danny had lived close enough to the edge of the law long enough to know what trouble he could be in with the people who had passed the edge. "Sit down, fellows," he said, as forthcomingly as he could manage, but swallowing hard. "Joel! Get these gentlemen something to drink."
Boyma hopped onto the lowest couch and moved the corners of his lips a fraction of an inch—it might almost have been the intention, at least, of a smile. "We don't want anything to drink out of those glasses of yours, Deere," he said, "we only want to talk to you a little bit."
Danny swallowed. "Have I got a problem with you?"
"I don't think you do, Deere. Although you never can tell." He glanced at his nearest colleague, who opened a dispatch case. "You can have this back," he said, as the man handed Danny the collection can that had been taken away from his Hancock Park hustler. It was empty, but the man reached in his pocket and counted out two dollars and forty-five cents in coins and stacked them on the marble coffee table in front of him.