“In that order?”
She got up to cut the cake. “You’re a trying child. And you’re going to miss the best bet of your life. Eleanor, I mean.”
“She’s too good for me.” I was only half kidding.
“You’re my son,” my mother said, plopping a slice of cake onto a paper plate. “She loves you,” she told the plate.
“Hell is almost getting what you want.”
“That’s fatuous. You behave as though your life had nothing to do with you.”
“I don’t feel as though I’ve got very much control over it,” I said, and Max flashed into my mind: Control is an illusion.
“I’m an old woman,” my mother said with surprising bitterness. “Things are ceasing to work. That’s something that can’t be controlled. There’s nothing wrong with your life that couldn’t be fixed with a little common sense. Eleanor is a good, steady girl. Your children would be perfectly beautiful. Sometimes I wish I could just choke a little sense into you.”
“Yeah, well, I love you, too.”
She put the cake firmly on the sink, went to her chair, and leaned down and opened the paper. The audience was over. “I’ll say hello to your father for you.”
The moon had risen earlier and brighter than I would have liked. It hung fat and full and pasty in the sky, skipping over a thin wisp of low-hanging clouds like a stone on ocean foam.
Eight o’clock, and not a parking space in sight. The night was still hot. Alice’s windows admitted a stream of dry air as I circled the block, passing Max’s house, making a right onto Santa Monica and then another right-north again-on the next street. While Max’s street, Flores, was still slumbering peacefully in the 1920s, with rows of craftsmen’s bungalows lighted up on either side, apartment houses had taken root on the parallel street. Many of them had broken out in almost dermatological eruptions of architectural whimsy: portholes and ship’s railings, abstract neon compositions wired to the stucco, free-standing sculptures planted on the grass. Others rose blank and austere, Art Deco reincarnated.
Max’s house, of course, was dark. I could make out the yellow crime-scene tape across the porch and the seals pasted to the door. A driveway, lined with bougainvillea, ran alongside the bungalow, and a row of Max’s roses gleamed healthily in the moonlight on the far side. He had dozens more, Christy had told me, in back.
I didn’t want to park near the house anyway. Alice was far too distinctive. I might be ignoring Spurrier’s command, but that didn’t mean I didn’t take it seriously.
Four blocks away, on the other side of the Boulevard, I eased Alice into a space and climbed out, my joints stiff and cranky from sitting still for so long. I loosened up as I hit the sidewalk, and by the time I’d reached the lights of the main street I was walking like a more or less upright primate. A pair of latex gloves, pulled from a box of fifty I’d bought on the way, bulged uncomfortably in my pocket.
The restaurants and bars were full, men in jeans or shorts and T-shirts standing in line in front of the more popular places. I flowed with the current on the sidewalk, feeling anonymous and even confident. This was Sheriffs’ territory, though, and it took an effort not to glance at the occasional black-and-white, idling slowly by in the traffic. Some of the deputies, I noticed, wore their shades even at night. Never a good sign.
Flores Street was dark and relatively deserted. Walking quickly, like someone who knew exactly where he was going, I turned up Max’s driveway and past the house, my heartbeat accelerating and the taste of my mother’s coffee sharp and sour in the back of my throat. I found the gate in the center of the shoulder-high chain-link fence, wincing as it squealed open. This was not something I would be able to explain if a patrol car spotted me.
Roses lifted pale faces to the moon, and the breeze, a real fire breeze blown down from the desert, stirred the tendrils of the pepper tree that arched high above the yard. The tree soaked up the moon’s light, and I had to grapple in my pockets for the little medical flashlight, the size of a ballpoint pen, I’d taken from Alice’s dash compartment. Then I slipped into the latex gloves.
The key to the back door, one of several Christy said Max had stowed around the property, was where he’d told me it would be, under the center cushion of a small vinyl-upholstered couch shoved up against the side of the sagging wooden garage. It faced a dry birdbath that contained a pyramid of spherical Christmas ornaments, a decorative touch that seemed uncharacteristically tacky for Max. Maybe it was meant to be funny.
Out of curiosity I first tried the keys I’d gotten from Max’s dry cleaner, but none of them could be fitted into the lock. The one from the couch slipped in easily. I gave it a full turn and pushed against the door, but it didn’t budge.
It took me longer to figure it out than it should have. I turned the key farther and pushed against the door again, and then I backed away from it as though it were red-hot.
I hadn’t unlocked the door. I’d locked it.
My shirt was suddenly wet beneath the arms. Leaving the key in the lock, I stepped away from the house, still walking backwards, until a rosebush poked its thorns into my back. I sidestepped and kept going backward, my eyes on the house, until I was pressed up against the rough trunk of the pepper tree.
No lights showed in the house, no signs of movement. The pepper tree sighed and whispered, bumping against my back in time with the pounding in my chest.
To the right, the fence joined the corner of the house. To the left, the driveway stretched on its way to the street, past more windows than I liked to think about. Behind me, on the other side of the pepper tree, loomed the blank wall of an apartment building, at least three stories high. My rosy bower was a cul-de-sac, as they like to call dead ends these days.
The darkest part of the shade was just next to the pepper tree. I sat there in the warm dirt, my back against the apartment building, and waited.
When the moonlight began to spill over me, maybe two hours later, I shifted to the other side of the tree. Nothing had stirred in the house, and although the breeze kept making a racket in the tree above me, I hadn’t heard anything else. When the light reached me a second time, the moon far to the west now, I got up and shook the kinks from my legs, my back creaking petulantly, turned away from the house, and shone the little penlight at my watch. I’d been there for more than four hours.
The key was right where I’d left it. I turned it, to the left this time, listening to the tumblers’ reluctant click and fall, and slowly pushed the door open. Max’s kitchen lay in front of me, illuminated by a milky patch of moonlight on the littered linoleum floor. It wasn’t much light, but it was enough to show me the place had been ransacked. Drawers had been ripped from their housings, cupboards emptied. Silverware skittered away from my feet as I moved forward toward the pile of food in front of the refrigerator. I smelled sour milk and onions.
The idea of leaving presented itself with some force. I was not looking at the aftermath of a police search.
The kitchen opened into a small breakfast area, rounded and windowed to my left, and I remembered I’d passed a bay window in the driveway. This was a part of the house I hadn’t seen, so I paused a moment to get my bearings, trying to reconcile the rooms through which Max had led me and the side of the house as I’d seen it from outside. More data: Christy had said Max sometimes slept in his room and sometimes in his own, so there were at least two bedrooms. After a few minutes of silent visualization, I had a hypothetical floor plan: Behind me, the kitchen; the small dining room would be in front of me, opening into the living room, and beyond that, the front door. To the right would be the library where I’d talked to Max, a hallway, and the bedrooms.
The moonlight through the bay windows showed me a wilderness of broken dishes and torn cookbooks, ripped open and flung to the floor. The cookbooks I could understand-lots of things can be hidden in books-but the dishes were frightening. They bespoke rage, pure and simple, rage so powerful that its owner hadn’t been able to contain it even though the sound of the shattering dishes must have been deafening in the small room. He would have known the neighbors might have heard them, but he had thrown and trampled them anyway.