"He left as soon as you started to. I gotta get back to your house. I'm afraid he might have been here to keep an eye on you while the other guy broke in. Are Jack's disks."
"On my desk. Both copies."
"Shit."
"But we sent a set to Bobby."
"Yeah, but if they get the others, they'll know that we've at least looked at them," I said. "Or that you have, anyway."
"But we don't know anything. Not really," she said.
"They don't know that."
LuEllen's rental car whipped around the knoll, moving too fast on the narrow black-topped cemetery lane. She pulled up, popped the door and said, "Got him, and got his plate."
"Good. We've gotta get back to Lane's place. Like now."
"Call the police," Lane said. LuEllen and I glanced at each other. She caught it and said, "Okay. I'll call the police. We'll find a pay phone on the way out. The guy who was here knows we can't get back there for half an hour. If there is another guy, maybe the police could still catch him."
"Worth a try," I said.
"Wait for me."
She went back to her friends' car, leaned in the back, said something, got her purse, and hurried back to us. "I'm riding with you," she said.
We drove out to a gas station, spotted a drive-up coin phone. LuEllen dialed 911 and passed the phone to Lane, who said, "Look, I don't want to get involved in this, but I think I saw a man breaking into a house. No, I don't want to get involved." She gave the address, hung up, and we were gone.
LuEllen would not have anything more to do with any cops: "I'll drop you at the church so you can get Lane's car, and I'll call you from a motel."
"Sure."
LuEllen looked at Lane: "If the cops are there when you get there."
"I'll be surprised."
"Tell them that you were at your brother's funeral. Right up front. First thing."
"Why?"
"That'll fit you into a slot, for the cops. Dopers hit houses during funerals. The neighbors have gotten used to people coming and going, and during the funeral itself, the house is usually empty, so it's a good time to go in. It's like a thing."
"Like an MO," Lane said.
"Right, exactly," LuEllen said. "Like television."
The cops were there, two squads, four officers. We pulled up and one of them came trotting over. Lane got out and asked, "What's wrong?"
"Do you live here, ma'am?"
"Yes, it's my house."
"We think it may have been broken into. We got an anonymous nine-one-one call and when we checked, we found the front door had been forced."
Lane's hand went to her throat and she said, "Is the man."
"We don't think he's inside. We talked to one of the neighbors and he said he saw a man exit the back door, and walk away down the streetthat was just about the time we got the nine-one-one call. He had a fifteen-minute start on us by the time we talked to the neighbor, so he's miles away. His car was probably right around the corner."
"Oh, my god," Lane said, and she started walking toward the house. I said to the cop, "We were just at her brother's funeral."
"You're not her husband?" One of the cops asked, as the others started after Lane.
"No, I'm just a friend of her brother's; I drove her car to the church."
"We better check the house, just in case," he said.
Inside, as the cops moved from one room to the next, Lane looked at me and shook her head, silently mouthed, "They're gone." Also gone: her laptop, a jewelry box with a few hundred dollars worth of jewelryand a lot of memories, Lane saida Minolta 35mm camera and three lenses, a checkbook, a couple of hundred English pounds that she kept in a bureau drawer, and a broken Rolex watch given her by her ex-husband.
"Making it look like they were here for the high-value stuff laptops, cameras. Making it look like junkies," I muttered.
"Goddamn animals."
The cops were decent about it. They told her there wasn't much they could do, absent any indication of who might have broken in. They apologized, as though it were their fault, told her to get better locks, and left.
Lane and I spent the next ten minutes teasing out the consequences of the burglary. There were a couple. If the people who took the disks were worried about what Jack knew, and were willing to kill him to keep his mouth shut, then the same might apply to Lane. On the other hand, they might look at the disks and conclude that nothing on them was worth killing forthat another death would just draw attention to them. Flip a coin
LuEllen called, and I told her about the burglary "The cops are gone, we're gonna have a war council "
"I've got a room at the Holiday Inn," she said "I'll change clothes and come over. listen, you don't have a package, do you?"
"No."
"Maybe.
"Yeah."
LuEllen had reverted to her usual dress by the time she arrived at Lane's, jeans and cowboy boots, and an orange silk blouse under a jean jacket She had the figure of a gymnast to go with the jeansshe looked spectacular, if you like cowgirls. She brought along a roll of 35mm Polaroid color slide film, a compact Polaroid film-development machine, a single-slide cabin projector, and a box of empty slide holders. She popped the film out of the camera, and we sat around the kitchen table while she developed it, cut out the individual frames, and snapped the frames into the plastic slide holders.
"If she's gonna be around here, she's gonna need somebody looking out for her," LuEllen said, talking to me as if Lane weren't there.
I nodded. "You know who I'm thinking about? I'm thinking about John Smith. He's in on this already, and he lived in Oakland. I bet he'd know somebody."
"Who's John Smith?" Lane asked.
"He's a guy, an artist," I told her. "He was a young kid in Oakland back in the early seventies when the Black Panthers were going. He's still out there on the left, still knows a lot of hard people."
"How'd you meet him?"
"We helped him organize a Communist revolution in the Mississippi delta," I said.
"Unsuccessfully, I take it."
"No, no, it worked out fine," LuEllen said. That might have been an overstatement. Bobby had convinced us that there might be some money involved in overthrowing a little strong-arm dictatorship in a small town of the Mississippi River. By the time we finished, we'd made some money, all right, and our friends were running the place, but there was blood on the ground, and some of the dead were good people. LuEllen doesn't always seem to remember that part of it; or she does, but finds no point in dwelling on it. She looked at me. "So we call him." She'd finished with the film, got the little cabin projector, plugged it in, and projected a slide against the white front of Lane's refrigerator.
"That's the guy," I said. "I'd bet on it."
Lane shivered and said, "He looks mean."
She was right. He had that thick-necked, tight-mouthed line-backer look, with a crew cut to make the point. "I'm sure he is," I said.
The next slide showed the same man caught as he climbed into a red Toyota Camry with California plates. I jotted down the number: "Who does Camrys?" I asked LuEllen.
"Hertz," she said.
"Time to make some calls," I said.
LuEllen and I drove out to the pay phone again, and I hooked up my laptop, called Bobby and gave him the tag number for the Camry: "Rental car, could be Hertz. Need to know the driver's name and anything else you can find. Driver probably lives in Dallas area, probably flew into San Francisco in the last day or two. Dump to my cache site, I'll pick it up later. Plan to call John Smith for some help, talk to him."
Then we called John.
"Kidd, goddamnit, it's been a while." He pulled his mouth away from the phone long enough to yell, "You guys be quiet for a minute, okay? Daddy's on the telephonehey, Marvel, it's Kidd." Then he was back: "What's up?"
Then Marvel picked up, and I said, "How's the commie state senator?" and she laughed and the bullshit rolled on for a few minutes. Then LuEllen wanted to talk, and we had a long-distance old-home week. I finally took the phone back and said, "Listen, John, we've got a problem out here in Californiawe're in Palo Altoand I was hoping you might be able to hook me up with somebody."