"For what?" Lane was unaware of the drama.
"Those Jaz disks. He said he'd put them in the safest possible place."
"You know what that means? I thought it was just a. phrase," she said.
"Maybe. But we could look around."
"The house is sealed."
"Yeah," I said. "With a piece of tape."
CHAPTER 4
The rest of the afternoon was taken up with the melancholy routines of violent death: claiming the body, signing for a bag full of personal effects that the cops didn't wantbesides the routine junk, Jack had $140 in his wallet, unless somebody had clipped it along the way, and Lane's high school graduation photo, which made her cry again. She also signed a contract with a local funeral home to handle shipment of the body by air freight. The coffin cost $1,799, and came with a guarantee that neither of us was interested in reading.
When Lane was in Dallas the first time, to identify the body, she'd gone to look at Jack's rented house, although she hadn't been allowed inside. We cruised it late in the afternoon, a two-bedroom, L-shaped cement-block rambler painted an awful shade of electric pink. The exact shade, I thought, of a lawn flamingo. A short circular driveway took up most of the front yard. There was no carport or garage. We could see only one door, right in the middle of the house, under an aluminum awning. We continued around the block, and from the other side, could see a small screened porch jutting into the backyard.
And there was a fireplace chimney. Not much of one, but there was one.
"He always rented the cheapest livable place," Lane said. "He'd fly back to California on weekends."
"Didn't like Texas?"
"Not a California kind of place," she said.
"Some people would count that as a blessing. Most Texans, for example."
She let the comment go by, as we cruised the house again.
"How do we get in?"
"I don't know. We'll have to see what lights are on, with the neighbors. If we can get in the back porch, we'll have some cover."
"Okay," she said. Simple faith.
We did the block once more, and I looked for kids' swing sets and bikes, basketball hoops, and dogs. LuEllen had trained me: if there are kids around, the parents in a family tend to be at home in the evening, and awake and alert. Basketball hoops often means teenagers, and teenagers come and go at weird, inconvenient times. Dogs are the worst. Dogs bark: that's how they earn their money, and in this neighborhood, they'd probably be listened to.
The house on the south side of Jack's had a hurricane fence around the backyard, which could mean either kids or dogs. The one on the north side, a noxious-green one, was as simple and plain as Jack's, with no sign of life. The house directly behind Jack's had an above-ground swimming pool in the backyard, which probably meant kids.
If there were kids running around, or splashing in the pool, we'd have to forget it. If not, the biggest problem might be the streetlight across the street and down one house.
"What do you think?" Lane asked.
"We probably ought to sky-dive onto the roof and cut our way into the house with a keyhole saw."
"Kidd."
"We ought to sneak around the back between the green house and Jack's place, if the green house doesn't show any lights, then cut our way into the screen porch and see what the situation is there. Usually, there's a way in."
"If we break in, they'll know it was us."
I shook my head: "No, they won't. We're leaving for San Francisco at eleven o'clock tonight. If they don't get around to the house for a few days. well, who knows what might have happened? And really, who cares? They've already searched the place."
We found a Wal-Mart and bought burglary toolsmight as well have the bestspent some time eating Tex-Mex, dropped the rental car with the airport Avis, and checked in with the airline. When we were set to fly, we rented another car from Hertz, using a perfectly good Wisconsin driver's license and Amex gold card issued to my old pal and fishing buddy Harry Olson, of Hayward, Wisconsin. Harry didn't exist, but he had money in the bank, a great credit rating, and a perfect driving record.
The fake ID convinced Lane that we really were going to break into her brother's house: she'd been relaxed all afternoon, but now she was tightening up. "The question we have to ask ourselves," she said, "is whether this is worth the trouble we could get into."
"We won't know unless we find the Jaz disks. Like you've been telling me, there are some odd things about this killing. If Jack was killed because of something with my name on it, I want to know what that something is. Without the cops getting it first."
"Hmm."
"You don't have to go in," I said. "All you have to do is show up with the car when I'm ready to leave."
"If you're going in, I'm going in."
That would help; we could cut the search time in half. So I didn't say no, though I had the feeling that if I had said no, and insisted on it, she might have given in.
"We won't go in if the situation looks bad. If the neighborhood's lit up, or we see people on the street."
"Okay. That's sensible."
When we got back to the house, the neighborhood wasn't all lit up, and there were no people on the street. The green house on the north side of Jack's house was dark. There was no car in the drive, or in front of it.
We cruised it once and I stopped a block away. "You remember everything?" I said. "We're joggers."
"I remember, I remember," she said. "If we're gonna do it."
"Let's go."
We jogged down the street, loose sweatpants and T-shirts. I was carrying a small olive-drab towel wrapped around our Wal-Mart tools. If we ran into cops, I was hoping I could pitch the towel into a bush before we had to talk with them.
That was the plan. Or, as Lane put it, "That's the plan?"
The night was warm and you could still feel the day's unnatural heat radiating from the blacktop. We stopped two houses away from Jack's, as though we were catching a breather. Moved to the sidewalk. The streetlight was only about half-bright, and the shadows it cast seemed even darker than the other unlit spots.
"Anything?" I asked.
"No." She giggled nervously. "God, I'm going nuts."
"Be cool." We sauntered on down the sidewalk, looking, looking. At the green house, we turned up the driveway, walked halfway around the loop, then cut across the lawn, and in five seconds, we were between the two houses, in the shadows. If caught and questioned at that moment, Lane was finding a bush to pee behind. We waited for a minute, two minutes, threeabout a century and a half, in alland nothing happened. No lights went on, we saw no movement. No dogs.
The house behind Jack's, with the pool, showed a backyard light, and lights in the windows, but there was a croton hedge along the back fence, and it cast a shadow over us.
No sauntering, casual bullshit here. We duckwalked to the back porch, found the screen door locked, and the crack in the lock covered with a length of yellow plastic tape and a notice. I carefully peeled them off. The door wanted to rattle when I touched it: it was flimsy, meant to keep out nothing stronger than a blue-bottle fly. I unwrapped the towel, pulled out a short steel pry-bar, pried the door back enough that we could force the lock-tongue across the strike plate.
We eased the door open and slipped inside, crawling now. Listened again. Nothing at alclass="underline" or almost nothing. Cars on a major street, three blocks away. A crazed bird somewhere, chirping into the dark. An air conditioner with a bad compressor "Hope the rest is this easy," Lane whispered.
"Shh." We pulled on thin vinyl cleaning gloves and I stood up to look at the porch. The porch had been framed with two-by-fours, and around the top, where the two-by-fours met the screen panels, there was an inch-wide ledge. If I was naive enough to try to hide a house key, that's where I would have hidden it