Unexpectedly, her anger ebbed, and in its place a terrible hurt began to surface. Crying, she whispered to him.
“I let the bastard get away, Vince. I had him on the floor, begging, and I didn’t kill him. I did the wrong thing.”
He tried to respond, the words dying in his throat. She looked into his face and knew exactly what he was thinking.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered tearfully.
Arm in arm, they trudged across the dunes back to the beach house.
By nightfall, the lepjack was in the care of a pricey Malibu veterinarian, and Hardare had moved his family to the stuffy St. James Club on Sunset Boulevard. No less than half of L.A.’s finest had escorted them to the hotel, while the other half scoured the city looking for the Lamborghini belonging to a famous singer whose weekend house Osbourne had broken into.
For dinner, they ate take-out fried chicken in front of the TV in their suite while avoiding the local news programs.
“How are tickets selling,” Jan asked, heaping seconds of cole slaw and mashed potatoes onto her paper plate. Her mood had shifted like the wind in the past few hours, finally metastasizing into something she could deal with: raw hunger.
“Slow,” Hardare said, his eyes leaving the grainy Gunga Din Crystal had found flicking channels. “The first four nights are almost at break even, but after that it’s soft.”
“Do you think what happened today will help?” Jan said. “It isn’t the kind of publicity we were looking for, but it still gets our name out there.”
“Not really,” he said, hating to burst her bubble. “I spoke to the theatre manager earlier. He said he was getting dozens of calls from people wondering why we had stayed in L.A. after all that had happened. I guess they didn’t see the valor in it.”
Putting her plate aside, Jan said, “You sound like you might not anymore, Vince.”
“I don’t see any valor in this if it means losing you or Crys,” he said. “There are times when the phrase `The show must go on.’ impresses me as the dumbest thing anyone has ever said.”
Crystal zapped the TV’s power and sat on the couch beside her father. “Are you thinking about cancelling, Dad?”
“It crossed my mind,” he said. “What do you think?”
Crystal shook her head. “Not me.”
Without hesitation Jan said, “Not me either.”
He said, “Okay. I’m glad we’re still in this together.”
“Baldie won’t be back,” Crystal said. “Trust me.”
Hardare laughed, hearing some of his own bravado in his daughter’s claim. “How can you be so sure?” he asked her.
“Easy,” Crystal said. “I saw what Jan did to him.”
By 11:30 Hardare was ready to call it a night when the phone rang in their suite. He put the receiver to his ear. “Yes?”
“This is the front desk,” a man’s voice said. “Detectives Wondero and Rittenbaugh here to see you.”
They had found Osbourne. Hardare said, “Send them right up.”
“Not yet,” was Wondero’s answer as he and Rittenbaugh entered the suite. “But we’re getting close.”
It had been a long day for them as well, their faces showing the many miles they’d traveled.
“You found the Lamborghini,” Hardare said.
“We sure did,” Rittenbaugh replied, “Parked in an alley near Paramount studios. The interior is stained with blood. We think Osbourne might use it to leave the city. One of our guys spotted a wallet lying on the seat. We want to look at it, but we’re afraid of impounding the car. Osbourne might see us, and run.”
“Why not lock pick the car door,” Hardare said.
“The locks are specially fixed,” Rittenbaugh said. “Our guy couldn’t open them, and he’s a pro.”
“But he isn’t as good as you are,” Wondero said. “We were hoping you might take a whack at it.”
Hardare was tired enough to already be feeling the bed beneath him. A cup of black coffee would fix that, he thought.
In the darkened bedroom he gently shook Jan awake and explained where he was going, promising to be back soon.
“Haven’t we helped the police enough?” she asked sleepily.
“I can’t say no,” he told her.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
The locks on the Lamborghini had been specially fitted with tamper-resistant devices. Kneeling on a newspaper, Hardare held a penlight in his mouth and began to explore the lock on the driver’s door with two universals, their special construction letting him “see” the lock’s peculiar design.
He heard a man’s cough and glanced up. A pair of uniformed cops guarded each end of the block, as well as two on a rooftop, watching with infra-red binoculars. Wondero and Rittenbaugh stood behind him, waiting anxiously.
“Think you can open it?” Wondero asked.
“We’ll see,” he said.
Hardare’s head was buzzing from the swill that 7-Eleven called coffee. He shut his eyes, and let his fingers go to work.
Houdini, whose techniques he considered nonpareil, had picked locks with a blank mind. With twenty years practice, Hardare had reached this level, and even gone one step further, able to dream of faraway locals and the pleasures such places afforded.
He was imagining the city of Stuttgart — the first proposed stop for The Hardare Circus — when the driver’s door clicked open. Standing, he brushed himself off.
“All yours,” he said.
“Nice work,” Wondero said.
The detective retrieved the wallet lying on the seat, flipped it open, and pulled out a California Driver’s License. It contained a photo of Osbourne wearing a wig and glasses. The name on the license was Gene Murray the address 4501 Rosewood.
“That’s walking distance from here,” Rittenbaugh said.
The shaky two-story at 4501 Rosewood reminded Wondero of so many houses featured on Hollywood celebrity tours: a non-descript place, with a sloping porch and old casement windows, the same kind of nothing house Cary Grant and Marilyn Monroe and Carole Lombard had lived in, until fame and fortune had called them to the hills.
Wondero waited for their back-ups to position themselves. Two policemen in the alley, four standing on the curb, a chopper circling overhead, testing its spotlight on rooftops. He rapped three times on the screened front door.
Rittenbaugh edged sideways across the porch, attempting to see inside. “I hear something.”
Wondero knocked again, harder.
The front porch light flickered on, the moths asleep within the glass casement coming to life. Wondero clutched his 12 gauge, double pump shotgun to his chest. He had discounted this exact scenario years ago, convinced Death would be caught by chance, or worse, never caught at all. For him to make the collar, it was enough to make him start going back to church.
“LAPD, open up.” He paused. “Okay, we’re going in.”
Wondero kicked the door three inches above the knob. The door went down, and he rushed inside. Sitting on a chair in the hall was a package of dynamite that was wired to the door. The light on the porch had been voice-activated. It was a trap.
“Get out — get out!”
Wondero and Rittenbaugh were on the lawn when the bomb went off, and the house became engulfed in bright orange flames.
Hardare was sitting in the detectives’ car across the street when the house caught fire. He jumped out, and met the detectives in the middle of the street. They were both white as ghosts.
“What happened?”
“Osbourne booby-trapped his own house,” Wondero said. “Son-of-a-bitch just destroyed all the evidence.”
The house continued to burn. Neighbors filled the sidewalks to watch. In the window of a house next door, Hardare saw a stocky, elderly woman with an ecru net in her hair, who appeared to be tied up with ropes.