He wasn’t in the dining room or his office. I checked his downstairs bedroom suite last, hoping to find his bathroom door closed. It was open. The light was off.
I was coming down the hall toward the stairs when I spotted his wheelchair. It was at the bottom of the steps, and it was empty. The song finished, and the house went quiet. I stared up at the ceiling, listening for the sound of footsteps or voices, but everything I could hear was closer in: the dull, incessant drone of Harvey’s air purifier, the ticking of the old mantel clock, the one his great-grandfather had made in Poland. Harvey wound it every day. My own coils were wound pretty tight as I waited and listened.
The intro beat began, then the violins…and the voice again. I had no idea whether Harvey had a record player with automatic replay. If he didn’t, then someone had lifted the needle to start the song again, the same song, and it wasn’t Harvey. Harvey couldn’t make the stairs.
My heart felt massive. It was pumping hard, pushing me forward and back on alternate beats. The stairwell was empty as far as I could see, but that was only halfway up. I took the first step. My foot caught on the second, and I nearly pitched forward. The climb lacked grace, but it was fast as I made my way to the first landing. I stopped there. The music felt denser up there, and it was loud enough that I couldn’t hear anything else. All of my other senses went into overdrive, overcompensating for what the thick wall of sound took away. If someone came at me, I would have to see him or smell him. I wasn’t going to hear him.
I took the final flight two steps at a time. Once I started going again, I couldn’t stop. I reached the upstairs hallway and just kept moving. All the doors were closed except the one at the end. It was the room where I had left the boxes of albums.
I stopped short of the door and held with my back to the wall for maybe a second. Then I dropped into a low crouch and turned into the doorway. I was so wound up I almost hoped for a reason to fire, for something to empty the clip into. But there was nothing to shoot at in that bare space, just stacks of boxes along one beige wall and an empty canvas folding chair.
I took a couple of steps into the room. A few of the boxes had been pulled out into the middle of the floor. One had the lid off. The LPs inside were stacked neatly. Another served as a stand for the turntable. The needle was gliding across a 45. An extension cord snaked between two big speakers that, last I’d looked, had been gathering dust in a closet. Someone had obviously wired everything up. It could have been Harvey. Maybe Rachel had helped him up the stairs. She didn’t seem substantial enough to do it, but I was probably underestimating her.
When I reached down to lift the needle, I caught movement in the doorway to my left. I was hoping for Harvey but taking no chances. As I turned, I raised the Glock. The man coming through the door wasn’t Harvey. He had a handgun. That was what I noticed as he dropped to one knee and pointed it at me. He didn’t shoot, which was good. He yelled, which confused me. He pointed at me and then at the floor and yelled even louder. Another man came in right behind the first. He pointed his gun at me, and things started to slip out of control. I was sure he was about to put at least two rounds into my chest. But then I looked at what he was showing me with his other hand. Then I knew what they were yelling and why, and I couldn’t get my hands up fast enough.
The first man skittered in closer, dancing back and forth as if I were on fire. “Drop the weapon. Drop it! Put it down. Do it now. I will shoot you!”
He was so hyped I was surprised he hadn’t already. Very slowly, I got down on my knees and set my gun on the floor.
“Face on the floor.” He grabbed me by the shoulder and yanked me forward. “Now. Right now!”
I went down flat on my belly with my arms out, mashed my cheek to the floor, and tried to figure out what the FBI was doing in Harvey’s house.
4
THE MUSIC HAD BEEN OFF FOR A WHILE, BUT IT WASN’T gone. It hung in the air and stayed in my head, the aural afterimage pulsing and pounding. It was possible it would always be there, forever burned into my consciousness by the hot blast of adrenaline that had accompanied it.
We were in Harvey’s office. Special Agent Eric Ling of the FBI sat across from me with his laptop balanced across his knees. The tea service Harvey and Rachel had shared that morning was between us: two delicate china cups on saucers, the pot, two spoons, and a bowl of sugar. One of the cups had lipstick on it. Rachel hadn’t even taken time to wash the dishes.
Ling was tall for an Asian man-I guessed Chinese-and though he was wearing traditional FBI garb, his black eyes and smooth, shaved head reminded me of a lynx-coiled and dark, with a propensity for slinking about gracefully. That’s why it was so disconcerting every time he spoke.
“We’re going to hang here until Lew finishes checking the rest of the house. Are you cool with that?”
He didn’t sound exotic. He sounded like a slacker, someone whose every utterance either began or ended with the “dude” salutation. Someone who would have been more at home working the skate rental shed on Santa Monica Beach than sitting across from me in Harvey’s office, typing into his laptop.
Something he saw on his monitor drew a mellow smile. “Wi-fi rules, man.”
According to Special Agent Ling, he and his partner, Special Agent Lew Southern, had drawn their weapons and entered the house when they found the front door open and no one responded to their calls. He was careful to point out that they had identified themselves. They had done a search, much as I had, but instead of finding an empty wheelchair had found an armed woman.
It hadn’t taken long to get things sorted out. I was who I said I was, and I had a carry permit. They were looking for Harvey. I was still waiting to find out why.
Ling glanced up at me. “Do you know that your name comes up more than a thousand times in Google?”
“Doesn’t the FBI have anything more efficient than Google?”
Dude, “There is nothing more efficient than Google.” When he smiled, tiny pleats formed at the edges of his eyes. They stood out against the smooth, flat planes of his face.
“I’m going to try Harvey again.” I probably didn’t have to announce it, but the circumstances of our meeting had encouraged me to avoid making sudden moves. I flipped open my phone, called Harvey’s cell number, got voice mail again, and flipped it shut without leaving yet another message.
Ling spoke without looking up from his work. “Maybe his phone is off.”
“It probably is.” He could never remember to turn it on. “But he never leaves the house. He hardly ever leaves his wheelchair. I don’t even know how he got upstairs.”
“You said his wife was here.”
“Ex-wife.”
“Maybe she helped him. Maybe the two of them were reminiscing, spinning some old tunes, and decided to go out for a mochachino.”
“He doesn’t drink mochachinos, and he sold his car a couple of years ago.”
“What about her car?”
I sat back in my chair, disappointed and annoyed that I didn’t know if she had a car. I didn’t know how she had gotten to the house. I didn’t have her phone number or her address. I knew nothing about the woman, except that she had suddenly appeared just ahead of the FBI and that she had concocted a story to get me out of the house. Now Harvey was gone.
“I told you she sent me off on a wild-goose chase.”
“You also said you found them in a clinch this morning. It could be they wanted a little alone time together.”
“He wouldn’t have lied to me like that.”
Ling said nothing, but he wore an expression I had seen before on law-enforcement types, the one that comes from the deep and abiding belief that everyone lies. He wasn’t that old, but he must have seen enough already to know that we were all capable of ghastly things and that lying was the least of them. Maybe so, but…