In The Falling Light (3 page)

Jevon talked about when the agency had sent
him to look after this rich old broad in Sausalito, all alone in a
big, drafty house and worth millions. Completely batshit as well,
but she refused to live in a rest home and had high power lawyers
to keep her out of one. Jevon said the place creeped him out, that
there were strange noises and things moving at the corner of your
eye and laughter like from a little kid. He said no one lasted on
the job more than a couple months, and lots of them just took off
and never came back to the agency. Superstitious nonsense. But then
he started talking about the cash.

He didn’t know where the stash was, even
admitted he’d made an attempt to find it, but he swore it was
there. People would come to visit her sometimes, charity people,
and she’d always have a fat envelope of bills for them.

“Where’s she get the envelopes?”

Jevon looked at him with those stupid eyes
and said, “I dunno, Staples?”

Cesar broke his nose for that one.

Later he asked, “No, dumbfuck, where’d the
cash come from?”

Jevon shrugged, looking over his icepack,
and his voice was thick and nasally. “She just had it. I’d go to
get something for her, and when I came back she’d have it in her
lap, waiting for the charity people.”

“So she kept it close by.”

Jevon shook his head. “Nah, man, I looked
all over. She’s too old to use the stairs, sleeps in a little room
on the main floor, but I searched that whole level. Never found
nothing.”

Now, seeing that Rosalyn Acre was a good
deal more agile than she appeared, and could probably manage
stairs, although slowly, Cesar knew a much broader search was
required. Jevon was just lazy.

Just before his release, Cesar brought a
sharpened piece of Plexiglas into the showers and stabbed Jevon to
death, holding the kid by the throat and staring into his surprised
and frightened eyes while he did it. No one was able to put the
killing on him, and he was released as scheduled. Jevon wouldn’t be
telling anyone else about the rich old lady with fat envelopes of
cash.

Cesar crushed out his butt and slipped it
into a Pepsi can he kept concealed inside the spout of a drain
pipe, then headed back in, popping a mint and stopping in the
kitchen to wash his hands and scrub his face. When the water
stopped he could hear tiny snorts and wheezes, the sign she would
be waking up soon. He went back to the parlor.

It took six months of muling heroin for Cat
Santos in Orange County, living like a monk and saving every cent,
until he had enough money put away to relocate north and get what
he needed from some specialists he met in prison. The cost of the
health worker training was nothing compared to what he spent on a
new identity, fabricated background and phony job references. It
wiped out his savings, but within a year of leaving Chino he had
completely disappeared from the system, left his parole officer
behind, and became a clean-cut employee of Youngman-Price. He had
considered the quicker and less expensive route, simply doing a
night-time home invasion and grabbing what he could. But if what
Jevon said was true, that the money was hard to find, then a couple
hours in the house might not be enough. Instead, Cesar decided he’d
be smart about it.

It was surprisingly easy to land the Rosalyn
Acre gig. As Jevon had said, no one wanted it, no one lasted long,
and most never came back. And the stories! Holy Christ, the
bullshit that floated around about the house being haunted and the
old woman being a witch. He heard plenty of that, but nothing about
large amounts of cash hidden away.

Cesar had been here three weeks now, on duty
and staying overnight five days straight, then off for two when
Rosie went into the medical center for a couple days as the doctors
ran tests and verified she would live another week. Only a few
people came to the house, including the gardeners who showed up
once a week, but they stayed outside. A cleaning service came every
other Wednesday, grocery and pharmacy delivery was on Friday, and
one time a Youngman-Price supervisor had dropped in unannounced to
check up on his employee. The visit was brief, and the supervisor
left satisfied. Cesar wasn’t allowed to stay in the house while she
was away at the medical center, and had to return to his dumpy
apartment in Oakland until she came back. Those were frustrating
days, since it was lost time, time which could be spent searching
the house.

Though there were plenty of bedrooms on the
upper floors, he slept in a narrow, converted hall closet not far
from Rosalyn’s first floor bedroom, a baby monitor on the floor
beside him so he could hear her in the night if she went into
distress. His room was simple and bare, cell-like, and the irony
was lost on him.

He had to admit that Jevon was right, the
place was creepy, more so at night than in the day. He was sure
he’d heard running feet on the floors above, and what at first
sounded like a child’s giggle but was certainly just air in the
plumbing. He’d caught movement out of the corner of his eye several
times, but he suspected the old bag had a cat somewhere. She said
she didn’t, but shit, she was senile, probably wouldn’t remember it
even if she had one. Probably rats in a place this old. And of
course there was the frequent, uneasy feeling of being watched.
More than once he had awakened in the dark absolutely certain
someone was in the room with him, watching as he slept. Cesar knew
that was just holdover paranoia from being in the joint.

Three weeks of searching after she went down
for the night, poking through room after room with a big six cell
flashlight, checking under beds and inside closets packed with
moth-eaten clothes and ancient hat boxes, looking in dressers and
behind paintings. Nothing. No steamer trunk full of bills, no
hidden safes or cubby holes. As big as the place was he had drawn a
rough map and checked off rooms already inspected, and even after
all this looking there remained unexplored areas. He was confident
he’d find it.

Especially since he had seen the
envelopes.

It happened on two occasions, once right
before a visit from UNICEF, the other during a begging call from
the Greater Bay Area Animal Rescue Shelter. One moment it wasn’t
there, but turn around for a second and look back, and there it
was, a plump envelope resting on the afghan in her lap. And the hag
hadn’t
moved
from her chair.

Said hag was waking up now, snuffling and
rubbing bony knuckles at weepy, pale eyes, smacking her lips. Cesar
checked his watch and brought her some water and her medication,
having to hold the glass for her as she choked it down. She looked
up at him with dull gratitude, and he smiled gently back at her,
imagining how wonderful it would be to punch her in the face, to
hear those bones crack.

“I want my pictures,” she announced.

Cesar just looked at her. What the fuck was
she talking about?

“There,” she pointed past him, and he turned
towards a full bookcase against one wall. “My pictures. I want to
look at them.”

Cesar moved to the bookcase, eyes running up
and down the many shelves of leather-backed books. They all looked
old, and some were probably rare and worth a lot by themselves.

“On the bottom. My pictures.” Her voice was
petulant, like a child.

Cesar squatted and looked at the bottom
shelf – something darted under a table on the left, out of the
corner of his eye, but when he snapped to look there was nothing
there.

“My
pictures!”
Now she was
wheeze-shrieking.

“Okay, Mrs. A, I’m looking.”

“
Rosie!”

“Yes, Rosie. I’m looking.” He spotted a
cluster of photo albums, pulled one out and held it up. “This?”

“No! Cock asshole…” she shook her head, and
seemed to lose interest as she poked at a mole on the back of her
hand. Cesar wasn’t surprised by the outburst or the language. She
was batshit, after all, and he’d heard it from her before. He
started to put the book back.

“The red one,” Rosie said.

There was only one that color, a big book
with a cracked, dark red leather cover. He pulled it as she
unbuckled herself –
he didn’t know she could do that
– and
tottered towards a flower-patterned love seat, carefully lowering
herself to the cushions as if the very act of sitting down could
fracture her bones. And likely it could, he thought.

Rosie patted the cushion beside her. “It’s
very large, I’ll need you to hold it for me, Lyle.”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, keeping from rolling
his eyes. Now he’d have to sit for the next hour or so and look at
old photos of people she wouldn’t remember, listening to rambling
stories about the ones she did, and all the while not giving a
flying fuck. He sat and opened the book.

Cesar didn’t know much about history, but
the way people were dressed in the old black and white photos
looked to be from the turn of the century. The
previous
century, and he wondered again just how old the bitch might be. The
photos in this book appeared to be from her childhood, and he
endured her stories, patiently turning the pages when she asked,
holding back sighs when she trailed off into the fog of memory,
having trouble recalling names or places, watching her get
frustrated at times as she studied long-gone faces and tried to
remember who they had been. He barely heard her.

“This is me with Pumpkin,” she said as a new
page was turned.

Cesar was thinking of a stripper he had
known in LA with the tattoo of a tarantula on her inner thigh, and
remembering the way she looked up and batted her long black
eyelashes while her mouth was occupied. He glanced down at the
page, and instantly forgot about the stripper, looking instead at
where the old woman was pointing. It was a faded image, brown with
time, of two little girls playing on a wooden floor with a
collection of dolls and tin toys. Sunlight was streaming through an
odd, circular window set in an alcove, dust motes heavy in the air
and giving the scene a mystical look. In the background he could
see a pile of trunks, a heavy wardrobe, a wire dress dummy with a
frilly hat on it and a stack of paintings partially covered with a
tarp. A large object stood just inside the shot on the far right,
tall and smooth, a pair of side by side doors on heavy hinges, each
with a large handle, and one with a big dial.

A vault. A big, free-standing vault.

Rosalyn was babbling about someone called
Pumpkin, but Cesar didn’t hear her. He was staring at the vault, at
the objects in the room behind the girls, and at the window. He
recognized the unusual shape and design of that window. The house
had half a dozen of them which could be seen from the outside, all
set in dormers. That was an attic window. Rosie’s vault was in the
attic.

“Such happy days,” she crooned, fumbling to
turn the page. Cesar let her do it, his eyes staying on the image
of the vault until it disappeared into the book.

It was eight-thirty, and the old woman had
been asleep for an hour. Cesar climbed the narrow stairs from the
third floor to the attic landing, the baby monitor clipped to his
belt, its red light flickering as she snored softly in the
background. He carried the Maglite in one hand, and had a dozen
pillow cases draped over the other arm.

The landing’s boards creaked as he stopped
before the single door, the flashlight throwing a white circle on
the plain wood. He reached for the cut glass knob and turned,
expecting it to be locked, fully prepared to shoulder it open if it
was. It wasn’t. The door swung in quietly, revealing a vast dark
space. A breeze puffed through the opening, smelling of dust and
mold and age. Cesar stepped inside, closing the door softly behind
him, and panned the flashlight around.

The attic ran the length of the house, a ten
foot central beam peaked overhead, the roof angling down on each
side with exposed rafters. Moonlight glowed in the circular dormer
windows, spilling washed-out light into some places and casting
deep shadows in others. He checked for a light switch, found none,
traced the flashlight beam along the walls and roof, saw no light
fixtures. It was dusty, and he sneezed twice. A lot of junk had
collected up here in the century since that photograph was taken,
creating a maze of tarp-draped furniture, stacks of crates and
trunks, decaying cane patio chairs and rotting umbrellas, more
dress dummies and lots and lots of paintings. He heard a skittering
noise to his right. Rats for sure.

The window he had seen in the photo was in
front of him on the opposite wall, and he made his way past a lumpy
couch and a pile of cracked leather suitcases, reaching a central
aisle running both directions through the center of the junk. He
panned the light right and immediately picked out the top of the
vault, right where the photo had shown it, hidden behind a draped
wardrobe. That it was still here was not particularly surprising,
the thing must weigh a ton or more, and must have been a real bitch
to get up to the attic in the first place. Cesar walked towards it,
wondering how much stuff he would need to move to get to it, then
wondering how he was going to get it open. He had no tools. Might
have to wake the old bag up and shake her until she spit out the
combo.

He needn’t have worried on either count.
There was a clear path to where the vault stood against a wall, and
both doors were wide open. His powerful flashlight beam revealed
multiple shelves running top to bottom on each side, and resting on
every one of those shelves were stacks of tightly-bundled bills
wrapped in colored, paper bands.

“Jesus,” he whispered, walking slowly
towards it. The flashlight moved up and down, side to side,
revealing that the vault was deep, and every shelf was packed to
the back with bundles. He stopped in front of it – the vault was
taller than he was – tucked the flashlight under an armpit and took
down a stack, riffling through it. Hundreds. The band read
$10,000.00. And there were hundreds of them. Thousands. How much
was here? Had to be millions, all in untraceable cash.