King Maybe (17 page)

“Do I ever.” If I could get hold of him. If, by now, the Slugger hadn't beaten him into a quart of guava jelly.

“Good, because some of the things you choose, if your eye is as sharp for other items as it is for cowboy boots, will need to be handled sensitively. I wouldn't want them being traced back to me.”

“Me neither, especially since it would have to be through me.”

“So.” He tapped his nails, which were covered in clear polish, against the marble of the table. He crossed his legs and looked at his boot. “Does Dubya
really
—”

“He does.”

“That stings. Oh, well, it makes sense that he'd know all about cowboy boots. Probably a dab hand with a rope and a heifer, too.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “He's afraid of horses.”

He shrugged. The image of Dubya quailing before a horse didn't engage him. “Aren't you interested in the details?”

“Sorry. I get sidetracked. What about the details?”

“The money,” he said. “Half up front, as I said, which means now.” He reached inside the leather vest and came up with a thick envelope, which he dropped on the table. Then he pulled out another, from the left side of the vest, and leaned forward to get at his hip pocket for a third. He pushed them across the table at me. “One thousand, eight hundred, and seventy-four twenties and two tens. They ran out of twenties. Too thick for one or even two envelopes. From dozens of sources, none of them directly linked to me.”

“What if I'd started at a hundred thousand?”

“I would have been wrong,” he said. “But you have no idea how rarely I'm wrong. Anyway, you'll get another fifty from the stuff you take, if you're creative about it. Maybe more. And afterward, of course, the other half.”

“When do I go?” I said.

“Thursday night.”

“Tomorrow night? Not enough time. I haven't even seen the house.”

He shrugged. “That's when it is.” He leaned forward and shoved the envelopes a little closer to me. “Thursday I'm taking the little woman up to San Francisco for the opening night of some opera or other. It's the only night for months that the house will be empty, just you and thirty-four thousand square feet of expensive things. You can go in any time after seven and steal to your heart's content until midnight. Our plane back will land at LAX a little after midnight, unless it takes off late or early.”

I said, “Early?”

“Private plane. I'll call if we're going to be early. I'm making it easy for you. You'll have a floor plan with all the interesting places marked. I'm going to give you the code to the gate so you can drive right in. And you'll have the number to punch up to turn off the alarm when you go in and then out again. And all the other alarm info.”

“What kind of an alarm?”

“An absolute mother,” he said. “I'm going to tell you all about it. The one thing you're going to need to think about is the alarm.”

16

Zillow

“I
know
what I told you before,” I said to Anime. “And it's still important, but this is urgent.”

“More urgent than your daughter?” She was speaking more loudly than I would have liked, but the restaurant was jammed with people in the grip of a late-night jones for Mexican food.
This was the second time in a few months we'd eaten in the very same booth.

“They're both urgent,” I said. I looked around, but no one seemed to be eavesdropping. “That's why I want to hire both of you. So you can double up.” I picked up my beer. “And how can you guys be out at this hour? It's a school night.” It was almost eleven.

“Oh,
please
,” Lilli said, with a level of exaggerated patience I would have thought it would take decades to acquire. She grabbed another handful of tortilla chips.

“I'm sleeping at
Lilli's
,” Anime said, indicating Lilli with both hands to help me follow along. She brought the hands back to herself. “Lilli's sleeping at
my
house.”

“We're both staying in the storage unit,” Lilli said with her mouth full. “Monty is off somewhere, so we have the vending machines all to ourselves.”

Their nominal commander, who called himself Monty Carlo, had bought an entire storage facility and combined two of the garage-size units into a surprisingly plush headquarters from which to mount computer raids. The kitchen, in addition to a small stove and sink, had a great many vending machines.

“Paradise,” I said. “How long will that work?”

“Well, my parents are in Hong Kong,” Anime said, “and my brother, who's supposed to be taking care of me, doesn't.” She reached for the chips, and Lilli slapped her hand.

“And my mom would miss her vodka before she'd miss me,” Lilli said.

“I'm sure that's not true,” I said.

Lilli gave me a level gaze. The silence stretched out until I filled it.

“If you're staying at the storage facility, how'd you get here?”

“I drove Monty's car,” Lilli said. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt that said
if you have to ask, don't bother
. Anime's shirt didn't say anything; it depicted the black silhouette, on red, of a girl reading a book. A thick arrow rose up out of the book and into the air, then down through the silhouette's head and straight into her heart.

“You're not old enough to drive—” I said, but then someone bumped my elbow, hard enough to make me slop beer onto the front of my pants.

“Food in a minute,” said the waitress, without slowing as she passed.

“She's mad at you,” Lilli said approvingly.

Anime was messing with her phone. “Here,” she said. “Before we get to the new project, whatever it is
.
” She slid the phone across the table to me. On it was a picture of the Spirit of Discontent, age fifteen or so: small, suspicious eyes, face turned just slightly away from the camera as though preparing to dodge, mouth pursed as if about to spit.

Lilli said, “Isn't she wretched?”

“Patricia Anne Gribbin, a.k.a. Patty,” Anime said.

“And also Leatherface,” Lilli said.

I said, “That's unkind.”

“Don't look at me,” Lilli said, giving me arched Lucille Ball eyebrows. “That's what someone called her on Facebook. Her skin is pretty rough.”

“Where'd you get this?” I said as the waitress, who had flirted with me the first time I ate here with Anime and Lilli, began to put plates in front of the girls. Anime had a burrito big enough to get its own driver's license, soaked in red chili sauce. Lilli, who'd said she needed to lose six pounds and who'd monopolized the basket of tortilla chips since we sat down, had a large green salad. I had nothing so far. Without a glance at me, the waitress wheeled and headed back to the kitchen.

“You blew it,” Anime said. “Before, I mean. She's hot, Maria is.”

“I've got a girlfriend,” I said. “I think.”

“Oho,”
Lilli said.

I asked, “Where'd you get the picture?”

“High-school yearbook,” Anime said. “It was online. What's with this girlfriend?”

“Don't ask me,” I said. “You know men can't talk about feelings.”

“Actually,” Anime said, “Lilli and I don't know all that much about men.”

“By
choice
,” Lilli said immediately. “It's like trichinosis. I know it's out there, and I'm glad someone understands it, but it doesn't have to be me.”

“We're not
that
bad. Not all of us, I mean.”

“No,” Lilli said. “In the spirit of fairness, some girls are pretty beastly, too.”

I said, “You've both, um, done something with your hair.”

And they had. They'd cut it off on one side only, blunt and straight as a shingle, exactly at the center of the ear. Left ear for Lilli, right for Anime. “Kind of halfway to Kim Jong Un,” I said.

“Eeeeww,” Anime said. “He's got
sidewalls
. We've got bobs, like in the twenties. Well, half bobs.”

“So, I mean, it's what? It's supposed to make you a pair?”

“We
are
a pair,” Lilli said.

“Then why cut it on different sides?”

Anime said, with something like pity, “You tell us.”

I looked at them for a moment or two, working on it. Anime crossed her eyes. I said, “Mirror image.”

Lilli reached across the table to high-five me, and Anime took advantage of it to grab the basket of chips. “Look,” Anime said, tilting the empty basket toward me. “I'm in love with a glutton.”

“So get more,” Lilli said. She started turning over her lettuce with her fork as though she hoped a croissant were hidden under it.

“The game that this Patricia seems to be pulling on Rina,” I said. “It's about . . . you know, social circles—which circles you're in, which circles you're not in. As I remember, it was pretty cruel.”

“It's a bastard,” Lilli said, digging deeper.

“You girls do something like this with your hair, isn't that sort of asking for it?”

“We don't care,” Anime said. “And we're pretty femme, both of us. There's some, like, plaid-shirt girls who are the lightning rods. They get all the attention.”

Maria put down a plateful of carne asada, an inch out of reach. I leaned toward it, and just as I closed my fingers on it, she said, “Hot plate.” Then she took the empty chips basket and left.

“Patricia,” Anime said as I blew on my fingers. “You know if she uses Line? Is she on Tumblr? Ello? Instagram? YouTube? Vine? Yik Yak?”

“Surely you jest,” I said. “I just found out about Facebook.”

“We'll figure it out.” Anime was carefully unwrapping and examining her burrito, like someone looking for a missing diamond. “The personal stuff on her Facebook page is for friends only, but that's easy to get around.”

“Whatever you can find,” I said.

Maria materialized and dropped a new basket of chips directly in front of Lilli, who pushed her salad aside.

Anime raised a hand, fingers spread wide, and began to tick them off, an item at a time. “So far we've got her full name, her address, her birth parents' names, her stepfather's name—Mom and Dad seem to have split, and Mom remarried—that picture we showed you, her grade-point average in elementary, the fact that she's allergic to peanuts, her birthday, her top-ten movies of last year—”

“Yeah?” I said. “What was her number-one movie?”

“That weepie about teenage cancer patients.”

Lilli said, “They're all weepies. Girl likes to cry.”

“You tough guy,” I said, and Lilli gave me a broad smile.

“Pisces,” Anime said scornfully. “They're always reaching for the hankie.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” I said.

“Which part did you miss?”

“Rina is . . . uhhh, a Scorpio.”

“Well,” Anime said, a bit stiffly, “if you'd told me Rina's astrological sign was pertinent, I'd have factored it into the equation.”

“This girl, Patricia, she's claiming that her birthday is this week.”

Lilli said, “We forgot. We should have spotted that.”

“Patricia is March twelfth,” Anime said, looking at her notes. “We got it from the birth certificate, since we haven't hacked the privacy walls on her Facebook page yet.”

“See,” I said, “I think she's a liar on every level. She's faking this birthday so she can share the party and get closer to Rina. I think she talked some friend of hers into saying she'd seen Rina's boyfriend holding hands with another girl.”

“Men,” Lilli said.

“Oh, yeah?” Anime had returned to dissecting her burrito. “What about Katie Mendoza?”

“She had
soap
in her eyes,” Lilli said, as though for the ten-thousandth time. “I was walking her to the nurse's office. Uh, guiding her.”

“
Was
Rina's BF holding hands with that girl?” Anime said.

“According to the boyfriend, yes. What I doubt is the second girl's testimony. Whether she was even there. Seems orchestrated somehow.”

“
Listen
to us,” Lilli said. “You'd think there were no real problems in the world.”

“Feels real to Rina,” I said. “Same way I'll bet Anime felt about Katie Mendo—”

“'Kay, 'kay 'kay.” Lilli said. “So what's the new job?”

Three minutes later
I was studying the living room of Jeremy Granger's house, in full color. Unfurnished and vast, it looked like the space where the first Boeing 787 was assembled, even on the cramped screen of Anime's phone.

“Zillow,” Anime said, as if it were a word.

Looking at her own phone, Lilli said, “Thirty-four thousand square feet. Built in 1982 by a guy who produced game shows. Sold in 1996 to somebody from Qatar who never lived in it. Sold again in 2000 to a woman who's described here as an heiress, pretty much the same thing as saying ‘pitiful nonachiever.'
Sold to a rock-and-roller in 2004 and then to your guy in 2008.”

“These pictures are from when it was on the market the time he bought it,” Anime said. She reached over and swiped the screen, making way for a new picture, a formal dining room half a block long. “There's even a movie, a tour of the house. The agents put them online for rich people who are on, like, different continents.”

“Or alternate universes,” Lilli said. “The rock star the Qatar guy sold it to was Mr. Overdose, you know, Ray what's-his-name, the lead singer of the Thuds. He died there. Probably died three or four times before he made it all the way.”

“Explains the lower price,” Anime said. “Death'll do that.” She was calculating in her head, lips moving silently. “Down twenty-nine, almost thirty percent from the first time it sold. I could bring up a Beverly Hills real-estate median-price graph, but that's probably not what you're looking for.”

“This is perfect,” I said. “Send me the links so I can go over them. I've got a floor plan he drew for me, but I need to know if it's accurate.”

“You want the builder's plans?” Anime said.

I said, “Excuse me?”

“
You
know, the ones the City of Beverly Hills had to approve.”

“I know what they are. I just didn't believe my ears.” I grabbed a chip out of the basket, evading the slap Lilli aimed at my hand. “If someone makes big changes—you know, structural changes—to a house, would that have to be given to the city, too?”

Lilli said, “You mean, if your guy or the Thud decided to add, like, an indoor pool—”

“Exactly. Or any other change that might come as an unwelcome surprise.”

“We can get it,” Lilli said, “as long as they filed with the city. Sometimes people don't.”

“And you can get me a copy of those?”

“Sure,” Anime said. “We know a specialist.” She pushed the eviscerated burrito away, rearranged but largely uneaten, and Lilli immediately buried her fork in it. “I'm kind of surprised
you
don't know one,” Anime said. “Considering.”

“I need you guys to go to work on this, fast. I want aerial pictures if you can find them so I can see what's around the house, I need all those plans, I want information on the alarm system, which he told me the name of and I'll remember it in a minute, I want everything you can get. The names of the neighbors, if you can find them. And for the thing with Rina, everything you can find on Patricia Anne Gribbin.
Everything
.”

“When?” Anime said.

“By two tomorrow, for the house. Rina, you can have until Friday at noon.” I reached into my pants pocket and pulled out two fat, crinkled envelopes. “There should be a little more than twelve thousand in each of these. Okay?”

Lilli was eating, but Anime had her hands free, and she made the envelopes disappear so fast it was as though they'd never been there. She gave me a bright smile. “College fund,” she said.