King Maybe (31 page)

“Got boxes full of them,” he said.

“Well, good,” I said. “Attention to detail is essential to success.”

“Okay, we're on. Any refinements?” He waited, his Montblanc fountain pen poised over the small leather notebook in which he'd been making notes.

I said, “Excuse me?”

“Options? Extras?”

“No. Dead will be fine.” I pushed back my chair, meaning to stand, but instead I said, “No, wait, I'm wrong. Just before your guy pulls the trigger, I want him to say, so it's the last thing Granger ever hears, ‘This is for Suley.'”

“S-O-O—”

“No.” I got up from the table. “
Suley
, S-U-L-E-Y.”

The slugger wrote it down and shrugged. “Sounds the same.”

I said, “But it's not,” and my tone brought his eyes up to mine. “Even if he's just saying it out loud, I want her name spelled right.”

32

A Lower Standard

Ronnie had finally gotten her Korean food, and she wolfed it down as though she hadn't eaten anything since the first time I promised it to her, all those nights ago. Still full of Stumpy's roast chicken, I'd just picked at mine. We were in Soot Bull Jeep on West Eighth, in K-Town, and when we came out, burping garlic, she said, “So what's the surprise?”

I still hadn't committed entirely to the plan, but the question gave me the shove I needed. “It's about a mile from here.”

She said, “And I'm going to need my toothbrush?”

“If I get lucky.”

She slipped her arm through mine, and my heart did a little change step. She said, “Did you see the expression on Tyrone's face?”

“I did.”

“I see something like that,” she said, “and know that you set it up, and how much you probably had to do to arrange it, and it almost makes me willing to hold you to a lower standard.”

I said, “I would love to be held to a lower standard.”

“Well, if we're going to be an item, as they used to say, I should probably be willing to forgive a lapse here and there.”

“Lapses ‘R' Us,” I said. I opened the car door for her and said, “Does this count, too?”

“A really infinitesimal amount. This is the kind of thing that might make me overlook you chewing with your mouth open. Occasionally.”

“Do I chew with my—”

“No, silly. Just giving you an idea of scale.”

I got in and started the car. Took Eighth a couple of blocks and made a left. Blew out a bunch of air.

“Lungs are sounding good.”

“Great, great.”

“Although sudden, window-rattling sighs don't really inspire confidence.”

“I'm just nervous.”

“Nervous. Where
are
we going?”

“I think it's better if you just see it.”

“Want me to close my eyes until we get there?”

“Great idea.”

So she did, and I said, “Keep them closed,” when I pulled down the driveway into the underground garage. When I got out of the car, I said, “Don't open them yet.”

“I'm not walking in a strange place with my eyes closed. I'm wearing heels.”

“Up to you.”

A moment later she said, “Oh,” a syllable packed with disappointment. The garage took up an acre and was lit just enough to allow a person to make out large objects, at least if they were light colored and moving. I led her to the scratched and battered elevator doors and pushed the cracked call button, and when we got in and she saw the gouged walls and the graffiti and the single, dangling sour-milk fluorescent tube, her mouth tightened.

I waved at the recessed camera.

She said, “What?”

“The guards,” I said.

“To keep people in, I assume.”

I pushed
up
, and the elevator did its programmed little stutter and groan and creaked its way into motion. Ronnie stood closer to me and put her hand on my arm. “If this thing drops,” she said, “I'm jumping straight into the air and doing everything I can to land on you.”

“It won't drop,” I said. “That's all stage effects.”

“Really. For what purpose?”

“You'll see.”

We fell into a silence that thickened significantly when the doors opened on the third-floor corridor. There were water stains on the ceilings and cracks in the walls, and here and there the tacky maroon carpeting, stickier even than the rug at the Dew Drop Inn, was flaked with plaster that seemed to have fallen from the ceiling.

“Special effects?” she said.

I said, “Uh-huh.”

“Shame they left out the dead junkie hunched over his needle in the corner.”

“They spoil,” I said. “We're in between dead junkies right now.”

We reached the door of Apartment 302, and I keyed the first lock and then the second. Before I opened the door, I said, “I've never told anyone about this before.”

“And I can see why.”

“Not even Rina. Not Kathy, not Louie. No one.”

She was looking up at me.

“Just you,” I said, and I opened the door.

Two well-spent hours
later, we were in the living room, me in my bathrobe and her in one of my shirts, both of us drinking wine and looking at the aspirational lights of the Los Angeles skyline. She said, “A
library
.”

“I knew you'd like it.”

“So this is your . . . your bolt-hole. You're living in those motels and you have this place waiting for you.”

“It's where I'll go when it all comes down.”

“If,” she said.

“When,” I said.

“And you told me about it.”

“I love you,” I said.

“It sounds so
bald
when we're together. It's easier on the phone.” She snuggled closer to me. “But . . . uhh, me, too.”

“And I've still got a million questions about you, but this isn't a quid pro quo arrangement. I brought you here because I trust you and I love you, and I promise never to ask you those questions again until you're ready to talk about them.”

She went to kiss me on the chin, but I got my mouth down there in time and said, “I win.”

“You know,” she said, “not to wave off all those nice things you just said, but you promised
last
time that you wouldn't ask me about—”

“Yeah, but this time I mean it.”

She tilted her head to the right, regarding me. “So you didn't mean it the first time?”

“Sure I did,” I said. “But this time I'll mean it longer.”

33

USDA Prime

Three days later Jeremy Granger owned the news.
movie mogul found dead
was the biggie, plus the cluster stories:
dead tycoon's wife missing
and
double mystery in hollywood
, although none of it had actually happened in Hollywood; and after the cops announced they'd found the towels I used to clean up Suley's blood, right where I'd left them in the linen closet off the second-floor drawing room, the headline I'd waited for appeared:
granger: murder-suicide?

That last one became the topic of endless, mindless on-air and online discussion that grew into a firestorm after the cops revealed that the use of luminol in the drawing room had revealed traces of blood on the floor and on the candlestick, obviously unconnected with Granger's death, since he'd been shot, or shot himself, downstairs in his home office. Suley's parents, who were described as being “distraught,” had let the cops swab them for DNA to match the blood on the towels, but even before the results came in, a great many conclusions had been jumped to. TMZ used the murder-suicide possibility as an excuse to run a lurid history of Granger's mansion—titled, naturally,
house of horrors
—that swallowed the whole thing without chewing and linked it to the spirit of the suicidal Thud for good measure. Hollywood Ghouls and Ghosts, which led the credulous on tours of the city's plentiful suicide, murder, and overdose sites, complete with color postcards, added the house to their itinerary.

“You heard about it?” the Slugger said on the other end of the phone the day the first stories broke.

“Hard to avoid it. Good work.”

“You can bring me my stuff tonight, and you can buy the dinner, too.”

“You got it. What time?”

“An hour.” It was 7
p.m.

“Where? I want to go somewhere with a bar. You know, hoist one and then get a table to eat.”

“Ricochet in Beverly Hills. You know it?”

I did. It was one of the most expensive restaurants in the city, a one-percenter pickup joint par excellence. “Sounds great,” I said. “See you there. Make it eight fifteen, though. I've got something I have to do.”

“Fine. Hey, don't forget the stamp.”

“I promise,” I said. “I'll put it directly into your hand. Will Stumpy be there, or can we do without him?”

“Just you and me,” he said. “He didn't know about our arrangement, and I can't think of any reason to tell him about it.”

“Man after my own heart,” I said.

“Not yet,” the Slugger said, and we shared a hearty laugh.

“You keep the
twenty K he'll be carrying,” I said into the phone as I stood outside the restaurant. “He'll have the stamp in his pocket, and that's mine. I'll give you the last ten K when you hand me the stamp.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just come in here and let's get it over with.”

I pocketed the phone and went in.

The bar was packed, and the Slugger was already at his table. He looked antsy, like he was half afraid I wouldn't show, and his eyes went to me the moment I started across the floor.

“The twenty,” I said, putting an envelope on the table, “and the Gandhi.”

He pried it open and glanced inside. “All tied up neat,” he said. “You satisfied?”

“Couldn't be better.”

“Amazing, about the wife disappearing and the blood and all,” he said, looking at me with an edge of interest I hadn't provoked before. “Almost like you knew about it in advance.”

“Nah,” I said.

He licked his lips. “I just mention it, you know, 'cause you wanted my guy to say her name and so on.”

“Purest coincidence,” I said. “How'd he take it?”

“In the right ear.”

“I meant the mention of her name.”

“Oh, yeah. He wet himself. Although he could have done that before, I guess. My guy wasn't real clear on the timeline.”

“No,” I said, “I suppose he wouldn't be.”

“Even a pro,” he said, “they tend to be a little wound up when the target's that close.”

“I'm actually glad to hear that.”

“Listen,” he said. He flicked a corner of the envelope, hesitating. “I don't suppose you'd be willing to give me, like, an endorsement? To . . . you know.” He pointed a finger in the air, and his eyes darted past me, toward the bar, and rested there for a moment. He fingered his fringe reflexively and came back to me.

“Already did,” I lied. “Told him you exceeded all expectations.”

“Was he . . . um, was he in on the deal?”

I gave him a reproachful look and zipped my lips closed.

“Right,” he said, “right, right, right.
Right.
Forget I asked.” He looked past me again, and I could see the spark of interest in his eye.

“Well, listen,” I said, “as much as I'd love to chew the fat with you, I'm going to have to bail on dinner. There's an extra three hundred in the envelope because I said the meal would be on me, but when
some people
call you, you've really gotta go.”

“Got it,” he said. “Say hi for me. Love to meet him someday.”

“Maybe I'll set that up,” I said, but he wasn't paying attention to me.

“Is that fine, or what?” he asked.

I turned to see the very pretty girl sitting at the bar, caught in mid-smile. “Not bad.”

“Not
bad
? That's prime,” he said. “USDA Prime and pretrimmed. You think?”

“I guess,” I said, “if you like hippies. Have a good evening.”

Before I was out of the restaurant, Eaglet was in the seat I'd just vacated.

I sat in
the car for a moment, figuratively taking my moral temperature. I didn't feel good about what I'd done, but then I remembered Jejomar, and I couldn't honestly say I felt very bad either.

I dialed the phone and once again got the voice-mail lady. She never takes a day off, never gets hoarse. “Stinky,” I said, “you can go home now. It's all over.”

Then I started the car and pointed it toward K-Town, and Ronnie.

Afterword

The basic ideas for my books usually assemble themselves spontaneously in my mind, but this one was even more random than usual.

The first thing I had was the title, which came to me out of nowhere when I was jogging about two years ago. Just the two words,
King Maybe
, no meaning; what I liked about it was the combination of absolute power and absolute equivalency. It seemed to me that kings might say “yes” and “no” all day long, but there was something unkingly about “maybe.”

I parked the title while I finished the book I was writing then (
The Hot Countries
, I think), and at some point I realized that King Maybe was a studio executive who derived an almost sadistic pleasure from keeping people on the hook by deferring his decision whether to make their film. So I had a show-business book with a powerful villain, and the Suley story started to shape itself.

And then, in a single week, I got five emails from readers politely upbraiding me for not having written as many burglaries in the last two or three books as they felt they had a right to expect. I realized that I agreed with them, and decided that
King Maybe
would be a show-business book that was essentially all burglaries. Plus Suley. (This is as close to an outline as I ever have.)

When I finally sat down to write it, it was immediately apparent that the characters demanded a say in the story. One of my favorite writers, the wonderful Colin Cotterill (if you haven't read his Dr. Siri books, your life is not complete), gave an interview in which he said that the problem with writing a series, after a while, is that he shows up to write and realizes that the characters have been holding meetings without him and have developed firm ideas about what they will and won't do. That was the case here. What I had envisioned as a string of sensational burglaries, immaculately planned and executed by a master thief, turned into one disaster after another. And Ronnie kept elbowing her way in.

So you've just finished the book that my readers and my characters bullied me into writing. I hope you like it. I do, but I'm usually the last to know.

As always, lots of music accompanied the placing of the words on the page. For the burglaries, I put together a playlist of the darker cuts from all of Arcade Fire's albums (which means I left out three or four songs), Neil Young's “On the Beach” and “Rust Never Sleeps,” some Calexico and Fratellis and Franz Ferdinand, plus a bunch of Ravel and my current go-to for suspenseful scenes, Beethoven's late quartets.

For the material centered on Rina and Patsy and Anime and Lilli, it was all women, all the time. There's so much good rock, country, and just plain music by female singer-songwriters right now that I might write a book that's
all
women just to take advantage of it. I owe special thanks to Aimee Mann, Broods, Frou Frou (and Imogen Heap, solo), Lucius, Courtney Burnett, Rachael Yamagata, Ingrid Michaelson, Haim, the ever-present Tegan and Sara, Sky Ferreira, Karin Berquist of Over the Rhine (what a voice!), Mindy Smith, and two amazing young country songwriters, Kacey Musgraves and Ashley Monroe. One great talent after another.

And one more time, thanks to the people at Soho Crime for putting up with both me and Junior and making the books better in every regard: Bronwen Hruska; the formidable and usually correct Juliet Grames; marketing maestro Paul Oliver; Rachel Kowal; Abby Koski; Amara Hoshijo; and anyone I may inadvertently have left out. To my own eagle-eyed proofreader, Everett Kaser, and to the best copy editor a boy can have, Maureen “God Is in the Details” Sugden. Everything is easier when you're playing on a great team.

Last, it would be graceless not to thank Junior's new building consultant, who helped him survive this story and whose inside knowledge of houses will keep both him and me from making egregious errors in other books: the scrupulously honest (luckily for you) Peter “Tiptoes” Sanderson.