King Maybe (4 page)

“I hear what you're saying, which is more than you do,” she said. “So let me say it out loud to you while you listen. You think it's possible that your longtime fence, Stinky Tetweiler—”

“Who did in fact take out a contract on me about seven months ago.”

“I'm going to get to that. Stinky, who got grumpy with you six or seven months ago and wanted you dead but accidentally hired someone who's sort of sweet on you—”

“Was.
Was
sweet on me.”

“You'd know more about that than I would. So Stinky decides
again
to kill you, and this is the plan he comes up with: he goes to the trouble of finding the person who owns that stamp, he digs up all the information about how you could get into the house, which had to be expensive info, and then he tips off the owner of the stamp so he, the owner, can beat you to death. This means that, first, Stinky doesn't get the stamp and, second, he has to explain to this Slugger person, who doesn't sound like a very forgiving guy, how he knew you were going to be in his house.”

I said, “Well, when you put it
that
way—”

“Instead of just . . . you know, hiring another person to shoot you or sending you into a dark, empty house full of ninjas.”

“There's no such thing as a ninja.”

“Ninjas are everywhere.”

“And if ninjas
were
everywhere, a house full of them wouldn't be empty.”

“You're dodging the fact that I'm right.”

“Two guys,” I said. “Baseball bats. I'm ninety-percent sure they knew I was in there. Who else could have tipped them?”

“No one,” she said, turning right for the third or fourth time on Hayvenhurst, “which means that you have to go to the other ten percent. The ten-percent chance that you somehow tipped them to your presence, expert though you are, with your little flashlight.
N'est-ce pas?
”

“‘N'est-ce pas'?”

“That's how we Cathars talk. ‘
Bonjour
,
n'est-ce pas?'
We say it on the slightest provocation.” She pulled to the curb again, leaned forward, and rested her forehead on the wheel. “I'm hungry. Either I want something to eat and a cup of coffee or I want to go to bed.”

I looked at my watch. Ten thirty. “Trade you something to eat for the name of the place you were born.”

She said, “Eat where?”

“We're not doing it that way. I'll suggest someplace, you'll say no and suggest something else, and we'll wind up going to the place you suggested.”

“Since we're nearly on the other side of the hill, let's go to K-Town. The barbecue places are open late.”

“Fine, K-Town.” I waited long enough to see a coyote trot past the car, looking professional. Coyotes always look professional. “Well?”

“All right,” she said. “Newark.”

I braced myself for a surge of elation that didn't arrive. “That's it?”

“Why? Too easy?”

“I don't know. I don't feel like I actually won.”

“You didn't,” she said. “I lied. Tell you what. Turn on your phone and see whether Stinky's been trying to get you. Or call him, see if he answers.”

“I thought you were hungry.”

“I am, but this way my going hungry pays me back for having lied to you, so you can't be mad at me. See? We're even.”

I turned on my phone, and it rang with the information that it was Jake, so I turned it off again. “Fine, we'll go to Soot Bull Jeep and get our clothes all smoky and Korean. But change places so I can drive, and give me a little more time first, okay?”

“What for?”

“To take a discreet look at Stinky's house.”

4

The Baronial Elite

Stinky Tetweiler had once referred to himself, in my hearing, as “a member of the baronial elite.” He's also been known to let his choice of first-person pronoun slip from
I
to the royal
we
. If that gives you the impression that he could be an overprivileged, insufferably smug, self-satisfied twit, you would have an accurate impression.

He came by his smugness in the traditional baronial way, which is to say he inherited it through the dumb-luck accident of birth. He was the scion, albeit in disgrace, of the family that created that most pernicious of innovations, the perfume strip. After earning hundreds of millions with a product that made sensitive people's uvulas feel like a thumb down their throats, the Tetweiler family had diversified by buying one of the seven global companies that create molecules that mimic natural fragrances for commercial use in detergents, artificially flavored food and drinks, room deodorizers, new cars—everything from mosquito repellent to the seductive smell of a fake leather jacket.

He'd grown up in a 20,000-square-foot house with a scratchy little two-horse imitation ranch around it, way out in Chatsworth, in a nouveau riche area now occupied by Justin Bieber and some rising basketball stars. Give him credit: he knew from childhood what he wanted and what he didn't want. What he wanted was the money. What he didn't want was any part of the family business.

He tried, God knows he tried, to remake the fragrance racket in his own image and likeness. He created two spin-off companies. Celebrity Sweat was an attempt to market T-shirts with chemical reproductions of the perspiration of people like Tom Cruise and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Church of Scientology sued on Cruise's behalf, and that was that. Tokes Without Smoke attempted to appeal to people who had managed to divorce themselves from their addictions but still felt a sort of nostalgia toward them. The advertisements offered the scents of five kinds of marijuana, two varieties of opium, and the pungent reek of cooking meth, all dead-on imitations and all drug-free. Taken together, between the chemistry, the manufacturing, and the marketing, these two ventures cost the company almost a hundred million.

By the time his father started paying attention, Stinky had embarked on his third venture. He'd learned somewhere about the condition called synesthesia, in which there's a kind of sensory crossover that results (in some cases) in fragrances being associated with sounds, and he'd decided that synesthetes were guaranteed to be a commercially under-served group. Within a month he'd co-opted the services of a bunch of the company's chemists and a trio of people who either had synesthesia or claimed to, and he'd managed to create scent blends that were roughly equivalent to the first three chords of Mozart's “Dissonance” Quartet. The foundation had been laid for the world's first scratch-and-sniff music book when his father changed the locks at the office and installed Stinky's younger brother in the heir apparent's seat.

So Stinky turned to crime.

He became a high-end fence as a cheap route to nice things, for which he had an inexhaustible appetite and a keen eye for those that would yield a healthy profit. The stamp I'd bagged that evening, for example, would be sold to his client for about a quarter of a million, while Stinky had promised me only $35,000 to lift it. Or he might decide to keep it. There had always been rumors that Stinky held on to about as much loot as he sold.

“He's got room for it,” Ronnie said, leaning across me for a better look at the house. She smelled like Ronnie, blessedly free of fragrance molecules. Stinky's house, a fifth-generation Los Angeles mansion, rambled aimlessly around the crown of a big, hilly Encino lot, the back end of which bordered a golf course. The neighborhood, which had aspired to being mildly upper-middle-class when I was a failing Cub Scout, had been plowed under by the relentless bulldozer of big money and replaced by long gleaming strings of mini-mansions, as mismatched as freshwater pearls; gated communities, which I've always thought of as an opportunity to be locked in with people you don't even want to say hello to; and not one but two country clubs, complete with Disney heraldry on their logos: a lion passant and a nine-iron rampant on a field of green.

“From what I hear, he'd need something the size of Versailles to hold it all.” I said aloud for the first time a thought I'd had often over the years, “Might be nice to figure out where it is.”

“Looks like he's asleep.”

“That's the bad news,” I said. “Stinky has stayed up all night since he was ten years old. He never goes to bed until he's read the morning paper.”

“He still takes a paper? How quaint.”

“The important word in the phrase
morning paper
was
morning
. Stinky regards staying up all night as aristocratic behavior, flaunting the fact that he never,
ever
has to get up until he's good and ready. Baronial elite and all.”

“Maybe he's dead,” she said.

“It would have to have been awfully fast,” I said. “It's only been about an hour and twenty minutes since you pancaked that gate.”

She looked over at me as though she were thinking about getting out of the car. “I was kidding. About his being dead? I was kid—”

“I'm not.” I pulled away from the curb, leaving the dark house behind, and turned the corner. Halfway down I settled the car against the curb and opened the door. “Sit behind the wheel and leave the engine running. Give me ten minutes, and if I'm not back by then, go home. If you see anyone except me coming down this street, floor it.”

“And leave you?”

“Exactly,” I said. “No heroics.”

She sniffed. “And no Korean food.”

My cheap little runner's watch has two features that make it indispensable to someone in my line of work: a diplomatically dim blue light that lets me check the time without drawing an unfriendly eye, and a stopwatch. I put it in stopwatch mode, said, “Starting now,” and climbed out.

Walking briskly, but not fast enough to attract attention, I took twenty-nine seconds to get back to the corner I'd just turned and another thirty-four to get to the foot of Stinky's driveway, putting me sixty-three seconds in, with less than nine minutes to go. The driveway was long enough to eat another twenty-five seconds or so, and by the time I hung left to go around the house, which looked completely dark, even on this moonless night, I was almost two minutes in and already wishing I'd asked for twelve minutes rather than the punchy, macho-sounding ten.
Gimme ten minutes,
I heard myself say in my mind's ear. All alone and in the dark, I had the grace to blush.

Stinky had once spent a week in London and had brought home with him a spotty British accent, a weakness for scones, and—as I discovered when I slipped my foot into a wicket and fell flat on my face—an enthusiasm for croquet. Had he known his history, I mused as I tried to catch my breath and listened for any indication that anyone had heard my
whoooof
when I hit the ground, had he indulged his Britophilia beyond the occasional broad
a
, Stinky would have known that croquet actually originated in merry old France. It was first written about in the thirteenth century, being played by small-town French peasants with willow wickets and broomstick mallets. Early in the nineteenth century, the game was transplanted to Ireland, whence it became the plague of Blighty, disfiguring stately lawns all over that blessed isle and eventually tripping burglars in far-off California. A complete Victorian croquet set with decent historical associations can go for five, six thousand bucks, but they're too bulky to swipe and too specialized to fence.

Two minutes and forty-three seconds and I was breathing hard and hadn't looked through a single window.

I hauled myself to my feet and got as close to the house as the bushes would allow. The plan was simple: keep the house on my right and do the complete circle, looking for signs of life.

Chez Stinky was an absolutely style-free one-story burst of misplaced enthusiasm, maybe 6,000 square feet of unadorned stucco and glass—with no obvious architectural ancestors—that had views of the Valley to the north and the big, burglar-friendly windows such views demand. I'd been inside the front part of the house, which is to say the entrance hall, the living room, and the big formal dining room right behind it, often enough to have a sense of where the other rooms were apt to be: contractors like to economize on things such as plumbing and gas lines and often build very different-looking houses on the same plumbing schematic. My guess was that there was a kitchen, a service area, four bedrooms—or three and a den—and at least three bathrooms, each of which would have its own external window.

Los Angeles architecture is like one of those 1950s horror movies in which radioactivity produces terrifying mutations. In this case the radioactivity was the whimsical influence of the movie studios, the employees of whose art departments moonlighted as architects for decades and built whatever the hell they'd liked from the last film they'd worked on. I'd just escaped from an ersatz southern plantation house, and if it had been light enough, I could have seen from Stinky's yard a French Provincial, a Cotswold cottage, several faux-Spanish haciendas, a Moorish mini-palace with scalloped arches, two half-timbered Tudors, a Japanese teahouse that wouldn't have been out of place in Kyoto, a streamlined nouveau-deco hybrid, and a couple of the hard-to-heat glass-and-concrete slabs that became so popular in the nineties.

Stinky had probably looked long and hard to find the resolutely anonymous place he'd bought. He needed it to be that way because he swapped out entire interior decors as often as most people vacuum, and if one morning he decided to trash the Frank Lloyd Wright Craftsman furniture in favor of a Louis XIV motif, he didn't want anything as stubborn as architecture to get in the way of his plans.

The last time I'd been in the living room, I'd been beaten into library paste by his then-resident Filipino houseboy Ting Ting, but before the blood began to flow, I'd seen that Stinky had made one of his infrequent decorative lapses, a leathery assembly of Texas Marlboro Man junk, so six-gun butch that you would have worn chaps to dust it. It
deserved
to have me bleed on it. This two-fisted idyll had replaced a longer-lasting and much preferable Marie Antoinette period, Stinky having an instinctive sympathy for martyred royalty.

Whatever was in there now—and for all I knew, it could have been the Hall of the Mountain King or a twelfth-century peasant's cottage, complete with peasant—it was too dark to tell. About the only things I could make out were a couple of unadorned dark rectangles
against the dining-room window that had an angular simplicity, a lack of frill that said they might be Early American.

But no lights and, as far as I could see, no people.

Like most crooks, Stinky was not a trusting soul, and he'd dispatched me, a thief, to score a little piece of paper that would probably earn him a quarter of a mil.
And
he'd told me to bring it straight to him. The Stinky I knew would have been pacing the floor waiting for that stamp, feeling the kind of anxiety I always experienced when my ex-wife told me that our thirteen-year-old daughter, Rina, was at a sleepover. Since the divorce I'm no longer allowed to live with them, but mentally I'm frozen in their living room with my nose pressed to the window, checking my watch every ten minutes and arguing with myself about going to toss the house where she's staying. Stinky should have been anxious about the stamp, eager to brush his broad, spatulate fingers across the surface of the holder. Stinky had fingers like hams but a touch as delicate as a pickpocket's.

He should have
been
there. Cool as the evening was, I was perspiring.

Four minutes, fifty-two seconds.

From what I could see through the living room's side windows, the furniture was still looking Early American, perhaps even Shaker. The Shakers were a group of radical Quakers who included women among their elect and who, because they trembled in worship when the spirit seized them in its teeth, became known as the Shaking Quakers. They believed that owning an ornament led to the sin of pride, and so the furniture they made was as pure and beautiful a statement of function as any I've ever seen. As an influential religious force, the Shakers were a single struck match in the long-burning fire of faith, but if we believe that beauty is God's aesthetic default mode, we have to acknowledge that God employed the Shakers to bring a disproportionate amount of it into the world.

At the big dining-room window at the rear of the house, I was compelled by those classic silhouettes to risk the penlight that had probably gotten me into so much trouble earlier in the evening. The furniture was Shaker for sure, but there was no one sitting or standing in there to appreciate it. Nor could I find anyone either prone or supine on the carpets, no hair-raising pools of dark liquid, no overturned antiques. Stinky's exquisite seventeenth-century French cylinder desk—like a rolltop but with a curved, solid piece in place of the hinged slats and decorated with floral inlay in wood of six colors—was closed. Stinky closed it whenever he wasn't actually sitting at it, so he almost certainly closed it when he left the house, too.

But why would he leave the house? He should have been shifting from foot to foot, waiting for his Gandhi stamp.

And why was I still here? Six minutes down and all those other rooms to go. I got into a rhythm: shove myself through the brush to the next window, press my nose against the glass, turn on the penlight, swipe it around, move on. I learned that Stinky's enthusiasm for Shaker stuff, or value of any kind, didn't extend to the bedrooms, all but one of which could have been furnished from IKEA; any more generic and the carpet would have had a bar code woven into its center to let people order the whole room with a single misguided click. The exception, and what an exception it was, was the master bedroom. Stinky slept in what seemed to be an authentic, water-warped Venetian gondola, hauled up onto a custom-cut frame to keep it from rocking side to side on the waves of sleep, and the rest of the furniture in the room could have come directly from the Doge's Palace.