Читать книгу Violent Ward - Len Deighton - Страница 10

I drove back from the Petrovitch bash with a lot of worries on my mind. The Ventura Freeway, U.S. 101, runs west to Woodland Hills but it doesn’t run far enough or fast enough, because when you get there you might as well never have left the city.

When we first went to live in Woodland Hills it was a village. Betty loved it. It was country-style living, she said, a great place to bring up children. A village, did I say? Now it’s got all your user-unfriendly banks, plastic fast food, international high-rise hotels with atriums and shopping malls with floors made from Italian marble, indoor palm trees, and fountains with colored lights, not to mention vagrants sleeping out-doors in cardboard boxes.

They say this is a early-go-to-bed town, so who are all these guys doing the Freeway 101 assignment in the small hours? Newly waxed Porsches, dented Mazdas, Chevy pickups, stretch Caddies with dark glass and TV antennas – who are these guys? Tell me. That journey home took me the best part of an hour, crawling along in a pox of red lights. I tuned in to the news on the car radio. It was a litany of violence: a decomposing corpse found in a closet in Newport Beach, a liquor store stickup in Koreatown, a drive-by killing in Ramparts, and if that wasn’t enough you could join the crowds in Westwood flocking to see a movie about a cannibalistic serial killer. That’s show business?

As I got near my house I saw blue-colored flashes illuminating the trees. Uh-huh? There were two black-and-whites parked on my frontage. One of them still had the beacon revolving and its doors open.

I drove up and parked on my ramp. As I stopped and lowered the window, a young nervous cop came at me out of the darkness waving a handgun. ‘Are you the resident here?’ He was a thin kid – straight out of the Police Academy, unless I’m very much mistaken – growing a straggly mustache to make himself look old enough to buy a beer without flashing ID.

‘You got it, kid. You want to point that thing away from me?’

‘Mr Murphy?’ He looked up as the second car started up and pulled away.

‘That’s right.’ As I said it, another cop arrived panting from somewhere behind my house. He was a plump old fellow with his pistol in his hand. He was oriental-looking. You don’t get many oriental cops, do you? Hispanics, yes; black guys, even; but how many Asian cops do you see?

‘What’s going on?’ I asked. I went to the door and got out my keys.

‘There was a prowler,’ said the plump one. ‘A neighbor called it in. Saw someone in your yard. Do you want to go inside and see if he got entry?’

‘Confucius say, Cop with gun go first,’ I told him.

Before anyone could go anywhere there was the sound of a nearby door catch, and the prowler light illuminated the doorstep of my next-door neighbor, Henry Klopstock. He’d come out to watch. He was some kind of English teacher at UCLA. His wife liked to call him Professor Klopstock. ‘Is everything okay, Mr Murphy?’ He was leaning across the orange trees, the flashing lights illuminating his lined face and five-o’clock shadow and his slicked-down hair. When my son was dating the Klopstock daughter he was all smiles and Hello, Mickey. Then they split up – you know the way kids are – and suddenly he’s giving me the ‘Mr Murphy’ syntax.

‘Sure it is. Didn’t you hear the sirens? I always have a police escort now I’m running for mayor.’

‘Okay, okay. Sorry I asked,’ he said. I saw him exchange rolling eye glances with the Asian cop. So why ask dumb questions, right?

I went up the path and unlocked my front door and waited while the fat one stepped past me into the entry. Rex, my terrier, suddenly awoke and came scampering from the kitchen to growl at both of us.

‘It’s me, Rex,’ I said.

Rex crouched very low, crawled around, and watched resentfully. The cop looked at me, looked at Rex, and then stepped over him to jab the kitchen door with his nightstick. It moved just a little, but his second jab made the door open all the way. ‘Mind my paintwork, buddy,’ I said. ‘Try a little tenderness, like the song says.’

There was no one there, just the little safety lights that switch on automatically when it gets dark. He went from room to room, all through the house. I followed him. It wasn’t really a search and he didn’t do it like in the movies; he wasn’t agile enough. He knew there was no one there, and he was determined to make me feel bad about making him do it. He just plodded around, puffing, sighing, and tapping the furniture with his baton. He wound up inspecting the stuff I’ve got decorating all the walls. Broadway posters and signed eight-by-ten glossies of the stars. My dad left me his collection, and I added to it. It goes back to Show Boat. Forgive me, Dad; it goes back to Rose Marie. It’s the greatest. My dad got signed photos of everyone from Cole Porter to Ethel Merman.

The cop inspected these pictures and posters without enthusiasm. ‘Seems like your intruder didn’t get in.’ He said it like he was consoling me.

‘Is that your professional opinion?’ I said.

Having studied the titles of my books, the level of my whisky, the corn flakes supply, and the big colored photo of Danny that’s on the breakfast counter, he turned to me, gave a grin, and hitched both thumbs into his gun belt. ‘That’s right. You can rest your head on your pillow tonight and enjoy untroubled sleep.’

‘You must be the poet who writes for the fortune cookies,’ I said.

He smiled. ‘Just tickets.’

‘For the police charity concert?’ I said. ‘Who are you having this year—’

‘Yah, Miss Demeanor Washington and Felonious Monk,’ he interrupted me. ‘That’s getting to be a tired old joke, Mr Murphy.’

I knew he was just trying to make me feel bad about having him go inside first. But what is a cop paid to do anyway? Don’t get me wrong; I like cops but not at the fold of a tough day, right? And not when they are doing a Lennie Bernstein with their nightstick.

‘Just you living in the house, Mr Murphy?’

‘You got it.’

‘Big place for just one person.’

‘No, it’s just the right size. Listen, wise guy, I’ve put this mansion on the market four times in a row with three different real estate dummies in different-colored blazers. Three times it went into escrow, and three times the deal fell apart. What else would you like to know?’

‘Nothing,’ said the cop. ‘You explicated it just fine.’ I followed him outside. Explicated: what kind of a word is that?

We were standing out front smelling the orange trees, and I was remembering that if I roust these guys too much they might Breathalyze me, so I was taken suddenly good-natured: smiling and saying good night and thank you, and without any kind of warning there comes a noise and a scuffle as some dumb jerk of a burglar jumps out of my best bougainvillea and runs down the side alley.

It was damned dark. The plump cop didn’t hesitate for a second. He was off after him and moving with amazing speed for his age and weight and leg length. I couldn’t see a thing in the darkness but I followed on as best I could, clearly hearing the clattering sounds of their feet and then the loud and fierce creak of my back fence as first the perpetrator and then the cop vaulted over it into my neighbor’s yard. Behind me, I heard the scratchy sounds of voices on the police radio: the second cop was calling for backup. Then he changed his mind and said they were okay. What did he know? He was in the car with the heater on.

The fugitive was scrambling across the backyards to the street on the other side of the block. I knew the scam. Some other perp would be arriving there in a car to pick him up. The newspapers kept saying it had become a popular modus operandi for these suburban break-in artists. The papers said the cops should be countering it with random patrols and better intelligence work. Those newspaper guys know everything, right? Sometimes I wonder why these guys and gals writing in the newspaper don’t take over the whole world and make it faultless like them.

Bam! Now I heard the noise of someone blundering into my neighbor’s elaborate barbecue setup. Crash, crunch, and clatter; there go the grills and irons, the gas bottle thumps to the ground, and finally the tin trays are making a noise like a collapsing xylophone.

‘Owwwww … errrrrr!’

I stood there hoping it marked the perpetrator’s downfall, but the cry had the tenor trill of the plump cop. ‘Watch out!’ I shouted as loud as I could shout, but I was too late. Even before I reached the fence there was an almighty splash and another cry of anguish with a lot of shouting and gurgling.

The other cop, the young thin one, came rushing over to me with his gun drawn. He looked at the fence. ‘What happened?’

‘Sounds like your partner went into my neighbor’s pool.’

‘Holy cow,’ he said quietly and glared at me. ‘You son of a bitch, you let him do that?’

‘Don’t look at me,’ I said. ‘It’s a pool, not a booby trap. We didn’t dig it out in secret and cover it with leaves and twigs.’

‘Are you all right, Steve?’ he called into the darkness. I could hear his partner wading through the water.

There was the sound of a man climbing onto dry land. ‘The bastard got away.’ The half-drowned voice was low and breathless as he came back along the alley and opened my neighbor’s side gate. Shoes slapped water; he was wringing it from his shirt. More water flooded off him as he squeezed his pants and continued cursing. He came very close to me, as if he was going to get violent: he smelled strongly of the pool chemicals that cut the algae back.

‘You’d better come in and dry off,’ I said. My neighbor was nowhere to be seen and all his lights were out. Professor Klopstock certainly knew when to make himself scarce.

‘Why don’t you drop dead?’ he replied. You’d think they would have been mad at my neighbor, but the wet one was acting like I’d switched off the pool lights and lured him on.

‘We’ll get back to the precinct house,’ the dry one said. ‘We’re off duty in thirty minutes.’

‘Suit yourself,’ I said. Now that we were standing in the dim antiprowler light from my porch, I saw how wet he was. Up to his waist he was soaked, but his shoulders were only partly wet. He must have gone in at the shallow end, where all the toys and the inflated yellow alligator are floating, and recovered his balance before going under.

‘I should book you, smart-ass,’ said the wet one.

Book me? ‘What for?’

‘Disorderly conduct,’ he said.

‘Next time you take a midnight dip,’ I said, ‘don’t count on me for the kiss of life.’

‘And next time you get burglarized, drop a dime to your interior decorator,’ he said. I guess he was mad that I’d told him not to chip my paintwork.

They both got into the black-and-white, with the wet one moving carefully, and drove away. Once they’d sailed off into the night I went inside, poured myself a drink, sank down on the sofa, and kicked off my shoes. With a picture window in this town, who needs television? I looked around me; I should make more serious efforts to sell the house. Maybe if we swung a new office from Petrovitch I could rent a small service apartment somewhere nearby. If I could find a place real close, I could leave my car parked at the office. Why hadn’t I sold years ago? I knew the answer. This is the house where I’d been happy. Betty had brought Danny back here from the hospital, and everything in the house reminded me of those days. Under the dining room table were two cardboard boxes containing ornaments and chinaware. When Betty first left me I decided to move out right away and started packing up the breakable stuff. But it was a dispiriting task and I soon gave up. Now the half-filled boxes were just collecting dust under a dining table I never used. I had to do something about my life; it was a mess.

What a tacky day I’d had. And then, just to make it complete, the phone gets up on its hind legs and warbles at me. ‘Is that you, Mickey?’ said a voice I recognized.

‘No, it’s his valet. I’ll put you through to the solarium.’

‘This is Goldie,’ he said. ‘Goldie Arnez.’

‘Yeah, I knew which one it was,’ I told him. ‘I haven’t got a confusingly large number of acquaintances named Goldie.’

‘You slipped away without my seeing you go.’

‘Did I? I do that sometimes, when the hands are creeping toward the witching hour and I’ve swallowed too many of those sharp little sticks they spear the cocktail wieners on.’

‘Mr Petrovitch wants to talk with you.’

‘Put him on.’

A polite little chuckle. ‘Tomorrow. Nine A.M. sharp. At Camarillo airport. Bring all the papers concerning Vic Crichton’s deal with the British lord. The British companies and all.’

‘Camarillo?’

‘It’s a short drive down the freeway, Mickey. And at that time of day you should have the westbound side all to yourself.’

‘I would have thought a rich guy like that would have a hangar in John Wayne or Santa Monica, some place with a fancy restaurant.’

‘I got news for you. Rich guys like that have a chef right on the plane, cooking them all the fancy food they can eat.’

‘In the main building? Where will I find him?’

‘There’s no main building. You’ll spot his limo: white with tinted glass. Just make sure you bring the papers, like I said.’

‘I’m not sure I can do that. Those papers concern a client. There is a matter of confidentiality involved.’

‘Just bring the files.’

‘Like I’m telling you, Goldie. This is a matter of confidentiality, client-attorney confidentiality.’

‘Are you getting senile amnesia or something? One of the Petrovitch holding companies now owns your whole bailiwick. Remember, old buddy?’

‘That makes no difference in law. You can’t buy a law practice. All that’s happened is that we’ve taken on a new partner of Mr Petrovitch’s choosing. And I haven’t even met him yet.’

‘You play it any way you choose, Mickey. You were always a maverick. But if I were in your shoes I’d be at Camarillo airport with my notebook under my arm and my pencil sharpened.’

‘I’ll have to think about it.’ I was already thinking about it, and my thoughts were negative. That stuff went a long way back. Take the notebooks: Denise had filled them with that impenetrable shorthand of hers. Who knows what any of us might have said in some of those brainstorming sessions?

‘Yes, you think about it,’ said Goldie. ‘But don’t talk to Crichton or Lord Westbridge or any of their people. Got it?’

‘Did Petrovitch tell you to insert that clause into this tacky ultimatum of yours?’

‘It’s not an ultimatum.’ Then he amended it. ‘But, yes. As a matter of fact, Mickey, yes, he did.’

‘Tell him to get lost,’ I said.

‘I won’t relay that message. You be there in the morning, and if you still feel the same way you’ll be able to tell him in person.’

‘Okay.’

He was reluctant to hang up; he wasn’t sure he’d threatened me enough. ‘Better still, what say we meet in Tommy’s on Ventura? Do you still go there for breakfast?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Seven-thirty?’

‘Okay,’ I said. I guess Goldie wanted time enough to send the hounds after me if I didn’t show up.

‘Sleep on it, Mickey. If you want to talk to me anytime at all, day or night, the eight hundred number on the card I gave you is my cellular phone.’

‘Thanks.’ Goldie was the only man I knew with his own personal eight hundred number.

‘You’ll see reason,’ said Goldie.

When I’d sipped a little more of my whisky I had a sudden inspiration. I went to my dressing room – it’s a walk-in closet, really – and to the place where my personal safe is hidden behind a locked panel. My heavy-duty fireproof-steel money box was alive and well and locked up tight. There was nothing in it that could be of much value to a thief. There were my insurance papers, the deeds of the house, and a dozen or so three-and-a-half-inch floppies that I copied from my computer each week and brought back for safekeeping. But now that I looked again at it, a closer inspection revealed faint gray streaks along the edge of the wooden outer panel. I couldn’t think of any way those marks could have got there – I don’t let the cleaning lady come into the dressing room – so maybe the intruder had got inside. Maybe he’d just started on the combination lock when my neighbor’s 911 call had interrupted him. The sort of intruder who goes housebreaking equipped with watchmaker’s tools would have brought with him a police scanner to monitor the call and would have got out before the black-and-white arrived. Maybe he’d stayed outside, stayed real still, hoping everyone would go away before his pal came to collect him. Wow! So who’s been eating my grandmother?

I twirled the combination lock, opened the door of the safe, and looked inside. My stomach turned over. Flopped on top of a bundle of papers was an ugly brown withered hand, a severed hand. I jumped back like it was going to bite me. I looked again. There it was, like a huge tarantula poised to strike. It made me want to vomit. A hand! In a foolish and useless gesture I pushed the safe door closed while I went and got a flashlight from the garage.

With the light I could see right into the safe. Now that the light was shining on it I could see it was a glove, a heavy-duty protective glove used in factories and warehouses. I pulled the papers forward, holding papers and glove under the ceiling light to see it better. It was a leather glove, bent, battered, and whitened in use, the kind that might have been rescued from some industrial garbage bin. Even now it took me a moment or two before I could touch it. It seemed to be pulsating with life, but then I realized my hand was trembling. There was no message with it, but it was just the kind of prank that Goldie would pull on a guy who might not at first see reason.

This was getting a little too rich for my diet. I flipped open my notebook and called the Century Plaza, where Vic Crichton was staying. They put the call through to his suite and it was answered immediately. I said, ‘Can I speak to Vic?’

‘He’s not here. This is Mrs Crichton. What is it about?’

‘Dorothy, this is Mickey. We were talking tonight, remember? I know Victor was pretty smashed but drag him out of bed and order some coffee from room service, honey. We’ve got to talk.’

‘My name is not Dorothy. This is Mrs Crichton, and I’ve just arrived from London, and I’m waiting for him to get back. Who is this?’

Shit! All these British voices sound the same to me, especially after a long day at the office. ‘Murphy. I’m Sir Jeremy’s West Coast attorney. I’ll call again when you’ve had a chance to settle in.’

‘You say you saw Victor tonight?’

‘No. I mean, it must have been someone else. It looked very like him, but it gets crowded at the health club, and I was in the pool with the chlorinated water getting in my eyes.’

‘I planned to surprise him,’ said Mrs Crichton. ‘But there are no messages here, and the office number I have doesn’t answer.’

Surprise him; she’d do that, all right, and surprise his girlfriend too if they both went back to his hotel. ‘I’m sure he’ll show up,’ I said. ‘Will you ask him to phone Murphy? Tell him it’s a matter of life or death.’

‘Life or death?’

‘I’m exaggerating,’ I readily admitted. ‘This is Southern California; everything is a bit larger than life around here. And a bit smaller than death.’

‘I’ll tell him.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Crichton.’

I hung up, and then I began worrying whether some bastard had tapped my phone. I would have unscrewed the handset and looked for a hidden microphone, the way they do in movies, except that this was a Japanese phone with a handset of welded plastic.

‘What should I do about the paperwork, Rex?’ I said, but Rex had disappeared. He always was a go-to-bed-early kind of dog.

I felt like going to bed too, but the Westbridge files, three boxes of them, were in my downtown office, some twenty-five miles away. And Camarillo was forty miles in the other direction. Why did I pick up that lousy phone? Why didn’t I let Goldie leave his messages on my answering machine?

I had to have something to show that bastard Petrovitch. I mean, I wasn’t in a position to tell him to drop dead. When the deal went through and my check was cashed then maybe it would be different, but not right now. Goldie was right; no matter about the fine print, the fact was that Petrovitch owned me and the whole kit and caboodle. Maybe the written record was secret, but all those sheets of paper, on which it was typed or written, were owned by him. So what did I do? I went and climbed back into my Caddie.

By four o’clock in the morning I was sitting in my office sorting out all the Westbridge stuff with a big industrial-size shredder at my side. It was spooky in that place in the dead of night. In the street there were some strange people patrolling, I’ll tell you: hookers, drug dealers, and kids from the gangs, armed to the teeth and pupils dilated. The janitor was useless. He has an apartment as part of the deal but he didn’t budge from it. I could have rolled the whole building away without his coming down to see where we were headed.

I boiled some water and stole a little of Miss Huth’s instant and found where she stashed the chocolate chip cookies. Then I went through the papers sheet by sheet. I made three piles: one, don’t matter; two, grand jury for Vic Crichton; three, trouble for Murphy. And I’m telling you I made sure everything in the third pile was shredded into paper worms, shaken, and stirred too. As I sorted through that stuff I saw indiscreet little items that could have had me disbarred a dozen times over. I didn’t take a deep breath until only two piles remained. Trouble for Westbridge, Inc., was something I could endure.

Then I crammed all the totally innocuous stuff into my best pigskin document case. With that done I sprinkled a few trouble-for-Westbridge items over them just to make it look kosher and stuffed it tight and strapped it down. Then I took the more delicate Westbridge material – one three-quarter-full Perrier-water box of it – and put it into my trunk and drove back home with it.

I put it on a rafter in the garage together with a lot of other cardboard boxes that had formerly contained my desktop computer, my microwave oven, my coffee maker, and all that kind of stuff, because if you don’t keep the cardboard boxes the stores won’t fix items that go on the blink. Did you know that? They won’t fix them without the boxes.

The dust and dirt I dislodged from that garage made me dirty enough to need a good long hot shower. By the time I was through washing up there was no time for sleep. I changed into a sport coat and cords to show all concerned that this wasn’t a part of my regular schedule and then went along Ventura Boulevard to Tommy’s Coffee Shop.