Nighttown Read online

  I said, “Where’d you get the kids?”

  “Casting agency. All kids are a blight, but kid actors should be run over the day they get their AFTRA cards.” She sat back, cocked her head, pushed the bright glasses down on her nose, and subjected me to a gaze that peeled me and looked straight through me to the wall behind. I did not sense unreserved approval. “They think they’re in a reality series with hidden cameras.”

  I turned to look out the window again, but she tapped the back of my wrist. “You might want to count this,” she said.

  The envelope was a thick little pillow, and I have to admit that I was flipping through an impressive stack of twenties before I had to resist the impulse to slap my forehead like one of the Three Stooges. I marked my place in the stack with an index finger and looked back out through the window, and sure enough, Eddie, his Afro, and the Mouseketeers were gone. On the other hand, an attractive young woman was coming in. She eyed me for a second, but then her gaze dropped to my shirt, and she shook her head. When I looked back at Harried Mom, she was shaking her head, too, so that made it unanimous.

  Her eyes were the odd off-green you sometimes see in olives, but not as warm. “That was test number one,” she said, “the distraction test. You flunked.”

  I said, “Gee.”

  “Can’t imagine why Stinky is so high on you.”

  “I could have told you not to listen to Stinky.” I stopped counting, slipped the envelope into the pocket of my jeans, and scooted across the bench. “Well,” I said, “thanks for the chat.” She leaned toward me quickly, and something about the movement got my attention. It shoved in my direction a little splash of chilled air that surrounded me completely and ran straight down my spine. It’s difficult for me to explain why—in such a brightly lighted, resolutely ordinary restaurant, jammed to the exits with potential witnesses—the gesture packed as much threat as it did. I stopped scooting and looked at the plastic sheen of her hair because I didn’t want to look at her eyes, which she hadn’t taken off me.

  “That’s a little tiny bit better,” she said. “You paid attention to me.” She sat back by about an inch, and I resisted the urge to sit back myself. She said, “Look, I have to make a snap judgment here.” Her eyes were bouncing around the restaurant until they snagged on someone, but then they kept going. “You’re not ideal for me, and obviously you’re not thrilled with me, either. We can’t all be Romeo and Juliet.”

  “They had their own problems,” I said. I checked out the restaurant, trying to figure who had engaged her attention, and found myself looking at the attractive young woman who had just come in and who was waiting in line to order something she would regret in a few hours. A rap of knuckles on the table brought me back to the issue at hand.

  “So we’re not matched by fate,” she said, tapping a tangerine fingernail on each of the last three syllables. “But time is an issue, as usual, and I doubt I’ll find anyone better. And that’s why business always involves money, isn’t it? Because otherwise we’d never hang around with the people who pay us.”

  I said, “Really.” It was just a bookmark. She’d stopped talking, and that should have been my cue to do what I’d planned to do ever since Stinky called me and told me how many people already knew something about the job: pocket the $2,500, say thanks, and walk out of the place. But walking away would have required me to turn my back on her, and the very idea made the skin over my spine pucker.

  “Of course.” She spread her hands, the telltale gesture of someone who’s making a gift to the thick, an explanation that shouldn’t be required. “A salary is what they give you because you’d rather be somewhere else.” She tilted her head to the right, the restaurant’s fluorescents chasing orange highlights over her curls. “Don’t you think?”

  I was looking around the restaurant, thinking there might be other Eddies on hand. “I have no idea. Except for two weeks as a busboy in a restaurant when I was sixteen, I’ve never earned a salary.”

  “I know, you found your life’s work at sixteen, seventeen. That’s a lot of break-ins, and Stinky says you’ve never been arrested.”

  I said, “Stinky should keep his mouth shut.”

  “Never even questioned,” she said.

  I put my elbow on the table and my chin in my hand. It’s a posture that expresses patience without being offensive. I waited.

  She nodded her head, eyebrows raised: a prompt. “Is that right? You’ve never been questioned?”

  I said, “Do you know the answer?”

  She brought her lips together into a poisonous little air kiss.

  “Okay, just for the record,” I said. “Once. But it was bullshit, a cop’s way of forcing me to do him a favor. If I’d said no, he was going to charge me with a job I didn’t do.”

  “But if you didn’t do it—”

  “The victim was an elderly judge,” I said. “What the police think of as a cop judge, someone who believes there’s no such thing as an innocent defendant, and during the robbery he and his wife were pistol-whipped. Even if I’d only been in jail for an hour I would have come out with my thumbs on backward and a note saying I’d slipped in the shower. So if that counts as being questioned, I’ve been questioned.” I stopped and drew a breath. “But here’s the thing. I’m not inclined to work with you.”

  She patted the absurd hair into place despite the fact that it hadn’t moved. “You might want to reconsider that.”

  I said, “Well, this is how good I don’t feel about it. Here.” I put the envelope back on the table, pushed it toward her.

  “Exactly one minute,” she said, flicking the envelope aside. “Let me talk for one minute, and you can take the money with you, whatever you decide to do. Twenty-five hundred a minute, okay?”

  “You’re not going to persuade me.”

  “I have no intention of persuading you.”

  “Well, then,” I said, starting to get up.

  “I’m threatening you.”

  “With what?”

  “Since the moment Stinky mentioned your name, I’ve been learning everything I could about you. People do talk, you know, even those who aren’t supposed to. About the only thing I didn’t have was your license plate number, and you took care of that when you drove in here.” She looked down at her hands on the table and put them in her lap. “I don’t want to threaten you, but I do need to talk to you. One minute for twenty-five hundred bucks. How often do you make that kind of money?”

  I shook my head, but I didn’t get up. It was worth staying, at least long enough to try to figure out how much she actually knew.

  “No one lives in the house I want you to hit,” she said. “It’s going to be torn down in a few days. It’s empty. It’s secluded. I have the key you’ll need to get in. How am I doing?”

  “Forty-two seconds to go.”

  “I won’t need it. No one will see you because the windows are covered on the inside so you can use an arc light if you want to. I can tell you what room it’s in. It weighs less than three pounds. You can tuck it under your arm and go.”

  “Why don’t you do it?”

  She tightened her mouth, not enjoying the challenge. “That has nothing to do with you. Listen, you can sit here making guesses all day, and all we’ll do is waste time.” She glanced at a cheap running watch that I would have bet was bought just for this meeting. “It’s obviously important to me that you do this. That means I need you to get in and then get out again and stay alive at least long enough to meet me for the handover, and you can do that anywhere you want, in front of as many people as you want, on America’s Got Talent or whatever it’s called, if you want. Is the minute up?”

  “Yes.” I put a hand on the table to push myself up.

  She reached out and rested her fingertips on the back of my hand. The orange nails matched the hair perfectly. She pushed them into my skin just a littl
e, and I resisted yanking my hand back. “I’ve told you it’s urgently important to me that you get in and out in one piece and that you can make the delivery anywhere you choose. What I haven’t told you is how much I’ll pay you and how much of that you can walk away with in exchange for about five minute’s worth of work.”

  “Why the nonsense with the kids?”

  “Obviously, so I could get up and leave without being noticed if anything smelled bad.”

  My phone gave out the little xylophone tremolo that announces a text.

  I said, “How much?” I glanced down at the phone and saw a nice, sharp picture of my would-be employer taken by someone who had a good clear angle from behind me.

  She said, “When I have your attention, you’ll find out.”

  I pocketed the phone and looked over at her in time to see her reach into her purse and pull out a large manila envelope about two inches thick. “First payment.” She dropped the envelope on the table, and I could hear the plop even over the noise level in the restaurant. “Twenty-five thousand. Add it to what you’ve already got. Do you seriously think I’d let you walk out of here with this much money if I didn’t think you were going to make it out of the house and bring me the thing I want?”

  I said, “First payment?”

  “Another twenty-five on delivery.”

  “Thousand.”

  “If you want me to say it out loud. Thousand.”

  “Who else wants it?”

  She said, “Excuse me?”

  “You’re willing to pay me, as you say, very well, to go get something. That means one of two things: either it belongs to someone who won’t intentionally give it up and knows how to defend it, or there’s someone else who wants it. In either case, you’re afraid of that someone.”

  “There’s no one I’m afraid of, not in this world or the next.”

  “Then go get it yourself.”

  She sat back in the booth and gave me an eye that lowered the temperature in the whole restaurant. The earlier chill was Miami by comparison; this one was so thick it felt viscous. “Yes or no. Right now, in the next five seconds.” She put her hand, fingers splayed and flat, on the manila envelope and the smaller envelope beside it. “Yes, and you walk out of here a lot richer. No, and you’d better keep your eye on the rearview mirror. For the foreseeable future.” She pushed both envelopes to my edge of the table and smiled. “Maybe both eyes.”

  Twenty-five K. Another twenty-five K to come. Versus looking over my shoulder for however long it might be, worried not just about me but also Ronnie. I slid the envelope off the table and into my lap and said, “Fine. Have it your way.”

  3

  Smooth the Tie, Touch the Hair

  Dismal as Horton House was, the sight of the books that remained on the living room shelves had cheered me slightly. Books, I think, exude a kind of airborne tranquilizer. The percentage of the world’s murder victims who are killed in libraries is statistically negligible. I could feel the soothing waves of silent words, sort of an imaginal massage, loosen the muscles in my back and shoulders. From the bottom step, I looked back through the living room archway, beaming the penlight at the shelves, and promised myself a stop there on the way out.

  It says something about the priorities of the age in which we live that I’ve never known a burglar who stole books. The sole exceptions to the rule are when the target has essentially ceased, economically, to be a “book” and become, instead, a valuable object, a category that says nothing about the items it includes except that they’re in extremely short supply. It’s certainly not about merit; a battered copy of Don Quixote is in the same sale bin, at the same markdown, as a paperback of Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s about scarcity. As someone once observed, if the ground were littered with rubies, we wouldn’t bend down to pick them up. The more somebody else wants something, the more we have to have it.

  But these shelves had been pilfered, hadn’t they? I played the light over them again and saw the answer to the conundrum. No one had taken any books. The empty spaces here and there on the shelves made a symmetrical pattern. There had been knickknacks placed among them, some of them probably old and valuable. Take the knickknacks, leave the books.

  I flicked off the light and closed my eyes softly, barely letting the lids meet. Squeezing them shut sets off retinal fireworks that you don’t want to have to cope with in a dark environment. It’s sort of like looking for a firefly through a barrage of Fourth of July skyrockets. When, at the count of twenty, I let my lids open, my pupils felt as dilated as an owl’s. I found I could see a slight variation in the darkness around me. The portion of the living room framed by the archway was just perceptibly paler than the entrance hall, which was as dark as the hole at the bottom of the world, where the souls leak out. And then, when I looked up the stairs, it was, somehow, darker still, as though it had been reduced and thickened, like a sauce. And the baby powder smell was stronger in that direction.

  The house chose that moment to let out a remarkably low, grinding groan, the kind of sound a yawl might make capsizing in a high sea. Almost simultaneously, the solidity of the carpeted stair beneath my feet went a little gelatinous for a couple or eight long-feeling seconds, and then held still again as the house subsided into a displeased aftermath of yips, barks, and creaks.

  Okay, just a wee seismic jolt, commonplace in California, the kind that always startles TV news anchors who are working live. All the painstakingly acquired smoothness goes out the window to be replaced by a few seconds of borderline yammering in suddenly high-pitched voices with regional accents, and some apprehensive glances up at the thousands of pounds of lights hanging overhead. When it’s over, if one of them is a male, he’ll use his palm to smooth his tie. The woman will usually touch her hair. Those will probably be the last human gestures at the end of the world: smooth the tie, touch the hair.

  I saw again in my mind’s eye that outrageous orange Dynel hair. She had the key. Why didn’t she just come in and get whatever it was herself?

  I was stewing, unusual for me, so I blamed it on the house. In my life I’ve spent uninvited time in probably four hundred houses and I’d never liked one less than I liked Horton House.

  The carpeting on the stairs killed the sound of my footsteps as I climbed, and by staying right next to the banister, I managed to ascend relatively quietly. The penlight was off since, for all I knew, there were people upstairs—unlikely but not impossible—and after about fifteen steps I started very softly kicking the riser of the step in front of me, just to make certain that one was there. Nothing feels more like slapstick than lifting your leg in expectation of a step that’s not there and then putting it down seven or eight inches lower than you’d anticipated. It’s like stepping into a hole. Fred Astaire couldn’t have made it look anything but klutzy.

  And, of course, it’s noisy.

  When my little forward kick didn’t hit anything and I knew I was at the top of the stairs, I stood there and waited for something to say boo.

  Nothing did, but if something had I probably would have preferred it to the smell of powder, which was much heavier up here, as cloying as a face full of lilies. It was almost enough to tint the darkness pink. It amazed me that any high-priced designer of fragrance molecules would have offered it up for sale rather than chucking it into the bin labeled Stenches. I turned my head, inhaling slowly through my mouth. The floor plans had put the master bedroom at the back of the house, farthest away from the racket and stink of horse-drawn buggies that once rattled down the street. That put it to my left, and that was the direction where the powder’s smell was strongest. Miss Daisy, as the sole remaining Horton in Horton House, would have claimed that room. That she had remained there, rather than being shifted against her will into, say the cook’s bedroom, raised my hopes that the rooms upstairs, the rooms in which she lived, hadn’t been scavenged into the humiliation I’d seen on the gr
ound floor.

  When you’ve done this as often as I have, you learn to listen around corners. The first step in doing that is to go as still as a pond and then close your eyes, which was unnecessary in the pitch-blackness of the second floor. Breathe with the tip of your tongue touching the roof of your mouth, which, as people who work around microphones know, is the quietest way to do it. Then stay there until you get a sense of the house’s regular noises, and listen through them. Up until now, Horton House had been making too much random noise for me to do that, but the little seismic hiccup seemed to have calmed things down for a moment, settling months’ worth of resentful, grudge-filled stresses and strains in a single, cranky jolt. For the first time since I’d gone in, the house was silent. Above me I suddenly heard the faint, rapid tapping of rain, fingernails on the soundboard of a stringed instrument.

  All my experience told me I was alone up here. And the unvarying velvet of the darkness told me that the windows on this floor were covered, too, which meant I could use the penlight without attracting any attention outdoors. I punched the button.

  The stairs ended in a landing with a magisterially high ceiling. Directly across from me was a wall, bare now, but with an enormous dark patch indicating a missing picture. The patch was perhaps six feet long and four wide, hung vertically, a standard portrait format for someone worth wasting twenty-four square feet of wall space on. In this case, it was almost certainly the man whose name—well, whose alias—the house bore, the nineteenth-century claim jumper who, as a young thug in his twenties, had begun to accumulate what would become the Horton fortunes by stealing silver and gold from mine sites in Nevada until around 1890. At that point, things got too hot, and he ran; he ran, in fact, all the way to England, via New York, with his victims in highly motivated pursuit. According to A Miscellany of American Rogues—a decorous, almost courteous exposé of some of the nation’s dodgiest rich, written in the 1940s—the Atlantic stopped the law in its tracks while the claim jumper seems to have crossed in style. If the book is accurate, he spent a couple of quiet years in London, where he changed his real name, Edgar Francis Codwallader, to the less Welsh and less memorable Henry Wallace Horton, Jr. I thought the Junior was a nice touch, and not because it’s my given name, but rather because people who invent names for themselves so rarely think of it.