“Well,” Ethan said, “maybe Christmas morning this year you’ll have a couple surprises.”
Sitting forward in his chair, eager for the sense of mystery that he had so recently dismissed as unimportant, Fric said, “What—you heard something?”
“If I heard something, which I’m not saying I did or didn’t, I couldn’t tell you what I heard, assuming I heard anything at all, and still keep the surprise a surprise, by which I don’t mean to imply that there is a surprise or that there isn’t one.”
The boy stared in silence for a moment. “Now you don’t sound cop honest, you sound like the head of a studio.”
“You know what heads of studios sound like, huh?”
“They come around here sometimes,” the boy said in a tone of worldly wisdom. “I recognize their rap.”
Ethan parked across the street from the apartment house in West Hollywood, switched off the windshield wipers, but left the engine running to power the heater. He sat in the Ford Expedition awhile, watching the place, deciding upon the best approach to Rolf Reynerd.
The Expedition was one of a collection of vehicles available for both job-related and personal use by the eight live-in members of the twenty-five-person estate staff. Among other wheels, a Mercedes ML500 SUV had been in the lower garage, but that might have drawn too much attention during a stakeout if the day required surveillance work.
The three-story apartment house appeared to be in good but not excellent repair. The cream-colored stucco wasn’t pocked or cracked, but the place looked to be at least a year overdue for painting. One of the address numbers above the front door hung askew.
Camellia bushes laden with heavy red blooms, a variety of ferns, and phoenix palms with enormous crowns provided the lushness of high-end landscaping; but everything had needed a trim months ago. The shaggy grass suggested that it was mown not weekly but twice a month.
The landlord shaved his costs, but the building nevertheless looked like a nice place to live.
No one rented here on a welfare check. Reynerd must have a job, but the fact that he’d been delivering death threats at three-thirty in the morning suggested that he didn’t have to get up early to go to work. He might be home now.
When Ethan tracked down his suspect’s place of employment and began to make inquiries about him with fellow workers and neighbors, Reynerd almost certainly would be alerted by someone. Thereafter, he would grow too wary to be approached directly.
Ethan preferred to start with the man himself and work outward from that initial contact.
He closed his eyes, tipped his head back against the headrest, and brooded about how to proceed.
The engine roar of an approaching car grew so loud that Ethan opened his eyes, half expecting to hear a sudden siren and to see a police chase in progress. Traveling far too fast for a residential street, a cherry-red Ferrari Testarossa exploded past, as though the driver were in fact hoping to run down a darting child or an old lady slowed by orthopedic shoes and a cane.
A tire-thrown plume spewed up from the puddled street, drenching the Expedition. The glass in the driver’s door briefly clouded with ripples of dirty water.
Across the street, the apartment house appeared to shimmer as if it were a place in a dream. Some aspect of that transient distortion seemed to trigger a vague memory of a long-forgotten nightmare, and the sight of the building in this warped condition caused the hairs to rise inexplicably on the back of Ethan’s neck.
Then the last gouts of the plume drained off the window. Falling rain quickly cleared the murky residue from the glass. The apartment house was nothing more than what it had been when he’d first seen it: a nice place to live.
After judging that the rain was falling only hard enough to make an umbrella more trouble than it was worth, he got out of the SUV and dashed across the street.
In southern California during the late autumn and early winter, Mother Nature suffered unpredictable mood swings. From one year to the next, and even from day to day in the same year, the week before Christmas could vary from balmy to bone-chilling. This air was cool, the rain colder than the air, and the sky as dead gray as it might have been in any truly wintry clime much farther north.
The main door of the building featured no buzz-through security lock. The neighborhood remained safe enough that apartment lobbies did not absolutely require fortification.
Dripping, he entered a small space, less a lobby than a foyer, with a Mexican-tile floor. An elevator and a set of stairs served the upper stories.
The foyer air curdled with the lingering meaty scent of Canadian bacon, cooked hours ago, and the musty smell of stale pot smoke. Weed had a singular aroma. Someone had stood here this morning, finishing a joint, before stepping out to meet the dreary day.
From the bank of mailboxes, Ethan counted four apartments on the ground floor, six on the second, and six on the third. Reynerd lived in the middle of the building, in 2B.
Only the last names of the current tenants were printed on the mailboxes. Ethan needed more information than these stick-on labels provided.
An open communal receptacle, recessed in the wall, had been provided for magazines and other publications on those occasions when the volume of other mail didn’t permit the postman to put all items in the boxes.
Two magazines lay in the tray. Both were for George Keesner in Apartment 2E.
Ethan rapped a knuckle against the aluminum doors on several of the mailboxes for the apartments in which he had no interest. The hollow sound suggested they were empty. Most likely the daily mail had not yet been delivered.
When he rapped on Keesner’s box, it sounded as though it was packed full of mail. Evidently the man had been away from home for at least a couple days.
Ethan climbed the stairs to the second floor. One long hall, three doors on each side. At 2E, he rang the bell and waited.
Reynerd’s unit, 2B, lay directly across from 2E.
When no one answered the bell at Keesner’s apartment, Ethan rang it again, twice. After a pause, he knocked loudly.
Each door had been fitted with a fisheye lens to allow the resident to examine a caller before deciding whether or not to admit him. Perhaps from across the hall, Reynerd was watching the back of Ethan’s head right now.
Receiving no response to his knock, Ethan turned away from Keesner’s door and made a show of frustration. He wiped his rain-wet face with one hand. He pushed that hand through his damp hair. He shook his head. He looked up and down the hall.
When Ethan rang the bell at 2B, the apple man answered almost at once, without the protection of a security chain.
Although an unmistakable match for the image captured by the security camera, he proved to be more handsome than he’d been in the rain the previous night. He resembled Ben Affleck, the actor.
In addition to the Affleck aspect, however, he had a welcome-to-the-Bates-Motel edge to him that any fan of Anthony Perkins would have recognized. The tightness at the corners of his mouth, the rapid pulse visible in his right temple, and especially the hard shine in his eyes suggested that he might be on methamphetamine, not fully amped but clipping along at high altitude.
“Sir,” Ethan said even as the door was still opening, “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m sort of desperate to get in touch with George Keesner over there in 2E. Do you know George?”
Reynerd shook his head. He had a bull’s neck. Lots of time spent on weight machines at the gym.
“I know him to say hello in the hall,” Reynerd said, “and how’s the weather. That’s all.”
If that was true, Ethan felt