Stalking the Angel Read Free

good-looking devil, aren’t you.” Twenty minutes before noon and she was drunk.
    I looked back at Hatcher. He was grinning.
    Sheila Warren was in her forties, with tanned skin and a sharp nose and bright blue eyes and auburn hair. She had the sort of deep lines you get when you play a lot of tennis or golf or otherwise hang out in the sun. The hair was pulled back in a pony tail and she wore a white headband. She looked good in the tennis outfit, but not athletic. Probably did more hanging out than playing.
    She opened the door wider and gestured with the glass for me to come in. Ice tinkled. “I suppose you want to see where he had the damn book.” She said it like we were talking about an eighth-grade history book.
    “Sure.”
    She gestured with the glass again. “I always like to have something cool when I come in off the court. All that sweat. Can I get you something?”
    “Maybe later.”
    We walked back through about six thousand miles of entry and a living room they could rent out as an airplane hangar and a dining room with seating for Congress. She stayed a step in front of me and swayed as she walked. I said, “Was anyone home the night it was stolen?”
    “We were in Canada. Bradley’s building a hotel in Edmonton so we flew up. Bradley usually flies alone, but the kid and I wanted to go so we went.” The kid.
    “How about the help?”
    “They’ve all got family living down in Little Tokyo. They beat it down there as soon as we’re out of thehouse.” She looked back at me. “The police asked all this, you know.”
    “I like to check up on them.”
    She said, “Oh, you.”
    We went down a long hall with a tile floor and into a cavern that turned out to be the master bedroom. At the end of the hall there was an open marble atrium with a lot of green leafy plants in it, and to the left of the atrium there were glass doors looking out to the back lawn and the pool. Where one of the glass doors had been, there was now a 4 × 8 sheet of plywood as if the glass had been broken and the plywood put there until the glass could be replaced. Opposite the atrium, there was a black lacquer platform bed and a lot of black lacquer furniture. We went past the bed and through a doorway into a
his
dressing room. The
hers
had a separate entrance.
    The
his
held a full-length three-way dressing mirror and a black granite dressing table and about a mile and a half of coats and slacks and suits and enough shoes to shod a small American city. At the foot of the dressing mirror the carpet had been rolled back and there was a Citabria-Wilcox floor safe large enough for a man to squat in.
    Sheila Warren gestured toward it with the glass and made a face. “The big shot’s safe.”
    The top was lying open like a manhole cover swung over on a hinge. It was quarter-inch plate steel with two tumblers and three half-inch shear pins. There was black powder on everything from when the crime scene guys dusted for prints. Nothing else seemed disturbed. The ice tinkled behind me. “Was the safe like this when you found it?”
    “It was closed. The police left it open.”
    “How about the alarm?”
    “The police said they must’ve known how to turn it off. Or maybe we forgot to turn it on.” She gave a little shrug when she said it, like it didn’t matter very much in the first place and she was tired of talking about it. She was leaning against the door-jamb with her arms crossed, watching me. Maybe she thought that when detectives flew into action it was something you didn’t want to miss. “You should’ve seen the glass,” she said. “He brings the damn book here and look what happens. I walk barefoot on the carpet and I still pick up slivers. Mr. Big Shot Businessman.” She didn’t say the last part to me.
    “Has anyone called, or delivered a ransom note?”
    “For what?”
    “The book. When something rare and easily identifiable is stolen, it’s usually stolen to sell it back to the owner or his insurance