Stalking the Angel Read Free Page A

company.”
    She made another face. “That’s silly.”
    I guess that meant no. I stood up. “Your husband said there were pictures of the book.”
    She finished the drink and said, “I wish he’d take care of these things himself.” Then she left. Maybe I could go out and Hatcher could come in and question her for me. Maybe Hatcher already had. Maybe I should call the airport and catch Bradley’s plane and tell him he could keep his check and his job. Nah. What would Donald Trump think?
    When Sheila Warren came back, she had gotten rid of the glass and was carrying a color 8 × 10 showing Bradley accepting something that looked like a photo album from a dignified white-haired Japanese gentleman. There were other men around, all Japanese, but not all of them looked dignified. The book was a darkrich brown, probably leather-covered board, and would probably crumble if you sneered at it. Jillian Becker was in the picture.
    Sheila Warren said, “I hope this is what you want.” The top three buttons on her tennis outfit had been undone.
    “This will be fine,” I said. I folded the picture and put it in my pocket.
    She wet her lips. “Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?”
    “Positive, thanks.”
    She looked down at her shoes, said, “Ooo, these darn laces,” then turned her back and bent over from the hip. The laces hadn’t looked untied to me, but I miss a lot. She played with one lace and then she played with the other, and while she was playing with them I walked out. I wandered back through to the kitchen and from there to the rear yard. There was a dichondra lawn that sloped gently away from the house toward a fifty-foot Greek Revival swimming pool and a small pool house with a sunken conversation pit around a circular grill. I stood at the deep end of the pool and looked around and shook my head. Man. First him. Now her. What a pair.
    Whoever had gone into the house had probably known the combination or known where to find it. Combinations are easy to get. One day when no one’s around, a gardener slips in, finds the scrap of paper on which people like Bradley Warren always write their combinations, then sells it to the right guy for the right price. Or maybe one day Sheila flexed a little too much upper-class muscle with the hundred-buck-a-week housekeeper, and the housekeeper says, Okay, bitch, here’s one for you, and feeds the numbers to her out-of-work boyfriend. You could go on.
    I walked along the pool deck past the tennis court and along the edge of the property and then back toward the house. There were no guard dogs and no closed-circuit cameras and no fancy surveillance equipment. The wall around the perimeter wasn’t electrified, and if there was a guard tower it was disguised as a palm tree. Half the kids on Hollywood Boulevard could loot the place blind. Maybe I’d go down there and question them. Only take me three or four years.
    When I got back to the house, a teenage girl was sitting on one of four couches in the den. She was cross-legged, staring down into the oversized pages of a book that could’ve been titled
Andrew Wyeth’s Bleakest Landscapes
.
    I said, “Hi, my name’s Elvis. Are you Mimi?”
    She looked up at me the way you look at someone when you open your front door and see it’s a Jehovah’s Witness. She was maybe sixteen and had close-cropped brown hair that framed her face like a small inner tube. It made her face rounder than it was. I would have suggested something upswept or shag-cut to give her face some length, but she hadn’t asked me. There was no makeup and no nail polish and some would have been in order. She wasn’t pretty. She rubbed at her nose and said, “Are you the detective?”
    “Uh-huh. You got any clues about the big theft?”
    She rubbed at her nose again.
    “Clues,” I said. “Did you see a shadow skulk across the lawn? Did you overhear a snatch of mysterious conversation? That kind of thing.”
    Maybe she was looking at me.