Time Bomb Page 14

  Finally, we left the building. She still looked tense, but she slipped her arm through mine.

  The custodian was eager to lock up the school grounds and begin his weekend, so she drove the Escort onto the street and parked just outside the gate. We took the Seville and headed west. The restaurant I’d chosen was on a busy stretch of Ocean Avenue across from the bluffs that look down on the birth of Pacific Coast Highway. French but friendly, a clean white decor and canvas-topped front porch with a waist-high brick wall that allowed alfresco dining while segregating the sidewalk throng. We got there by six-fifteen. Several homeless people were competing with the parking valets for turf. I gave away a few dollars and got dirty looks from the valets.

  We were seated at the bar for another twenty minutes before being escorted to a spot under the canvas. By eight-thirty, the Big-Deal-Pending folks would be tooling up in rented Mercedes and designer Jeeps that would have intimidated Patton, but at this hour we were opening the place.

  Across the street, a grove of coco palms crowned the bluffs. Through the crosshatched trunks of the big trees, the sky was trapezoids of blood-red streaked with aqua, diluting to hammered copper near the horizon. As we sipped our drinks, it deepened to indigo. I watched the play of light and shadow on Linda’s face. She’d pinned her hair up. A few fine golden strands had come loose near the nape of her neck. They caught the last hints of daylight and glowed like electric filament.

  I said. “Isn’t this better than TCBing?”

  She nodded, rested her chin in her hand, and looked out at the sunset. Long graceful neck. Grace Kelly profile.

  The waiter came, lit the table candle, and recited the daily specials. The kitchen must have overstocked on rabbit, because he kept pushing some kind of hare stew provençale.

  She smiled up at him, said, “Sorry, but I just couldn’t eat Bugs,” and chose grilled white sea bass. I ordered steak in peppercorn sauce and a bottle of Beaujolais nouveau.

  We drank and didn’t say much. It took a long time to get served. When the food came she ate with the same gusto she’d shown the first time.

  First time. Our second dinner. Despite that, despite all those chats in her office, I knew little about her.

  I caught her eye and smiled. She smiled back but seemed preoccupied.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Not back at work, I hope.”

  “No, no, not at all. This is lovely.”

  “But there’s still something on your mind?”

  She ran a finger up the stem of her wineglass. “I guess I’m trying to figure out if this is a date.”

  “Do you want it to be?”

  She shook her finger at me. “Now you sound like a shrink. ”

  “Okay,” I said, sitting up straight and clearing my throat. “Back to take-charge guy. It’s a date, babe. Now be a good girl and eat your fish.”

  She saluted and put her hand down on the table. Long, graceful fingers that I covered with mine.

  She took a deep breath. Even in the dim light I could see her color deepen. “I’m really pretty full. How about we skip dessert?”

  Time had raced; it was nearly nine by the time we got back in the car. She closed her eyes, put her head back, and stretched her legs. Then more silence.

  I said, “How about a drive?” and when she nodded, headed north on Ocean and turned onto the ramp that leads down to Pacific Coast Highway. I slipped Pat Metheny into the tape deck and drove in the slow lane all the way to western Malibu, just past the Ventura County line. Mountains on one side, ocean on the other—past Decker Canyon, very little evidence of human disruption. I got to Point Mugu before beginning to feel drowsy. I looked over at Linda. The light from the dashboard was barely strong enough for me to make out her features. But I could see that her eyes were closed and she had a satisfied-child smile on her face.

  The car clock said it was ten-fifteen. The highway sign said we were nearly at Oxnard. I thought of the last time I’d driven this way. To Santa Barbara, with Robin. I turned the car around, ejected Metheny, fed Sonny Rollins into the deck, and headed back to L.A. listening to the magic sax turn “Just Once” into something transcendental.

  When I stopped at the light at Sunset Beach, Linda stirred and blinked.

  I said, “Good morning.”

  She sat up. “Good Lord! Did I fall asleep on you?”

  “Like the proverbial baby.”

  “How rude. I’m sorry.”

  “Nothing to be sorry for. Your serenity rubbed off on me.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Ten after eleven.”

  “Unbelievable—I just lost two hours.” She sat straighter and smoothed her hair. “I can’t believe I just conked out like this.”

  I patted her wrist. “No sweat. I’ll just expect total vivaciousness next time.”

  She gave a noncommittal laugh and said, “I guess you’d better take me back to get my car.”

  The light turned green. I got onto Sunset, reached the manicured magnolias of Ocean Heights just before midnight.

  A cold, thick fog had settled in. Esperanza Drive was silent and blanketed by a crushing darkness. Not a soul on the street; the diamond windows of the ranch houses were black as obsidian, the low-voltage glow of landscaping spotlights dulled to amber smudges. Only a few illuminated doorbell buttons managed to pierce the vapor, orange discs that followed us, a battalion of tiny cyclops eyes.

  My windshield clouded and I turned on the wipers. They scraped out a lazy four-four and I felt my eyelids droop.

  Linda said, “Never been here at this hour. It’s eerie—so... vacant.”

  I said, “L.A., but more so,” and drove slowly toward the school. As we neared the spot where she’d left her car, I saw something. Two more eyes. Red irises. Taillights. Another car, parked in the middle of the street.

  The fog had grown thicker; I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. I put the wipers on high, but the windshield kept beading with moisture and fogging up on the backbeat of the four-four. I reduced speed, rolled closer, saw movement through the haze—a manic blur of movement, trapped by my headlights. Then harsh music: dull percussion followed by a solo of breaking glass.

  “Hey,” said Linda, “what the—that’s my car!”

  More thumping and shattering. The crunch and scrape of metal against metal.

  I gunned the engine and sped forward. Movement. Clearer, but not clear. Human movement. The pad of footsteps over the swoop-swoop of the wipers. Then another engine revving. I opened my window and screamed, “What the hell’s going on!”

  Tires squealed and the taillights diminished to pinpoints before disappearing into the mist.

  I jammed the Seville into park and sat there, breathing hard. I could hear Linda’s respiration racing ahead of mine. She looked terrified but made a move to get out. I held her wrist and said, “Wait.”

  “Oh, Jesus Lord.”

  I turned off the wipers. We endured an evil minute, then another. When I was convinced we were alone, I got out of the car.

  Cold silent street. The fog had an ozone smell.

  Beads of glass littered the street, vitreous against the damp pavement, like melting hail.

  I looked up and down Esperanza. Down the row of ranch houses, still dark.

  The silence stretched and became absurd. Not a hint of movement, not a single window yellowing, or the merest creak of curiosity.

  Despite the racket, Ocean Heights slept soundly. Or pretended to.

  Linda got out of the Seville. We examined her Escort. The windshield of the little car had been punched out. So had the windows on the driver’s side. The hood had been caved in and was riddled with fissures that were raw metal around the edges. Bubbles of safety glass dusted the surface and pooled in the low spots.

  “Oh no,” she said, gripping my arm and pointing.

  Another type of assault: the once-white roof was a cyclone scrawl of red and black spray paint.

&nbs
p; Abstract art: a coiling, dripping portrait of hate.

  Abstract except for one clear bit of representation.

  Covering the driver’s door, sprayed and resprayed for emphasis, its diagonal cruelty unmistakable even in the fog, was a black swastika.

  13

  Her hands were shaking too hard to get the key in the lock, so I opened the door to the school. She managed to find the corridor light and flip it on, and we went to her office, where I phoned Milo. He answered, sounding groggy. When I told him what had happened, he said, “Wait right there.”

  He arrived half an hour later. Thirty silent minutes with my arm around Linda’s shoulders, feeling the rigidity of her body, then watching her pull away, pace, shuffle papers, fuss with her hair. When Milo walked in she composed herself, thanked him for coming, but seemed cold.

  Something about cops...

  If Milo noticed it, he didn’t let on. He questioned her with a gentleness I’d seen him use with child witnesses, then put away his note pad and said, “Sorry you had to go through this.”

  “So what else is new,” she said.

  He stood. “I’ll use your phone and get the print boys down here, but that will take some time. So why don’t the two of you go on home. I’ve got all the info I need.”

  She said, “No prints. Not another media circus.”

  Milo looked at me, then back at her. “Dr. Overstreet, we’re in hear-no-evil territory—if anyone across the street saw what happened, they won’t let on. And even if we manage to find an honest person, chances are they saw nothing worthwhile ’cause of the fog. So pulling prints from the car is really our only chance of getting anywhere.”

  “They were using crowbars or something like crowbars. What’s the chance of pulling any prints from the car?” she said.

  “Slim,” he admitted. “Unless they slipped and touched the car. But without prints, we’ve got nothing—might as well forget the whole thing.”

  “That’s what I want, Detective Sturgis. To forget it.”

  Milo scratched his nose. “You’re saying you don’t want to file charges?”

  I said, “Linda—”

  She said, “That’s exactly what I’m saying. The children have been through enough. All of us have. The last thing we need is another fright, more attention.”

  I said, “Linda, if there’s some danger, don’t you think the children and their parents should be aware of it?”

  “There’s no danger—this is just more of the same garbage we’ve had since the beginning. The sniping put us back in the spotlight and another cockroach crawled out. And there’ll be others—phoning, mailing. Until they find someone else to pick on. So what would be the point of advertising this? No one would be caught and more kids would be scared into dropping out. That’s precisely what they want.”

  Gutsy speech, but by the end of it she was talking in gulps, almost hyperventilating, and digging her nails into the arm of the couch so hard I heard fabric scrape.

  I looked at Milo.

  He said, “Did you keep any of the hate mail?”

  “Why?”

  “In the unlikely event we ever find the piece of shit who trashed your car, maybe we can match a print to one of the pieces of mail and add a federal charge to his grief. You’d be surprised how nasty those postal inspectors can get.”

  She said, “I told you I don’t want to go public.”

  Milo sighed. “I understand that, and I promise you there’ll be no official investigation. And that’s why I said ‘in the unlikely event’—‘near impossible’ would be more accurate. But let’s say the perp returns—emboldened by getting away with it. And let’s say someone catches him in the act. You’re not saying you’d want us to let him go, are you?”

  She stared at him, threw open a desk drawer, and yanked out a stack of envelopes bound with string.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting it at him. “My entire collection. I was going to donate it to the Smithsonian, but it’s all yours. Happy reading.”

  “Who else touched the contents besides you and your secretary?”

  “Just us. And Dr. Delaware.”

  Milo smiled. “I suppose we can rule him out.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “Got something to put it in?” he said.

  “Always happy to oblige, Detective.” She opened another drawer, found an interoffice mail envelope, and dropped the stack into it. Milo took it.

  I said, “What about some kind of protection, Milo? In-creased patrol.”

  Both of them turned to me, then exchanged knowing glances. Cop and cop’s kid. I felt like a new immigrant who didn’t know the language.

  He said, “I can have a patrol car drive by once each shift, Alex, but it’s unlikely to make a difference.”

  She told him, “Sorry for bringing you down here. If I’d thought it out rationally, I wouldn’t have bothered you.”

  “No bother,” he said. “If you change your mind or need to file a report for insurance, let me know. I can push some paper for you, maybe speed things up. Meantime, let’s get your car towed.”

  “If it still drives, I’ll take it home myself.”

  I said, “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why not?” she said. “The damage is probably all to the body. If it rolls, home it goes. I’ll call my insurance company tomorrow and have it towed from there. The district will pay for a rental—one advantage of being a civil servant.”

  “Linda, without a windshield you’ll freeze.”

  “Fresh air. I’ll survive.”

  She searched in her purse and pulled out her keys.

  I looked at Milo. His shrug said, Nolo contendere.

  The three of us left the office, Linda walking several paces ahead, no one talking.

  Outside, the street was still silent and seemed more dank, a sump for the haze. The Escort looked like a piece of junk sculpture. Linda got in through the passenger door. When she closed it, it made an unhealthy, rattling sound, and a few pieces of glass fell onto the street and tinkled like wind chimes.

  Milo and I stood by as she jammed the key into the ignition. The little car sputtered and belched and for a moment I thought there’d been mechanical damage. Then I remembered that it had sounded that way the first time I’d heard it.

  She kept trying. Milo said, “Gutsy lady.”

  I said, “You think this is the right way to handle it?”

  “She’s the victim. It’s her choice, Alex.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  He ran his hand over his face. “Matter of fact, she’s probably right. She knows the way things work, knows we’ll never catch the assholes. All she’d buy would be more cameras and print space.”

  The Escort started, then stalled and died.

  I said, “Okay. Sorry for calling you out for nothing.”

  “Forget it. I was restless anyway.”

  I recalled his grogginess over the phone but said nothing. He took out his keychain and began swinging it like a lasso. Looked at the swastika, then out at the row of darkened homes.

  “Lovely times we’re living in, Alex. National Brotherhood Week.”

  That reminded me of something. “How’d your meeting with Ferguson go?”

  “Nothing dramatic. Call me tomorrow and I’ll run it by you. Meanwhile, go and do your civic duty.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Make sure Dr. Blondie gets home in one piece.”

  He patted me on the shoulder and shambled to his car. Just as he drove away, the Escort’s engine caught and stuck. Linda fed it gas. I walked up to the shattered window.

  “I’ll follow you home, Linda.”

  “Thanks, but I’m okay, it’s really not necessary.” Her face was streaked with tears but she was forcing a tough look—almost comically grave. The hand on the steering wheel was taut and ghost-white. I touched it. She pumped the gas pedal several more times. The Escort made a noise like an old man clearing his throat.

  I
said, “You might have radiator damage, something that’s not obvious. The last thing we need is for you to get stranded somewhere.”

  She looked up at me. Lots of fine pale hair had come loose. Her mascara had run, creating sad-clown streaks.

  I touched her cheek. “Come on—what are friends for?”

  She looked at me again, started to say something, closed her eyes, and nodded.