Tribulations of the Shortcut Man Page 7

  “What do you mean?”

  “I guess what I mean is that I hope you have plenty of fire insurance.”

  “Fire?”

  “Well, uh, not in all cases.”

  The gate swung open, Puss gave me the thumbs-up.

  We drove up the circular driveway to the front of the house. A woman in a nurse’s hat with a green stripe was waiting at the front door.

  “I’m Eileen Klasky, RN.” She was mid-thirties, pretty in a hard-looking way, dark-headed. She looked at us suspiciously.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m Dave Hunter. And this”—I indicated Pussy, who had her hair tied back and carried a clipboard—“is Gas Technician Williams.”

  “I guess you want to see the water heaters.”

  “Yes, ma’am. There’re more than one?”

  Nurse Klasky was brusque. “This house has seven bathrooms.”

  “Probably two or three heaters, then. Maybe an auxiliary upstairs.” I ran my fingers through my hair. “We gonna scare anybody pokin’ around?”

  “Just the sick man upstairs.”

  Pussy immediately screwed up. “What’s wrong with him?”

  Klasky drew back. “Why would that be any of your business?”

  “Sorry,” said Puss.

  “Fine.” She looked at Puss astringently. “Can I show you to the basement, where the heaters are, or do you want to give the man upstairs a prostate massage?”

  “Sorry,” said Puss, again.

  “We’re just interested in the heaters, ma’am.” I looked sternly at Puss.

  “Then follow me.”

  The sick man upstairs. Lewis was sick and that was all there was to it. But the charade had to conclude in character.

  A staircase at the rear of the entryway led down. The basement was extensive and well finished. Finally we reached the utility room.

  Four huge water heaters were bolted to the wall. They shared space with a set of dining room chairs, some random pieces of furniture, a couple of birdcages, some floor lamps, and some saggy cardboard boxes.

  I examined the heaters, checked my clipboard, nodded. “Yup. These are the ones.” I looked at Puss. “You ready to take some numbers?”

  “Yes, I am.” She readied her clipboard. She was seldom as compliant in real life.

  I got down on one knee, started reading some numbers, whatever they meant. “G-c-3-4-654-PRL-18. Got that?”

  “Wait a second.”

  Wait a second? That meant she was thinking. I looked at her and she was looking at me. Something was up.

  She came over. “That number doesn’t sound right.” She pointed to some writing on her clipboard.

  I have to go upstairs and see.

  “That’s impossible.” I looked into her eyes. She pleaded silently.

  What to do?

  I punted. “Let me check the number one more time.” Again I bent down and read. “G-c-3-4-654-PRL-18. No, that’s PRL-19.”

  “That makes it right.”

  I decided to let her go up. Maria and Victor, the usual staff, who Puss had told me about, would take no surprise in her presence. “Go out to the truck,” I instructed. “See if you can find the replacement parts. We may have the whole subassembly on board.”

  That would get her a minute or two if I could distract the nurse.

  I have to go upstairs and see. I thoroughly crossed out Puss’s note.

  I turned to the nurse, proffered the clipboard. “Could you take a few numbers down, ma’am? We’ll be out of your hair that much quicker.”

  With a sigh of irritation she took the clipboard. “For Christ’s sake.”

  Pussy signaled that she was leaving. “I’m going to go upstairs to the truck, Dick.”

  “Fine. And you may as well check online. And hurry. We’re making the lady wait.”

  Pussy was gone in a flash.

  Klasky tipped her head to one side. “I thought you said your name was Dave.”

  It was until Pussy forgot her lines.

  “Dick, Dave, what’s the difference?” I shrugged, got down and looked for another number. I’d bluff my way through.

  “Your name is Dick-Dave?”

  Sweet Christ. Now I was a hayseed.

  “That’s my name, Dick-Dave. Call me whatever you want. Or either one.”

  Penelope Grafton, a.k.a. Pussy Grace, reached the entryway, listened. The house was quiet. Her heart was beating at hyperspeed. It was now or never. She turned and raced upstairs.

  The door of the master suite was open. She slowed and entered on tiptoe. The room, usually exceptionally neat, was helter-skelter. On the bed, under a haphazard mass of covers, a large form breathed heavily.

  She approached, pulled the covers back.

  Art. But, Jesus Christ. He was many days unshaven, and very pale. His breath came irregularly, there were dried liquids at the corners of his mouth. He was wearing filthy, wrinkled pajamas and smelled of urine. His breath was foul, medicinal.

  On his bedside table were a multitude of prescription bottles and random tablets of different sizes and colors. Art had never been sick.

  Art groaned, scaring her, and his eyes opened. They were unfocused, looked past her. He finally saw her, tried to sit up, talk.

  “Uhhgg. Prushy . . .”

  “Art! Are you alright?”

  He fell back into his pillow.

  “Art, what’s happened? Are you okay?”

  Art, with great effort, sat up. He saw his table of medicines, knocked them explosively to the floor. “All shfucked up, Prushy. Shelp me.”

  When would stupid Pussy Grace come back down here and rescue me from the bad theater I was stuck in? She’d done it again. And I’d let her do it. Shit. Meanwhile I lay on my back, neck twisted like a giraffe, with a flashlight, reading meaningless numbers to Nursie. “T-15-fg-431-plu-23-a. Got it?”

  “Got it, Dick-Dave.”

  Fucking Dick-Dave. I would kill Puss.

  “Wait a second,” said Nursie.

  “What?”

  “B-l-u or p-l-u?”

  “Uhhhh . . . p-l-u.” The flashlight was getting yellow and dim. I shook it.

  “I thought so. Thanks, Dick-Dave.”

  She thought so. Was she fucking with me?

  “It could have been c-l-u,” enunciated Nursie, carefully.

  “I see. But, as luck would have it, it’s p-l-u.”

  “What’s i-c?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You said ‘i-c,’ Dick-Dave.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You said, ‘i-c, it’s p-l-u.’”

  “Then it’s p-l-u.” Goddamnit.

  “I know that, Dick-Dave.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Let’s start over.”

  Fuck me with a spoon I hated Puss and Nursie and their whole accursed sex. I moved my head to reread the placard and something metal and sharpish jabbed into my head behind my ear. God-damnit.

  “Can you still see?”

  “Yes.” Of course I could see. If my flashlight hadn’t, that second, cut out. I banged it again and it came back. I started reading numbers, eyes bulging with rage, in the yellowish dark. I read slowly. Like you’d read to a moron. If a moron insisted on being read to.

  “T—15—fg—431—plu—23—a. Got it?”

  “Of course I got it, Dick-Dave.”

  “You sure?”

  “Sure I’m sure. It’s what I had last time.”

  Pussy had never really appreciated how big Art was. He was huge and he was heavy. She felt like a bird leading a hippopotamus by a string. Who was walking whom was the question.

  “I’m prishoner, Prushy. In a den of theiveths. They want my money.”

  He had one arm over her shoulder and she had an arm around his waist. He was unsteady on his feet. She wondered if she could keep him up.

  “Are you through screwing around with those heaters?”

  “Screwing around?”

  “Screwin
g around.”

  I nodded. “I guess. For the most part.”

  “Then let’s get a move on.” She handed me the clipboard filled with nonsense. “Where’s your brainless assistant?”

  I shrugged. That’s what I wanted to know: Where was my brainless assistant? “Still in the truck, I guess.” I’d have to screw around a little longer. “It’s time to purge the heaters,” I said.

  He was walking a little stronger. He was coming back. Her hand pushed into the small of his back. She encouraged him. “That’s it, hon. That’s it. All we gotta do is find a way to get you out of here.”

  But suddenly Art had stopped dead in his tracks. With his huge fists clenched, he stared upward, trembling violently. From his throat came a terrible shout of pure agony. She pushed against his back but there was no way she could keep him up. Slowly, like a massive tree, he toppled backward and smashed to the floor.

  I heard the scream and the thud and I knew things were severely fucked up in a brand-new way. Nursie ran for the stairs and I followed her up.

  The master suite was full of refuse and there in the middle of the floor lay a huge man on his back.

  “Goddamnit.” Nursie threw herself down, pushed an eye open, checked for a pulse at the neck.

  I looked down. Lewis looked very dead to me.

  Nursie started in on CPR. A breath. Five chest compressions. A breath. She looked up at me. “Call . . .” Then stopped.

  What else but 911? “I’ll call 911,” I said, pulling out my phone.

  But then Pussy stepped out of the shadows, a cane in her hands. “Don’t bother. He’s dead.”

  Nursie spun to Pussy’s voice. Pussy swung the cane like a bat, whacked Nursie across the side of the head. Nursie fell across Lewis, unconscious.

  I didn’t know whether to shit or wind my watch. I wanted to kill Puss. “What the FUCK? You idiot.”

  I dragged Nursie off Lewis. “Help her. She’d better be fucking alive.”

  I took Nursie’s place with Art. One breath. Five compressions.

  Puss examined Nursie. “This bitch is alright.”

  Panting, I raised myself from Lewis. “Maybe that bitch is his nurse, you moron.”

  I did another two minutes on Lewis. Nothing. The man was cashed out.

  Puss looked over. “He was dead when he hit the ground.”

  “Fuck you, doctor.”

  “He was dead, Dick, I could tell.”

  Nursie moaned. Which meant she was about to be a problem.

  “What are we going to do with her?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question.

  Before I could stop her, Puss whacked her with the cane again. Right across the forehead. Nursie went limp again.

  “God DAMN it.” I pointed to the corner of the room. “Go over there and sit. Don’t do anything more. Don’t move. Just sit.”

  I checked Nursie out. Still alive. Thank God. I dragged her over to Lewis’s bed, laid her there.

  “She’ll be alright,” said Puss.

  “Fuck. You. Just sit there.”

  I tried to think. What was I in the middle of, so far? Trespassing, home invasion, assault, manslaughter. And conspiracy.

  “I had him up and then he fell,” volunteered Puss.

  “But why did you have him up, doctor? If you don’t mind me asking.”

  “There was nothing wrong with him.”

  I pointed to the corpse.

  “Obviously. Nothing wrong with him.”

  “They were drugging him. He was a prisoner.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do. He told me. And I was a nurse.”

  “You? A nurse?”

  “Yes, butthead.” Then, an amendment. “Almost.”

  “A wet nurse.”

  “El Camino Community College.”

  I looked around the disaster site. Nursie stirred again. “We gotta get out of here. What did you touch?”

  “Everything,” said Puss.

  Gauging my luck, I half-expected the gate not to work. But it opened right up. I rolled down the hill, made a left at PCH. I heard no sirens, saw no flashing lights. I zapped the window down, breathed the ocean air.

  “I’m sorry, Dick. I’m really sorry.”

  There were no words in the English language that could adequately express my disappointment in myself. And all I knew was English.

  Puss persisted. “Dick, I’m sorry.”

  “Shut up.”

  As we approached Entrada Drive and Patrick’s Roadhouse, of Schwarzenegger fame, a yellow Mercedes took the corner, coming toward us on two wheels.

  “I’ve always hated those things,” editorialized Puss. “And the bitches who drive them.”

  I was still beyond words.

  “Don’t you hate them, too?”

  “Shut up, Puss. Just. Shut. Up.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Sisters

  Ellen Glidden was at Art Lewis’s house fourteen minutes later. “It’s me, idiot,” she snarled into the security box, “open up.” The gate rolled back.

  Upstairs, in the master suite, she looked down on dead Art Lewis. She turned to her sister. “You stupid goat. Ask you to do anything. All you had to do was fucking watch him. It was that simple. But no.”

  Ellen poked the toe of her pointed leather shoe into the corpse’s side. “Wake up, asshole.” She knelt down and pushed back an eyelid. No response. Shit. Disaster. Fucking Art Lewis. Beyond earthly concerns.

  She looked around the room. “Who else was here?”

  Eileen despised herself at that moment. Even more than she hated and feared her elder sister. When Ellen had called a week ago with a surefire way for her to make twenty-five thousand dollars, in cash, she should have hung up the phone. Instead she listened. And earlier this evening, watching Law & Order, she realized that keeping Mr. Lewis drugged up in his own home was a special kind of kidnapping.

  “I asked who else was here.”

  Eileen flared. “Goddamnit, Ellen. Who died and made you king? No one was here.”

  “I saw a ball cap in the entryway, Eileen. Art Lewis didn’t wear ball caps and it wasn’t there this morning.”

  Eileen folded. “The Gas Company came. They were making a safety check.”

  “So you just let them in.”

  “It was the Gas Company, Ellen.”

  “What did I tell you? No more calls, no entries.”

  “It was the Gas Company, Ellen. It would have raised suspicion not letting them in.”

  “You looked at their identification?”

  “Yes.”

  “Liar.”

  “They were here to check the water heaters. It was let them inspect”—she spread her hands suggesting the reasonableness of her actions—“or sign a waiver saying I refused the check. I didn’t think you’d want me signing anything.”

  Ellen stared at her sister. Supposedly from the same parents. An imbecile of the first water. “You didn’t give me thought one. Because you have no thoughts. You read the waiver?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Of course not. Where did they go?”

  “To the water heaters in the basement. They took numbers down.”

  “Both of them?”

  “One of them did go back to the truck.”

  “And you followed that person?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t know where they went.”

  “The guy stayed in the basement. I watched him like a hawk. The girl went back to the truck to—”

  “The girl?”

  “A woman. Mid-thirties, I’d say.”

  Eileen could never tolerate Ellen’s rage. Her earliest memories were of Ellen mad. Those burning eyes making her brain smoke. She could feel it in the center of her head as she sucked lies and falsehoods from the ether to placate the evil witch. “After the guy took down the numbers I took him back to the entryway. Then I heard a thud and I ran up here.”

  Eileen pointed to the corpse. “And he was right where
he is now.” She swallowed. “And then the girl came out of nowhere and hit me in the head.”

  “What?”

  “She hit me with a cane.”

  “That’s why there’s that lump on your forehead.”

  “Yes.”

  “So everyone was up here and saw the dead man?”

  “I guess so.”

  Ellen blew up. “You are too stupid to live. The next thing you’ll say is everyone was gone and then you called me.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  Ellen looked around the room, thought. She put another toe into Art’s side. Nothing. The big asshole was dead. “They couldn’t have been Gas Company employees.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course they weren’t, you goat. Gas Company employees don’t assault their customers with canes.” She looked at the egg over her sister’s left eye. “Put some ice on that thing.”

  The sisters straightened up the bedroom as best they could, cleaned all surfaces with 409. The drugs were put into a plastic bag to be disposed of. But Art was just too heavy to move. He must have weighed four hundred pounds. Asshole.

  “What do we do now?” whined Eileen.

  “I don’t know.” It depended on who Eileen’s visitors were. Then Ellen remembered the security shack. It wasn’t locked. She fiddled, could only find the front-door footage.

  “Are there cameras all over the house?”

  “Sixty of them. They’re everywhere. Catching everything. You blow the gas man or something?”

  “Don’t be disgusting,” said Eileen.

  Ellen got the front-door footage up on the monitor. The video looked over Eileen’s shoulder down on two figures, a man and a woman. Good sweet Christ. Relief filled her like cool water.

  “These are the two?”

  “Yes.”

  Ellen lit up a cigarette. “Well, luckily for you, I know that woman. That’s Art’s girlfriend. Her name is Pussy Grace.” A no-account pole dancer. She wouldn’t want to get involved. Wouldn’t call the police.

  “And who’s he?”

  “Don’t know him.” Yes, Pussy Grace meant amateur hour and that meant everything wasn’t ruined. Pussy was suspicious, that’s why she came snooping, but she didn’t have enough brain wattage to light a match. Ellen sucked in another draft of nicotine. Everything could still work out.