He let go of my hand and I got out of the limousine and walked across the street. Joe Pike and I went back to the hotel, called Karen Lloyd at her bank, and told her what Vito DeLuca had said. We checked out that afternoon.

  Forty-one

  October moved into November, and three weeks later, on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, I was on my deck grilling salmon steaks and Japanese eggplant for Cindy, the beauty supply distributor, and Joe Pike and another woman named Ellen Lang. Ellen Lang had been a client once, several years ago, and since then she and Joe Pike have seen each other, time to time. She had a deep tan, and when she laughed there were dimples high on her cheeks. Laughter came easier to her now than in that earlier time.

  Joe Pike and Cindy and Ellen Lang were inside, making salad and garlic bread and mint tea, when the phone rang. Someone inside answered it, and Ellen Lang came out and said, “There’s a call for you. It’s Peter Alan Nelsen. The director.”

  I said, “Wow. Maybe this is my big break.”

  She said, “Oh, you.”

  Ellen stayed with the salmon and I went inside and took it in the kitchen. On the counter next to the sink, Pike sliced the long French bread and put it on a tray while Cindy watched him. Cindy had soft auburn hair and expressive brown eyes. I liked watching her watch Pike’s precise moves.

  Peter said, “They’re coming out to visit.”

  “Karen and Toby?”

  “Yeah. He’s got a week off for Thanksgiving and I asked’m to come out.”

  “Great.” I already knew, because Karen had called and told me.

  “She doesn’t want him traveling alone, so she’s coming, too.”

  “Even better.”

  “She’s not coming by herself. She’s bringing some guy.” She had also told me that.

  “She’s got a life, Peter. That’s a good thing. Why don’t you get a date and the four of you can go out one night. Leave Toby with me.”

  “I know. I know.” He didn’t say anything for a little bit. “Listen, when they’re out, I’m gonna bring Toby to the set, take’m to Disneyland, that kind of thing. You think you could sorta be around some of the time? At first.”

  Pike finished cutting the garlic bread and Cindy took it outside. She wriggled her eyebrows as she passed and gave me a yum-yum smile. She smelled of daisies. Yum, all right. “Sure, Peter. Not the whole time. But if you need me around at first, sure.”

  “Hey, thanks. I really appreciate that. I really do.” He sounded relieved. “I’m out at the Malibu house. You wanna come out?”

  “I’ve got company.”

  “Another time, okay? You ever wanna come out, you don’t even have to call. Just come.”

  “Sure.” Elvis Cole, detective to the stars.

  I hung up and Pike said, “What’s up?”

  “Karen and Toby are coming out and he’s scared. Growing up is a scary time.”

  “He asks you a lot. Maybe he should try growing up without you.”

  “He calls me less now than he once did. He’ll call me less still. He’s getting there.”

  Pike nodded. “Yeah. I guess he is. Karen getting any chaff from the DeLucas?”

  “Vito’s been good at his word. All of the DeLuca accounts through the First Chelam Bank have been collapsed and the funds in the Barbados accounts have mysteriously vanished.”

  “So she’s free.”

  “Yes. She’s as free as you can be when you’ve got the memories she has, but, like Peter, she’s getting there, too.”

  Outside, Ellen Lang moved the fish to the side so it wouldn’t overcook and Cindy put the garlic bread in the center of the grill. Pike washed off a yellow pepper, cored it in the sink, then sliced it into thin rings. Each ring was uniform, no thicker or thinner than any other ring. When the pepper was cut, he added the rings to the large salad that had already been built and we took it out to the deck.

  Ellen Lang says that if you stand on my deck and close your eyes, with a breeze coming up the canyon to blow across your face, it’s easy to imagine that you’re flying free through the sky, over the city with Tinkerbell and Mark and Wendy, off to Never Land to find the lost boys.

  I haven’t told her, but I’ve always thought that, too.

  ROBERT CRAIS is the bestselling author of eleven suspense novels, including The Monkey’s Raincoat, Stalking the Angel, Lullaby Town, and Free Fall, all available from Bantam Books. He has written for such award-winning television shows as L.A. Law and Hill Street Blues, and he lives in Los Angeles.

  Visit his website at www.robertcrais.com.

  If you enjoyed Lullaby Town, you will want to read Free Fall, now available in paperback at your local bookseller.

  FREE

  FALL

  ROBERT CRAIS

  Here is a special preview of Free Fall.

  FREE FALL

  Robert Crais

  Jennifer Sheridan walked into my office as if she were Fay Wray and I was King Kong and a bunch of black guys in sagebrush tutus were going to tie her down so that I could have my way with her. It’s a look I’ve seen before, on men as well as women. “I’m a detective, Ms. Sheridan. I’m not going to hurt you. Perhaps I’ll even be polite.” I gave her my best Dudley Do-Right smile.

  She smiled back but she didn’t look any less uncomfortable. If Dudley Do-Right didn’t work, maybe the Groucho Marx nose?

  Jennifer Sheridan said, “Is what we say privileged, Mr. Cole?”

  “As in, attorney-client?”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head. “No. My records and my testimony can be subpoenaed and, under California law, I must provide them.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t like that.

  “But there is latitude. Sometimes I forget things.”

  “Oh.” She liked that better, but she still wasn’t convinced. We were standing in the doorway to my office, four stories above West Hollywood on Santa Monica Boulevard. I was holding the door, but Jennifer Sheridan couldn’t seem to make up her mind whether to come in or to leave. Across the hall you could hear laughter coming from the insurance office and one door down two very attractive Hispanic women came out of the beauty products distribution outlet. One of them had about nine cubic feet of teased hair and probably kept the distributor in business by buying hair spray. They went to the elevator. Jennifer Sheridan said, “This isn’t easy for me, Mr. Cole. I’m not sure I should be here and I don’t have much time. I’m on my lunch hour.”

  “We could talk over sandwiches, downstairs.” There was a turkey and Swiss on a French baguette waiting for me in the deli on the ground floor. I had been thinking about it for most of the morning and with each passing moment seemed to be thinking about it all the more.

  “Thank you, no. I’m engaged.”

  “That wasn’t a sexual proposition, Ms. Sheridan. It was a simple offer to share lunch and perhaps more efficiently use both our times.”

  “Oh.” Jennifer Sheridan turned as red as a beating heart. She was wearing a light-blue cotton skirt with a white blouse and a matching light-blue bolero jacket and low-heeled navy pumps. The clothes were neat and fit well, and the cuts were stylish but not expensive. She would have to shop and she would have to look for bargains, but she had found them. I liked that. She carried a black imitation leather purse the size of a Buick. She held it with both hands.

  “Also, Ms. Sheridan, I’m getting tired of holding the door.”

  Jennifer Sheridan made up her mind and stepped past me into the office. She walked quickly and went to one of the two director’s chairs across from my desk. There’s a couch, but she didn’t even consider it. Jennifer Sheridan had sounded young on the phone, but in person she looked younger, with a fresh-scrubbed face and clear healthy skin and dark auburn hair. Pretty. The kind of happy, innocent pretty they call girl-next-door. The kind of pretty that dimples when it smiles and wins your heart, and deserves to. That kind of pretty. The kind that starts deep inside and doesn’t stop on the way out.

  I made her for twenty-three but she looked eighteen and she’d still be carded in bars when she was thirty. I wondered if I looked old to her. Nah. Thirty-eight isn’t old.

  I closed the door, went to my desk, sat, and smiled at her. “What time do you have to be back?”

  “One. I’ll have to leave here by twelve forty-five.”

  “All right. What do you do?”

  “I’m a secretary for the law firm of Watkins, Okum & Beale. We’re in Beverly Hills.”

  “Is that how you found me?” I work for Marty Beale, time to time. A little skip tracing, a little missing persons. That kind of thing.

  “I peeked in Mr. Beale’s reference file. Mr. Beale thinks highly of you.”

  “You don’t say.”

  “They don’t know that I’m here and I would appreciate it if you didn’t say anything …”

  “Sure.”

  We smiled at each other some more and sat. The people who come to me are sometimes talkative, chattering nervously without conveying information, or sometimes reserved, sitting quietly until they realize that they’ll have to say something if they want me to help them. The talkers, you have to let run themselves out. The quiet ones, you have to motivate. Not easy to do when your stomach is growling. I took the Groucho Marx nose out of my desk, put it on, and looked at her. “Guess who?”

  She blushed and said, “I don’t really know how to begin, Mr. Cole.” The nose gets them every time.

  “On the phone you said something about your boyfriend.”

  “My fiancé. I think that he’s mixed up in some kind of criminal thing and I’m sure that it’s dangerous and I’m scared.” Her eyes filled when she said it and she clutched the purse to her breasts. It was big enough to hide behind.

  “Okay. What kind of crime are we talking here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is he stealing cars?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Is he embezzling?”

  “No. It wouldn’t be that.”

  “How about fraud?”

  She shook her head. “That couldn’t be it.”

  “We’re running out of choices, Ms. Sheridan.”

  She nodded and glanced into the big purse as if there were something inside it that she was hoping she wouldn’t have to show me, as if she had come here thinking I would just sort of know about her problem and be able to solve it. Maybe Marty Beale’s file said that I was so good I must be psychic.

  I said, “Perhaps if you told me about your fiancé.”

  She held the purse tighter. “It’s so hard.”

  “I know it’s hard, Ms. Sheridan, but if you don’t tell me about him, I can’t help you. Do you see that?”

  She nodded, but she still didn’t say anything.

  I took out a yellow legal pad, a black SenseMatic pencil, and made as if I were poised to copy the rush of information she was about to provide.

  She shifted her feet beneath the chair.

  I made a couple of practice marks on the page. Subliminal prompting. “Okay. I’m ready. Fire away.”

  She swallowed.

  “Anytime.”

  She stared at the floor.

  I sighed, then put the pad on the desk and the pencil on the pad. I put my fingertips together and looked at Jennifer Sheridan through the steeple, and then I looked at the Pinocchio clock that I’ve got on my wall. It has eyes that swing from side to side as it tocks, and it’s always smiling. I like it that it’s always smiling. It was twelve twenty-two, and if I could get down to the deli fast enough, the turkey would still be moist and the rye would still be edible. Sometimes the quiet ones are so quiet that they tell you nothing and finally leave, keeping their problems to themselves. It works like that sometimes.

  I stood up. “Maybe you should go to the police, Ms. Sheridan. If your fiancé is in danger, it is better to get in trouble with the police than it is to get hurt or killed.”

  She clutched the purse even tighter, shook her head, and gave a miserable “I can’t do that.”

  “I spread my hands. Twelve twenty-three.

  She looked frightened. “My fiancé is the police.”

  “Oh.” Now it was my turn. I sat down.

  “You won’t tell, will you?”

  “So far,” I said, “I don’t know anything to tell.”

  Jennifer Sheridan opened the large purse and took out a photo album that was so thick that it must’ve weighed three pounds. She opened the album and turned it so that I could see a 3 × 5 color snapshot of herself and a tall good-looking kid in a black LAPD summer-weight uniform leaning against a squad car. They were smiling. “His name is Mark Thurman. He doesn’t work uniform anymore. Last year he got chosen for a plainclothes REACT position at the Seventy-seventh Division in South Central Los Angeles. He was one of the youngest men chosen. He was very proud of that.” She seemed proud of it, too. “Everything was fine for the first few months, but then he seemed to change.”

  “Change.” Like the Pod People.

  She nodded, encouraged by my insightful response. “It happened almost overnight. He became anxious and scared and real secretive. We never kept secrets from each other and now there are things that he won’t talk about with me.” Pod People, all right.

  I looked closer at the picture. Thurman had long forearms and a ropy neck and a country boy’s smile. He must’ve been fourteen inches taller than Jennifer Sheridan. I said, “I know a lot of police officers, Ms. Sheridan. Some of them are even my friends. I can tell you that it can be a hard job with unusual hours. You see too much of what’s wrong with people and you don’t want to go home and talk about it. It’s nothing to talk about with people you love.”

  She shook her head, telling me that I didn’t get it. “It isn’t just him not talking about the job. He was in uniform for three years and I know to expect that. It’s the way he acts. We used to talk about getting married, and having children, but we don’t anymore. I ask him what’s wrong, he says nothing. I say tell me about your day, he says that there’s nothing to say. Mark was never like that before. He’s become very irritable and snappish.”

  “Irritable.”

  She nodded. “That’s right.”

  “He’s irritable, and that’s why you think he’s involved in crime?”

  She gave me an impatient, “Well, it isn’t just that.”

  “Okay. Have you seen your fiancé perform a criminal act, or heard him speak of it, or seen the results of it?”

  “No.”

  “Has he exhibited signs of an income other than his police salary?”

  “No.”

  I spread my hands. “Sounds like you think he’s up to something because he’s irritable.”

  She gave me more of the impatience. “You don’t understand. Mark and I have known each other since the seventh grade. We fell in love in the ninth grade. That’s how long we’ve been going together. I love him and he loves me and I know him better than anyone else in all the world.” She opened the album so that I could see and flipped through the pages. She would find a page, and point, and I would nod. I don’t know how old they were in the first photograph, but they looked like babies. Here we are holding hands. Here we are laughing. Jennifer Sheridan’s breasts had only just begun to bud. Here’s Mark playing football. Here’s Jennifer presiding as student council vice-president. Jennifer Sheridan turned the pages and pointed and it was like watching a newsreel of their lives. Here we are at the homecoming game. Here we are at the prom. They grew and they matured, and they were always together. See us at the graduation? Maybe she did know him better than anyone else in the world. “I know who he is and what he likes and how he feels about everything that he feels anything about. I know him and that’s how I know that he is in trouble and he needs my help.”

  “All right. Do you have any clues?”

  She frowned at me. “What do you mean?”

  “Clues. An overheard snatch of conversation. A sub-rosa glimpse of a secret bank account. Clues. Something that I can use in ascertaining the nature of this crime.” I hadn’t used ascertaining in three or four weeks.

  She said, “Are you making fun of me?”

  I was getting one of those headaches that you get when your blood sugar starts to drop. She thought that she knew, but then they always think that they know. I looked at the ceiling. “No, I’m trying to make you consider what you want and why you want it, Ms. Sheridan. You claim that Mark Thurman is involved in criminal activity, but you have no direction in which to point me. That means that you’re asking me to surveil an active-duty police officer who may or may not be involved in illicit activities as you so suspect. Police officers are paranoid by nature and they move around a lot. This will be expensive.”

  She looked uncertain. “How expensive?”

  “Two thousand dollars. In advance.”

  You could see her swallow. “Do you take Visa?”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  She swallowed a second time. “That seems an awful lot.”

  I spread my hands.

  She closed the album and put it back in the huge purse and took out a red doeskin wallet. She looked in the wallet and got a faraway look like she was working with numbers. Then she pulled out two twenties and put them on my desk. “I can pay you forty dollars now, and forty dollars per month for forty-nine months.”

  I said, “Jesus Christ, Ms. Sheridan.”

  She clenched her jaw and brought out another ten.

  “All right. Fifty dollars.”

  I raised my hands, got up, and went to the glass doors that lead out to the little balcony. The doors that came with the office were aluminum sliders, but a couple of years ago I had them changed to a nice set of double-glazed French with brass handles. I opened the doors, set them so that the breeze wouldn’t blow them closed, and then I looked out. Four stories below, two guys were sitting across the street in a tan unmarked sedan. A tall guy with shaggy, thick-cut hair was sitting behind the steering wheel and a shorter guy with a ragged face was slouched in the passenger’s side. The tall guy had long forearms and a ropy neck and looked a lot like Mark Thurman. Son-of-a-gun. I turned away from the doors and looked at Jennifer Sheridan. Nope. She didn’t know that they were out there. “Mark work today?”

 

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