The pool was empty, the screening torn in a few places, the bright paint peeling and fading. It all had a look of plaintive gayety, like an abandoned amusement park. The effect was doubled when I remembered what had bought this hideaway paradise. Arista had said Boody was in television. Thus the armpits, nasal passages and stomach acids of America had financed this unoccupied splendor. In an L shaped building beyond the pool plantings were garages and servants’ quarters. There was one red jeep in residence. We made our comments in hushed tones.
I took a closer look at the rear of the main house. An inside hook on a pair of shutters lifted readily when I slid the knife blade in.
“Are you out of your damned mind?” Nora asked nervously.
“I’m just a delinquent at heart,” I said. The windows behind the open shutters were aluminum awning windows, horizontal, with the screen on the inside. I closed the shutters and wedged them shut with a piece of twig, and continued my prowl.
“Do you want to get in there? Why?”
“Because it’s next door to Garcia.”
“Ask a stupid question,” she said.
It finally turned out that the front door was the vulnerable place. The big brass fittings were more decorative than practical. The sturdy plastic of a gasoline credit card slid the latch out of the recess in the frame. I invited Nora in. She shrugged and came in.
Bright spots of light came through openings in the shutters. The big living room was persuasively vulgar, white rugs, white art-movie furniture, and some big oil portraits on the wall in kodachrome technique, of a jowly man looking imperious, a pretty dark-haired woman with a look of strain around her mouth; and two little girls in pink sitting on an upholstered bench with their arms around each other. The Clan Boody. There was a white concert grand piano, and as I passed it I ran a fingernail down the keys.
Nora started violently and said, “My God! Don’t do that.”
The basic plan of the house was pleasant. Big bedrooms, playrooms, studio, library, big kitchen and service area. It was moist and hot and still inside the house, with a smell of damp and mildew. The immediate procedure was to set up rapid access. She watched me rig the door at the side, a solid door opening onto the pool area from the bedroom wing. It was locked by an inside latch, and the aluminum screen door beyond it was latched. I unlocked them both. I found a piece of cord in the kitchen and tied the screen door shut. Anyone checking the house would find it firm. But if I wanted to come in in a hurry, all I had to do was yank hard enough to break the cord, then latch both doors behind me.
“I don’t understand you,” Nora whispered.
“The gopher acts like a very sassy and fearless beast, honey. But he is all coward. He spends a lot of time and labor preparing escape tunnels he hardly ever gets to use. But sometimes he needs one, and that makes him feel real sassy. Just settle down. You saw me try the lights and the water. If they were coming back in a hurry, they’d have them turned on, and the hotel would get the grounds in better shape and fill the pool and so on. Now let’s check a couple of things.”
I used my lighter to look at the cans in the storage pantry. “See, dear? Plenty of canned fruit juices. And stuff that doesn’t taste too bad cold-beans, beef stew, chili. This is an advance base, next to unfriendly territory. Maybe we never use it.”
She followed me to the library, staying very close to me, saying, “It just makes me so damned nervous, Trav.
“ When I sat at the desk and began to look through the papers in the middle drawer, she sat on the edge of a straight chair, turning her head sharply from side to side as she heard imaginary noises.
“Claude and Eloise Boody,” I said finally, “of Beverly Hills. Claude is Amity Productions. He is also Trans-Pacific Television Associates, and Clabo Studios, unless these are all obsolete letterheads.”
“Can we leave now? Please?”
We went back out the front door. It locked behind us. She was a dozen feet in the lead all the way to the driveway chain, and she kept that lead until we were a hundred feet down the road. She slowed down then, and gave a huge lifting sigh of relief.
“I don’t understand you, Trav.”
“Carlos Menterez y Cruzada has or had a taste for the Yankee celebrity, show biz variety. He partied it up here. Boody would be a pretty good procurement agent. He lived next door. I wanted the California address. If things peter out here, it’s another starting point.”
“But still…”
“The houses seem to have been done by the same architects. I wanted the feel of one of the houses, what to expect about the interior planning -materials, surfaces, lighting, changes of floor level. Garcia’s is bigger and it will sure as hell be furnished differently, but I know a lot more about it now.”
“But why should you…”
“Tonight I’m going to pay an informal call.”
She stopped and stared at me. “You can’t!”
“It’s the next step, honey. Over the wall, like Robin Hood.”
“No, Trav. Please. You’ve been so careful about everything and…”
“Care and preparation can take you just so far, Nora. And then you have to make a move. Then you have to joggle the wasp nest. I’ll be very very careful.”
Her eyes filled. “I couldn’t stand losing you too.”
“Not a chance of it. Never fear.”
I told her too early in the day. It gave her a bad day. She got very broody and upset. She toyed with her food. I knew what was happening to her. She was shifting to a new basis for her emotional survival. Maybe it was good, maybe it was bad. I couldn’t judge her. The steam was going out of her. She was identifying more closely with what we were becoming to each other. God knows it could not have been a substitute for Sam. But they set the mad ones to weaving baskets, and it seems to help. Maybe the baskets become important-when all you have is a basket.
I left her by the pool in the afternoon while I walked into town and made some random purchases here and there. I had become some kind of a minor celebrity. I could tell by the way the kids acted. They didn’t hustle me for coins. They followed me in a small and solemn herd, about twenty feet behind me.
At one corner two bravos were squatting on their heels. As I went by one of them spat across my bows. I stopped and stared at the pair of them, at two lazy smiles. One of them unsheathed a great ugly toadstabber of a knife and began cleaning his nails. I began to feel like the tortured hero of a thousand westerns, the fast gun, the one everybody wants to try their luck against.
On that almost deserted corner I had the feeling I was being watched by many more eyes than just the round ones of my pack of children. I remembered an old trick I had learned the hard way, from some marines. They had used combat knives. Unless I gave these characters something to think about, there was a chance they might keep challenging me, and get a little ugly.
I went smiling to the man with the knife and held out my hand and said, in my hideous Spanish, “Su cuchillo, por favor. Por un momentito.”
He hesitated and handed it over. It was just barely long enough. I stuck it into the side of the building, shed my shoes and socks, and then stood out in the dust with the knife, facing the pair of them. I held the very end of the haft in one fist, and the end of the blade in the other, edge up. Then I jumped over it like over a jump rope, forward and back. You have to be reasonably limber and agile, but there is a very simple trick to it.