He remembered that the back door had been small and solid with heavy dead bolts, and the windows had been big, with double panes for strength. As he stepped around the back, he could see that some remodeling had been done since he had last seen the house. The back entrance was now through a pair of French doors with a simple bolt that turned by hand. He approved of the concrete patio that had been added and, even more, the low reinforced-concrete wall with an irregular row of boulders in front of it to break up any big waves that might come all the way up here in an extremely high tide.
He looked around the patio for a few seconds, but found that the owners had not left anything he could use, so he kept walking to the place where he remembered the gas meter was. There he found a wrench that was designed for turning off the gas in an emergency. He took it to the French door and swung it once into the small pane of glass nearest to the bolt. He reached in and opened the door, stepped inside, then crossed the living room to the front door, undid the bolt, opened it, and beckoned to Diane.
She was still sitting in the driver’s seat looking uncomfortable. She shook her head and stayed there. Mallon left the front door open and walked to her side of the car. “Come on in,” he said. “We’ll be safe and comfortable here until we can get things straightened out.”
She glared at him. “What are you talking about? You just broke a window to get in. I heard you.”
He shrugged. “The house belongs to a friend of mine. He won’t mind. I sold it to him.” She stared straight ahead, the same resentful expression on her face. “Diane, get out of the damned car.” He pulled her door open and waited.
She was looking up at him now, and he could see she was still reluctant, but she slowly and deliberately swung her legs out, leaned forward, and stood up. She had her arms wrapped around herself with her purse dangling from one hand and her keys in the other as she walked to the front door and into the house.
She turned on the switch by the door so the overhead light went on, stepped to the center of the living room, and looked around her. There were a few movers’ cardboard boxes collapsed on one side of the expanse of wall-to-wall carpet, and a few partial rolls of packing tape beside them. “There’s no furniture. Is your friend Japanese?”
“He’s not living here, he’s putting the house up for sale again. That’s why I know he wouldn’t care about the glass.”
She set her purse on the floor, tossed her keys into it, and looked around. “If you owned the place once, you must remember where the bathrooms are. Which way?” She watched Mallon point, then walked to the door, pushed it open, switched on the light, and closed the door.
Mallon immediately knelt to reach into her purse. He found her cell phone, but his hand had brushed a second object that interested him. He reached inside again, grasped it, and brought it out.
The gun was surprisingly small. It barely filled his hand. He slipped the gun and the telephone into the two inner pockets of his jacket, stood, and looked around him, trying to think clearly. He heard the toilet flush. He switched off the overhead light, stepped silently into the dining area, opened the back door, went outside, and watched through the windows.
She came out and looked around her. “Robert?” She stepped toward the kitchen and then to the hallway and looked around some more, then quickly snatched up her purse and slipped into the bathroom again. After a few seconds, she emerged and set her purse exactly where it had been. She stepped back and looked at it, adjusted its tilt a bit, and sat down a few feet from it, her back against the wall.
Mallon returned and shut the door, then went to the pile of movers’ boxes and tape. He used his pocketknife to cut a square of cardboard off one of the boxes and then taped it over the broken glass.
“Robert,” said Diane. “Why are we here?”
He turned and looked at her in the dim light from the bathroom. “I’m not entirely certain,” he answered. “We need to talk a bit before either of us does anything.”
“All right.” She folded her arms and waited. “So?”
He took a deep breath and released it slowly. He had been dreading this, but he reflected that it had already begun: he had taken her gun and her phone, and she knew it. “How did those two men know that you and I were going to meet at that house in Malibu?”
She looked shocked. “Are you sure?” she asked. “What makes you think they knew it?”
“They arrived after I did. They might not have known I was already there, but they certainly knew I would be. I think that’s why one guy came ahead alone. They wanted to see whether I had arrived.”
She eyed him skeptically. “How could they possibly have known?”
“How could they possibly have gone to a particular block on a narrow, dark street in Malibu to find me if they didn’t?”
In the light from the bathroom doorway, he could see her eyes. She had been rigid and tense, but now she was beginning to be frightened. “You’re scaring me. Do you think they tapped our phone call? That they heard what we were planning, and then came to wait for us?”
He shook his head slowly, never taking his eyes off hers. “We never said aloud where we were going to meet, remember? You said it was the place we once looked at together.”
“Did they follow you?”
“No chance,” he said. “I took a taxi to the edge of Malibu. I went down to the beach for a time. Then I went back up on the road and walked there that way after it was dark.”
“Then maybe they followed me,” she said. “Oh, Robert, I’m sorry. I never saw them.”
“You got there after they did.”
She said, “This time, yes. But I drove down there earlier. I didn’t want to sit around in a hotel waiting and then run into traffic and be late, so I left early. I drove through once as soon as I got to Malibu, just to be sure I remembered which house it was. Then I went to a movie.”
“Why didn’t they follow you to the movie, and stick with you? It’s a great place to meet someone.”
Diane shook her head, her body rocking impatiently. “How do I know? I don’t even know if they did follow me. They didn’t find me, did they? They found you.”
All the time while Diane was talking he watched her. He could actually see her in the act of thinking: grasping at alternative explanations, but rejecting this one as too transparently foolish, that one as incriminating. “No matter what they saw,” Mallon pointed out, “they couldn’t have known that the time for them to show up was ten.”
She shrugged. “Then they did tap the phone call.”
“No,” said Mallon. “They didn’t. You told them.”
“No.” Diane began to move on the carpet, pushing herself slowly to get farther away from him. “No, I didn’t. I would never do that. I don’t even know who they are, and I’m your friend. I work for you. We’ve known each other for eight or nine years. Why would I want to help somebody kill you?”
Some instinct or memory or warning came into Diane’s mind, and she stopped moving away. She seemed to have difficulty preparing herself. “There’s no reason at all. We can’t let ourselves get paranoid and turn on each other,” she said, and she began to move a bit closer.
Mallon could see what she was thinking, as though it were printed on her forehead. She knew he was armed. She did not want to be ten or twelve feet away from him, close enough for him to be sure of hitting her if he fired, too far away for her to do anything to stop him. She was smiling with a sincere, concerned look in her eyes as she moved closer. Without any shade of change in her expression, and without a change in the direction of her movement, she sprang.