“Like I said,” he said, his tone clicking ever so slightly from solicitous to demanding, “we’ll make this easy on everyone. Meredith and Matt really want this to happen. I’m not going to tell them it can’t. I’ll have a crew over to your place in thirty minutes. Just tell me where.”
“I could, Brett. But the problem is, I’m not there. I’d love to help you, Meredith, and Matt out, but I’m working on a story for tomorrow’s Record. I’ve got my own job to do, Brett. As a matter of fact, I’ve got to run and do it now. Thanks for your kind offer.”
I heard him whining into the phone as I hung up.
Not ten seconds later, the phone chimed again.
“Yeah, Flynn here.”
“Jack, Regis Philbin here…”
Seriously, it was Regis Philbin. I love the man, I really do, but now was not the time to profess it. I write a story destined to rock my native Boston right to its parochial core, and this is how it begins to unwind, with a bunch of TV people wanting to piggyback on what they don’t have. And I thought it was newspapers that were in trouble. Well, okay, maybe we are as well, but at least there’s some honor to it.
As soon as I extricated myself — politely so — from that offer, I turned my phone off, rose from bed, and gazed out the window at the flashing neon up and down the Vegas strip — Paris to my left, New York — New York and the Bellagio across the street, the outdated Bally’s to my right. I wondered if my gamble would pay off today, not just for me but for women I didn’t yet know, women who were marked to die. Which is when it hit me. Most stories, truth be told, were little more than an exercise in this grand and illustrious business of reporting. If you get it, terrific, you make a splash, maybe cause some humiliation, perhaps even a resignation. Believe me, been there, done that, with mayors and governors and even a president. But this one, this one was different. People’s lives were on the line, people I didn’t know. A killer might have been playing games with these notes and driver’s licenses and all that, but it wasn’t a game at all. I was in the middle of it, but felt like a mere conduit, working on behalf of people I would probably never know.
I did know this, though: I needed a good hand, I needed it fast, or more people, myself possibly included, were destined to die.
15
At about nine o’clock, I slowly drove down Rodeo Road, a street, I’m fairly certain, that was pronounced like the sporting event with the cowboys on the bucking broncos, and not the more affected shopping boulevard that runs through the heart of Beverly Hills. I once quite literally bumped into Angelina Jolie on that boulevard, but that’s not really the point here. I’d bet Mongillo’s lunch money that I wasn’t going to run into her today.
Still, the houses surprised me for their size, which is to say they were large, as well as for their condition, which was well kept. These were nice homes painted in subtle, sophisticated colors with wide, irrigated lawns and freshly trimmed fauna. All very un — Las Vegas — although what did I expect, giant lighted flamingos in residential developments? Some of the houses had big bay windows, others had triple-car garages. It appeared very quiet, this neighborhood, meaning there weren’t kids running around the streets playing kick the can, but maybe that’s because kids don’t play that anymore.
Anyway, 284 Rodeo Road was a gray center-entrance house with two levels and a brick driveway. More important, it was also where Bob Walters had come to live after retiring from the Boston Police Department, which gets back to the point about me being surprised. This didn’t look like the kind of street where old men on a public-service pension could afford to retire, but maybe he bought at just the right time, as it was being built, or maybe he had family money on one side or the other. People and money, I’ve learned in life, will always surprise you in ways good and bad.
I glided past the house to get a sense of what I was dealing with, as well as to stall for a little more time, and a block or two down pulled a U-turn and circled back. The garage doors were closed, as was the center door. The windows were all pulled shut, some of them darkened by drawn shades or curtains. The sprinklers were not on, but then again, they weren’t on any other lawns, either. Maybe that whole thing about not watering the grass while the sun beats down on it is true. But how would I know? I live in a downtown condominium.
All of this is to say that it didn’t look like there was anyone home, or if there was, it didn’t appear that they had jumped out of bed and happily embraced the new day, as I had nearly six hours earlier. I knew Walters’s phone number and could call, but why would I do that after flying all the way across the country to knock on his door? If he wasn’t home, I wouldn’t leave a note, because the element of surprise was an advantage I wasn’t ready to cede. No, I’d end up staking out his place for pretty much the entire day if I had to. The big problem would come if he and his wife were away on vacation, but they already lived in Vegas — where the hell would they go?
I pulled up to the curb next to the neat sidewalk and parked. “Hello, Detective, Jack Flynn, it’s an honor to meet you. I’ve come a long way to ask you a few questions and am hoping you can be of help.”
That was me, practicing. I don’t usually do that, but I was uncharacteristically nervous over this encounter, if they were home to have one. I needed to get this right.
A couple of more sessions like that, and then I opened the door, pulled myself out of the rental car, and walked up to the house, carrying just a blank legal pad in my hands. The day, by the way, was nothing shy of brilliant, with a big sun floating in the shallow blue sky and temperatures that felt like the low seventies, cooled with just a whisper of a desert breeze. Beats the hell out of a Florida retirement, that’s for sure.
I rang the doorbell but didn’t hear the chiming sound inside, so I wasn’t surprised that it didn’t get any sort of response. I stood for several long seconds waiting, then opened the screen door and knocked.
Nothing.
I knocked again. Still nothing. No dogs barking, cats meowing, home owners threatening me to get off their property. Just empty, dead air, sonorously punctuated by a few birds chirping from a distant tree.
I knocked a final time, to the same lack of response, so I shut the screen door and walked back to my car. I didn’t like the feel of this, but couldn’t figure out why.
I fidgeted with my cell phone, wondering if I should call Walters’s number to make sure he wasn’t home. He was probably running errands with his wife, or at a doctor’s appointment. My worst case, he was on that vacation I feared, maybe off visiting a grandchild back in Massachusetts. We could have passed each other at the airport here or in Boston, or maybe our planes roared by each other thirty-three thousand feet in the sky. If so, at least I got the frequent-flier miles out of the trip.
Then something occurred to me: Maybe he was inside, dead. Maybe whoever had been trying to kill me killed him. It wasn’t necessarily a rational thought, but these weren’t necessarily rational times. People kept indiscriminately dying, or, as in my case, nearly dying, and there was no logical reason to think that pattern was about to stop or change.
I started to punch out his phone number, urgently now, when a red van pulled up to the curb behind my car, stopping abruptly a few feet from my back bumper. For some reason, it made me think of how I had declined the insurance at the car rental counter, because I’m told that’s what you’re always supposed to do. Anyway, the driver’s-side door flung open and a twentysomething kid, a guy, in loose jeans and a T-shirt, trotted up to the front door holding a small brown paper bag. He opened the screen door and left the small bag in the gap between the doors. Two seconds later, he was gone.