“Someone broke into the house Thursday night.”
“Oh sure.” He slapped the end of the workbench that separated us. “Anything happens, just blame old Larry, the town delinquent.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you said you were in the house.”
“Yeah,” he said, very matter-of-fact about it, like wasn’t everybody walking into the house? “But that was a whole long time ago. And it was just that one time. I mean, I tried to, but the next time the key didn’t work.”
I nodded; it had been before Dad changed the lock. I asked him, “What were you looking for?”
A shoulder rose and fell. “Like I said, just to see what the house was like.”
“Why us?”
“That’s the thing I wanted to tell you about.” He looked around, moved a step closer to speak in a soft, confiding voice. “I sorta looked in a lot of houses.”
“Just to see what they were like?” I asked.
“Yeah. And what people were doing,” he said. “I saw a lot of things.”
“Private things,” I said, suddenly feeling cold.
He nodded, his old cockiness coming back. “What I said to Beto that day, it was the truth. I saw it for myself.”
“You called his mother a Saigon whore.”
He smirked, head bobbing up and down to affirm that I had hit on the answer. “She was. A great big whore.”
The door into the house opened quietly and Jean-Paul, barefoot, came down the two steps into the garage; he held a gun in his hand. To distract Larry from turning around and seeing him, and possibly running off again, I made a lot of noise pulling Dad’s stool out from under the workbench. I sat so that, to talk to me, his back was completely to the door where Jean-Paul stood.
“That’s a disgusting thing to say, Larry.”
“Okay, but what I saw her and the guy doing was pretty damn disgusting, too,” he said. “Old Bart would be at the store and Beto was at school and this guy would come over and, jeez, like you said, disgusting.”
“But not so disgusting that you turned away.”
“Boys will be boys,” he said, flashing his snaggletoothed grin.
“Shouldn’t you have been in school?”
“The thing is, I used to ditch a lot. Then they’d suspend me for ditching.” He sneered: “Assholes.”
“Who was the man?” I asked.
A phone rang inside the house, making Larry turn toward the sound. He spotted Jean-Paul.
“Maggie, ça va?” Jean-Paul asked without venturing further into the garage.
“We’re okay,” I said.
Larry turned back and wagged a scolding finger at me. “I said, just you.”
“Hey, Larry, you broke into my house late at night,” I snapped. “What did you expect? That Jean-Paul wouldn’t come out and check on me?”
He seemed to think that was reasonable, and did not question that Jean-Paul had brought a gun with him.
“Who was the man?” I asked again.
He shrugged. “We were never introduced, if you know what I mean.”
“But you saw him. Can you describe him?”
His gaze slid toward Jean-Paul. “Maybe I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
“Is there something that might help you remember?”
“Could be. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”
He headed toward the door. But he stopped with his hand around the doorknob and looked over his shoulder at me. “Do you remember what you said to me on that day?”
“I do. And I’m sorry that what I said hurt you so much.”
“The thing is,” he said, turning his face away from me. “What you said, it was true, too. I was pissed off at Beto, hell, I was pissed off at all of you guys and your perfect lives. I thought that if I told him what his mom really was, it would put the stupid little prick in his place.” He fell silent for a moment, sighed, before he said, “But you were right. Bringing him down wouldn’t make people like me.”
With that, he turned and left, shutting the door behind him.
After he was gone, I opened a drawer in the workbench where I had seen a package of steel hasp locks and a pair of padlocks. I handed them to Jean-Paul, took out the can of screws and the electric screwdriver, and together we installed the locks on the inside of both the garage doors to the backyard and to the side yard, the door Larry said he had been using the key to open. With that same key, Isabelle had been able to access my bedroom, until Dad put a deadbolt on the door into the house.
“I’ll call a locksmith in the morning,” I said.
“Probably wise.”
He picked up the gun he had been carrying when he came out to the garage.
“Where’d you find that?” I asked.
“I’ll show you.”
We went into Dad’s den and over to his desk. The desk I so carefully emptied.
“After you went downstairs, I began to think,” Jean-Paul said as he pulled out the bottom drawer, the same drawer where I had found the strongbox with the movies and the crime scene photo of Mrs. B. “Where would a man hide a gun so that his wife and child, and certainly the cleaning woman, would not happen upon it, even if they looked for it? Perhaps the underside of a drawer?”
He put his hand against the inside of the drawer and turned it over to show me the bottom. The wood was too pristine to have had something affixed there for a couple of decades.
“So, where did you find the gun?” I asked.
“Voilà.” He removed his hand and a wood panel fell out. Dad had made a false bottom, creating a fitted compartment for the gun and a box of ammo and a cleaning kit, and a top to hide them.
“I’ll be damned,” I said, imagining Dad at his garage workbench, carefully crafting a safe place for his contraband firearm. “I’m not surprised. If Dad could hide a mistress and their daughter from his wife for a couple of years, he would certainly figure out how to hide an itty-bitty gun.”
Jean-Paul picked up the Colt automatic and weighed it on his palm. “Not so small, my dear. This weapon was standard military issue at one time, excellent stopping power.”
“Max said it was unregistered. Do you think it’s traceable?”
He gave me a little French shrug and a moue while he considered. “Probably traceable from the manufacturer to first point of sale. But from there?” He turned the Colt over and looked at the serial number. “I’ll make some calls, yes?”
“Be careful with that thing,” I said. “Is it loaded?”
“It was, yes, but no longer.” He opened the top desk drawer and showed me the gun’s magazine and a box of.45 ACP shells. “The ammunition is very old, certainly unstable. Perhaps you might ask your Detective Halloran to have it taken away for disposal.”
I had qualms about doing that. “If I tell Kevin about the ammo, he’ll ask about the gun it belongs to. I may want to keep the Colt if it’s unregistered and untraceable. You never know when that might be handy to have.”
He reloaded the gun. “My dear, should I be afraid?”
“Not you,” I said. “It might be your sweet tuchis I’ll need to save.”
Chapter 13
“But it was a lovely idea,” I said, peeling a red rose petal off Jean-Paul’s cheek. “Incredibly romantic.”
“In theory, yes. There was such a large bucket of red roses, and what to do with them all, yes?” He got up to scoop crushed petals off the sheets and drop them into the trashcan he had brought in from the en suite bathroom. “But in application, a bit sticky.”
“I think I’ll dream about seaweed,” I said.
He laughed as he slid back between the sheets and wrapped me in his arms. “I shall leave rose petal-strewing to the movies in the future.”
“Maybe so,” I said, picking yet another petal off his bottom. “But it was still a lovely idea.”
He yawned, reached across me and turned off the bedside light.
The house was quiet, all doors securely bolted, windows locked, the loaded Colt in a drawer next to the bed. I nestled down against Jean-Paul and hoped for sleep, but I still buzzed with the events of the day. Every time I began to drift off, an image, a fragment of conversation, the sound of gunfire and shattered glass would seep through and set my mind racing again. I felt restless. If I had been alone and at my own home, I would have gone for a run in the canyon below my house. But that wasn’t something I would do in the middle of the night in a dark Berkeley neighborhood. I tried to lie still to let Jean-Paul sleep. I thought he had dropped off when he kissed the top of my head and spoke into the dark.