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“Yes. Ms. Paquette?”
“Call me Linda.”
In the porch light, her eyes were Egyptian green.
She said, “Your mama must have had a hard nine months carrying all of you around.”
“I was smaller then.”
Stepping back from the door, she said, “Duck your head and come on in.”
He crossed the threshold, and after that nothing was ever the same for him.
Five (#u65e7b131-c2e7-55e0-bb92-b6c31e1b1967)
Golden honey poured wall to wall, a wood floor so lustrous and warm that the humble living room appeared spacious, quietly grand.
Built in the 1930s, the bungalow had either been meticulously maintained or restored. The small fireplace and flanking wall sconces were simple but elegant examples of Art Deco style.
The glossy white tongue-and-groove ceiling lowered over Tim, but not unpleasantly. The place felt cozy instead of claustrophobic.
Linda had a lot of books. With one exception, their spines were the only art in the room, an abstract tapestry of words and colors.
The exception was a six-by-four-foot image of a television with a blank gray screen.
“Modern art baffles me,” Tim said.
“That’s not art. I had it done at a photo shop. To remind me why I don’t own a TV.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Because life is too short.”
Tim gave the photo a chance, then said, “I don’t understand.”
“Eventually you will. A head as big as yours has to have some brains in it.”
He wasn’t sure if her manner indicated a breezy kind of charm or a flippancy bordering on rudeness.
Or she might be a little screwy. Lots of people were these days.
“Linda, the reason I’m here—”
“Come along. I’m working in the kitchen.” Leading him across the living room, she said over her shoulder, “Max assured me you’re not the type to stab me in the back and rape my corpse.”
“I ask him to vouch for me, and that’s what he tells you?”
As he followed her along a hallway, she said, “He told me you were a talented mason and an honest man. I had to squeeze the rest of it out of him. He really didn’t want to commit to an opinion about your possible homicidal and necrophilic tendencies.”
A car was parked in the kitchen.
The wall between the kitchen and the two-car garage had been removed. The wood floor had been extended throughout the garage, as had the glossy white tongue-and-groove ceiling.
Three precisely focused pin spots showcased a black 1939 Ford.
“Your kitchen is in the garage,” he said.
“No, no. My garage is in my kitchen.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Huge. I’m having coffee. You want some? Cream? Sugar?”
“Black, please. Why is your car in your kitchen?”
“I like to look at it while I’m eating. Isn’t it beautiful? The 1939 Ford coupe is the most beautiful car ever made.”
“I’m not going to argue for the Pinto.”
Pouring coffee into a mug, she said, “It’s not a classic. It’s a hot rod. Chopped, channeled, fully sparkled out with cool details.”
“You worked on it yourself?”
“Some. Mostly a guy up in Sacramento, he’s a genius at this.”
“Had to cost a bunch.”
She served the coffee. “Should I be saving for the future?”
“What future did you have in mind?”
“If I could answer that, maybe I’d open a savings account.”
His mug had a ceramic parrot for a handle, and bore the words BALBOA ISLAND. It looked old, like a souvenir from the 1930s.
Her mug was doubly a mug, in that it was also a ceramic head of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt biting on his famous cigarette holder.
She moved to the ’39 Ford. “This is what I live for.”
“You live for a car?”
“It’s a hope machine. Or a time machine that takes you back to an age when people found it easier to hope.”
On the floor, on a drip pan, stood a bottle of chrome polish and a few rags. The bumpers, grill, and trim glimmered like quicksilver.
She opened the driver’s door and, with her coffee, got behind the steering wheel. “Let’s go for a ride.”
“I really need to talk to you about something.”
“A virtual ride. Just a mind trip.”
When she pulled the door shut, Tim went around the coupe and got in through the passenger’s door.
Because of the chopped roof, headroom was inadequate for a tall man. Tim slid down in his seat, holding the parrot mug in both hands.
In that cramped interior, he still loomed over the woman as though she were an elf and he a troll.
Instead of mohair upholstery, common to the 1930s, he sat on black leather. Gauges gleamed in a checked-steel dashboard billet.
Beyond the windshield lay the kitchen. Surreal.
The keys were in the ignition, but Linda didn’t switch on the engine for this virtual ride. Maybe when her mug was empty, she would fire up the Ford and drive over to the coffee brewer near the oven.
She smiled at him. “Isn’t this nice?”
“It’s like being at a drive-in theater, watching a movie about a kitchen.”
“The drive-in theaters have been gone for years. Don’t you think that’s like tearing down the Colosseum in Rome to build a mall?”
“Maybe not entirely like.”
“Yeah, you’re right. There never was a drive-in theater where they fed Christians to lions. So what did you want to see me about?”
The coffee was excellent. He sipped it, blew on it, and sipped some more, wondering how best to explain his mission.
Crunching through dry eucalyptus leaves on the front walk, he had known how he would tell her. When he met her, however, she was different from anyone he expected. His planned approach seemed wrong.
He knew little about Linda Paquette, but he sensed that she did not need to have her hand held while receiving bad news, that in fact too much concern might strike her as condescension.
Opting for directness, he said, “Somebody wants you dead.”
She smiled again. “What’s the gag?”
“He’s paying twenty thousand to get it done.”
She remained puzzled. “Dead in what sense?”
“Dead in the sense of shot in the head, dead forever.”
Succinctly, he told her about the events at the tavern: first being mistaken for the killer, then being mistaken for the man hiring the killer, then discovering that the killer was a cop.
She listened open-mouthed at first, but her astonishment faded rapidly. Her green eyes clouded, as if his words stirred long-settled sediment in those previously limpid pools.
When Tim finished, the woman sat in silence, sipping coffee, staring through the windshield.
He waited, but finally grew uneasy. “You do believe me?”
“I’ve known a lot of liars. You don’t sound like any of them.”
The pin spots, in which the car gleamed but also darkled, did not much brighten the interior. Though her face was softly shadowed, her eyes found light and gave it back.
He said, “You don’t seem surprised by what I’ve told you.”
“No.”
“So … then you know who he is, the one who wants you dead?”
“Not a clue.”
“An ex-husband? A boyfriend?”
“I’ve never been married. No boyfriend at the moment, and I never did have a crazy one.”
“A dispute with someone at work?”
“I’m self-employed. I work at home.”
“What do you do?”
“I’ve been asking myself that a lot lately,” she said. “What did this guy look like, the one who gave you the money?”
The description didn’t electrify her. She shook her head.
Tim said, “He has a dog named Larry. He once went skydiving with the dog. He had a brother named Larry, died at sixteen.”
“A guy capable of naming his dog after his dead brother—I’d know who he was even if he’d never told me about Larry or Larry.”
This was not playing out in any way that Tim had imagined it might. “But the skydiver can’t be a stranger.”
“Why not?”
“Because he wants you dead.”
“People are killed by strangers all the time.”
“But nobody hires someone to kill a perfect stranger.” He fished the folded photograph from his shirt pocket. “Where did he get this?”
“It’s my driver’s-license picture.”
“So he’s someone with access to the DMV digital-photo files.”
She returned the photograph. Tim put it in his shirt pocket again before he realized that it belonged to her more than to him.
He said, “You don’t know anyone who’d want you dead—yet you aren’t surprised.”
“There are people who want everybody dead. When you get over being surprised about that, you have a high amazement threshold.”
Direct, intense, her green gaze seemed to fillet his serried thoughts and to fold them aside like layers of dissected tissue, yet somehow it was an inviting rather than a cold stare.
