Good Morning, Killer - April Smith [57]
“Are the fifties coming back?”
Alarmed: “What do you mean by the fifties?” He lowered the blue aviators, peering closely at the prints. “This is the hottest thing. The Internet,” he whispered. “Hit the jackpot with this lot.”
My pits were damp. I wanted to flee.
“Hugh,” I said, and his big head jerked. “You’ve got mail.”
I left the money in an interoffice envelope.
It was odd to be on the other side of deception—I had always been the snoop, after all. But it turned out I was good at it, and in this new world of upside-down loyalties and reversed color fields, I moved with remarkable confidence, able to have several conversations with Andrew that smacked of normalcy. It is different when you know what you want. You behave like a phantom, clinging to walls and molding into corners to hear what you need to hear, coax what you have to coax. Unknown to him, our next few phone calls took on a subtle but interrogatory tone. I fairly purred with newfound interest in his preferences and found out things:
He wasn’t at all sure about his birthday; he might go up to see his sister in the Bay Area. The Harley would need a new muffler. Someone he had gone to high school with just died of a heart attack. He was swamped with work. Willie John Black could not be located, which was frustrating because we were soon to get a military ID of Richard Brennan. Ross Meyer-Murphy was calling Andrew every day, as he was calling me, demanding that we “get the guy.” The department had busted Laurel West Academy wide open with an expanding drug investigation that would hit the papers any day. Andrew wasn’t even getting to the gym. The most he could manage was a drink after work at the Boatyard or breakfast at Coffee Craze in the Marina, where he knew the beach ’n’ biker regulars. That’s right near me, could we meet there? I asked, guessing the answer. Well, he didn’t really get around that often.
The address on Sylvia Oberbeck’s driver’s license was a white stucco sixties apartment building in Mar Vista with a wire sculpture of three fish and ocean waves over the front entrance. I would take the G-ride because the Barracuda would have stood out in the residential neighborhood. Still, Andrew had a sixth sense on him, which I had to take into account, so instead of parking on the street I would pull into a driveway behind somebody’s car already tucked in for the night and watch the apartment through the rearview mirror.
Sylvia Oberbeck’s balcony was the one crowded with Japanese lanterns and discarded dining room chairs, an old TV. She lived alone (no other names on the mailbox). I once observed an athletic woman arriving on a mountain bike, which she hefted onto her shoulder and carried inside. She then emerged with Officer Oberbeck, and they drove off in her Mazda. This created a short-lived lesbian fantasy.
I would stay only briefly, not vibrating with tension like the rookie on stakeout I had once been, but a lazy predator on nature’s time. I was patient, collecting information. I wanted to be immaculately prepared—get it done, if it had to be done, with one swift blow.
Sunday morning I cruised by Coffee Craze and saw them together. They were sitting at a table sharing the newspaper—she in a visor with her hair in a ponytail, he wearing shades, a warm-up jacket and sweats. He sat hunched over his food, the way he does, concentrating on sawing something on his plate, glancing at a section folded back on the table. She lay back, inside the open tent of the paper, hefty legs in black exercise tights, one foot in a dirty old running shoe up on a chair.
Nothing even barely sexy was going on, and after a few nights of unremarkable surveillance, I was beginning to feel relieved. In fact,