Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [16]
“You scared?”
“Course I’m scared, you nut. Let’s go.”
Jack was looking at the board of keys. “Let’s take one of their goddam cars and race hell out of it.”
They took the keys to a 1946 Cadillac, found the car, and drove it off the lot, smashing through the thin guard chain across the driveway, hearing the posts holding the chain splinter and crunch. They drove up Burnside, Jack behind the wheel. It never entered his mind that he had just committed grand theft, among other major and minor crimes. All he knew was that at last he was behind the wheel of a fine automobile, there was plenty of gas in the tank, and the evening was ahead of them. He did not think about money again for almost an hour.
After taking the Cadillac out on the highway and opening it up a few times, Jack and Denny came back to Portland, and for a while drove through the expensive curved streets of Council Crest. Driving the big, powerful car at top speeds had been terribly exciting, and now they were calming down, not talking, just looking out the windows at the rich people’s houses. The plan was to abandon the car up here and walk back down to the downtown section.
“Hey, I been in that house,” Denny said, pointing. Jack pulled the car over, and peered through the gloom. The house Denny meant was back behind a hedge and trees, and the second story, which they could see from where they were, was dark and deserted-looking.
“You remember that kid Weinfeld?” Denny asked. “This is his joint. I come up here and had lunch. He owed me eight bucks from snooker an we come up here to collect. God, what a mansion! You never seen anything like it. They got a room for every fuckin thing you can think of; the old man’s got his own bar, all that crap. They must be damn near millionaires.”
Jack looked up at the blank dark windows of the building, set in its framework of damp firs, beneath a roof that seemed to have a dozen chimneys. “God,” he said.
“They’re really rich bastards,” Denny said. “In fact, they’re takin a vacation in Mexico. Weinfeld come around last week askin if anybody wanted any dirty pictures or anythin.”
“The place is empty?”
Denny looked at Jack. He began to grin. “Empty as hell, man. What’er we waitin for? Let’s ditch the car an bust in!”
“Sure to be money laying around someplace,” Jack said. “What a fuckin break!”
The Weinfelds were not rich and the house was not a “mansion,” but the boys had no experience at all with the really rich, and so could not tell the difference. Weinfeld owned a small shoe store specializing in work shoes and odd sizes. He made a comfortable living, and his home was a comfortable one; in 1947 it would have been worth about $20,000. It was surrounded by hedge, lawn, and trees, and there was heavy, ornate-looking furniture in all the rooms; deep, wall-to-wall carpeting in most of the downstairs, and one very large, extremely beautiful blue Persian carpet in the living room, its border ornate designs in white, maroon, gold, and blue. The boys stood in the middle of this carpet, looking around themselves at the most splendid home they had ever seen outside the movies. Jack noticed that most of the windows in the house had the thick double-draperies that could be used in blackouts, and so he pulled them and turned the lights on. There was a large fireplace, and over it a mantel adorned with small delicate glass figurines of animals; and above that there was a picture—an oil painting—of an attractive, pleasant-looking woman in a white dress with a blue sash. The picture had its own little light above it, which went on with the wall lights when Jack flicked the switch. (The switch bothered him; it made no sound, no click, but the lights went on anyway.)
“My God,” Jack said.
“What’d I tell you?” Denny said proudly. “Aint it a mansion? We ate lunch up in his room. He’s got a room all to himself up there, with his own desk, and all kinds of crap all over the walls. He must be a lonely fucker, er why would he come down to the poolhall?”
For a while they forgot all about their purpose in breaking into