either direction.
6
THE TRUNK
The long driveway, made of rust-red Mexican paving tiles, curved past Eric Leben's enormous Spanish- modern house before finally turning out of sight to the garages in back. Rachael parked in front.
Although Ben Shadway delighted in authentic Spanish buildings with their multiplicity of arches and angles and deep-set leaded windows, he was no fan of Spanish
Nevertheless, as he got out of the car and followed Rachael down a dark Mexican-tile walkway, across an unlighted veranda where yellow-flowering succulents and bloom-laden white azaleas glowed palely in enormous clay pots, to the front door of the house, Ben was impressed by the place. It was massive — certainly ten thousand square feet of living space — set on expansive, elaborately landscaped grounds. From the property, there was a view of most of Orange County to the west, a vast carpet of light stretching fifteen miles to the pitch-black ocean; in daylight, in clear weather, one could probably see all the way to Catalina. In spite of the spareness of the architecture, the Leben house reeked of wealth. To Ben, the crickets singing in the bushes even sounded different from those that chirruped in more modest neighborhoods, less shrill and more melodious, as if their minuscule brains encompassed awareness of — and respect for — their surroundings.
Ben had known that Eric Leben was a very rich man, but somehow that knowledge had had no impact until now. Suddenly he sensed what it meant to be worth tens of millions of dollars. Leben's wealth pressed on Ben, like a very real weight.
Until he was nineteen, Ben Shadway had never given much thought to money. His parents were neither rich enough to be preoccupied with investments nor poor enough to worry about paying next month's bills, nor had they much ambition, so wealth — or lack of it — had not been a topic of conversation in the Shadway household. However, by the time Ben completed two years of military service, his primary interest was money: making it, investing it, accumulating ever-larger piles.
He did not love money for its own sake. He did not even care all that much for the finer things that money could buy; imported sports cars, pleasure boats, Rolex watches, and two-thousand-dollar suits held no great appeal for him. He was happier with his meticulously restored 1956 Thunderbird than Rachael was with her new Mercedes, and he bought his suits off the rack at Harris & Frank. Some men loved money for the power it gave them, but Ben was no more interested in exercising power over others than he was in learning Swahili.
To him, money was primarily a time machine that would eventually allow him to do a lot of traveling back through the years to a more appealing age — the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, which held so much interest for him. Thus far, he had worked long hours with a few days off. But he intended to build the company into one of the top real-estate powerhouses in Orange County within the next five years, then sell out and take a capital gain large enough to support him comfortably for most — if not the rest — of his life. Thereafter, he could devote himself almost entirely to swing music, old movies, the hard-boiled detective fiction he loved, and his miniature trains.
Although the Great Depression extended through more than a third of the period to which Ben was attracted, it seemed to him like a far better time than the present. During the twenties, thirties, and forties, there had been no terrorists, no end-of-the-world atomic threat, no street crime to speak of, no frustrating fifty-five- mile-per-hour speed limit, no polyester or lite beer. Television, the moron box that is the curse of modern life, was not a major social force by the end of the forties. Currently, the world seemed a cesspool of easy sex, pornography, illiterate fiction, witless and graceless music. The second, third, and fourth decades of the century were so fresh and innocent by comparison with the present that Ben's nostalgia sometimes deepened into a melancholy longing, into a profound desire to have been born before his own time.
Now, as the respectful crickets offered trilling songs to the otherwise peaceful silence of the Leben estate, as a warm wind scented with star jasmine blew across the sea-facing hills and through the long veranda, Ben could almost believe that he had, in fact, been transported back in time to a more genteel, less hectic age. Only the architecture spoiled the halcyon illusion.
And Rachael's pistol.
That spoiled things, too.
She was an extraordinarily easygoing woman, quick to laugh and slow to anger, too self-confident to be easily frightened. Only a very real and very serious threat could compel her to arm herself.
Before getting out of the car, she had withdrawn the gun from her purse and had clicked off the safeties. She warned Ben to be alert and cautious, though she refused to say exactly what it was that he should be alert to and cautious of. Her dread was almost palpable, yet she declined to share her worry and thus relieve her mind; she jealously guarded her secret as she had done all evening.
He suppressed his impatience with her — not because he had the forbearance of a saint but simply because he had no choice but to let her proceed with her revelations at her own pace.
At the door of the house, she fumbled with her keys, trying to find the lock and keyhole in the gloom. When she had walked out a year ago, she'd kept her house key because she'd thought she would need to return later to collect some of her belongings, a task that had become unnecessary when Eric had everything packed and sent to her along with, she said, an infuriatingly smug note expressing his certainty that she would soon realize how foolish she had been and seek reconciliation.
The cold, hard scrape of key metal on lock metal gave rise to an unfortunate image in Ben's mind: a pair of murderously sharp and gleaming knives being stropped against each other.
He noticed a burglar-alarm box with indicator lights by the door, but the system was evidently not engaged because none of the bulbs on the panel was lit.
While Rachael continued to poke at the lock with the key, Ben said, “Maybe he had the locks changed after you moved out.”
“I doubt it. He was
She found the keyhole. The key worked. She opened the door, nervously reached inside, snapped on the lights in the foyer, and went into the house with the pistol held out in front of her.
Ben followed, feeling as if the male and female roles had been wrongly reversed, feeling as if he ought to have the gun, feeling a bit foolish when you came right down to it.
The house was perfectly still.
“I think we're alone,” Rachael said.
“Who did you expect to find?” he asked.
She did not answer.
Although she had just expressed the opinion that they were alone, she advanced with her pistol ready.
They went slowly from room to room, turning on every light, and each new revelation of the interior made the house more imposing. The rooms were large, high-ceilinged, white-walled, airy, with Mexican-tile floors and lots of big windows; some had massive fireplaces of either stone or ceramic tile; a few boasted oak cabinets of superb craftsmanship. A party for two hundred guests would not have strained the capacity of the living room and adjacent library.
The furniture was as starkly modern and functional as the rather forbidding architecture. The upholstered white sofas and chairs were utterly free of ornamentation. Coffee tables, end tables, and all the occasional tables were also quite plain, finished in mirror-bright high-gloss enamel, some black and some white.
The only color and drama were provided by an eclectic group of paintings, antiques, and objets d'art. The bland decor was intended to serve as an unobtrusive backdrop against which to display those items of surpassing quality and value, each of which was artfully illuminated by indirect lighting or tightly focused overhead minispots. Over one fireplace was a tile panel of birds by William de Morgan, which had been done (Rachael said) for Czar Nicholas I. Here, a blazing Jackson Pollock canvas. There, a Roman torso carved from marble, dating to the first
