“Okay, okay… Malibu neighbor, huh? You guys have the right friends. Anyone I might have heard of?”
Reed said, “Someone Dr. Delaware knows.”
Fox stretched. Onyx cuff links gleamed. “Sounds like Dr. Delaware and I need to get better acquainted. Okay, I’ll go get the toys.”
After he left the room, Milo said, “Nice work space, sure beats civil service.”
Fox’s place was on San Vicente near Wilshire, the southeast corner of Beverly Hills. The decor was skinny Italian leather seating, charcoal felt walls, chrome and brass and glass and cubist lithographs. The building was a twenties duplex, one of the last carryovers from the street’s former life as a quiet residential byway. Now the structure shared space with commercial and professional buildings.
Fox’s “Workland” had once been a master bedroom. Big and bright, with a rear view of a cactus garden, soundproofed padding beneath the felt. Playland-his living quarters-was on the second story, accessed through a teak spiral staircase, probably salvaged from a yacht.
Reed said, “He probably writes the whole building off. Aaron needs his deductions.”
Fox returned with a brown suede carrying case, settled back behind the glass desk. Fishing out a black box the size of a cigarette pack, he laid it down, added what looked to be a pen, then a tiny white button attached to a cord and a pin-jack. Similar wires spaghettied from the other components. The whole kit could fit in a trouser pocket.
Fox’s mocha hands passed over the equipment, like a battle priest blessing armaments. “One-stop shopping, gentlemen.”
Milo said, “That’s all of it?”
“Plus my laptop. Feed’s programmed to interface, one keystroke and we’ve got DVDs for posterity.”
“Cute.”
“Private enterprise.”
Milo pointed to the little black box. “That’s the recorder?”
“Recorder and transmitter,” said Fox. “This here”-touching the white button-“is the camera. Don’t ask me what it cost. We’re talking high-def infrared, cuts through the dark like a knife through trans fat.” Deft fingers rolled to the pen. “Decent mike, but truthfully, not spectacular. Manufacturer claims a two-thousand-foot range, I’ve found one thousand to be closer to the truth, and sometimes it blanks out. High-tech industry’s like Congress, promises more than delivers. For best results, have your mope stay no more than ten feet from her. I’ve got another one, a little more reliable, but it’s embedded in a jeans jacket, if he gets hugged hard enough, it could be detected.”
“How much wiring of our mope do we have to do?” said Reed.
“Recorder goes in his pants pocket, we cut a hole in there, run one cable up to the pen in his shirt pocket, I substitute the button for one of his and install the video feed. Any of you guys sew?”
Silence.
“Great, so now I’m your tailor. Be sure he’s wearing a shirt with a pocket and that it already has buttons the same color. And don’t even think of asking me to donate one of mine. There are limits.”
Reed said, “He’s wearing a blue button-down with white buttons. Brand new, courtesy his lawyer.”
“Wallenburg,” said Fox. “I thought she was corporate. What’s her connection to him anyway?”
“It’s complicated,” said Milo. “Ever work with her?”
“I wish-hey, maybe if this works out, you can put in a good word and she’ll send me some of those Enron- Worldcom cases.”
Reed said, “Maybe
“I wish you the best,” said Fox, “but hardware’s one thing, the human factor’s another. When
“He’s motivated,” said Reed.
“Good intentions, and all that?”
Milo said, “Road to heaven.”
“If you say so.”
Travis Huck’s reaction to the plan had changed his demeanor. Evaporation of fear, a smile almost broad enough to hide his lopsided mouth. I wondered if his concept of heaven included early arrival but said nothing. What would be the point?
Aaron Fox said, “You’re sure all you want me to do is sit on my ass and check the feed?”
“That’s it,” said Milo.
“Aw, shucks.”
“You want action, Aaron, you can always come back to the real job.”
“Gee, why didn’t I think of that. I guess billing for my time on this-not to mention having the department insure my gear-is a fantasy.”
Milo said, “I’ll guarantee full coverage of the hardware on my own ticket. And who knows, everything works out you might get the dough Simone owes you.”
“Oh, I’ll get it,” said Fox. “One way or the other.”
CHAPTER 41
Seven fifty p.m., La Costa Beach, Malibu.
The world has compressed, its boundaries the black-rimmed rectangle of a nineteen-inch laptop screen.
Green-and-gray world, tinted by infrared illumination. In the background, waves roll in a lazy, almost sexual rhythm.
A man stands by the tide line, motionless.
I sit at a long table of ancient pine. My seat affords me an oblique view of the screen. Milo faces the laptop, moves his face close to it at times, then he retreats, polishing off more Red Bull.
Aaron Fox is positioned to his left. He drinks sparingly, almost daintily, from his personal bottle of Norwegian Fjord Spring Water. In between swallows, he chews cinnamon gum.
Moe Reed stands in a corner and watches the ocean.
The table is a seven-foot trestle, waxed and knotted and criss-crossed with scars that look calculated. It fills most of the dining space of a house ten lots north of the late Simon Vander’s beach escape. Like Vander’s place, this residence is a smallish two-story box on battered, creosote-coated pilings, worth eight figures. Unlike Vander’s wood-sheathed bungalow, its walls have been stuccoed whale-belly blue, its windows upgraded to copper-tinted, rust-resistant double-hungs. The interior is cozy, under a beamed ceiling, wired for concert-hall sound and cutting- edge video. The walls are dead-white diamond plaster, set sparingly with the type of art that gets people cracking wise about their kids being able to paint just as well.
The furniture’s at odds with all that, a carryover from the house’s former life as a “rural beach cottage.” Rattan and wicker and chunky easy-use wood pieces, many of which resemble the thrift-shop discards they are, are set up carelessly over faded machine-made Oriental rugs slightly soured by mold. The kitchen is barely big enough for two people to stand in. A stainless-steel Sub-Zero and purplish granite counters overachieve.
Decor doesn’t matter, tonight. I suspect it never matters much, with a western wall of sliding glass offering a fine view of the Pacific.
The doors are open, the ocean shouts, I catch glimpses of stars above the overhang of the deck.
My eyes return to the screen.
The miniature world remains inert. I touch the smooth, waxed surface of the table. Nice; maybe it really was “rescued” from a monastery in Tuscany, as the house’s current resident claims.
She’s the sister of the owner, sponging happily. Her brother is an expatriate British rock star, now on reunion tour in Europe. Moe Reed gave me credit for finding the place but the real connection was Robin, who’d worked on the star’s guitars years ago, when he had to pay her on the installment plan.
The beach house joins four other residences in his real estate portfolio: Bel Air, Napa, Aspen, a pied-a-terre in the San Remo on Central Park West.
The sister is a fifty-three-year-old self-described “production assistant” named Nonie who doesn’t bother to tell
