To Die in Beverly Hills

but crooked. He hung up the phone. 'And what, pray tell, doth thee bringest me this fine day?' Davidson asked. He smiled and Bailey thought of the talking horse on television: all teeth.

'I bring gold.' Bailey smiled back as he handed Davidson a copy of the burglary report. 'The gold of one of your insurees, a Frau Gertrude Wallace of Coventry Circle Road in our fair city. It seems that someone broke into the old lady's castle and stole all of her jewelry. I have an informant that's been offered the load. I thought you might be interested in the recovery.'

Mark Davidson glanced at the report. 'Lots of jewelry.' He pressed an intercom button and gave Wallace's name, then asked for the file. 'When are we going to be able to get together for lunch?' Davidson said. 'Every time I call your office they tell me you're out in the field.'

'Been busy as hell lately. The burglars have been working overtime.'

'I read about the shooting.'

'It was a close call, but it's all part of the job. What's new with you?'

'I've been jogging six miles a day. I'm at the point now where I can't wait to get out and start jogging as soon as I get home from the office. If I miss a day I actually feel guilty about it. I don't sleep well without the exercise. You should try it. Jogging is the greatest tension reliever in the world. A few months ago I was a bundle of nerves. Now I could care less. I just let things sort of happen. I've come to the realization that no one knows what I want better than me. And jogging is something I do for me. When I'm jogging, it's my time, my day, my body.'

'I get my exercise by fucking,' Bailey said.

Mark Davidson horse-smiled at the remark. 'I've even got my wife into the jogging program. We get up early in the morning and get in some miles. At first she hated it, but now she's into it as much as I am. We run in a six-mile race every Sunday. We don't have arguments anymore because we're too tired. The feeling one gets during jogging is hard to explain. It's like the whole world begins and ends in your own body. You breathe and sweat and put one foot in front of another and nothing else matters. Your mind is clear. The experience is almost sexual.' Horse smile.

The receptionist brought the file to Mark Davidson and left. He sat quietly reading it for a while. 'Mrs. Wallace is a smart lady. She has every piece of jewelry listed in her policy. It looks like we're on the hook for all of it.'

'I have an informant…'

'You always have an informant,' Davidson interrupted, but his tone was good-natured.

'My informant says he can recover everything that was stolen in the Wallace burglary. He's been approached by some people who are trying to fence the jewelry. They're asking a lot of money for it. These people are professional burglars. They know what the stuff is worth. The thing we have going for us is that most of the items are custom-made. Any pawnshop would recognize them as hot. Therefore, my man has been approached. They want him to smuggle the jewelry to Paris or London and get rid of it there.'

Mark Davidson perused the burglary report. He tapped the keys on a pocket calculator for a while, then jotted some figures. 'The insured value is forty-six thousand. This is what we'll have to pay Mrs. Wallace to settle her claim.'

'That's a lot of bucks,' Travis Bailey said offhandedly.

'But they're not my bucks. And the sweet thing about working for an insurance company is that if we pay out a little more this year, we just raise the rates next year and make up for it. Can your informant recover all of the items listed in the burglary report?'

Bailey nodded. 'Everything except the cigarette case. Apparently the burglar already sold it.'

'If your man can recover everything else we'll be willing to pay him three thousand dollars,' Davidson said.

'He'll have to front more money than that just to show good faith. To get his hands on the jewelry, he'll have to put up six thousand. That's the minimum they'll take as a deposit. The plan the informant has worked out goes like this: He puts up the six grand as security. The burglar gives him the jewelry. He gives the jewelry to us. A couple of days later, he calls the burglar and tells him that he got stopped by Customs in London and they seized the jewelry. If they don't believe him, I furnish the informant with a phony Customs seizure form that he can show as evidence that the jewelry was taken away from him. That way my informant is able to recover the goodies for us without compromising his position. The informant wants a four-thousand-dollar reward for himself. The operation will cost you ten grand total, but considering that your company could end up forking out forty-six thou', I'd say it seems like a fairly good deal.'

Mark Davidson opened a desk drawer, pulled out a pair of blue running shoes. He set them on the desk. 'Runner's World says these are the best running shoes made. I just bought them this morning and I can't wait to try them out.' He stared at the shoes, then at Bailey. He showed his teeth. 'Is there any way we can do it for less than ten thousand?'

'Nope.'

'Then ten it is. See, I'm easy. Do you want the money the same way as last time?'

Bailey nodded. 'Small bills. The informant insists on small bills.'

Mark Davidson broke into nervous laughter. 'For all I know your informant may have burglarized the woman's house himself.'

'The informant is not your average churchgoer,' Bailey said, 'but he isn't a burglar. He's just one of those people who seems to be in the right place at the right time to get in on these things. I've known him for years. Shall we say he's well placed?'

Travis Bailey stood up to leave.

'You really should try jogging. Once you get into it it's all you think of. It's a real trip,'

'I'll have to try it sometime,' Bailey said on his way out the door.

Mark Davidson threaded laces in the new shoes for a while. His phone rang.

'Is Bailey gone?'

'Yes, sir.'

'What is this one going to cost us?'

'He wanted twenty thousand, sir, but I talked him down to ten. I finally had to put my foot down. It's a forty-six-thousand-dollar claim, so, all in all, I think we did rather well. It was a difficult negotiating session.'

'Good job, Mark.'

'Thank you, sir.'

Charles Carr tiptoed into the hospital room. The curtains were drawn and the sunlight that crept through gave the one-bed cubicle a dusky haze. Carr wondered about the smell; the odor of every hospital he had ever been in. Was it rubbing alcohol? He stepped to the side of Jack Kelly's bed. Kelly's breathing was labored. His barrel chest was pasted with a thick bandage. Carr touched Kelly's arm. He opened his eyes. He licked his lips. 'Charlie,' he said in a weak voice.

'Do you have pain?'

'Hurts like hell. It was like getting hit right square in the chest with a sledgehammer.'

'Do you feel like talking?'

Kelly licked his lips again, opened and closed his eyes a few times. 'When I was a kid I was playing catch on the front lawn with my brother. Burn 'em in we used to call it. Throw a hardball as hard as you can at one another. I got hit in the chest and it knocked me out. That's what flashed through my mind when I got hit. I was on the front lawn and my mother was holding me in her arms. She held a wet towel on my forehead. My brother was crying because he thought he'd killed me. My mother ran out of the house to help me because I couldn't breathe. While they were operating on me, I dreamed that I was riding on the roof of an ambulance made of glass. It was going a hundred miles an hour. I was lying on my stomach on the roof and I watched what was happening inside. I saw myself lying on the gurney inside and the paramedics were working on me. Jack Kelly is dying, I said to myself. Just as if Jack Kelly was a stranger. Jack Kelly is taking a ride in a glass ambulance and he's dying. He's checking out of this world. But it was as if everything was okay. I didn't feel pain right then. I had this urge to say good-bye to everyone, but that if I didn't get to, someone would take care of it for me and everything would somehow be all right. Jack Kelly rolled a deuce. He was being driven out of the world inside a see-through ambulance and