MURRAY: “Peanuts?”
BOYD: “No, sunflower seeds.”
MURRAY: “Well, shit, which is it?”
BOYD: “Sunflower seeds. He’s cracking the hulls and spitting them out.”
MURRAY: “Jesus, that’s a good camera, hotshot.”
BOYD: “Yeah.”
Burtell walked around the entire lawn perimeter, stopping now and then to watch the kids rolling down the grassy slopes, looking up at the tower light, eating sunflower seeds, pausing, looking the length of the sunken lawn to the fountain. People milled all around him, a Frisbee sailed perilously close. He didn’t speak to anyone. He was totally relaxed.
MURRAY: “Anybody see anything?”
No one responded. Burtell had almost made it back to the fountains approaching its east side, when a man in a suit joined him. Together they walked up the steps to the inner curve of the fountain curtain.
MURRAY: (excited) “Where the fuck he come from?”
CHERYL: “Goddamn it… I knew it, I knew they were going to do that.”
MURRAY: “Boyd!”
BOYD: “I’m shooting… I’m shooting.”
CHERYL: “I can shoot this, Murray, but the water’s going to screw it up. I can’t filter out the goddamned water… It’s not going to work.”
MURRAY: “You getting anything?”
CHERYL: “Snatches… here and there… Oh, wait They’re behind the… you know, columns… I can only shoot the sound if they’re in the open, under the arches. They’re walking in and out of the arches.”
MURRAY: “Boyd.”
BOYD: “Same here. I’m shooting, but they’re moving in and out of sight.”
MURRAY: “What’s he look like?”
BOYD: “He’s an old guy.”
MURRAY: “Old?”
BOYD: “God, he must be fifty, late fifties.”
MURRAY: “Shit, kid.”
Murray could hear them laughing.
Burtell and his companion walked back and forth the entire rime they were at the fountain. By Murray’s watch it was a thirty-two-minute meeting. They walked back and forth for thirty-two minutes inside the misty half circle of the water curtain, during which time Cheryl cursed intermittently and Boyd said, “Got ‘em… got’ em… got ‘em…” each time they stepped under one of the Roman arches.
Suddenly, without any body language that indicated they were finished talking, they parted, each exiting opposite sides of the fountain.
LI: “Murray. The guy’s heading down the slope to a car fifty yards in front of me. Do I go with him?”
MURRAY: “Not part of the deal, kid. Tell you what, though. Pull out and go down to the parking lot of that dorky restaurant at Westheimer. Catch his license plate. Okay, people. Heads up, here we go.”
Within three minutes they were coordinating their moves again.
LI: “Murray. Sorry, I don’t know, I guess I missed him somehow.”
MURRAY: “Figures.”
Chapter 31
Paula sat in the passenger seat and used a flashlight to locate Valerie Heath’s address on the Key Map while Neuman drove, heading south out of the city on the Gulf Freeway toward Galveston. It seemed that Heath and Sheck both lived in the same area on Houston’s extreme southeastern edge, a suburban sprawl of several incorporated cities that had grown up around NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the shores of Clear Lake which was connected to Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico by a narrow, crooked channel. In recent years Clear Lake had become a burgeoning sport and recreational playground for Houstonians who migrated from the city to the area’s numerous yacht clubs, marinas, and restaurants.
Valerie Heath lived on a peninsular development across the lake from two of the larger yacht clubs, not far from the channel that led into Galveston Bay. The peninsula had been scored with canals along either side of which homes had been built with individual docks for each house. The streets in front of the houses ran straight into the mainland.
They found the street Heath lived on, and Neuman slowed to a crawl as they looked at the addresses perfectly stenciled on the curbs in front.
“Jesus,” Neuman said as they eased past the spotless lawns, the magnolias and palms and sprays of oleanders. “This isn’t the kind of neighborhood I’d expect a couple of hardworking secretaries to be able to afford on sharesies.”
“Oh, really?” Paula said. “You would know?”
“Hey, not this, “Neuman insisted.
“There it is,” Paula said, leaning across to peer at a house on Neuman’s side of the street “Miami Vice,” she said. It was a modern white stucco affair with a clay tile roof and a tile circular drive. There were palms scattered in front of it, and a sprinkler system was throwing up a mist that floated across the lawn in a shimmering drizzle punctuated by landscaping lights that shot up the trunks of the palms to burst into green sprays at the crowns. The windows were lighted in several rooms of the house.
Neuman went to the end of the block and turned around and came back, parking in front of the house next door.
“Look at that,” Neuman said. “We must’ve had three inches of rain in the last ten days. They’ve got that damn sprinkler system on automatic, and they just forget about it.” He cut the motor. “She drove a what?”
“A Dodge van.”
“Well… that’s not a Dodge van in the driveway,” Neuman said. The black Corvette was glistening from the mist that floated out of the green light. “And there’s no garage. If they’re going to park at this house, they’ve got to park there.”
“Maybe it’s the roommate’s.”
Neuman leaned over and popped open the glove box and started digging around. “How about some light?”
Paula flicked on the flashlight. “What are you doing?”
“I keep some IDs and stuff in here,” Neuman said, fumbling through a clutter of maps and envelopes, vitamin bottles and flashlight batteries until he found something in a single-fold leather holder. He put it in his pocket He undid his tie and grabbed his sport jacket which lay between them. “Come on.”
They got out and walked to Heath’s driveway, following it up behind the Corvette to avoid the lawn sprinkler.
“This thing is spanking new,” Neuman said. He bent down and looked at the small metal dealership logo on the lower left side of the trunk. “Bought it in El Paso.”
They went around the car and into a courtyard to the front door. The night air was sticky, coming off Galveston Bay less than three hundred yards behind them. The mumbling of an inboard motor started up somewhere in the canal behind the house, and they could hear people calling to each other, friendly voices, a woman’s laughter. The sound of the inboard grew deeper as it began moving along the canal. Neuman rang the doorbell and quickly checked the mailbox, which was empty.
“This is too damn late,” Paula objected quickly.
The woman who came to the door looked to be in her early forties. She had dark hair chopped off short and kind of ragged at the neck and was wearing a pale blue terry cloth romper set She was barefooted and holding a spatula in one hand.
“Valerie Heath?” Neuman asked.
