The Burglar Read online

  She crawled out into the hallway, scampered up the steps, and pulled the steps up after her. The mechanism’s counterweight made the steel arms fold as the steps settled back into their spot. As she reached for the ring to pull the trapdoor shut, she heard the front door open.

  “Mr. Kavanagh?” So his last name was Kavanagh. “Mr. Kavanagh? Police officers.” There was a pause while they listened for a response.

  Elle waited until the cop shouted again before she closed the trapdoor so the cop’s own voice would mask the sound. She remained still and listened. The cops walked around downstairs calling for a minute or two and then clomped upstairs.

  They seemed to be making as much noise as they could, probably so the homeowner wouldn’t mistake them for intruders. They sounded like five men instead of two. During their ascent she retreated to the open window where she had entered. If they got interested in the trapdoor above the hallway, all she could do was slip out again and run. She listened, poised.

  The steps that led up to the attic were not far from the master bedroom, but if the cops were conferring down there, she wasn’t able to hear them. This was a tricky moment. It would be dangerous to be here once cops discovered the bodies and called in to their station. Cops were like ants. They never went away after they’d found something, and this place was going to be infested with them for days. She heard their feet arrive on the second-floor landing. She had to move now. She slithered out the window and looked around her, but her view was blocked by the tall trees. She crawled to the peak of the roof and stared at the neighborhood. She could see police vehicles racing toward the house from three directions. She had been here for seven minutes, but she had stayed too long.

  She slid on her bottom along the shingles to the next lower level of the roof. Then she crawled to the edge, clutched the gutter with her fingers, swung her body off the roof, hung at arm’s length, and dropped. She landed on the patio hard, but recovered quickly and walked to the back wall of the yard, hoisted herself up, and rolled over to the next yard.

  Elle decided that jogging around the block to her car would look too much like running away, so she bent low and sneaked along the side of the house behind Kavanagh’s and out along the hedge to the next street, then walked to her car, got in, and drove. She was out the other end of the block and up to Sunset before she saw any more police cars. They entered her intersection from the west just after she turned right to the east. She was hoping she had left in time to keep the police cars’ automatic license plate readers from seeing hers and recording it.

  It felt like only a couple of minutes before she was back at the car rental on Hollywood Way in Burbank turning in the little white Mercedes. She walked a half mile and then called for a Lyft to take her to Van Nuys near her home. Her house was a simple white one-story ranch-style bungalow. What she loved most about it were the California oaks that shaded it and partially veiled it from view. She unlocked her front door, went inside, and pulled the shades. She had become increasingly wary about being seen or recorded from a distance. There were so many ways for the police to find a person. The Beverly Hills police were not much of a threat in the short term. There were only 250 of them—about the size of some family reunions. But the LAPD was like their big brother—ten thousand cops who always came when the Beverly Hills police called.

  The LAPD had every kind of toy: armored vehicles, choppers with night vision and infrared scopes. They were also testing drones, and what could the test be but using them to catch people like her? They could access surveillance cameras on the freeways, or go full southern sheriff and send dogs to sniff for burglars on foot. Sometimes it seemed as though it were all aimed at her.

  Elle took a long, hot shower. She wasn’t exactly a competitive runner, but she had impersonated one for about three hours today. She could feel the strain, which she had compounded by climbing around, jumping from roofs, and crouching in an attic.

  She dressed and turned on the television, which was a good model but only about three feet wide, because when she had been shopping in someone’s bedroom for one she had not wanted anything big.

  The local newspeople had picked up the story already, but none of them seemed to have learned any details. The police spokespeople weren’t on camera answering any questions, so she kept the television on and glanced at it occasionally while she made plans for the evening. She was feeling frustrated. She had just expended a great deal of energy and taken considerable risks to steal from what turned out to be the home of Nick Kavanagh, but she had ended up not stealing anything except her own image on the memory card of a camera, which was not actually stealing. It was some other crime that was much worse.

  Her recent efforts left her with the same dwindling money supply as before. She tried to operate most of the time on the cash she stole. This time she might have done pretty well. There had been the purses of two spoiled Beverly Hills wives and the cash stash of a man who apparently owned a serious gallery. Of course, she couldn’t assume anything. Over the past couple of years she had noticed that fewer people carried much cash. People like those two women walked around with credit cards that would cover the cost of the average house, but only a hundred or two in cash. And lately the few big cash collections she’d seen in houses seemed to be there only temporarily, waiting to be smuggled offshore to further tax evasion schemes. She had no idea if Kavanagh had any cash, and because of the killings, she would probably never know.

  Understanding her loss didn’t rectify it. Tonight she felt like going to see some friends who spent time in a quiet bar in the northern end of Hollywood. Its name was Serendipity, but all the neon except the last four letters had burned out and never been replaced, so everyone called it the Pity. The name the bar had chosen for itself fitted the mood inside better anyway. She knew she should be working, but she felt like talking to someone.

  She kept checking the television set, which was now showing endless, dizzying footage of the Kavanagh house from a circling news helicopter. There were about ten police cars, a few crime scene trucks, and a couple of coroner’s vans. The newswoman kept saying that she didn’t want to draw any conclusions, but the presence of coroner’s vans and no ambulances did seem to be a bad sign. “No shit,” Elle muttered.

  She tried to get herself to think about practical matters. She had used up the part of the day when she preferred to work. Breaking into houses after dark was a good way to get shot, but she still needed money. She had stolen some valuable items but hadn’t had time for a trip out of town to sell them. But a day ago she had spotted a couple of houses in Trousdale Estates that had multiple newspapers turning yellow in their driveways, and both had porch lights turned on during the daytime.

  Elle didn’t like selecting houses just because the owners were careless, but she also didn’t like watching her supply of cash dwindle. She chose one of the two on an impulse without going back to look at them again. Driving past the same house twice was as suspicious as most things a burglar could do.

  She took a nap that lasted for seven hours, woke up feeling stronger, and turned on the television again. In those seven hours someone had leaked the nature of the crime scene. The local news stations were all airing minute-by-minute updates, which teased salacious information, went to commercials, and came back to restate the lead-ins again without paying off on the sex. She could glean that the reporters knew that the three victims were found naked but weren’t saying it yet, but they did say they were all shot in the master bedroom and that the women were both married.

  When the local news shows were all over, Elle dressed for night work—a pair of black jeans, black leather running shoes, a black pullover, and an oversize denim jacket. She tucked her hair under a baseball cap. She put altered plates on her car before she opened the garage door to back out.

  The drive took her south, away from her part of the San Fernando Valley toward Beverly Hills. As she drove, it occurred to her that since the local news reports were over, the news vans and the light
s and cameras would already be gone from the Kavanagh house. She felt a strong curiosity about what would be going on there now. Would there still be a hundred cops walking around in white coveralls and masks, dissecting the place to its atoms? Did they guard places like that at night or just put tape across the doors? The cops had been in possession of this one for eight or ten hours by now.

  As she drove south of Sunset she felt drawn to the Kavanagh house. As her car moved along the same roads she had traveled this morning, she kept reminding herself that going there tonight would be foolish. On the other side of the argument, she was driving her own gray Volvo now, not the rented white Mercedes she’d used in the morning.

  In another couple of minutes she was approaching the house. There was no longer a huge crew of forensic people, there were no news vans parked on the road and no detectives in suits. There was a single black-and-white parked in the driveway, but there didn’t seem to be anyone sitting in it. There was yellow tape strung along the edge of the property, and there seemed to be some kind of notice posted on the front door.

  She moved past, diminishing her speed to study the place. She kept going until she was out of sight of the house, then turned around and headed for Trousdale Estates. As she drove toward the house she had picked out to rob, she made a series of resolutions. One was that, unless something unprecedented jumped into her hand, she wasn’t interested in searching for anything but cash. There was such a thing as being too greedy and too impatient. She was not going to even enter the house unless she was sure it was safe.

  She went along a winding road leading upward until she saw the chosen house. She went past, stopped, turned in the downhill direction to park, and then walked from there. The houses were all built on level spaces carved into the sides of high hills. Beyond some of them she could see reflections of the sky that had to be infinity pools.

  When she reached the right house, she moved close enough to slip into its shadow and then waited, watched, and listened. The newspapers were still in the driveway. She moved to the garage door. There was an SUV in one of the two spaces, but the other space was empty. If they’d had only one car, some of the stuff the occupants had piled neatly along the walls would have begun to drift into the empty space—cardboard boxes, bikes, pool toys, or cases that probably held soft drinks would have taken it over. It was a scientific law of garages. There was another car, and the occupants had gone somewhere in it.

  As she moved from there around the house, she verified that the place still looked as empty as it had a couple of days ago. She found a window that allowed her to check the control panel of the alarm system by the front door and verify that the alarm was turned on.

  All good alarm systems worked by wiring the door and window frames to the floors or walls of the house. If the door or window moved, a magnetic connection broke and the alarm sounded. She decided the safest way in was the sliding glass door overlooking the pool. She opened her lock-blade knife to scrape the dried putty along the edge of the glass. Then she used the tip to pry the glass free of the frame. She let the glass lean outward to rest against a lawn chair, then stepped over the unmoved metal frame into the house.

  Once she was in, she found that the electrical outlets all over the house had plug-in timers, which bolstered her confidence that the family was away.

  Elle took her time searching the place, but she knew exactly what she was after, so the process was simpler than usual. Money was compact and foldable, so it could be hidden anywhere in a house, but it usually wasn’t. Things that were valuable like money tended to be hidden in the bedroom. The money this time was in one of the purses hanging on a hook in the closet. It caught her eye because all the other purses with it were expensive brands and very pretty. This one was cheap and out of style. She realized that the woman had been afraid a burglar might steal one of the others for its intrinsic value, but this one was safe.

  Elle was not looking for jewelry but found some. The jewelry was in a flat plastic box in a cabinet under the bathroom counter. There was an antique diamond ring, a ring with what seemed to be a real emerald, a diamond tennis bracelet, and a few pins of uncertain value. Tile cleaners and drain openers were sitting on top of the box, so it drew her eye. Since she hadn’t used up much time yet, she also took off the lid of the toilet tank and found an extra envelope of hundred-dollar bills taped there. Encouraged, she went back to the closet to check the backs of drawers to look for more envelopes. She was forming a theory that the wife had gotten into the habit of raking off small sums from the household money in cash and hiding it. The other popular spaces Elle checked were clear.

  She found no high-end equipment. The only gun she found was a Smith & Wesson K-frame .357 Magnum revolver like the ones that were popular around the 1960s. She didn’t think the resale value would be great, but taking things she could sell made sense and leaving them made none. She swung out the cylinder and saw that the pistol was loaded, looked in the nightstand for the box of ammo and found it, then unloaded the weapon and saw that the box was now full. The pistol probably had never been fired.

  The rest of the house yielded only some petty cash in a pot in the kitchen. The house was tasteful and expensively furnished, but Elle wasn’t in the business of selling used Italian leather luggage, crystal vases, or grand pianos. She had come only for cash.

  When she stepped out through the sliding door onto the covered patio where she had entered, she took the time to lift the glass back into the doorframe, lean the chair against it, and then run a couple of strips of duct tape over it to hold it in place. There was no reason to leave the house open and vulnerable to bugs and rodents.

  She slowly drifted along the wall of the house and stopped amid a row of shrubs to watch and listen. She had not heard or seen anything, just felt a few hairs on the back of her neck stand up. Maybe it was a chill, just a slight swirl in the air currents, but maybe it was something else. The body was always sensing things, sending tiny alerts to the brain. She waited to see what had changed.

  She waited a full minute before she heard the feet. At first she wasn’t even sure that was what was making the soft crunching sounds. They were slow and seemed to come from somewhere near the back wall of the yard, but she didn’t see anyone in that darker zone. She reached into her right jacket pocket, felt the revolver, and reached into the left and found the box of bullets. Maybe it had been a mistake to separate them. The footsteps sped up and then seemed to be coming from the road. Her ears lost the sound, but then a car started. She heard it move off slowly but could not see either the car or its lights.

  Elle decided to stay away from the street. There were houses on both sides of the street, and the one she had robbed was on the side closest to the downslope. The backyard of each house occupied the outer edge—pools, tennis courts, and gardens that were built to end before steep precipices. She found a house three lots away where she could lower herself below the level of the house and walk through the brush of the hillside. Her car was parked a distance away, and she had to estimate how far she had come. When she was fairly sure she had traveled as far along the hillside below the road as she had to go, she began to look for a way back up.

  Two houses later she nearly tripped over a plastic pipe and knelt to examine it. The pipe was an inch in diameter, like the polyvinyl chloride pipe for sprinkler systems, but this one was black and it was aboveground rather than buried. She looked up the steep incline toward the back of the house above and assumed it must come from there. She followed the pipe for a few feet and came to a sprinkler head, so this must be a sprinkler system. She kept going, finding a sprinkler head every few feet. There were a few places where someone had installed pipes that were horizontal to the main pipe, and those had sprinklers too.

  As she studied the pipes she understood. This place was a natural spot for a brush fire. This part of town had been the estate of the oil-owning Doheny family a hundred years ago, so it had been here long enough to build up plenty of kindling. This homeowne
r had installed a sprinkler system, not to water the brush, but to save the hillside in an emergency. When she climbed the final steep section, she clutched the pipe and used it to haul herself up the slope to the level of the lawn above.

  When she raised her head above the level of the lawn she looked hard at the house, the shrubs, the fences. The owners were gone or asleep, but there were two fixtures on the sides of the house that she recognized as motion-sensor lights. If she got up and walked toward the street, she would set one or the other off and be in a spotlight.

  She felt like cursing, but cursing was not silent. She had no real evidence that what she had heard at the first house had been people trying to surround and corner her. It could have been a couple walking their dog or wheeling a baby around to put it to sleep. And all her clever evasion had only brought her here, to a worse, more precarious spot.

  Elle knew ways a person could turn off a motion sensor, but she didn’t see any circuit breaker boxes and suspected the one she needed might be on the side of the house beneath a motion-sensor light. She decided the best way past the sensors was the crudest. She would try to pass far enough away from them, but if she failed, she would stay low and run. People in the hills would be used to coyotes, raccoons, skunks, and opossums walking by at night. If she set off a light the neighbors would probably take her for a passing animal. She just hoped the people in the car she’d heard earlier wouldn’t be waiting somewhere nearby and see the light.