Page 25 of Hero

This story seemed to have everything—a very attractive woman who had a career protecting celebrities and powerful people. That didn’t necessarily make her a sympathetic figure. It was pretty much what the Praetorian Guard had done for a living in ancient Rome. She was already shaping up to be the latest one to be canonized by the media as a hero, something they often did just before they tied the hero to a stake and set them on fire. For the moment he had to set these bits of knowledge aside and get to work.

Joe had to concentrate on taking practical steps right now, before everybody started moving again and it was too late to guide the situation in the direction he wanted it to go. At the moment, he had exclusive access to the heroine of an adventure story. He hoped he could keep it that way.

She was behaving as though she was desperate to stay hidden. She had gotten herself home with him by taking on a false identity—Anna—and acting flirtatious in a way that women almost never were with strangemen. He made a mental note to see if he could get her to spell the false surname when he was ready to write, since she hadn’t even said it aloud yet. The main thing was to keep her here.

She had pretended to be attracted to him, which was almost insulting because she would never have acted that way unless she thought he was stupid. She had probably really been avoiding somebody and maybe it was really a rejected suitor, as she’d said, but it could also have been a reporter, or even someone she thought might harm her—friends of the robbers she’d shot, maybe? His internet introduction to her had mentioned that the supervisor who had been with her at the shooting scene had been murdered the next night. That would be enough to scare anybody.

He had to keep her here, but behave in a way that would avoid alarming her. He had to lie to her in a way that meshed with her lies to him. She would be Anna, and only Anna, for now. He had to let her believe he was fooled by her lies, but at the same time, not fear he expected an instant sexual relationship with her. That would make her bolt for the next hiding place, one that would hide her from him as well as everyone else.

He looked up from the computer search he had been performing on Justine Poole as though staring at the wall for the right unwritten word, and took the chance of giving her a sideward look. She had fallen asleep on his couch. He was relieved. He would have more time to think through what he would say to her.

Justine had seen him look up at the wall and then at her and then go back to work. She felt relieved that his reaction had been to leave her alone and let her sleep. She knew it wasn’t going to last, but the truthwas that she really had fallen asleep until she’d heard his movement across the room. She was used to working at night and the change in schedule and the hide-and-seek of this morning had left her tired. She hoped she hadn’t snored, as exhausted people sometimes did, and she knew that some also drooled. She moved her face on the pillow no more than an inch and moved it back, and found that she hadn’t been drooling. She didn’t want to be gross and disgusting—to anybody, not just Joe Alston, whom she barely knew and would probably never see again.

Joe was a victim. She had seen the killer through the coffee shop window and the easiest way to evade him was to use the man she’d caught noticing her. She had not been exactly lying when she’d pretended she’d felt some attraction to Joe. The qualities she’d thought might make him easy to manipulate, if viewed another way, were compliments, but she couldn’t think in those terms at the time. He was there, someone she could use as a way out. He had turned out to be a good choice, but depending on a stranger had created new problems and maybe even new dangers. As soon as she let him know she was awake she could be dealing with unwanted advances.

She moved ever so slightly to restore her circulation and waited to see if he had noticed. For a moment she thought about the articles she had read. He wasn’t stupid. He was also not a jerk. She had to hope that he was—what? Trusting, maybe. That trust might buy her a little more time in invisibility.

What she realized was going to interfere with her plan was that she had drunk most of that stupid large iced tea. More than large. What did they call it? Venti. And she had not gone to the restroom to pee, but to sneak out the window. She felt that now she had used up the time her body would allow her before she had to get up from the couch.

As she stood, Joe looked up from his computer. “Good morning,” he said.

“Sorry to fall asleep.” She had dropped the Anna accent. “Is your bathroom through there?”

“Yes,” he said. “The door on the right.”

She got past him and was inside with the door locked at last. After she had relieved herself she fixed her hair with his hairbrush and used some Kleenex to blot her lipstick and make its borders conform better to her lips. She was mainly concerned about what her next few steps should be. She was safe until Joe kicked her out, but she’d thought of nothing that would help catch Ben’s killer, or even decided on her next refuge. She returned to the main room.

He was still at his desk frowning at the laptop screen, the keys clacking as he worked. She glided by behind him and walked along looking at the pictures on the walls as though she were in a gallery. There were only four of what she thought of as trophy photographs, pictures of Joe in exotic places with one or more politicians or other well-known people. One that she lingered at showed him without a shirt on a sailboat tilting in a strong wind and gripping a rope with one hand beside Lars Helgerson, the composer and conductor of the Oslo Symphony Orchestra. She only recognized him because she had seen him at a performance in LA where she had been assigned to accompany an Italian opera singer. If the pictures were intended to impress women Joe brought here, he must have courted only smart ones. Maybe he displayed these as a test.

There were also a few good paintings. There was an autumn landscape that could be from one of the nineteenth-century Hudson River clique; a big sailing ship on a level course on a blue sea, so minutely detailed that she could feel the painter’s pride in the ship as the latest and best; and a couple of naked women, probably turn of the centuryFrench, by somebody who liked women. She didn’t think Joe’s essays were the sort that would make him able to afford these, but plenty of people who did the sort of work he did were born into rich families and got sent to the best universities, then felt they had to do something to justify all that luck.

As her browsing brought her closer to him, he closed his laptop, turned to look up at her, and said, “Do you need to get someplace this afternoon? I’ve done enough on this project for now, so I can take you anytime.”

“That’s really sweet, Joe,” she said, “but I was just about to call a Lyft.” She walked past the cluster of furniture and unplugged the phone she’d been charging. She had blown an opportunity to stay out of sight for a few more hours, but maybe there never had been an opportunity after her odd behavior in the morning.

“Or we could talk,” he said. “I mean, as you pointed out before, we both noticed each other in a place that was full of people this morning. It seems as though that might be worth looking into.”

She smiled and shrugged. “I was mostly trying to be funny. But okay.” He wasn’t so smart after all. But he must think that she was attractive—not unpleasant looking, anyway—and she might be able to use that. She could still stretch this for at least an hour or two and maybe even stay invisible until dark. Maybe right now the best she could do was to stay alive and let the piece of human scum who had killed Ben Spengler wear himself out looking for her.

18

Leo Sealy was watching the Spengler-Nash building through the rearview mirror of the parked white Toyota he’d rented when his phone buzzed. He wasn’t expecting a text message, so he looked at it, guessing it would be a wrong number. The screen said it was from a woman named Tania Marsh, and all it said was “Same place, now.”

The only person who had this number was Mr. Conger, so Sealy didn’t bother to think about it much, just started the engine, took a last look in the mirrors to be sure it was safe, and drove. Sealy had to expect this kind of thing. Clients were all reluctant to speak to him on any electronic device, so certain things had to be said in person. He would have ignored most of them, but Mr. Conger wasn’t somebody he could ignore. Sealy headed for the Griffith Park golf course.

When he arrived at the parking lot, he saw Mr. Conger walking toward him from the direction of the eighteenth green pulling a two-wheel cart with a bag of clubs. Sealy easily recognized the three men following him pulling golf bags on carts. Mick Noore was a very tall Black man, Vaughn Pineda had tattoo-sleeved arms and a shaved head, and Ducky Sanders had an unusually muscular torso and arms he’d builtlifting weights in prison, but noticeably short legs. It didn’t seem possible to Sealy that any of these men played golf.

They were all crew bosses with ties to Mr. Conger, whose operations included fencing stolen jewelry and other items. The golf bags were the perfect carrying place for a long gun, and the thought gave Sealy a tight feeling in his chest for a few seconds. He had hidden rifles that way himself. He gained control of the feeling by reminding himself he was in Mr. Conger’s good graces. The three men couldn’t be there to harm Sealy. They were just the rest of a foursome.

The other men went to three different cars and busied themselves folding carts, putting bags in their trunks, and changing their shoes. Mr. Conger walked to his own car, opened the door, and sat on the seat to remove his spikes. Sealy approached and Conger looked up and smiled. “Hello, Leo. Thanks for coming.”

“Happy to.” Sealy tried to make it sound true.

“Well, unless you got her today and hid the body, I’d say you’re stuck.”

Leo Sealy shrugged. “It’s taking a little longer than I wanted. I almost caught up with her this morning at a hotel near the airport, but by the time I made the rounds of the parking lot she was gone. I was pretty sure she was just trying to make it look like she was flying somewhere, because I figured she’d want to stay in LA until the police gave her the okay to leave. I saw her getting into a cab at the airport and followed her, but ended up losing her in the Valley. I was about to check for other leads when I got your message.”

“If you’d gotten her at the airport, you would never have made it to the freeway anyway. You don’t see many cops there, but they see you. You’re always on a bunch of cameras.”

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