Page 23 of Hero

“I’ll try to remember that. Thank you,” he said. “Look, let’s not just stand here. I’ll take you where you want. I don’t want to leave you stranded.”

“No, thanks,” she said. “I have some errands and then I’ll call somebody.” She started back down the alley. She heard no sound of him moving. Was he watching her walk? Then she realized that her steps had left him far enough behind so his proximity wouldn’t keep her killer from shooting her in front of a witness. This “Joe” person was over and now she had to get out of this neighborhood. She heard rapid steps behind herand spun around, ready to put up whatever fight she could to prolong her last morning alive. She said, “Hi, Joe.” Had the words sounded calm? No. But maybe he would attribute that to the fact that nobody wanted anybody running up behind them.

“Look, Anna, I’m sorry. Please come with me. I’ll get some work done and you can tell me where you want to go later.”

She tried to think of the right response, and it came to her—nothing. She took a step in his direction, he turned, and they walked toward his car in silence.

Leo Sealy had left the BMW in the Bank of America parking structure, and now he was striding along Ventura Boulevard looking in the window of each business to search for Justine Poole. He had taken a few minutes to find a place to leave the car where she couldn’t see it, but then he’d realized that if he parked at the bank he didn’t need to walk through the building to get out to the street. He was always leery of banks, because they had the best, clearest surveillance footage. Today he was being extra careful because he had his customary two pistols on him. He didn’t have any reason to believe there was a metal detector at the bank, but he knew one had been installed in a Chase branch in the Chicago area at least eight years ago. He’d always been sure not to be armed in banks even before then. If somebody bumped into him and felt a gun under his shirt, it would probably be in a crowded place like that and banks had reason to be on edge and expecting trouble.

He went into a Mexican restaurant, a pharmacy, a fancy bakery. When he saw a coffee shop across the street, he picked up his speed and headed straight for it. If she was anywhere around here, that would be it.

16

Joe’s place was a separate building behind a big house in the Hollywood Hills—what real estate people used to call a “mother-in-law unit.” Justine had always hated that name. The current jargon term “accessory dwelling unit” was no more elegant and less human. She liked the term “guesthouse.” Both buildings were painted the same creamy off-white.

The guesthouse was about sixty feet from the main house and about forty from the five-car garage, which was cloaked in magenta bougainvillea vines. Two mature California oaks shaded the guesthouse and the back part of the main house. As Joe’s car reached the upper end of the driveway, she could see that the backyard was a garden full of well-tended greenery.

He opened one of the garage doors with a remote control, coasted into the empty space, and pressed the remote to close the door behind them. She liked that, because if Ben’s killer had seen Joe’s car, he didn’t see it now. She happened to be looking at Joe in profile as he turned off the engine. He noticed and said, “It keeps the car from getting hot. The midday sun can be brutal.”

“I live in LA,” she said. “I like shade too.”

“I meant that I’m not putting the car away, really. I can take you wherever and whenever you want.”

“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “I believed you before. What’s your last name, by the way?”

“Alston.” He didn’t ask hers.

She followed him out a side door of the garage to a flagstone path that led to the guesthouse, which he used a key on his keychain to open. It was one of a dozen tiny indications that he was who he said he was and had a right to be here. She stepped in and looked around. There was a rectangular sunlit living room that evolved into an office as she moved down the length of it, past some nice gray furniture arranged in a conversational grouping to a space with a large desk and matching filing cabinet with a printer on it.

She could see a short hallway with one door on either side that had to be a bedroom. Across the living room was a rudimentary kitchen that consisted of a wall of counter space and cabinets interrupted by a refrigerator, a small electric stove top with a ventilation hood above it, a dishwasher, and a single sink. She said, “It’s a pretty, cheerful space.”

“Thank you.”

“Who lives in the big house?”

“A friend who rents me this pretty, cheerful space.”

“What’s her name?”

“His name is James. The reason he has the big house is that he’s the executive producer ofSacajawea. The reason he’s seldom in it is that he’s the executive producer ofSacajawea, which is shot in Canada. Before that it wasDoctor Frank, which was shot in an old decommissioned hospital and soundstages in LA. Even then he wasn’t hanging around much because he worked such long hours.”

She said, “So you just keep an eye on his place, walk his dog, and make sure nobody but you sleeps with his wife?”

“No dog,” he said. “And no wife right now either, probably because he worked too much to spend time with her.”

“Too bad. And this is the place where you work?”

“I do the real writing here, but part of the time I’m out doing research, taking pictures, and doing interviews.”

“Articles, then. And who buys them?”

“You sound like my mother.”

“You’re evading her question.”

“Magazines, newspapers, and syndicates, some of them online. And anything I don’t sell I publish on my blog.”

“Can you earn a living that way?”

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