Page 39 of The Bad Weather Friend

Benny heard music throbbing inside the house. Muffled by the limestone-clad walls and the multilayered bullet-resistant glass installed to foil burglars, the melody remained unidentifiable, while the bass beat thumped out a carnal rhythm.

The front door was a slab of teak set in a carved-limestone surround. Mounted above it, a security camera fixed the destiny buddies with an incriminating stare.

“Security video is often stored for thirty days,” Harper said.

“For our visit,” said Spike, “I’m emitting an electromagnetic signal that disables all security cameras.”

“Yeah? How do you do that?” Harper asked.

“Think of it as a long, uninterrupted, odorless fart composed not of gas but of microwaves that issue from my ears.”

“What if he has a gun?” Benny asked.

“All the more fun.”

“Well, the thing is, Harper and I aren’t bulletproof.”

“I am aware of that sad fact about human anatomical design. I will do my best to prevent you from being bullet riddled, stabbed, bludgeoned, strangled, set on fire, or crushed by large falling objects.”

Benny wasn’t sure whether Spike was joshing or mocking him. He decided it must be the former. Therefore he didn’t resort to mockery of his own by saying,Yeah, butwe’vegot reproductive organs.

The brushed stainless-steel hardware on the door featured a lever-action handle. The lock was engaged.

“Maybe we could just ring the bell,” Benny said.

Pointing to the camera, Harper said, “When Handy sees who it is, he’s not likely to open the door.”

Spike applied himself. Teak cracked as if it were balsa wood. Spanner screws stripped their threads and sprang from their holes and pinged across the courtyard paving. The latch assembly and the escutcheon—with cylinder, plug, and keyway—tore out of the door. Examining the ruined hardware, Spike said, “Mr. Duroc will have no memory of us after I’m done with him. Little things like this will mystify him and make him nervous for years to come.” He dropped the mortise lock on the stoop.

The door swung inward of its own weight, and Spike led them into a foyer that, like every room on the main level, was floored with polished cream-colored marble.

The music flooding the rooms through the all-house sound system was loud, but it wasn’t the volume that inspired Spike to grimace and snarl with contempt, “Electronic dance crap.”

Benny had been here twice for Surfside corporate parties. On both occasions, the place made him nervous. The interior designer believed in color and lots of it. Copper-leafed and silver-leafed and faux-malachite ceilings. Chandeliers like cascades of tentacular sea creatures. Glistening lacquered walls in apricot and peach and raspberry. Oversize plush furniture. Heavily veined quartzite end tables. The enormous abstract expressionist paintings—spatters, streaks, whirls, and blocks of color thrown and squirted and spatulated onto the canvases—might have been produced by psychotic monkeys with access to a wide spectrum of acrylics, but in fact were the work of an acclaimed Los Angeles artist.

They stepped out of the foyer into a hallway that led left and right. Directly ahead, a wall of glass in the spacious living roomprovided a view of Handy’s coastal cruiser in its slip and the dark harbor ringed by twinkling shore lights.

The compressed, repetitive melody and pounding rhythm masked any sounds that might lead them toward human activity. Benny half expected a dance line of time travelers from the late disco period to come strutting their stuff along the hallway, the guys in black ankle boots and white suits, their shirts open to mid chest, the girls in spike heels and slit skirts and silk blouses with deep necklines and rhinestone-encrusted chokers.

Then the music stopped. The sudden cessation of ear-splitting sound triggered in Benny a reaction similar to the manner in which he would have responded to silence abruptly shattered by a shrieking security-system alarm. He startled, pivoted this way and that, as if he had been caught in the act of theft. He considered—though only briefly—bolting from the house. When he realized Harper was looking at him as if making an assessment, he straightened his back, squared his shoulders, and strove for a steely-eyed Clint Eastwood look.

The silence lasted maybe six seconds. Then male laughter issued from somewhere to their right, and a different kind of dance music—piano and strings and a swooning saxophone, with a less insistent beat—filled the house, but at a more reasonable volume.

“Now it’s the last dance at the senior prom,” muttered Spike, evidently having become something of a music snob over eighteen hundred years.

“If I remember the layout,” Benny said, “that laugh came from the kitchen.”

“Lead the way,” Spike said.

Harper surprised Benny by taking his hand. He didn’t think she was scared and needed reassurance, not after she had reacted to the craggle’s eyeball trick as she might have to a magician conjuring a dove out of a pocket handkerchief. For maybe two seconds, he thought his Eastwood squint had impressed her with his potential manliness, but of course not. As they approached the entrance to the kitchen, she solved the mystery by whispering, “If Handy assaults you on sight, just know I took a course in how to treat gunshot and edge-weapon wounds. I can probably keep you alive until EMTs get here.”

“Good to know,” he said.

The immense kitchen had everything a high-end kitchen ought to have, then had it all again: four Sub-Zero refrigerator-freezers, two microwaves, four regular ovens, two islands with a vegetable sink in each, two larger sinks elsewhere, two griddles, two grills, two woks, two icemakers, two trash compactors. This was what a sales brochure might call a “kitchen equipped for major social events.” So if you had a thousand close friends in for a sit-down dinner on the patio, you didn’t have to work yourself to exhaustion, but could rely on a caterer and have a lovely evening for a mere quarter of a million dollars, including a fancy dessert about twice the size of a thimble as well as good but not exceptional wines.

On this occasion, a bottle of fine champagne was nestled in an ice bucket on the smaller island. Two Lalique flutes stood beside it, tiny bubbles rising through the golden liquid. Handy Duroc had only one guest. He was slow dancing with her through the generous workspace surrounding the islands.

More accurately, they weren’t dancing so much as they were rubbing their bodies against each other as they moved through that culinary wonderland. Benny was impressed with Handy’sability to lead his partner faultlessly in a figure eight around and between the islands, considering that both of them had their eyes closed and were making the kind of lower-body contact that tended to cloud the mind with desire or, again more accurately, lust.

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