THE TREES, A GROVE OF EIGHT, ROSE ON beautifully gnarled trunks, lifted high their exquisitely twisted branches, shook their graceful gray-green tresses in the wet wind, seeming both to defy the storm and to celebrate it. Fruitless in this season, they cast off no olives, only leaves, upon the cobbled walkway.
Twining through the branches, Christmas lights were unlit at this hour, bulbs of dull color waiting to brighten in the night.
This five-story Westwood condominium, less than one block from Wilshire Boulevard, was neither as grand as some in the neighborhood nor large enough to require a doorman. Nevertheless, the purchase price of an apartment here would gag a sword swallower.
Ethan trod the leaves of peace, passed under the extinguished lights of Christmas, and entered a marble-floored and marble-paneled public foyer. He used a key to let himself through the inner security door.
Past the foyer, the secure lobby was small but cozy, with an area rug to soften the marble, two Art Deco armchairs, and a table with a faux Tiffany lamp in red, amber, and green stained glass.
Although stairs served the five-story building, Ethan took the [88] slow-moving elevator. Dunny Whistler lived—had lived—on the fifth floor.
Each of the first four floors held four large apartments, but the highest was divided into only two penthouse units.
A faint unpleasant odor lingered in the elevator from a recent passenger. Complex and subtle, the scent teased memory, but Ethan could not quite identify it.
As he ascended past the second floor, the elevator cab suddenly impressed him as being smaller than he remembered from previous visits. The ceiling loomed low, like a lid on a cook pot.
Passing the third floor, he realized that he was breathing faster than he should be, as though he were a man on a brisk walk. The air seemed to have grown thin, inadequate.
By the time he reached the fourth floor, he became convinced that he detected a wrongness in the sound of the elevator motor, in the hum of cables drawn through guide wheels. This creak, that tick, this squeak might be the sound of a linchpin pulling loose in the heart of the machinery.
The air grew thinner still, the walls closer, the ceiling lower, the machinery more suspect.
Perhaps the doors wouldn’t open. The emergency phone might be out of order. His cell phone might not work in here.
In an earthquake, the shaft might collapse, crushing the cab to the dimensions of a coffin.
Nearing the fifth floor, he realized that these symptoms of claustrophobia, which he had never previously experienced, were a mask that concealed another fear, to which he, being a rational man, was loath to admit.
He half expected Rolf Reynerd to be waiting on the fifth floor.
How Reynerd would have known about Dunny or where Dunny lived, how he would have known when Ethan intended to come here—these were questions unanswerable without extensive investigation and perhaps without the abandonment of logic.
[89] Nevertheless, Ethan stepped to the side of the cab, to make a smaller target of himself. He drew his pistol.
The elevator doors opened on a ten-by-twelve foyer paneled in honey-toned, figured anigre. Deserted.
Ethan didn’t holster his weapon. Identical doors served two penthouse units, and he went directly to the Whistler apartment.
With the key provided by Dunny’s attorney, he unlocked the door, eased it open, and entered cautiously.
The security alarm was not engaged. On his most recent visit, eight days ago, Ethan had set the alarm when he’d left.
The housekeeper, Mrs. Hernandez, had visited in the interim. Before Dunny landed in a hospital, in a coma, she had worked here three days a week; but now she came only on Wednesday.
In all likelihood, Mrs. Hernandez had forgotten to enter the alarm code when she’d departed last week. Yet as likely as this explanation might be, Ethan didn’t believe it. Juanita Hernandez was a responsible woman, methodically attentive to detail.
Just inside the threshold, he stood listening. He left the door open at his back.
Rain drummed on the roof, a distant rumble like the marching feet of legions gone to war in some far, hollow kingdom.
Otherwise, only silence rewarded his keen attention. Maybe instinct warned him or maybe imagination misled him, but he sensed that this was not a slack silence, that it was instead a coiled quiet as full of potential energy as a cobra, rattler, or black mamba.
Because he preferred not to draw the attention of a neighbor and didn’t want to facilitate any exit but his own, he closed the door. Locked it.
From scams, from drugs, from worse, Duncan Whistler had made himself rich. Criminals routinely grab big money, but few keep it or keep the freedom to spend it. Dunny had been clever enough to avoid arrest, to launder his money, and to pay his taxes.
Consequently, his apartment was enormous, with two connecting [90] hallways, rooms leading into rooms, rooms that ordinarily did not spiral as they seemed to spiral now like nautilus shell into nautilus shell.
Searching in a hostile situation of the usual kind, Ethan would have proceeded with both hands on the gun, with arms out straight, maintaining a measured pressure on the trigger. He would have cleared doorways quick and low.
Instead, he gripped the pistol in his right hand, aimed at the ceiling. He proceeded cautiously but not with the full drama inherent in police-academy style.
To keep his back always to a wall, to avoid turning his back to a doorway, to move fast while scanning left-right-left, to be ever aware of his footing, of the need to stay sufficiently well balanced to assume, in an instant, a shooting stance: Doing all that, he would have had to admit that he was afraid of a dead man.
And there was the truth. Evaded, now acknowledged.
The cla............