Hit Me

Forty-Eight

I got in a twist over the GPS,” he told her. “I’d programmed it with two addresses where things happened.”

“The house that burned and where else? Oh, of course. The loft where you wrapped things up.”

“And anything digital lasts forever.”

“And of course you’d rented the car under your own name.”

“I did everything under my own name, including the car rental. So I hatched one brilliant idea after another. I could pull the GPS, smash it with a hammer, drop it off a bridge, and report it as stolen.”

“That would work, wouldn’t it?”

“You’d think so,” he said, “but suppose it’s got some kind of cyberconnection to a computer somewhere? Then making it disappear just might lead somebody to check with the mother ship and find out where it had been before it got lost. So I thought of opening it up and messing with its insides.”

“To reprogram it? You could do that?”

“Not in a million years. But I could probably find some way to make it stop working. I wouldn’t mention it, and nobody would notice until the next person to rent it couldn’t get it to work. If he even bothered to try.”

“Is that what you did?”

He shook his head. “I just left it alone and gave the car back to them. I decided it was nothing to worry about. If they have reason to suspect me, they won’t need GPS records. If they don’t, they won’t check them. And why should they? As far as they’re concerned, the case is closed. Richard Hudepohl is dead as a result of a fire set by the former lover of his jilted girlfriend.”

“All of which is true.”

“Well, almost true, and there’s nobody around to argue otherwise. Trish Heaney and Tyler Crowe are both dead. If the lab crew from CSI got on the case, they’d probably spot a few inconsistencies in the murder-suicide scenario, but real-life cops are in more of a hurry than the ones on TV. The case is closed, and the closest thing to a loose end is Joanne, and even if she’s crazy enough to tell someone, what can she say? She’s got the number of an unregistered phone that no longer exists, and she wired some money to a person who never existed in the first place.”

“So it’s all over. And yet you seem…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Moody? Dissatisfied?”

“Maybe.”

“Did you do that memory exercise? Making the mental picture smaller and bleaching the color out of it?”

He shook his head. “I probably should,” he said. “I’ve spent so little time thinking about them that I didn’t even remember to fade them out of my memory. I can barely remember what they look like, Trish and Tyler. Very distinctive in appearance, both of them, and yet it’s hard for me to picture them.”

“I wonder why.”

Later he said, “It was peripheral, all of it. What I was most interested in was getting the best possible price for the Soderling collection. The job in Denver was something to shunt aside and take care of in my spare time.”

“When it was supposed to be the other way around.”

“I was all involved with the stamps,” he said, “and it took me a couple of days to go have a look at the house on Otis Drive. If I’d made it my first priority, there never would have been a fire. Hudepohl would have been a soft target, he wouldn’t have had his guard up, so how hard could it have been?”

“For a man of your talents.”

“Well,” he said. “The point is, by the time I managed to go see where he lived, there was no house there. And then there was nothing to do, so I headed north and went back to work on selling the stamps.”

“Which was what you were really interested in anyway.”

“Right. And when Dot went proactive and got in touch with Mrs. Hudepohl, I wondered why she couldn’t leave well enough alone.”

“Because you already had half the money without doing anything.”

“And now I’d have to do something. And I did, and it went smoothly enough, but it was a little like watching a movie.”

“You weren’t really involved.”

“I managed to stay in the moment,” he said, “because you have to. And I didn’t get thrown off at the prospect of making bad things happen to good people.”

“Because they weren’t good people.”

“They weren’t just the kind of people you see on Cops. They were the kind who call up their friends to make sure they tune in and watch. She was a tramp and he was a glassy-eyed pyromaniac. And they smelled.”

“Oh?”

“I don’t think he bathed much. Maybe he resented water because people put out fires with it, but you could tell he gave it a wide berth. And she was wearing this overpowering perfume, with a trace of body odor under it.”

“Charming.”

“I smelled it again a few hours ago, when I made their images get fainter and smaller. I got rid of their faces, but I couldn’t get rid of the perfume. Jesus, I’ll bet that’s what it was.”

“What?”

“Jungle Gardenia. It’s not as though I recognized it, because I don’t believe I’d ever smelled it before, but I mentioned it, didn’t I?”

“It’s how your girlfriend got her name.”

“Her mother wore it,” he remembered, “and it evidently drove her father mad with desire.”

“But it just made you want to get back to your stamps.”

“It made me want to get out of there,” he said. “I wish there was a way to get the smell out of my memory. If I can do it with a visual image, why can’t I do it with an aroma?”

“Maybe you’ll figure out something.”

“Or maybe it’ll go away on its own. It doesn’t matter. The point is my work didn’t have my full attention, and I think there’s a lesson there.”

“Don’t try to do two things at once?”

“That’s part of it,” he allowed, “but there’s more. The other thing, the Denver assignment. I don’t think I can do that anymore.”

“Maybe it’s time to let go of it.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking. I thought I was done with it before, when Donny and I were doing okay rehabbing houses. And then I had a reason to go back to it, or thought I did, and it’s very seductive.”

“Easy money,” she said.

“Plus it’s easy to get involved. It’s problem solving, and you get caught up in it, and there’s a good feeling when it works out. Well, there can be a bad feeling, too, but you push that part aside. Except this time I didn’t get caught up in it, not really, and the good feeling didn’t amount to much. And there wasn’t exactly a bad feeling, but there was a bad smell.”

“And it’s still around.”

“I’ll tell Dot I’m done. We’ll still be friends, but she can call me on the regular line. We won’t need Pablo.”

“Pablo?”

“It’s not important. We’ve got plenty of money, and I think I can make money in the stamp business, even if that’s not the original reason I got into it. And I just realized something else.”

“Oh?”

“The real reason I didn’t explain Jenny’s name to Denia Soderling. It’s the same reason I didn’t sleep with her.”

“It would be long and drawn out and she might not get it?”

“It would be bringing somebody else into something that’s just for you and me. I didn’t think of it in those terms, I just knew I didn’t want to do it. Sleep with her or explain to her. But that’s why.” He drew a breath. “I suppose that sounds pretty silly.”

“No,” she said. “Not to me.”

“I’ll call Dot.”

She put her hand on his arm. “There’s no rush,” she said. “Call her in a little while.”