The Color of Light

Chapter 12

“I can think of only two places in this house where Dad might hide a gun,” I said. “One is his desk, but I have already emptied it. The other is his workbench in the garage.”

Jean-Paul threw his head back and laughed, something I had rarely seen him do. I looked over at him as I slipped off my jeans. “Sir?”

“My dear.” He pulled me against him and laid us back on the bed. “I am doing my very best impression of the romantic Frenchman, but, alas, apparently to no effect.”

I rolled on top and straddled him. “You’re doing a fabulous job of it, Monsieur. Top drawer. A-number-one. Le dernier cri.”

“But?”

“Your target, moi, is just too damn scattered at the moment to focus fully on the program.”

“Et donc?”

“So, give me ten minutes for a quick look, and I promise that when I return I will give all my attention in mind as well as body to your fine efforts.”

“A look in the garage?”

“A quick one.” I kissed him.

His wheels were turning, thinking. After a moment, he lifted me off him and said, “D’accord.”

I pulled my jeans back on, found my flip-flops, and hurried down the stairs through the quiet house and out through the butler’s pantry to the garage. Roy and Lyle had taken Uncle Max with them to Yoshi’s, a jazz club in San Francisco. Max’s note said he would stay overnight and take BART back in the morning. He’d left us the keys to his rented car in case we needed wheels in the meantime.

Lyle had finished sorting through most of the drawers and bins in and around Dad’s workbench before George Loper flamed out and progress halted. I rummaged through the remaining jumble, finding nothing more interesting than a book about constructing martin houses, a project Dad apparently never got around to, possibly because mosquitoes are not a big problem in Berkeley. I tossed the book into a trash bag and kept searching. Surely Dad wouldn’t hide a firearm where anyone might happen upon it. So, then, where? Unless he had disposed of it.

I had a wrench in one hand and a rubber mallet in the other, standing beside the workbench, looking around for inspiration, when the door to the side yard opened.

“Larry?” I raised the wrench as a reflex when he came through the door.

“Whoa.” Larry held up both hands. “Don’t throw that thing at me, okay?”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“I saw you.” He gestured toward the window in the side door. “And I saw you were alone, so I thought, No time like the present.”

“That door was locked; I checked it.”

“Yeah, well.” Sheepishly, he held up a key. “I know where your dad hid it.”

“Have you been coming in here all along?”

“Shit, yeah,” he said, sounding almost angry. “I told you that.”

“No, you did not.”

“I told you I was looking after the garden, didn’t I?” he said, as if speaking to an idiot as he aimed a thumb toward the rack of garden tools. “How the hell did you think I could do that without, oh, I don’t know, maybe a rake and a hoe?”

I put down the wrench and held out my hand for the key, which he gave me. The key was old, rusty where it attached to a small metal ring, but shiny, recently oiled where it fit into the lock.

“How long have you known about the key?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Just about always, I guess.”

For a long time, the same key could open all three of the small garage doors: one to the side yard, one to the backyard, and one into the house; my parents used the garage more as a workshop and garden shed than as a place to park cars. Somewhere along the way, when I was nine or ten, Dad had installed a new lock and a deadbolt on the door into the house. Max told me that Isabelle had been found in my room one night, watching me sleep. Any parent would have changed the lock after that.

“Did you tell Isabelle Martin where to find the key?”

“Mighta,” he tossed off as if giving her access to the house-to me-were of no consequence.

“You went into the house, too, didn’t you?”

“Just one time,” he said. “I thought there was no one home, but then I heard someone running the vacuum cleaner and I got the hell out.”

“No,” I said. “More recently, like night before last.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Someone broke into the house Thursday night.”

“Oh sure.” He slapped the end of the workbench that separated us. “Anything happens, just blame old Larry, the town delinquent.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But you said you were in the house.”

“Yeah,” he said, very matter-of-fact about it, like wasn’t everybody walking into the house? “But that was a whole long time ago. And it was just that one time. I mean, I tried to, but the next time the key didn’t work.”

I nodded; it had been before Dad changed the lock. I asked him, “What were you looking for?”

A shoulder rose and fell. “Like I said, just to see what the house was like.”

“Why us?”

“That’s the thing I wanted to tell you about.” He looked around, moved a step closer to speak in a soft, confiding voice. “I sorta looked in a lot of houses.”

“Just to see what they were like?” I asked.

“Yeah. And what people were doing,” he said. “I saw a lot of things.”

“Private things,” I said, suddenly feeling cold.

He nodded, his old cockiness coming back. “What I said to Beto that day, it was the truth. I saw it for myself.”

“You called his mother a Saigon whore.”

He smirked, head bobbing up and down to affirm that I had hit on the answer. “She was. A great big whore.”

The door into the house opened quietly and Jean-Paul, barefoot, came down the two steps into the garage; he held a gun in his hand. To distract Larry from turning around and seeing him, and possibly running off again, I made a lot of noise pulling Dad’s stool out from under the workbench. I sat so that, to talk to me, his back was completely to the door where Jean-Paul stood.

“That’s a disgusting thing to say, Larry.”

“Okay, but what I saw her and the guy doing was pretty damn disgusting, too,” he said. “Old Bart would be at the store and Beto was at school and this guy would come over and, jeez, like you said, disgusting.”

“But not so disgusting that you turned away.”

“Boys will be boys,” he said, flashing his snaggletoothed grin.

“Shouldn’t you have been in school?”

“The thing is, I used to ditch a lot. Then they’d suspend me for ditching.” He sneered: “Assholes.”

“Who was the man?” I asked.

A phone rang inside the house, making Larry turn toward the sound. He spotted Jean-Paul.

“Maggie, ça va?” Jean-Paul asked without venturing further into the garage.

“We’re okay,” I said.

Larry turned back and wagged a scolding finger at me. “I said, just you.”

“Hey, Larry, you broke into my house late at night,” I snapped. “What did you expect? That Jean-Paul wouldn’t come out and check on me?”

He seemed to think that was reasonable, and did not question that Jean-Paul had brought a gun with him.

“Who was the man?” I asked again.

He shrugged. “We were never introduced, if you know what I mean.”

“But you saw him. Can you describe him?”

His gaze slid toward Jean-Paul. “Maybe I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”

“Is there something that might help you remember?”

“Could be. I’ll think about it and get back to you.”

He headed toward the door. But he stopped with his hand around the doorknob and looked over his shoulder at me. “Do you remember what you said to me on that day?”

“I do. And I’m sorry that what I said hurt you so much.”

“The thing is,” he said, turning his face away from me. “What you said, it was true, too. I was pissed off at Beto, hell, I was pissed off at all of you guys and your perfect lives. I thought that if I told him what his mom really was, it would put the stupid little prick in his place.” He fell silent for a moment, sighed, before he said, “But you were right. Bringing him down wouldn’t make people like me.”

With that, he turned and left, shutting the door behind him.

After he was gone, I opened a drawer in the workbench where I had seen a package of steel hasp locks and a pair of padlocks. I handed them to Jean-Paul, took out the can of screws and the electric screwdriver, and together we installed the locks on the inside of both the garage doors to the backyard and to the side yard, the door Larry said he had been using the key to open. With that same key, Isabelle had been able to access my bedroom, until Dad put a deadbolt on the door into the house.

“I’ll call a locksmith in the morning,” I said.

“Probably wise.”

He picked up the gun he had been carrying when he came out to the garage.

“Where’d you find that?” I asked.

“I’ll show you.”

We went into Dad’s den and over to his desk. The desk I so carefully emptied.

“After you went downstairs, I began to think,” Jean-Paul said as he pulled out the bottom drawer, the same drawer where I had found the strongbox with the movies and the crime scene photo of Mrs. B. “Where would a man hide a gun so that his wife and child, and certainly the cleaning woman, would not happen upon it, even if they looked for it? Perhaps the underside of a drawer?”

He put his hand against the inside of the drawer and turned it over to show me the bottom. The wood was too pristine to have had something affixed there for a couple of decades.

“So, where did you find the gun?” I asked.

“Voilà.” He removed his hand and a wood panel fell out. Dad had made a false bottom, creating a fitted compartment for the gun and a box of ammo and a cleaning kit, and a top to hide them.

“I’ll be damned,” I said, imagining Dad at his garage workbench, carefully crafting a safe place for his contraband firearm. “I’m not surprised. If Dad could hide a mistress and their daughter from his wife for a couple of years, he would certainly figure out how to hide an itty-bitty gun.”

Jean-Paul picked up the Colt automatic and weighed it on his palm. “Not so small, my dear. This weapon was standard military issue at one time, excellent stopping power.”

“Max said it was unregistered. Do you think it’s traceable?”

He gave me a little French shrug and a moue while he considered. “Probably traceable from the manufacturer to first point of sale. But from there?” He turned the Colt over and looked at the serial number. “I’ll make some calls, yes?”

“Be careful with that thing,” I said. “Is it loaded?”

“It was, yes, but no longer.” He opened the top desk drawer and showed me the gun’s magazine and a box of.45 ACP shells. “The ammunition is very old, certainly unstable. Perhaps you might ask your Detective Halloran to have it taken away for disposal.”

I had qualms about doing that. “If I tell Kevin about the ammo, he’ll ask about the gun it belongs to. I may want to keep the Colt if it’s unregistered and untraceable. You never know when that might be handy to have.”

He reloaded the gun. “My dear, should I be afraid?”

“Not you,” I said. “It might be your sweet tuchis I’ll need to save.”