Point and Shoot (29 page)

The carousel kept churning. Airport carousels always reminded Hardie of a suit of armor, dirty and scuffed, as if a knight had fallen into a trash compactor.

The bags were belched up one at a time. None of them looked like Hardie’s. There was a loud cry to his left. The little boy was running toward the doors. A man in his late thirties stopped in his tracks, took a knee, then held his arms out as the boy tackled him. He lifted the boy up off the ground and spun him in a half circle. Hardie looked back at the carousel. The girl with the purse, the one who’d been tapping her shoe, was gone. He guessed her bag had come up.

Finally all of the bags were up and claimed, leaving Hardie to stare at the empty metal carousel, turning and turning and turning.

Figured.

The suitcase contained nothing of real value—a couple of gray T-shirts, jeans, socks, deodorant and toothpaste, some DVD standbys. And Hardie still had his carry-on bag, thank God.

But the loss was still annoying. He would have no change of clothes until the airline located his suitcase—
if
they located it, ha ha ha—and had it delivered. Hardie went to the airline desk near the carousel and filled out a form with boxes too small for even his small, tight printing. He wrote down the address of the house he’d agreed to watch, wondering how the promised courier service would ever find it.

The owner, a musician named Andrew Lowenbruck, had told Virgil that the place was notoriously well hidden, even to people familiar with the tangle of intestines that made up the roadways of the original Hollywood Hills. Some deliverymen insisted that Alta Brea Drive didn’t even exist.

Hardie figured he might see his bag somewhere on old episodes of
The Twilight Zone
. Maybe tucked into the background behind Burgess Meredith, or in the overhead bin over William Shatner’s head.

Still, Hardie dutifully filled out the missing-bag form, then hopped a dirty, off-white shuttle bus to the rental-car area. Hardie hated renting cars, because it was one more thing to look after. But you couldn’t be in the Hollywood Hills without a car. What was he supposed to do? Take a bus to Franklin and Beachwood, then hike on up to the house?

Lowenbruck was supposed to have met him at the place this morning. But he’d sent an apologetic e-mail last night to the service explaining that he had to be in Moscow earlier than expected. Lowenbruck was working on the sound track for a movie by an eccentric Russian director who wouldn’t let the unfinished reels leave his native country, so he had to fly out to watch an early cut to start gathering ideas. His original flight was canceled; the replacement left eight hours earlier. Virgil told him that Lowenbruck was known for his “pulse-pounding” action scores—the modern-day Bernard Herrmann, they called him. Hardie didn’t know what was wrong with the original.

So … Hardie wouldn’t be meeting him. But that wasn’t unusual. He rarely met the owners of the houses he watched—it was mostly handled by Virgil at the service, who in turn handled things by e-mail and FedEx key exchange.

Which was probably for the better. If they had a look at Hardie, some owners might change their minds.

Instead, Hardie got to know his clients by the stuff they left behind. The photos on their walls, the DVDs on their shelves, the food in their fridges. Stuff doesn’t lie.

As it turned out, Alta Brea Drive wasn’t too hard to find. Just shoot up Beachwood, the main drag, until you hit a dead end at the fairy tale–looking houses. Hang a sharp left on Belden, which only looks like somebody’s driveway—swear to God, it’s a real road, don’t worry, keep driving. Then, follow the intestinal tract straight up into the Hills until it looks like you are going to drive over the edge of a road and tumble down a ravine to your death. Then, at the last possible moment is another turn, and you find yourself in front of Andrew Lowenbruck’s house.

Hardie was thankful it was daylight. How the hell did people do this in the dark?

These roads weren’t meant for two-way traffic, let alone a row of parked cars along the sides. But that’s what people did up here, apparently—good luck sorting it all out. Still, Hardie made it up the mountain without an accident, and that’s all that mattered.

Hardie had been up in the Hollywood Hills before, watching other houses. But never in this specific area—the original Holly-woodland development known as Beachwood Canyon. The whole setup looked way too fragile to Hardie. Back in Philly, he’d had grown up in a $7,000 two-story row house, which was wedged in with hundreds of other row houses on flat tracts of land that stretched river to river.

Out here was the opposite—all hills and heights and precariously perched multimillion-dollar homes. Every time Hardie looked at the Hollywood Hills, he half-expected to hear a loud wooden snap and then
whooosh
. All of the houses would slide down from their mountain perches and end up in a giant pit of broken lumber and glass at the bottom of the canyon.

Which was just one of the many reasons Hardie drank a little bit more when he sat one of these houses.

Hardie pulled up in front and turned off his rental—a Honda Whatever that felt and drove like a plastic box. Forget Alta Brea Drive; Hardie wasn’t entirely convinced this
car
was real. But it was part of the airline–rental-car package he’d found online. He didn’t plan on driving it much, anyway. All he needed was a way to get to a grocery store to buy food and booze, and then eventually a way back to the airport.

There were two other homes on this twisting bit of road, one on either side of Lowenbruck’s place, all three of them clinging to the side of the mountain. Across Alta Brea was a rocky cliff covered in foliage. A crew of two workmen in buff jumpsuits were busy hacking away at the brush with chain saws. On top of the cliff was another of what Californians called a “house.” The only part you could see from street level was a turret, standing tall, looking like it was part of a full-fledged castle. That was the thing about these hills. No matter where you built your castle, there was always somebody with a bigger castle, higher up than yours.

From street level, Lowenbruck’s place looked like nothing more than a wide, flat bungalow. Spanish-tile roof, freshly painted stucco exterior. On the left was a single-car garage. In the middle was a sturdy front door cut from solid oak, and on the right, windows that would offer you a wide-screen view if tall shrubs weren’t in the way.

But Hardie knew this was just the top level. Virgil told him the place had three floors; the other two were built down along the side of the mountain. In his instructions, Lowenbruck called it his “upside-down house.”

The house was famous in a minor way. In 1949 a film noir called
Surrounded
had been set here, as well as parts of a 1972 neonoir called
The Glass Jungle
. This was no accident. The director of
Glass Jungle
was a big fan of
Surrounded
and had spent a lot of time on permissions for the location. Later still, in 2005, they remade
Surrounded
—this time calling it
Dead by Dawn
—but left out the house altogether. Hardie hadn’t seen any of the films, but Lowenbruck told Virgil there were copies at the house—the sitter should check them out, just for fun. Hardie would check out the first one, but not the others. He had a rule these days: he didn’t watch any movies made after he was born.

Seems the movies were another reason Lowenbruck wanted a house-sitter. Every few days some noir geek would just show up and start snapping photos of the house. Some would even try to sweet-talk their way in, as if the place were just a vacant movie prop and not a real place where actual people lived.

Late last night, when he had to catch his sudden plane to Moscow, Lowenbruck e-mailed Virgil to say he’d leave keys in his mailbox.

Hardie looked.

Yep.

No keys in the mailbox.

L
EAVING THE
keys to your $3.7-million-dollar home in your mailbox is never a good idea. But Lowenbruck had insisted—there was no time to FedEx them to Hardie, and he didn’t know any neighbors to leave them with. Couldn’t Hardie just let himself in? They’d be in the mailbox, what, a matter of eight hours?

Or never.

Hardie pulled his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, pressed the auto-dial number of Virgil’s office. He waited. Nothing happened. Upon closer examination, Hardie realized that there were no bars on the screen. Probably the damned hills, blocking everything.

Hardie decided he wanted a beer. Like, yeah, right now. It was super-early in the morning, but maybe that’s what he should do. Get back in the Honda Whatever, drive back down to level ground, and buy some beer. Perhaps by the time he got back, the keys would have magically reappeared in the mailbox. If not, drink another beer. Repeat until reality conformed.

Yeah. Sure.

Hardie realized that unless he wanted to guard this damned place from outside, he’d have to figure out some way of breaking in.

He examined the front, looking for entry points, hoping for an obvious weakness. The oak door was solid, locked. The wide-screen windows were locked as well—and wired. Hardie spied the security transmitters mounted in the corners of the frames. Lowenbruck had given Virgil the keypad code, but that was useless with Hardie locked outside now, wasn’t it?

Moving toward the right side of the property, past some eucalyptus bushes, Hardie craned his neck until he saw a wooden sundeck hanging off the back of the house. It was supported by narrow metal poles and fitted with a wrought-iron railing. If he could make it onto the deck, he could probably jimmy open the back doors. The only problem: there was no easy way up to the deck. From the edge, there was a fifty-foot drop to the ground. Not unless Hardie wanted to climb onto the roof, and then jump down onto the deck.

The latter, of course, seemed to be the only option.

Hardie sighed. Was he really going to do this? Who knows what kind of trouble he might get into up there. One slip and he could end up with a broken leg down in the ravine, bobcats circling him.

Hardie slid the phone into his pocket, climbed behind the wheel, pulled the Honda Whatever up closer to the garage door, then parked. He stepped onto the hood of the car and scrambled up the slanted tile roof. The tiles were warm from the sun. Hardie had a vision of the damned things breaking loose, sliding down the roof, and shattering on the pavement, one after the other after the other. Hardie was a large man; he didn’t know if the makers of Spanish tile took his size and weight into consideration.

But he made it to the peak of the roof without incident. There he paused. The lush bowl of the hills was laid out beneath him, and off in the distance were the hazy glass-and-metal skyscrapers of downtown L.A. Hardie instantly understood the appeal of living here. Even though the sides of the mountain were littered with homes, there was the illusion that yours was the only one that mattered, that the rest of these properties had been assembled here for
your
benefit. No one else had a view like yours, not the homes above nor the ones below. You had a front-row seat to the big show. You could enjoy it anytime you liked … when you weren’t slaving away on a sound track, that is. Hardie wondered how much Lowenbruck enjoyed his view. He doubted the man ever climbed up onto his own roof to catch this particular vista.

Okay, enough. Sooner or later somebody was going to look up and see Hardie standing here, looking like an idiot.

Hardie spied the deck and began to make his way over to it, arms out for balance. Still, he couldn’t help but glance down at the houses below. The different-colored roofs, the pools, the terracotta patios.

And through a clearing in the trees, on the back deck of the house closest to Lowenbruck’s, a nude woman sunbathing.

It almost looked like a mirage. The branches and trees made a perfect frame around her body, blocking out everything but her astounding and abundant nakedness. She was full-chested, with pink nipples that looked too delicate to be out in the bright California sun. Her body was muscled, perfectly shaved, and oiled—as far as Hardie could tell—from her nose down. Her skin practically glistened. Hardie wondered why Lowenbruck hadn’t left the keys with
her
.

The woman’s eyes were hidden behind sunglasses. She held a cell phone to her ear. And while her mouth moved, the words didn’t travel the distance uphill.

Hardie froze in place, pitched precariously on the downward slope of the roof. He stared for a few moments before he realized that, fuck, she could probably see him, too.

Probably telling a friend on the phone:
You’re never going to believe this, but some idiot is standing up on the roof of my neighbor’s place, staring at my tits.

Hardie continued his descent, placed a hand on the hot tile for balance, then jumped down onto the back deck. Something squished underfoot. Hardie was almost afraid to look … then did. Some kind of animal had been up here recently and had left a large deposit on Lowenbruck’s sundeck. Not a bird; this beast appeared to enjoy a heartier diet than seeds and grass.

Shit.

Fortunately, Hardie had packed another pair of shoes.

Unfortunately, they were in his missing suitcase.

Hardie tiptoed over and tried the sliding glass doors. Miraculously, they were unlocked. Either Lowenbruck forgot or he wasn’t in the habit of locking it.

The moment the contacts separated, however, the alarm was triggered—a shrill repeating
bee-BEEP bee-BEEP
. Thirty seconds and counting. Hardie knew there was a keypad by the front door. He needed to reach it fast or he’d have company soon, and that would no doubt push back his drinking by a few hours more.

bee-BEEP

bee-BEEP

bee-BEEP

Just as he was about to step inside he remembered the unidentified animal crap on his shoes. Hardie worked off one shoe hurriedly with the back of the other, reached down, yanked off its companion, then darted through the open doors looking for anything, anything at all, resembling a security keypad.