Authors: Dale Wiley
“Did Stephanie give you this book?”
“Are you snooping?”
“I guess I am.”
“Yeah, she did. Just after she found out. I look at it a
lot.”
I liked Stephanie even more than before, if that was
possible.
Tabitha occasionally consulted a map in the front seat and
made comments which weren’t really meant for me, almost like she had forgotten
I was even there. Finally, she whispered, “Look to your right. It’s the gray
house.” She cruised by slowly, like something out of a movie, while I peeked
out and saw our target.
We both knew we didn’t want to park too close to the house;
there are a surprising number of people who have little else to do except look
out their windows and worry about strangers. Tabitha searched for a place to
park and made me lie back down while she did it. In the meantime, she got her
cell phone out of her purse and called Helper’s number. The answering machine
picked up. No one was home.
It was probably five minutes later when she said, “Perfect.”
She had found Lydia Frock Memorial Park, which wasn’t much more than a big
patch of green that needed to be mowed. Still, half a dozen cars were parked in
a row, their owners off cavorting in various fashions: throwing Frisbees,
holding hands, and one hippie was singing “Helplessly Hoping” while strumming a
beat-up guitar. It was a great place for Tabitha’s car and its occupants to
blend in. We wouldn’t look a bit out of place.
“I’m leaving the G-U-N in the backpack,” I said through
clinched teeth.
She laughed and put the car in park.
I got out, grabbed the backpack—checking inside for the
twelfth time to make sure the Walther’s safety was on—and threw it over my
shoulders like the hippie I suddenly was. Tabitha locked up, and we decided it
would be best if we waited a minute or two before high-tailing it back toward
the street. I pushed her for a minute on a swing and chased her under a
tree—closer to the street—and, when we were convinced no one was watching, we
walked lazily away.
“How far are we?” I asked.
“Two blocks, maybe a little more,” she answered.
I felt a little strange, walking out in the road wearing a
wig and strolling along with implements of crime and destruction strapped to my
back. Tabitha looked smashing, even just in a sweatshirt and jeans, and I
looked fairly normal, the lucky guy whose girlfriend is a lot hotter than he
is. We probably wouldn’t be noticed. This was mainly because, sad as it was to
say, we were young, clean and white. In DC, race is still the answer to every
question and even more so in the suburbs. Had we been black, we would’ve drawn
attention to ourselves no matter what precautions we would’ve taken. But in our
present condition, with our present pigmentation, no one would think much of
anything.
We were soon on Helper’s block. I had barely gotten to
glance at the house before. Now I could see that it was a modern, gray stone
affair, which almost disappeared when compared with the larger houses around
it. Still, it was obviously worth a bundle, and I wondered how a young guy who
worked for what had to be the poorest government agency was living in it
without either being a crook, having a rich family, or was currently in debt
counseling. Tabitha moved behind me, unzipped the backpack, and grabbed the
remote opener Phillip had given her. She pressed the single button, and, ten
seconds later as we were just stepping onto the lawn, the device found the
right frequency, and the door hummed and opened. There was no car inside, which
made me very, very happy.
Tabitha quickly closed the door behind us. We were now
confronting the shiny masterpiece on the wall, which looked like a scale with
buttons. She put the remote back in, drew out Phillip’s code breaker, moved
toward the wall, and did what Phillip told her. She pressed several keys on her
keypad, and we both watched as the LED display numbers spun like slot machines,
not slowing down for nearly a minute. Then, one by one, they clicked into
place. While she was holding the machine, I put on a pair of surgical gloves,
and then punched the code into Helper’s alarm. I was shaking so badly I nearly
hit a five instead of a six, which would’ve made all of his neighbors believe
someone was invading.
But the lights on the console turned from green to red, and
my blood pressure dropped twenty points. I took off the backpack and gave it to
Tabitha. She put on her pair of surgical gloves, and I grabbed the lock picking
kit. Neither of us wanted to say anything; we were still sure we were going to
get caught. I checked the door first, hoping by some stroke of luck it would
somehow be unlocked but it wasn’t. So I relived my high school days when no
classroom door was a match for me or my friends. Actually, I would’ve loved to
have seen any of them at that moment because they were all better at picking
locks than I was, but I figured with real tools rather than clothes hangers and
credit cards, I might be able to do some good.
Actually, the door was one of those flimsy, almost hollow
types, which are more to keep the cold out rather than intruders. Helper was
relying on his high-tech system to keep me away, and, if it couldn’t do the
job, the door wasn’t going to be any problem. It clicked open on the third try,
and I motioned Tabitha in and then followed.
We were standing in the kitchen on slightly sticky,
off-white linoleum. The room was filled with fancy pots and pans and a wine
rack filled with lots of wines with unpronounceable names. He had the
obligatory framed pictures of spices, which all up-and-comers do. Tabitha was
already in the living room, and I followed, noticing the framed Harings and
Warhols. They were prints, not the real things, the kind of pictures everyone
had. I kept expecting the old boy to surprise me, but he didn’t. He lived like
a bland yuppie. There was an art-deco CD rack near the fireplace, filled with
two Miles Davis albums, John Coltrane, Frank Sinatra, Billie Holiday, Bob
Dylan, and Squeeze. His magazine rack held Time, GQ, and Mother Jones.
But we were more interested in his papers, and we found
none. He obviously had a housekeeper, I thought, but then I remembered how neat
his desk was and wasn’t so sure—maybe he was just too organized. I always hated
those people. There were no papers of any kind that I could see and certainly
not any of the incriminating-to-him, getting-me-off-the-hook variety. We
checked in his bedroom, replete with Ansel Adams photos and a waterbed, and
found the same thing. It was time to go upstairs.
The house was made to look bigger from the outside; it
appeared from there that the upstairs would be spacious, but it was actually
fairly small and dull. There was a guest bedroom, which was in the process of
getting new wallpaper, a storage closet, a bathroom, and Mark’s office, which
was what interested us. It had recently been painted a brilliant white, which
made me think of powdered donuts. There were small pictures, one to a wall,
which were almost eaten by the white space around them. This was obviously the
over-artistic effect he was going for, which almost made me laugh. They were
black and whites of street life in Italy, similar to the super classy ones you
find in Pizza Huts.
Mark was smart enough to keep the good stuff out of sight,
so Tabitha powered up the computer. “He has a zip disk,” she said, almost
triumphantly. I pumped my fist like we had scored a touchdown, still unsure
what the hell a zip disk was.
While she clacked away at the keyboard, I went to the
window. The back yard held more signs of the utter suburbanites who had lived
here before. There was still a big dog house in back and a tire swing. Mark was
trying to rid the house of its former existence but was doing it a piece at a
time. The guest bedroom would be the next thing gutted.
Tabitha saw me idling by the window and suggested that I do
something. I saw two main choices: search the file cabinet in the corner or
comb through Mark’s desk. I decided to handle the latter first. I knelt beside
Tabitha and examined his desk drawers. There were papers relating to this and
that at the NEA but nothing major; Mark didn’t seem to bring much work home.
And then I saw something interesting. In the third drawer, there was a thick
manuscript, almost three hundred pages. The front page proclaimed in courier
type,
Shade of a Pale Tree by Marcus Helper
.
I was willing to bet that it was a navel-gazing,
novel-length display of purple prose, all about boring young people, repressed
by their parents in boring places, who were now going home to make valuable new
insights into their boring lives while not doing anything interesting enough to
keep my attention—like all “serious” novels seem to be these days. Behind the
manuscript, there was another stack of letters, all with Mark’s letterhead,
addressed to various agents and publishers, all dated three weeks ago. Mark had
written,
Rejected
in red ink across a couple, while most of the others
weren’t yet defiled. I felt for him in this regard, as my few feeble attempts
at writing had wound up being scorned by publishers everywhere.
I asked Tabitha if she saw any big word processing documents
entitled “Shade” or “Tree” or something like that, and she told me she was
simply copying everything to the zip disk. She had already gotten his Quicken
financial records and was just checking to see if there was anything else she
needed to grab.
I moved to the file cabinets and noticed the small locks on
each of them. I was about to open the first one when I heard something
downstairs. I froze.
“Mr. Helper? Mr. Helper? Are you here?” An older woman’s
voice called from downstairs.
Eighteen
T
abitha looked terrified, grabbed the
zip disk out of the computer, and shut it off. I thought about reaching for the
gun but knew whatever I was capable of, it was not killing old ladies.
“Mr. Helper?” She still looked downstairs.
Tabitha put the disk in the backpack and handed it to me.
She moved to the window and opened it. She was pantomiming. The ledge was
fairly large. She stepped out, looked down one last time, and jumped, grabbing
onto a tree branch, which bent so far I just knew it would break. She let go at
the last second, falling four or five feet and landing nicely, brushing herself
off as she turned to watch me.
I waited until the branch catapulted back and quit shaking
and then moved closer to the window, since I could hear the woman coming out of
the bedroom. It wouldn’t be long until she was coming upstairs. I threw the
backpack to Tabitha, thinking of Phillip’s equipment and not breathing until
she caught it. Then I stepped gingerly onto the ledge.
Tabitha was mouthing something, and I was struggling to
comprehend her.
“Close it,” she whispered.
I heard the woman moving up the stairs. I turned slightly,
poised precariously, and tried to push the window closed. I could feel myself
losing my balance. I stuck my arm out and tried to grab the tree limb.
And I missed.
I missed that branch entirely, although another one below it
slapped me in the face. I yelled, “Oh!” rather loudly as I began to get near
the bush below. It broke my fall, and I broke it, stuck in a dozen places by
branches and twigs. The fall knocked the wind out of me, demolished the bush,
and I thought,
Oh, God, help my shoulder!
All of the pain from the day
before was back, doubled with new aches. I was sure the woman was racing
downstairs to check out the back yard.
Tabitha pulled my bad arm, but she quit after I shrieked.
She slapped me on the back way too hard and seethed, “Come on.”
I did, turning around momentarily when I realized I had lost
my hat and my wig in the fall. I wanted to go back and get them and almost
cried when I knew I couldn’t; I wanted to be a good burglar and not leave any
clues. Screw that; we ran straight for the dog house, and I bumped my head
trying to get myself in.
The dog house? Tabitha climbed in and I quickly followed,
contorting myself a dozen different ways to get inside. I turned around enough
that one eye could actually see something out of the doggie hole, and I
imagined I was hurting Tabitha.
“Okay?” she whispered, somewhat forced.
“Why are we in here?” My eyes were now adjusting, and I
could see her head, pinned to the wall by what could formerly be called my good
arm, but what I now knew as my better arm. They both hurt so much. She motioned
toward the hole, and I could see why.
The woman, probably the housekeeper, was now looking around
the back yard. She went to the far side of the yard, checking over the fence,
which came to her chin. I wanted to peek out, so I could see more, but Tabitha
nudged me. She walked back, checking the damage to the bush. She saw the hat and
wig, picked them both up, and examined them. A moment later, she realized she
shouldn’t touch them for fear of destroying evidence and put them back down,
trying to approximate their positions and doing a pretty poor job of it. She
walked directly toward the dog house, taking the path we had taken.
Did she spot us? My heart stopped, and, for a long second, I
believed the jig was up, but the woman kept on walking, presumably to check the
other walls. She clucked her tongue and went back over to the bush. By this
time, I was ready for the inspection to be over, because I was pointed in
twelve different directions and none of them felt very good. The woman
scratched her head, adjusted the hat and wig some more, and then ran around to
the front, most certainly to call the police.
I edged back out, and Tabitha followed, shaking her wrist.
She pointed toward the back fence, closer to the park, and I vaulted it
cleanly, which was a first. She made it effortlessly, and I noticed to my
chagrin that she was a good deal neater than me. We both sprinted through the
yard and down the block, not caring now if we drew any attention as long as
they couldn’t out-run us. We slowed down as we got closer to the park. Tabitha
unlocked the car, and I dove in. She sped off, pinging gravel off the backs of
several cars.