The Devil's Code

out how to get into a place without anybody knowing,” I said. “LuEllen and I talked to Jack about that, a little, about not leaving a mark . . . that’s why I looked for the house key at Jack’s place. Better to ease your way in, than to break something, and he knew that.” I took a turn around the kitchen, working it through, finally shook my head. “I can see how they could have set it up. It’d take two guys, but they’d have to be brutal assholes to shoot that old man, the guard.”
    “Two guys came to burn down the house,” she said. She said it quietly, like a scholar making the killing point.
    “Goddamnit,” I said after a while. “I think they killed him.”

 7 
    W e sent the second copies of the Jaz disks off to Bobby’s friend John Smith—also a friend of mine, and an artist himself—and I spent the next two days trying to find something that made sense on the Jaz disks, and working along the edges of the bay, with watercolor. Salty water has a different quality from fresh water, a heavier, more viscous feel. The heaviness was compounded by the light, which was very green and hard. I never got it quite right.
    Lane stayed at the house, getting ready for the funeral, doing a little telecommuting and some restless reading. She also spent some time poking through the Jaz disks, but neither of us found much.
    Three days after the fire, the blisters on her arms were drying to unsightly splotches of itchy dead skin,while the redness under her neck had begun to fade to brown. I brought in meals during the day, and in the cool evenings we walked out to dinner at a dimly lit Italian place, where the burns wouldn’t be visible.
    T he funeral took place on a beautiful California morning, fifty people gathered in an old-fashioned Spanish-style stucco chapel, where an Episcopalian priest said all the right words with the right dignity. The women cried, the men shook hands and Harry Connick Jr.’s “Sunny Side of the Street” played through the sound system as Jack’s childhood friends carried his casket out the side door.
    LuEllen walked in the door a few seconds after the service started. I almost didn’t recognize her in the New York black dress, hat, and wraparound sunglasses. She lifted a hand to me and slipped into a pew across the way. Lane didn’t notice—she was out of it, struggling through the worst week of her life, struggling to get her older brother into the ground.
    At the end of the service, Lane went to the front door to shake hands. LuEllen drifted over to me and said, “Bummer.”
    I said, “Yeah,” and then, “You’re looking nice. The black dress.”
    “I was working in New York,” she said. LuEllen was something of a chameleon. In black, without lipstick, with her close-cropped frosted-blond hair, she could have been a London model, except that she was too short, and her shoulders a tad too wide. When she puton Western shirts, the kind with the arrows at the corners, and cowboy boots, you’d swear she’d come straight back from hauling hay out to a horse barn in Wyoming, a rosy-cheeked good-time country girl. In Miami, she could have been a drug dealer’s bimbo; in San Diego, a slightly used Navy wife on the lookout for a Coronado Island admiral . . .
    But she was a lot more than all of that.
    “Anything good?” I asked.
    “Coin dealer. Let it go. Way too much protection.” She looked around with the kind of eye-drooping, stand-back attitude she tended to develop after a couple of weeks of pushing her way around Manhattan.
    “Not like you need the money,” I said.
    “Not yet, anyway,” she said. She nodded at Lane. “Who’s the chick? Jack wasn’t married, was he?”
    “His sister. Lane Ward.”
    “Oh, yeah; when you look at her close, you can see it.” She looked at Lane and then back up at me: “Too much makeup for my style,” she said.
    “There’s a story behind it.” I told her about the house and the fire. “So she’s flash-burned on her neck and arms and the cops want to talk to her. We’re trying to bullshit our way through the funeral, then get her out of sight until she’s healed.”
    “Gotta hurt,” she said. LuEllen was unimpressed by pain; her own or anybody else’s.
    “It does. The doc said it’d take eight or ten days to heal, so we’ve got a while to go.”
    “Can we talk with her around?”
    “I think so; but I haven’t given her anything on you at all, except your first name, and I’ll keep it that