“I faxed you the police report about the exploding hearse at O’Neal’s. Do you remember that?”
“I remember.” Barely. I was flunking my Galigani quiz.
“Well, you don’t have to worry anymore. Ever since all this started—the switched clothes and all?—we beefed up security at our place. George Berger—you do remember Matt’s partner?” A laugh here, as sarcastic as Rose ever got. “He recommended this excellent service. I think they’re ex-wrestlers or boxers. Big, big guys. So when the goons broke in through the basement window, our guys were waiting. It was beautiful. It took about five minutes for the gorillas to give up their bosses. You guessed it. Bodner and Polk.” A pause, and then, “Done.”
I pictured Rose brushing her palms against each other, as if she herself had taken on and cleaned up a messy situation, though I doubted either Frank or Robert would have let her anywhere near the “gorillas.”
“Rose, I’m sorry I didn’t get to—”
“Don’t give it another thought, Gloria. Now that I see what you’ve had to go through, I’m sorry I bothered you in the first place. I’ll bet you’ll be glad to get home.”
“Indeed I will.”
“I mean, you have just as much excitement here, right? And Matt probably misses being near his sister. And then there are those earthquakes you have to worry about.”
Matt’s sister, Jean, lived on Cape Cod, not exactly “near” her brother, by East Coast standards. Finally I realized what Rose was thinking. Each time I went to California for a visit, she worried that I’d stay there. Not paranoid on her part, since I did have a history of impulsive cross-country moves.
As for earthquakes, that was another matter. The worst one I’d been in had sent me under the conference table with my boss at the time, while books from the shelves on the wall tumbled over us. No harm to people that day, but the quake, a 5.3, left the physical plant a mess, and we all went home early.
I couldn’t keep my friend on the hook any longer.
“Rose, I’ll be home soon.”
“I know, I know. Just checking.”
It seemed a long time before I’d be packing, however. The week ahead loomed in front of me, shadowy and unpredictable. I tried to imagine a wedding at the end of it.
The picture was very fuzzy.
Matt and I pulled up in front of Patel’s house for the sole purpose of reclaiming Elaine’s car, partly buried under the same trees I’d used for cover the day before.
I got out of Dana’s Jeep and started toward the Saab, which I was to drive home. I paused at the front driveway and glanced at the door, a few yards away. The graceful branches of large old trees couldn’t minimize the effect of stark black-and-yellow crime scene tape.
I stood there and looked back at Matt. He got out of the Jeep and walked up to me. He put his arm around my shoulder and led me toward the Saab.
“Don’t even think about it,” he said.
Obedient as an electron in a magnetic field, following a predetermined path, I got into the Saab and buckled up.
I had no intention of breaking through police tape.
It was much too bright out.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
There was good news on Friday evening. Matt took the call as we sat in Elaine’s living room. Phil was not only alive but awake and talking. Not that he’d said much. Phil had told Elaine and Dana, and the police, that he didn’t get a look at who had shot him.
We also learned that the bullet had grazed past all Phil’s important organs without penetrating them. He would have bled out (Dana’s words, we were told), however, if Elaine hadn’t found him.
“So it was a TNT,” Matt said to me when he’d hung up.
“Trinitrotoluene? Why are you back on nitrogen compounds?” I asked him. “Not that I wouldn’t be happy to go into the fascinating history of nitrogen, like the fact that it was first called ‘burnt air,’ as in, air that has no oxygen.”
Matt put up a halt sign with his hand. “‘Through and through.’ That’s what we call it when a bullet goes straight through a body, leaving both an entrance and an exit wound. TNT, for short.”
I was sure my idea of what TNT stood for was much more common than Matt’s.
Elaine met us in the hallway of the hospital, animated and seeming relieved that the worst was over. “The bullets came from outside the house, through the patio door,” Elaine said. “The first one just shattered the glass. The second—” She swallowed. “The alarm went off and made a lot of noise, but Patel apparently hadn’t paid his monitoring service bill, so no one came, and the neighbors didn’t pay attention. They never do. But at least it scared the man with the gun, because he didn’t stay around to try again.”