The Adjal of Jimmy Temple

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

The next morning the neighborhood looked like Venice with bursting canals. The sky was dark with rain clouds and unseasonably cold from the rain. "Your Lamborghini might need pontoons," I said.

She peered out the window over my shoulder. "I want to get home."

"Home? As in Malibu?"

"Yes, Jimmy, as in Malibu. Trish will be there."

"That's the best reason I can think of not to go there."

"That's the only reason. If she intends to murder you, or knows who does, how else can we find out?"

We, I thought, and more than ever liked the sound of it. "I had the impression it was you she wanted to murder," I said, immediately realizing this would lead into another typically whirligig Wanda explanation, and in the same breath went on, "If she's not there we've wasted a trip."

"She'll be there. We've got a ten million dollar beach house that unless it's sandbagged will end up in the surf."

"Yeah, I can just see her packing sand into bags." Visualizing Trish Kincaid doing manual labor was almost harder than visualizing the gateway.

"She'll be supervising," said Wanda. "That's her next to greatest pleasure."

I didn't bother asking what she considered Trish's "greatest" pleasure, and we pulled on our clothes and went downstairs. There was no sign of Sam, which didn't displease me. Maybe he was out scouring Hollywood Boulevard for wet room candidates. I opened the front door and we gazed out at the rain. I thought of the white-blonde hair, that cold Aryan face, like some Nazi experiment that had worked.

"Why do you live in the same state, much less the same house?"

"I love that house. And it's big enough for us to keep out of each other's way."

We scooted through the rain to the Lamborghini. Wanda slipped out of her trench coat and tossed that and her overnight bag into the jump seat, and herself into the driver's. The torrential water sloshed over the rear wheels when she backed up, but before the engine got wet she expertly snapped the clutch and we shot down the street. We drove onto Sunset Boulevard and skimmed over a thin sheet of water toward the ocean.

I called my voicemail and there were two new messages. One was from Virginia Darrell.

"Jimmy! Bad news. Somebody broke into your office last night. Doesn't look like they took anything, just busted up your bookshelves a little."

It didn't surprise me. The fat man. What was he looking for? The second call was from Ginger. "Hi Jimmy, it's Ginger McLean." Finally, I knew her last name. "Just checking in."

Thankfully, I was holding the phone tight to my ear, so Wanda didn't hear and in my mind told Ginger to just check out. I told her about the fat guy, and that he had been following us, and that I hadn't mentioned it to her because I didn't think it had any connection to what we were doing. Now I wasn't so sure. Now I wasn't sure of anything. I turned on the radio to get the weather. There was a warning that Pacific Coast Highway was flooded, without power or landline telephones.

Wanda turned into a Shell station on Barrington. "I don't want to get caught in Malibu if the gas pumps don't work. Fill it up, will you? I have to use the ladies' room."

Except for the attendant behind bullet proof glass I was the only person there pumping gas. A Lexus pulled up. Behind the wheel was Dwight Devlin. Beside him sat an unhappy, grizzled, middle-aged man wearing a tweed golf cap and matching tweed jacket. Even seated, you could see he was very short, string bean-thin, jockey-sized.