The Monkey's Raincoat Read Online Free PDF Page B

wouldn’t suddenly come through the front door, run back here, and see it.
    The master bedroom was at the back of the house looking out on the pool through some nice French doors. It smelled of Anaïs Anaïs. I pulled the bolts at the top of each French door and ran my fingers along the stiles. They hadn’t been jimmied. There was a kingsize platform bed, a dresser, a chest, and a desk, and all of it was torn up pretty much like the others. They had one of those sliding wall closets with the mirrored hanging doors. The left half was Ellen and the right Mort. Boxes and shoe bags and a Minolta camera case and a larger box that said Bekins had been tossed out to the center of the room. Mort had some nice pants and some nice shirts and half a dozen pair of Bally shoes. There was a tan Nino Cerruti shirt I liked a lot hanging beside three dark gray Sy Devore suit bags and two from Carroll’s in Westwood. A lot of clothes to leave behind, but maybe Mort traveled light.
    A collection of family pictures hung over the bed. The kids. Mort and the kids. Ellen. Mort and Ellen. Mort didn’t seem to be playing favorites. The nicest had Mort in the pool with the younger girl on his shoulders and Perry and the older girl in his arms. Nothing looked wrong in those pictures. Mort didn’t look crazy. Ellen didn’t look small. Nothing ever looks wrong in the pictures. Everything always goes wrong when the camera’s turned away.
    The bathroom door was still closed, the water was still running, Janet Simon was still smoking, Ellen Lang was stillstanding with her arms crossed, cold. I went into the kitchen. Every cupboard had been emptied, every bag of sugar and rice and flour and box of cereal spilled. The grill had been pulled off the bottom of the refrigerator and the stove had been dragged away from the wall, scarring the vinyl with ragged furrows. I found a bottle of Extra Strength Bayer aspirin in a mound of Corn Chex, ate three, then went back out into the living room.
    Janet Simon gave me frozen eyes. Ellen Lang watched the floor. I cleared my throat. “Someone was looking for something and someone knew where someone else might want to hide it,” I said. “This was professional. Mort didn’t do this. You’re going to need the police.” Stating the obvious is something I do well.
    Ellen Lang said, “No.” Softly.
    Janet Simon crushed out her cigarette and said, “
Yes
.” Firmly.
    I took a deep breath and smiled sweetly. “I’m going to check around outside,” I said.
    It was either that, or hit them with a chair.

5

    I went out to the Corvette and got the big five-cell I keep in the trunk. I looked for jimmy marks on the front door lock stile and the doorjamb, but didn’t find any. Three bay windows at the front of the house overlooked a flower bed with azaleas and snapdragons. The windows weren’t jimmied and the flowers weren’t trampled. I walked around the north side of the house and there were four more windows, two and a space and then two more, each still locked on the inside. I let myself through a wooden gate and walked the back of the house past a little beaded bathroom window to the pool. No openings punched in the wall, no sliding door off its track, no circular holes cut into glass. No one slugged me with a ball peen hammer and disappeared into the night.
    I stopped by the pool and listened. Motor sounds from the freeway to the south. Water gurgling through pipes to the little bathroom. Somewhere a radio going, Tina Turner coughing out
What’s Love Got to Do With It?
. Through the glass doors, I could see Ellen and Janet in the living room, Ellen with her arms squeezed across her chest, Janet making an explanatory gesture with her cigarette, Ellen shaking her head, Janet looking disgusted. I thought of great teams from the past: Burns and Allen, Bergen and McCarthy, Heckle and Jeckle. I took a deep breath, smelled jasmine, and