Picturing the scene was too much for him. He got up and went down to the kitchen to fix himself another drink. By now he was on the second cycle of intoxication; having drunk himself past the point of nausea by mid-afternoon, he was moving inexorably towards a deep luxurious drunkenness; the kind that flirted with oblivion. He’d suffer for it for whatever part of tomorrow he saw of course, and probably the day after that. He was no longer young enough or resilient enough to shrug off the effects of a binge like this. But right now he didn’t give a rat’s ass. He simply wanted to be insulated from the pain he was feeling.
As he opened the immense fridge to get himself ice, he heard, or thought he heard, somebody, a woman, say his name.
He stopped digging for the ice and looked around. The kitchen was empty. He left the fridge open and went back to the door. The turret was also deserted, and the dining room dark, the empty table and chairs silhouetted against the window. He walked on through it into the living room, calling for Marco. He flipped on the light. The fifty-lamp chandelier blazed, illuminating an empty room. There were several boxes of his belongings sitting there, still unopened. Moved from Bel Air but still unpacked. But that was all.
He was about to go back to the kitchen, assuming the voice he’d heard alcohol-induced, when he heard his name called a second time. He looked back into the dining room. Was he going crazy? “Marco?” he yelled.
There was a long empty moment. Somewhere in the darkness of the Canyon a solitary coyote was yelping. Then came the sound of a door opening, and he heard Marco’s familiar voice: “Yes, boss?”
“I heard somebody calling.”
“In the house?”
“Yeah. I thought so. A woman’s voice.”
Marco appeared on the stairs now, looking down at his employer with an expression of concern. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I just got unnerved, is all.”
“You want me to go check around?”
“Yeah, I guess so. I don’t even know where it was coming from. But I heard somebody. I swear.”
Marco, who’d emerged from his bedroom in his boxers, headed back upstairs to get dressed. Todd went back to the kitchen, feeling a little stupid. There wasn’t going to be anybody here, inside the house or out. Every stalker, every voyeur, every obsessive was canvassing the crowds around the Pavilion, looking for a way to slide past the security guards, under the velvet rope, and into the company of their idols. They weren’t wasting their time stumbling around in the darkness hoping for a glance of Todd Pickett, all fucked up. Nobody even knew he was here, for Christ’s sake. Worse; nobody cared.
As he returned to the business of making his drink, he heard Marco coming down back the stairs, and was half tempted to tell him to forget it. But he decided against it. No harm in letting one of them feel useful tonight. He dropped a handful of ice-cubes into his glass, and filled it up with Scotch. Took a mouthful. Topped it up. Took another mouthful — And the voice came again.
If there had been some doubt in his head as to whether he’d actually heard the call or simply imagined it, there was now none. Somebody was here in the house, calling to him.
It seemed to be coming from the other side of the hallway. He set his drink down on the counter and quietly crossed the kitchen. The turret was deserted. There was nobody on the stairs either above or below.
He took the short passageway down to what Marco had dubbed the Casino, an immense wood-paneled room, lit by a number of low-slung lights, which indeed looked as though it had been designed to house a roulette wheel and half a dozen poker tables. Judging by the distance of the voice it seemed the likeliest place for whoever had spoken to be lurking. As he walked down the passageway it briefly occurred to him that to make this investigation without Marco at his side was foolishness. But the drink made him bold. Besides, it was only a woman he’d heard. He could deal with a woman.