Now Westwood was struggling back from the precipice. The streets were safer than they had been for a while. Many shops and galleries had closed, however, and new businesses had not moved into all of the empty storefronts. The lingering atmosphere of despair might take years to dissipate entirely. Built at the solemn pace of coral reefs, civilization could be destroyed with frightening swiftness, even by a blast of good intentions, and all that was lost could be regained, if ever, only with determination.
The gourmet coffee house was busy. From the open door came the delicious aromas of several exotic brews and the music of a lone guitarist playing a New Age tune that was mellow and relaxing though filled with tediously repetitive chords.
Joe intended to scout the meeting place from across the street and farther along the block, but he arrived too late to do so. At two minutes past six o’clock, he stood outside of the coffee house as instructed, to the right of the entrance, and waited to be contacted.
Over the noise of the street traffic and the guitar, he heard a soft tuneless jangling-tinkling. The sound instantly alarmed him for reasons he could not explain, and he looked around nervously for the source.
Above the door were wind chimes crafted from at least twenty spoons of various sizes and materials. They clinked together in the light breeze.
Like a mischievous childhood playmate, memory taunted him from hiding place after hiding place in a deep garden of the past dappled by light and shadow. Then suddenly he recalled the ceiling-mounted rack of copper pots and pans in the Delmanns’ kitchen.
Returning from Charlie Delmann’s bedroom, in answer to Lisa’s scream, Joe had heard the cookware clinking and softly clanging as he had hurried along the downstairs hall. Coming through the door into the kitchen, he saw the pots and pans swinging like pendulums from their hooks.
By the time he reached Lisa and saw Georgine’s corpse on the floor, the cookware had settled into silence. But what set those items in motion in the first place? Lisa and Georgine were at the far end of the long room, nowhere near the dangling pots.
Like the flashing green numbers on the digital clock at Charlie Delmann’s bedside, like the swelling of flames in the three oil lamps on the kitchen table, this coppery music was important.
He felt as though a hard rap of insight was about to crack the egg of his ignorance, letting spill a golden liquid understanding.
Holding his breath, mentally reaching for the elusive connection that would make sense of these things, Joe realized that the shell-cracking insight was receding. He strained to bring it back. Then, maddeningly, it was gone.
Perhaps none of these things was important: not the oil lamps, not the digital clock, not the jangling cookware. In a world viewed through lenses of paranoia—a pair of distorting spectacles that he had been wearing with good reason for the past day and a half—every falling leaf, every whisper of wind, and every fretwork of shadows was invested with a portentous meaning that, in reality, it did not possess. He was not merely a neutral observer, not merely a reporter this time, but a victim, central to his own story, so maybe he could not trust his journalistic instincts when he saw significance in these small, if admittedly strange, details.
Along the sidewalk came a tall black kid, college age, wearing shorts and a UCLA T-shirt, gliding on Rollerblades. Joe, puzzling over clues that might not be clues at all, paid little attention to the skater, until the kid spun to a stop in front of him and handed him a cellular phone.
“You’ll need this,” said the skater, in a bass voice that would have been pure gold to any fifties’ doo-wop group.
Before Joe could respond, the skater rolled away with powerful pushes of his muscular legs.
The phone rang in Joe’s hand.
He surveyed the street, searching for the surveillance post from which he was being watched, but it was not obvious.
The phone rang again, and he answered it. “Yeah?”
“What’s your name?” a man asked.