Forget to Remember, page 11
part #1 of Carol Golden Series
Ault kept up a steady stream of conversation, directed mostly at Carol. “You may be wondering why I don’t have a motorized chair. Actually I do, but my doctor wants me to get some exercise, so I use this one indoors. I drive the other one when I’m out and about.”
Carol tried to be polite. “You have a beautiful place here, Mr. Ault. The view, the paintings…”
“Yes. Money may not buy happiness, but it does buy a certain amount of beauty.” He looked at her with green eyes. “Speaking of beauty, you look fabulous in that sweater.”
“Thank you.”
“Reminds me of what girls wore in the forties and fifties. Those were the days. Sweaters that gave a hint of what was inside, but you had to use your imagination to fill it in—or out.” He chuckled. “Now when most girls wear a sweater, it’s cut down to here, boobs spilling out all over the place. Leaves nothing to the imagination.”
Carol had almost worn her v-neck top. Close call.
Ault continued in reminiscing mode. “Back when my brain worked better, I used to write poetry. I bet you don’t believe that, Jake.”
“No, Seb. I always thought of you as a hard-drinking sports nut.”
“That’s a fair assessment, but there was a softer side to me that didn’t show up in the locker room. In fact, I wrote a poem called ‘Sweater Girl.’” He rang the bell, and when the woman appeared he said, “Send in Kyle.”
The man in the suit came into the room.
“Kyle, go and print out a copy of the poem called ‘Sweater Girl.’ I want to present it to the young lady.”
“Yes, sir.”
Kyle smiled and disappeared through another doorway. He returned while they were eating ice cream with a choice of sauces. He handed the poem to Ault who bowed his head slightly, gave it to Carol, and invited her to read it.
Carol put down her spoon and looked at the computer-printed page.
I long for the days of the sweater girl—
Those innocent days.
In dreams she would haunt us,
She'd tease us and taunt us
In reds, whites and grays.
Some say that today's is a better girl—
A girl you can touch.
She's strong and aggressive
Or sweet and caressive;
She's sometimes too much.
For instance, when she is a wetter girl—
Aswim at the beach
In G-string bikini,
So tiny, so teeny;
It's all within reach.
And then there's the case of the letter girl—
A feminine jock.
She'll kick, hit and chase balls
Like soccer and baseballs;
Watch out for her sock!
I long for the days of the sweater girl—
With figure supreme.
She'd make us delirious
But still be mysterious,
And leave us our dream.
“I like it.” Carol was impressed. It wasn’t Robert Frost, but it had a certain energy to it. It also rhymed, something the songs Beard had been playing on the radio didn’t seem to do.
“Thank you. Nothing warms my heart more than praise from a lovely lady.”
“May I keep this?”
“Of course. That’s your copy.”
Ault excused himself, citing a bladder problem, and wheeled out of the room. Carol looked at Beard. “What do we do now?”
“Now we get to work. As I said, leave the talking to me.” Beard spoke uncharacteristically softly, as if the walls had ears, leaning across the table.
“He’s such a nice man. I hate to—”
“He’s a bastard and a crook. This is no time to start thinking. Just do what you’re getting paid to do.”
Carol didn’t say anything more. There was no point arguing with Beard. She pretended to reread the poem. When Ault returned, he ushered them into a gigantic living room that also featured wall-to-wall windows. There was a card table in one corner. Ault positioned himself at the table, still in his wheelchair, with his back to the window. At Beard’s signal, Carol sat down opposite Ault. Beard sat to Ault’s right.
“Well, Jake, I guess you came here to take my money. Since I won’t gamble with you anymore, you brought Carol to do the honors. Did you train her?”
“I didn’t need to. She’s better than I ever was. She took money from me.”
Ault laughed and turned to Carol. “How did you learn the game these guys play?”
“I grew up playing shell games on street corners.”
Ault laughed again. “I like a girl with a sense of humor.” He picked up a deck of cards. “If you had your choice, how would you set it up?”
“Uh…how about 5-4-3-2-1 and I start?”
“Okay, but if I lose, I get to call the next round.”
That sounded fair to Carol.
Beard said, “Let’s talk stakes.” He opened his purse and poured a stack of one hundred dollar bills onto the table. “How about five grand?”
Ault didn’t blink an eye. “You want to risk it all on the first game?”
“Yeah, I trust Carol.”
“All right. It’s your funeral.”
Ault dealt the cards in the way Carol specified and nodded to her to move. She took one card from the row of five. She already had the game won. If Ault knew this, he didn’t let on, but it soon became apparent. When she took the last card, he was unfazed.
“Oh well, easy come, easy go. Now I get to pick the setup. I’m just going to deal out all the cards and see where they fall. Then I’ll start.”
He ended up dealing six rows, seemingly at random: 16-13-10-7-5-1. Carol had practiced converting to binary and adding up the columns. As she calculated in her head, Beard said he wanted to risk all of the ten grand. Carol cringed. If Ault knew what he was doing, Beard would end up with nothing.
Ault studied the board for only a few seconds and removed the single card, leaving 16-13-10-7-5. That was the wrong move. He had to take cards from the row of sixteen, because in binary, sixteen is 10000, and the other rows contained fewer than sixteen cards. Thus the binary 1 was in a column by itself, violating the rule that each column should have an even number of ones for a winning combination.
Beard was right about Ault. He had undoubtedly once had a razor-sharp mind, but he’d lost it. He had become senile. Carol knew the move she should make, but she couldn’t do it. She sat and stared at the cards. Beard stared at her. He was getting fidgety. Ault was humming a tune to himself.
Carol stood up from the table. “I have to go to the bathroom.”
Beard started to protest, but Ault held up his hand. “When you gotta go you gotta go. The cards will still be here when you return.”
Carol took her purse and followed the route she had memorized to the bathroom. A house this size resembled a maze, and finding the bathroom wasn’t a cinch. She went inside and closed and locked the door. She looked at the window she remembered seeing beside the toilet. It was cracked open. She raised the sash until there was enough room for her to fit through.
A screen covered the opening. She fiddled with it for a few seconds and figured out how to loosen it. It was light; she held it in both hands and gave it a push to sail it away from the window. She stood on the toilet and stuck her head out into the darkness. She could just make out grass a few feet below. The screen had fallen far enough away so she wouldn’t land on it.
She hesitated. Once she went through the window, she would be committed. She would make an enemy of Jake Beard. He would come after her. But she was no hustler. She couldn’t play his game. She considered going back to the living room and explaining this to Ault and Beard. Ault would be cool, especially if she showed him how she could beat him. Beard wouldn’t. Since he was her protection and her ride home, he could be dangerous if he turned against her. She needed to get away from him.
She threw her purse out the window. With her hands on the windowsill she pushed off from the toilet and found herself hanging over the sill, arms and upper body on the outside, legs on the inside, with her weight on her stomach. She couldn’t stay that way more than a few seconds.
Scrambling furiously, she grabbed the sill and managed to twist her body around so her legs were outside the window. She was glad she had been doing stretching exercises that increased her flexibility. She hung from the sill by her hands and then dropped, landing awkwardly on the grass and falling onto her back.
CHAPTER 18
Carol got up slowly, hurting in several places, but she didn’t think she’d sustained any injuries worse than a few scrapes. She jogged toward the front of the house and immediately realized her shoes were not built for running. She needed to retrieve the athletic shoes she’d left in Beard’s car.
The car was parked in the circular driveway near the front door of the house. Outside lights illuminated it, but the living room windows faced in another direction. She hadn’t been gone long enough yet to raise an alarm. She reached the car, fervently hoping it wasn’t locked.
She tried the door on the driver’s side because it was facing away from the house. It opened to her pull. Beard must have been confident the locked gate would keep his beloved car safe. Giving a sigh of relief, she dove across the bench seat and grabbed the bag that contained her shoes from the floor. Backing out of the car, she closed the door until it was just ajar, but didn’t try to shut it. The noise of it latching might carry into the house.
Carol crouched beside the car where she wasn’t visible from the house and changed her shoes. She forced herself to take a few extra seconds to make sure the laces to the athletic shoes were securely tied. It occurred to her the Cadillac was old enough that each door had to be locked individually. Since she hadn’t locked the door on the passenger side, she could have gotten in that way, even if Beard had locked his door. She hoped she would have thought of that and not panicked if Beard’s door had been locked.
She got to her feet and headed toward the fence, keeping her body bent over and the car between herself and the house. Of course, the farther she got from the car, the less protection it gave her. The next problem was getting through the fence. Iron spikes lined the top, waiting to impale her. A good athlete could still climb over it, but it would be dangerous, especially in the dark.
A light illuminated the double gate. It didn’t have spikes sticking up from the top. Instead, there were fancy iron curlicues. They offered good hand and foot holds, and wouldn’t stab her if she slipped. Video cameras were undoubtedly trained on the gate. If Kyle or somebody happened to be watching the security monitors a mansion like this would certainly have he would see her. Would they come after her?
She wasn’t a burglar. Anyway, it was too late to back out. Carol tossed the plastic bag containing her purse and her good shoes through the space between two of the vertical iron bars and climbed up the gate, using the crossbars and the curlicues. She threw one leg over the top and then scissored her other leg over. She lowered herself down the other side. This was easier than going through the bathroom window.
She picked up her shoe bag and started trotting downhill on the narrow street toward the city lights. There were enough streetlights and outdoor lights from the houses she was passing for her to navigate her way between the rows of parked cars.
She heard a car coming down the hill behind her. Was Beard chasing after her, already? The car was still around a curve, but the engine didn’t have the hesitant, unmufflered rumble the Caddy had. She ducked behind a parked car, just to be safe. The car rolled past, loud music blaring from an open window. Must be young people.
She continued downhill, panting, slowing to a fast walk. She wasn’t used to running. She figured by going downhill she would hit civilization. Had the men missed her yet? The locked bathroom door would stall them for a few minutes. Beard would be really pissed off and come after her. She had to be on the alert.
The minutes went by, and Carol didn’t hear the distinctive sound of Beard’s car. She was making good progress. A few cars passed her, going in both directions. Since there was no sidewalk, she got off the road when they went by. The area was quiet except for car noises. In the distance she heard the hum of substantial traffic.
The hum grew louder as she approached a busier street. She made several turns, still heading downhill. Traffic grew heavier, but there were sidewalks here. She walked on the left so she would be on the other side of the street from Beard if he appeared. She constantly looked over her shoulder, nervously watching for him, now that the noise was too loud for her to pick out his car from the others.
She came to Sunset Boulevard. Of course, she had heard of the famous Sunset. Beard had driven on it briefly on the way to Ault’s house. In spite of it being a Tuesday evening, the sidewalks were crowded with all sorts of people, many of them dressed in strange outfits. The congestion was good for her. She blended in and disappeared.
She turned right, toward the ocean. She had a vague idea of following the coast home. Maybe she should call Rigo. A digital clock in front of a building said it was 10:14 p.m. Rigo would still be working. She didn’t want to bother him. Even so, she unzipped her purse and looked for her cell phone. It wasn’t there. Kyle had taken it. She didn’t see any phone booths. Had they completely disappeared because of the digital revolution?
Carol knew she could borrow a phone from someone if necessary, but she wasn’t going to call Tina and Ernie. If they had to come and rescue her, they’d probably kick her out of their house. She could call Rigo after he got off work, but he had done too much for her already. She needed to get herself home.
Her purse contained the forty dollars Rigo and Adam had given her plus a couple of ones. She doubted that it was enough money to get her to Palos Verdes by taxi. It was probably too late to ride a bus all the way. Besides, that would take hours, even after she figured out how to do it. She crossed the tricky intersection where Beverly Drive and Crescent Drive intersected Sunset, and found she was at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
Carol walked up the driveway toward the entrance. Uniformed men were helping two guests with their luggage. They had just exited an exotic car Carol didn’t recognize. She approached one of the hotel employees. “Can I get a taxi?”
He glanced at her. She tried to hide the scrape on her arm. He smiled. “Yes, ma’am. Right over here.”
He led her to a waiting yellow taxi she hadn’t seen and opened the door for her. She couldn’t afford to give him a tip. As she climbed in, she gave him a smile and a flash of leg, hoping that was enough. It would have to be.
The taxi driver started his engine and said something to her in broken English. Carol gritted her teeth before speaking. “I only have forty-two dollars. Is that enough to get to Palos Verdes?”
He shook his head.
“How about the beach?”
“The beach—where?”
“Manhattan Beach?” She knew from her travels that Manhattan Beach was south of the Los Angeles Airport. She could walk from there.
“Manhattan Beach? Okay, we go to Manhattan Beach.”
He drove west on Sunset. Carol remembered hearing somewhere the Chevrolet Corvair, an ancient General Motors car with a rear engine, was supposed to have been so unstable the curvy Sunset Boulevard became a graveyard for them. They passed the UCLA campus, and the driver went south on the 405 freeway.
Communication wasn’t good between them because his understanding of English was questionable. Carol monitored their progress, hoping he was really going to the beach. She was relieved when she saw the signs for LAX and knew they were headed in the correct direction. He exited the freeway at Rosecrans Avenue.
The meter had reached forty-two dollars, but she sweet-talked him into driving closer to the beach with the meter off, figuring it would be safer to walk on the beach than on the streets. He took her to the corner of Rosecrans and Highland Avenue. She could see the ocean. This would have to do. She gave him the forty-two dollars, thanked him, effusively, and headed downhill to the beach walking path.
Late as it was, there were still a few people walking and running on the concrete path that wended its way in front of the beachside houses. Now that Carol had safely eluded Beard, she felt a lot better. This was an adventure.
The coolness of the ocean breeze caressed her face. In addition to her cell phone, she had left her jacket at Ault’s place. All she wore were her short-sleeved sweater and skirt. She didn’t think the temperature was below fifteen—Celsius. She reminded herself Fahrenheit was used in the U.S. Okay, about sixty Fahrenheit. As long as she kept moving she wouldn’t get cold.
Hermosa Beach followed Manhattan Beach. Here the walking path and bike path, which were separate in Manhattan Beach, became one. However, bikes were almost nonexistent at this hour. Carol was getting tired. Her feet hurt. She could see the lights of the hill of Palos Verdes Peninsula ahead, but they looked like a mirage she would never reach.
She asked a female jogger what time it was. The answer was twelve thirty. Rigo must be home now. Hopefully, he would be in bed and not worrying about her. At the end of Hermosa Beach, she had to walk on the street to get around the small-boat harbor. She walked past the shops and the parking structure at the Redondo Beach pier. There was still some activity at the restaurants on the pier, a couple of which had Tony’s as part of their name.
Instead of taking the beach path through Redondo, she went uphill to the path that followed the cliff above the beach. It fronted a series of apartment buildings. She would have to start climbing eventually, anyway. It didn’t hurt to gain a little altitude now. The apartments were largely quiet. Even beach lovers slept. When the path ended, she walked along the cliff-side street. A few cars cruised by.
One slowed down to her pace and a male voice called. “Need a ride, honey?”
