Page 77 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Cat’s Paw

He opened the folder. “Yes, of course you’ll need that. It’s, let’s
see here, Home Security for the Technophobe. I’ve only seen an outline of
it, but the man struck me as a certifiable paranoid.”
In other words, I thought, an expert in his chosen field and the
author of a definitive work on the subject. The Lesleys didn’t sound
like the kind of people you could cozy up to very easily, but it was a
lovely spring afternoon, and I had a golden opportunity to show the
boss another side of my multifaceted talent. Exactly why he had
chosen me for this job I had occasion to wonder about several times
in the next two days.

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The Lesley residence was one of a series of almost identical tract
houses up in Rancho Hills, a slowly crumbling development from the
Sixties, I would guess. Each stucco house was L-shaped, the foot of
which was an attached two-car garage; that structure also provided
the only variations in layout—half had the garage opening
perpendicular to the front of the house with a curving driveway out
to the street, alternating on the left and right side of the main
structure; the other half had the garage door facing the street, with a
short straight driveway, again either on the left or right side of the
house. You’d have to be pretty boring yourself not to find that kind
of neighborhood exceedingly boring. And I suppose they had the
usual covenants against painting your house bright green with pink
polka dots or parking your camper truck on the tiny front lawn. Not
surprisingly, each house had its address prominently displayed.
Inside, away from public view, anything could be going on in these
houses. No doubt they concealed survivalists, with caches of arms
and dehydrated rations; odd collectors of trivial Americana, like
thousands of Coke bottles or every known Barbie doll; devil
worshippers practicing rites by rote out of a do-it-yourself manual on
Satanism published by one of Mallard’s seedier rivals; and dozen
upon dozen of exceedingly boring nuclear families clutching mass-
marketed commodities closely to their bosom. Crime, or the fear of
it, had reached this charmless suburb: I noticed several posted
placards warning would-be footpads that the premises were protected
by this or that security service (“armed response” was the phrase

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