The Burglar: A Novel

1

A young blond woman ran along a quiet tree-lined Bel-Air street at dusk. She kept her head up and her steps even and strong. The street was in the flat part of Bel-Air just north of Sunset, a neighborhood with big old houses built as mansions by movie and television people in the 1950s and ’60s. Mansions still occupied giant parcels sectioned into lawns and gardens, but over time the old owners had died, and the new owners had noticed that the houses were not the newest styles and not as large as a house might be. For years they had been in the process of demolishing the old homes to build new ones that looked to them like clearer embodiments of wealth and potency.

The runner’s name was Elle Stowell. She wore a dark blue T-shirt that said YALE on it and black running shorts. On her feet was a pair of distinctive running shoes of a brand worn by female runners who lived in neighborhoods like this one. They cost hundreds of dollars and were superbly made, but their real purpose was to give their wearer an edge that was more sociological than athletic. They were a credential, proof that the runner belonged here.

Elle was small, an inch over five feet tall. Her size and her pretty face made her seem younger. She was very fit, her body thinner and more long-muscled than an Olympic gymnast’s because her daily routines relied more on running and swimming than on jumping and upper-body work.

Elle Stowell needed to be physically exceptional but needed not to look physically exceptional. She had to be able to show up in neighborhoods like this one looking like the daughter of the couple down the street. She often put on a shirt with the name of a university so she would appear to be a student home for a visit and running near her parents’ house.

She had a light complexion and blue eyes, and she spent lots of money on styling and dyeing her hair to duplicate the golden look of the daughters of the rich. She acknowledged that she did not compare with her best friend, Sharon, who could walk into a restaurant and cause the conversations at tables to trail off, or her friend Ricki, who was a model and appeared to be an elongated ink drawing of a goddess. If pressed, Elle might have admitted she was cute.

A week ago she had driven through this neighborhood looking for the right house, and then three days later, she had walked her friend Elizabeth’s little white French bulldog through here on a leash. At each house where a dog lived, the dog would charge to the fence and bark at the French bulldog, warning it to stay away forever or face dire consequences. When she had finished the walk, the bulldog felt flattered by the attention, and Elle knew where there were dogs and where there weren’t. At the place she was going there weren’t.

Elle needed money right now, but she didn’t like working after dark, when the danger increased. Her work required her to look rich and be where rich people lived, but she was careful to tone down her appearance to avoid being kidnapper bait—no sparkly jewelry, no watch or rings, no daydreaming, particularly at night. She never let her alertness lapse, and she listened for cars overtaking her from behind. Even if there was nothing to be afraid of, no attention was welcome. Her only accessory was at her waist: a black fanny pack which contained a few small tools and a lot of empty space.

She reached the block she had chosen and ran straight to a house that was undergoing a thorough renovation. She was sure that, when completed, it would look a lot like an old gray stone bank. It had a long front porch with four pillars that appeared to hold up the front end of the roof but were only ornaments. At this stage of construction the house was surrounded by scaffolds: three levels of steel piping with walkways consisting of two ten-inch-wide boards laid side by side every three or four yards.

Elle veered in front of the building, already pulling on her surgical gloves, and hoisted herself up on the temporary chain-link fence, stepped on the chain and padlock that held the gate shut, and jumped to the ground inside the fence. She went to the scaffold on the side of the house, pulled herself up onto the first level about six feet up, and walked along the scaffolding, feeling a slight springy bounce of the boards under her feet. It occurred to her that if her 105 pounds made the boards bow a little and rebound upward, a carpenter who weighed twice as much must have a pretty bouncy walk.

She kept turning her head to look over the tall concrete fence a few feet from the scaffold. She kept looking in the windows of the house next door and seeing things that pleased her. There were no lights on in the rooms she passed. In the kitchen, the timers on the oven and the microwave, and the lighted green dots showing that the refrigerator was working, were the only signs that the power was on.

When she reached the back end of the board walkway, she shinnied up a vertical pipe of the scaffold. She was hot from running, and the coolness of the metal felt good on her legs, which were doing most of the work of pushing her body upward. She reached the second level and kept going to the third. The top level of the scaffold jutted about two feet above the eaves of the house, so she had an unobstructed view of this side of the peaked roof, a bit of the terrain beyond, and the tree canopy that shaded the quiet street for a distance on both sides. Dusk had now faded to darkness, and she could see strings of streetlights going on throughout the neighborhood.

She spent a few more minutes looking at the house next door. That house was not under renovation. She could see enough of it to verify that it was still in pristine shape from its own rebuilding a year or two ago. She could also see that the swimming pools—one big irregular-shaped pool and a long strip of water near it for swimming laps—were covered with black plastic sheeting. The nets were off the tennis courts. Days ago she had already verified that no dog was present, the cars were locked in the garage, and the newspapers and mail had been stopped.

Elle knew a lot about houses and about the ways people in rich neighborhoods thought about them. At the moment when the people living next door had learned that the house on the lot where she was standing right now was going to be razed and this monstrous building erected in its place, they had undoubtedly begun to make plane reservations. They had gone somewhere to wait out the long period of construction. If they were rich enough to afford a massive house in Bel-Air, they didn’t have to sit in it and listen to the sounds of bulldozers, saws, cement trucks, nail guns, and foremen shouting at their crews in Spanish. They had, as rich people could do, sidestepped the unpleasantness. Right now they might be in the South of France or on the New England coast or touring Iceland.

Elle bent down, picked up the end of one of the boards forming the walkway of the scaffold, propped it on the scaffold’s railing, and eased it across the empty space to rest on the railing of the balcony extending from the house next door. She wiggled the board to be sure that it was solidly and evenly resting on the two railings. Then she opened her fanny pack to take out a bungee cord, wrapped it around the board twice, and used the two metal hooks to secure it to the scaffold so the board would not move.

She lifted herself to the level of the railing, set a foot onto the board, and then began to walk. For Elle, walking on narrow footholds at great heights was not a pleasure, but she had learned to do it as a teenager in gymnastics. A ten-inch board was much wider than a ten-centimeter balance beam, and she wasn’t expected to do any tricks on it. She kept her attention on the board and walked over it without allowing her mind to interfere.

She got over the railing to the balcony and looked in the French doors. The view was limited because of gauzy white curtains and the lack of light, but she could see this was a bedroom with an empty bed, a dresser with nothing on the surface, and an open empty closet. The ceilings were at least twelve feet high, and when she looked back at the scaffolding she had just left, she estimated that the level of the French doors where she stood was nearly thirty feet above the ground. She took out her small flashlight to look for signs of an alarm but spotted none in the bedroom. Most contractors didn’t think doors and windows at that height were worth wiring.

She examined the lock on the French doors, then selected the right bump key for the lock on her key ring, inserted it and turned it just far enough to get the pins under pressure, hit the door with her shoulder, and turned the key farther as the pins jumped. The door swung inward.

The room was big and luxurious, but it wasn’t the one she wanted. This was a room a family might keep immaculate and waiting for grandparents or other guests—close to the rest of the family but far enough away from them to preserve everyone’s nerves. It had a bathroom with a telephone—an indication the intended visitor was elderly—its own balcony, a good television set. She went through the doorway to hunt for the master suite.

When she got to the master suite she found the door locked, as she had expected. This room took a different bump key, but when she stepped inside she felt hope. She had been putting off working for a while, so she was experiencing a shortage of cash. The picture of a woman on the man’s tall dresser caught her eye. The woman was dark-haired, wearing a dark blue strapless evening gown and a necklace. She was very attractive. She seemed to be in her late thirties at the time of the sitting, so she was now probably in her fifties. The necklace was exquisite. It was a chain studded with diamonds, made to suspend a circular sapphire cradled in a nest of diamonds. There had been wealth here. Maybe it was still around.

Elle considered. She had been hoping to find a bit of cash for her immediate needs and then move on. When people went away, they often left some so they could replenish their wallets with American money without having to go to a bank when they got home. But if a woman had serious jewelry, she would not have taken it with her to Europe or Asia. She would have left it locked up in a safe-deposit box at a bank or in a hiding place at home.

Elle had to make a quick choice: look for the envelope of cash inside a book or taped under something, or look for the jewelry in false containers and safes. She had to move. She had seen nothing to worry about yet, but she knew that it was best to do things rapidly in case there were security devices installed that she had not seen.

People were not always very smart about hiding things. It had astounded her at times that people still hid things between the mattress and the box springs of a bed, but they did, so she had to look there before she moved on. What she found this time was a Colt Commander pistol. She released the heavy mattress and let it cover the gun and went on. She found the safe in the man’s walk-in closet. The space was big enough for a drive-in closet if the owner could have driven a car up the stairs. The safe was built into the wall behind the row of suits, but it was not a very formidable one.

The safe reminded her of the safes in hotel rooms. Its display had only four lighted squares for the numbers. She sat down, made herself comfortable, and began to work the combination. To a novice, ten thousand possible digits would have seemed a daunting number, but Elle was optimistic. She was a rapid typist, and her decision to go after the jewelry was final.

There were some combinations that were more likely than others. She hit four 0s, four 1s, four 2s, all the way through 9. She hit 1234, 4321. The address of the house was 1477. If the owner used birthdays, the final two numbers would be the year, which had to be 99 or less, and because there were only four digits, the first pair had to be a single-digit month and a single-digit day. Colored stones were often given because they were birthstones. A sapphire was the birthstone for September, so maybe the first digit was 9.

She set the second digit as 1, then went upward on the final pair of numbers from 1 to 99. When nothing happened she made the second digit 2 and repeated the process. When she made the second digit 4 and then ran the final two up to 70, there was a click, then an electronic sound like something spinning, and the safe popped open. The sight made her draw in a breath. She opened the blue velvet case and recognized the sapphire necklace from the picture. Behind the blue velvet case was a black velvet case, and when she opened it she saw a sparkle of diamonds. She turned on her flashlight. Yellow diamonds. She put both necklaces into her fanny pack, then looked farther inside the safe. There were papers that might be worth something, but not to her. She turned off the flashlight. She had done enough, and she sensed it was time to go. As she closed the safe, she saw that the four numbers were blinking on and off. She didn’t want the owner to come into his closet and instantly see that his safe had been opened and his wife’s necklaces stolen. Any delay in discovery was good for Elle.

Elle decided that the blinking probably meant that the safe had been opened but not reset. She pushed the door shut and then hit reset, then 0000. The blinking stopped, but she had an uneasy feeling.

Elle went back along the empty hallway to the guest room with the French doors and stepped out to the balcony. From here she could see for a distance. Far down the street she could see a pair of cars. They were black-and-white with numbers painted on their roofs, and the lights above the windshields were spinning red and blue. They were moving fast, but she heard no sirens. They were on their way to a crime in progress.

Elle grasped the board on the balcony railing with both hands and hoisted herself up so her knees were on it. She didn’t have anything to hold on to to rise to her feet, so she crawled quickly along the board to the scaffold on the other house, where she eased herself down to the board walkway. She unfastened the bungee cord and put it in her fanny pack, then dragged the heavy board back from the balcony to the scaffold. Before the police arrived she had just enough time to slide it into place where she had found it.

The flashing red and blue lights were gone, but Elle could hear the cars pull up at the front of the house. Doors opened and slammed, and there were metallic voices squawking from radios and heavy footsteps running up to the gate of the chain-link fence. Elle didn’t have time to find an open window to climb inside the half-finished house. All she could do was lie down on her side with her arms straight, pull her body back toward the house so it was all on one ten-inch board, and stay still.

The beams of powerful flashlights swept the ground in front of the house, then moved along the sides, throwing shadows of the scaffolding onto the gray wall beside her. Now and then one of the beams would unexpectedly jump upward to shine in a window. Only a couple of times did Elle see a beam shine upward as far as the third level of the scaffold, and from ground level all it could do was shine on the underside of the board walkway.

She saw the flashlight beams moving along below her, flitting from side to side. Now and then one of them would switch off for a few seconds and then switch back on as though to fool someone who would think the police had gone away. At least two cops reached the rear of the building. They spent some time sneaking up on a tall pile of lumber, with guns drawn, but nobody was hiding there. Next they moved to the house and she heard them doing the predictable thing, which was to try the doors and the first-floor windows to be sure none of them was unlocked or broken.

There was more radio traffic, and then she heard two of the cops moving past the scaffold. When she could, she looked through the crack between the boards of her scaffold and saw the cops prowling around the house next door, checking its doors and windows too. She could see that they were not just going through the motions because they were here anyway. Somehow they had come to know that the house was either at risk or already being hit.

Time passed, and she had to let it pass. One of the best strategies for hide-and-seek was to outlast the opponent, to simply remain silent and motionless longer than he thought you would. She didn’t like it much. It occurred to her that she also had a date tonight. She was supposed to go to dinner with a guy who wasn’t exactly fascinating, but she believed in keeping her word and being fair to men who asked her out. She didn’t want somebody with a legitimate grievance going around repeating it to every other guy and making her seem horrible. She had gone out with this one three times, so he would probably be madder if she stood him up now, because it would seem personal.

The police should have left by now, and she was beginning to get uneasy. She had never been arrested for anything, and the prospect of arrest terrified her. If she got caught with a set of bump keys, a big razor-sharp knife, a lockpick, a tension wrench, and what looked like half a million bucks in jewelry, she would be in prison until she was ninety.

And then one of the cops found a way in. She could see the beams of their flashlights inside the house next door. In a few minutes they’d be upstairs. That meant they’d be able to look out the window and see her up here on the scaffold.

Elle grasped the vertical pipe frame of the scaffold, held on loosely, and slid downward to the second level. She heard a radio voice again, and this time it seemed to be coming from two places at once. Then she heard footsteps, this time running, and she went down on her belly on the second level and froze. She saw the other two policemen running across the driveway to the house next door, the one she had robbed. She held on to the vertical support and slid to the ground.

As soon as her feet touched, she ran toward the street. She turned the corner of the house to the gate, lifted herself up, stepped on the chain and padlock, and slipped between the sides. Two cop cars were parked at angles so their snouts nearly touched at the gate, so she could barely get down without touching them. As she passed the open driver’s-side door of one, she heard the sound of the car’s engine, a quiet reassuring purr.

In an instant she sensed this was the way. It was as though she were on a circus platform and a trapeze was swinging through the air toward her. If she jumped for it and caught it, she could swing to the other side. If she waited, thought, and decided, the trapeze would swing away from her, and the next time it swung back it would be out of her reach and her jump would propel her into the empty air and death.

She slid onto the seat, shifted into reverse, grasped the steering wheel, and tugged the door toward her. She knew enough not to slam the door and enough not to drive past the house she had robbed. She swung the car around and gradually accelerated up the street. She turned the first corner, accelerated some more, and then made the next left. She parked the car at the curb near the third corner, turned it off, and took the keys. She ran around the corner to the street where she had left her own car. She had not wanted to drive right up to it and let the cop car’s automatic plate reader record her license plate, or let whatever dashboard device it might have see her or her car. She got out and never looked back, just ran as fast as she could to her car.

As she drove, she noticed that she was breathing heavily. She wasn’t winded, and she wasn’t tired. As soon as she was a mile or so away, she began to shiver, and it lasted until she was home with her car in the garage and the doors locked. It took her over an hour before she felt calm enough to shower and dress for her date.

At dawn the next morning, Elle Stowell was out running again. She had been dumped last night, and the guy wasn’t even her boyfriend. She had gone out with him three times—four if you included the breakup date. That part was astounding when she thought about it. While she had still looked like a prospect to him, he’d acted so broke that she’d wanted to pay for herself, him, a limo for each of them, and some food for whatever starving relatives and pets he had at home. But on the night he dumped her, he bought her a fancy dinner. Was she supposed to go home and console herself with the thought that she had been let down and cast off, but at least she’d ingested four thousand calories doing it?

This one had been handsome but dense. She had spent three evenings listening for any indication that something was going on behind his eyes. Nothing ever peeked out. And his farewell speech was a variation on the theme that the problem wasn’t her—meaning the shape of her body and the features of her face—but him. He just didn’t feel he understood women.

It was interesting to her how often men said they didn’t understand women. They were right that they didn’t, but it wasn’t because women were uncommunicative. Plenty of women she knew talked almost continuously. The problem was that men thought of themselves as being more similar to anything else on the planet—male horses or wildebeests or chipmunks—than to female human beings. Women were their opposite. To them, a thirty-two-year-old male physicist was more similar to a billy goat than to a thirty-two-year-old female physicist.

Not that Elle was thirty-two or a physicist. She was twenty-four and a burglar, a sneak thief. This wasn’t a fact that she ever brought up with men, so it hadn’t been a factor in her rejection, but it was an important part of her existence, since it was the part that paid the bills. So once again she was running. She was jogging along a beautiful road south of Sunset that wound around in Beverly Hills and offered the occasional view of the Los Angeles Basin, and her purpose wasn’t to burn the calories from her valedictory dinner. She was casing houses along the route, looking for her next score.

There was esoteric knowledge involved in being a burglar—broad areas that took some thought and skill. There was choosing the house, entering the house, and finding the items that were worth taking. Elle Stowell was good at all three.

Elle was strong but small, so she couldn’t carry a seven-foot television out of a house if she’d wanted to. It didn’t matter because the real prizes were all small and dense—money, watches, jewelry, gold, guns, and collections—and usually they were to be found in or near the master bedroom suite. Some of the things she found in bedroom hiding places that fitted this description were revealing but not for her to take: secret cell phones for calling lovers, second sets of identification, bugout kits, or drugs.

Her small size helped her. She looked like a person who would be out running at dawn in a rich neighborhood, so she didn’t worry people who saw her. There was a certain irony in this, because the same qualities made her a fearsome burglar. She could enter a house in dozens of ways that were impossible for a large man. She could easily crawl into a house through a dog door or take the glass slats out of a louvered window and slither inside. Both openings were common and neither was ever wired for an alarm.

Elle had seen practically everything that made homes vulnerable. Spare keys were hidden in or under pots, on top of lintels, inside hollow imitation stones, or hanging on small-headed nails on the sides of two-by-fours in garages or outbuildings. These were good places to look anyway, because if there was no key, there would still be tools that would get her into a house. She always looked to see where these buildings were and whether they were easy to enter.

She was also cautious. Before she committed herself she looked for a small, cheap car or two near the house, because these belonged to maids and nannies. Pickup trucks belonged to pool men and gardeners.

Elle knew that a burglar was a sorry, selfish thing to be, but she had gotten started at a time when she was too young to be on her own and had to eat. She had known even then that burglary deprived rich people of stuff their insurance companies would pay to replace. It also shook their confidence and made them feel violated. That was bad, but it also made the act a little bit sexual, which all the most tempting crimes were. A burglar saw everything they’d hidden and learned a great many of their secrets, and even when Elle didn’t have time to accomplish that, they thought she had. They knew they had been exposed and, in a way, used for someone’s pleasure.

Rich people felt the humiliation and loss more keenly than poor people did, because all those possessions and luxuries were dear to them, in some cases were them. Poor people had already been ripped off a thousand times and knew their possessions were crap. They had never invested anything useful in them, like their self-esteem or their souls. By adulthood the poor had been beaten into wisdom and detachment. Elle had known all about being poor by the time she was ten. Everything ever provided to her was cheap, worn, mismatched, and inferior. Even the name Elle had been a handicap.

She wasn’t really sure why her mother named her Elle. She had once hoped it had been a naive feminist gesture, but suspected she was probably just named after the magazine or a person in a movie. When most people heard her name they asked her what the L stood for. Usually she just made something up—Lilith, Lorelei, Lamia.

Elle had spent her childhood in South Pasadena, in an old house that was teeming with cousins. Her grandmother had raised three daughters and then raised their children too. Her mother had been the middle one, the girl who had been universally recognized as the most beautiful of three beautiful girls, but also the stupidest. Elle’s grandmother had admitted this freely in front of Elle. She had said, Like a little china doll, and her head was just as hollow. Elle gathered over time that her mother had been in a car with a boyfriend when he had driven the car into a concrete viaduct. Nobody had ever told her whether the boyfriend was her father, which led her to believe he wasn’t. No other candidates were ever mentioned to Elle.

Growing up in the big old house didn’t take her as long as it took the others. She was out on her own at fourteen. Now and then she had brought back sums of money for her aunts and grandmother. For a time she had the notion that she would come back one day and live with the family again, bringing with