Ms. Percival’s room was as described, with one exception. The surprise was a square of gray concrete neatly set into the thick carpet in front of her desk; impressed into it were a pair of petite shoeprints and the dimples of hands not much bigger than a twelve-year-old’s. Written beneath them, with a flourish that betrayed lots of anxious practice, was the name Anna Percival. A custom-made bit of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, a bit of old-time glamour created as a treat for his assistant. His weensy assistant. I thought again about the teenage girl, sixteen or however old she was, whom he’d used to clear his predecessor out of this office and then married, remembering suddenly that a wife couldn’t be compelled to testify against her husband, a quirk in the law that many dreadful people have found useful. I couldn’t actually say I was liking Granger very much.
Okay, back out into the hallway and then a quick pass through the rest of the floor, as empty as the first, the big difference being that up here the walls weren’t painted, they were covered in cream-colored suede. It was almost enough to tempt me to take off the food-service gloves just to feel it. The suede, plus the carpet, deadened sound very effectively, and I realized I was going to have to keep my ears wide open while I was working.
It occurred to me that I hadn’t seen the elevator up here, and that mystery was solved the moment I sidestepped Ms. Percival’s cluttered little desk and pushed open the door to Granger’s office: the elevator was set into the left-hand wall, at its corner with the wall I’d just come through. I put a hand behind me to make sure the door closed silently, but it was already slowing, finding its way home with a discreet sigh.
The office was about twice the size of my living room at the Wedgwood, which made it pretty damn big—an oversize architectural piece of pie with three walls, one of them curved. It was lit from overhead by dozens of tiny halogen pin spots about an inch across. The carpet was the color of Jake’s old tan, at least two inches thick, and it stretched uninterrupted from the door to a riser eighteen inches high, made of stone that was green enough to be malachite. It stretched about ten feet long and six deep, in front of the window on the rear wall. On top of the riser perched a gleaming satin-finished Regency desk from the early nineteenth century that would have had Stinky slapping at his nose with both hands.
The desk was all status and no storage, nothing as plebeian as drawers, about four feet wide with drop leaves on either end that, when raised, would have doubled its width. The sole object on the desk was a big chrome- or silver-plated antique telephone with an ornate, heavy-looking handset napping horizontally on an elevated cradle. The dial had been replaced with a touch screen.
The chair was an object of beauty, a circle of deep-grained wood with a carved back and delicately shaped arms encircling a cream-colored leather seat cushion. I put it at about 1850, French, and roughly $6,500 retail. The desk cost a lot more.
Off to the right, the furniture of a small sitting area had been shoved into the smallest possible space: a red leather couch and chairs in English gentlemen’s-club style, the couch pushed against the wall with the chairs flanking it, and in front of it a low marble-topped table, also English. Facing the couch, at the center of the table, was a twin to the Regency chair behind the desk, making it clear where Granger sat when he chose to descend from his platform.
Two other things were evident from the arrangement of the furniture: first, no one sat down unless asked to do so by Granger, since that would have meant crossing the entire office to get to the couch and chairs; and second, he didn’t ask very often. The riser beneath his desk was a time-honored movie-mogul trick that he’d probably borrowed from Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn, both of whom were sensitive about their height and both of whom enjoyed the experience of having people look up at them. It would take a good reason for Jeremy Granger to come down to floor level.
In order to take all this in, I’d spent only fifty or sixty of the small number of seconds available to me; that’s what the adrenaline is for. To my left stood the open, dark elevator, also nineteenth-century, featuring stained walnut paneling and a shining brass accordion grid that would be pulled closed before the car could start down. I would’ve liked to have taken a better look, but the clock in my head was running: I was going to spend a total of twenty minutes inside, tops, and I was already about six minutes in. Look what had happened two nights earlier, when I got sloppy about that.
Which reminded me that I was going to have to do something about the Slugger.
Against the wall beside the elevator, beneath a painting of an English racehorse that probably wasn’t by George Stubbs although it sure looked like it was, was the old wooden filing cabinet Jake had mentioned, but I’d taken only a couple of steps toward it when I realized that not only was the cabinet a fake, it wasn’t even a good fake. In fact, it was prop furniture, probably from some movie that was set in nineteenth-century England. It had been clumsily distressed; a tiny drill had been used to create the wormholes, and the grain had quite plainly been put on with a paintbrush over what was probably plywood. An eyesore at this distance, although I supposed it would have looked convincing enough in the background if the lighting were dim. A nighttime scene, perhaps. In black and white.
What was it doing in here?
I gave it a closer look. Cheap and clumsy. A little alarm went off in my head. This was junk. There were ten of these in every studio prop house in town, and nine of the ten would have been better. Why was it in this man’s office?
The watch said I had twelve minutes and a little change remaining. I’d lost some time, distracted by the fake. So speed things up.
“Ambient Violet,” obviously, begins with an A, and they’d expect me to begin with the top left-hand drawer. The fastest plausibility check I could think of was to see whether all the drawers were full, and if they were, whether the documents inside them obeyed the hard-and-fast rules of alphabetical order. If not, I was gone.
I opened the bottom-right drawer. The first thing I saw was a synopsis of Zoo Station, a splendid World War II novel by David Downing that I’d thought would make a great movie when I read it. Behind that was a folder titled ZZZZIP, all caps, which, when I opened it, proved to be a continuation of the Sandra Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality in which her character went into burlesque with, it promised, “riotous results.” The folder had a large red no stamped across it in about sixty-point type, which was the only sane judgment.
Nothing else in the drawer, but there aren’t that many titles that begin with Z. I opened one approximately in the middle and found myself looking at a folder for something called Nirvana Candy, which was subtitled A Heavenly Comedy.
I felt a furtive twinge of compassion for Jeremy Granger. Swill in both directions, up the alphabet and down again. On the other hand: (a) this was a guy whose three biggest hits, all with the word Eight in the title, starred a four-story tarantula who was actually a handsome ancient Egyptian prince enslaved by a perpetual curse; (b) these ideas, however grim most of them might seem to me, represented (according to Jake) the hopes and dreams of writers, directors, and producers who were targets of Granger’s wrath and were being consigned to permanent turnaround; and (c) I hate most movies and am no one to pass judgment.
So, slightly reassured, I opened the first drawer. There it was, five or six folders back, just behind something called The Always Machine. Jake’s would-be masterpiece was housed in a relatively thick file, more substantial anyway than ZZZZIP. The first thing in the folder was a three-page, double-spaced document on Jake’s letterhead that described the film as “a paradigm-shifting filmic exploration of the eternal aspects of everyday life.” If that description had popped up on network television, I thought, there would have been broken remotes all over America.
That was followed by three or four letters from Granger to a director and some actors whose names I knew, offering them “something courageously offbeat” that represented “a uniquely different appro
ach by a legendary producer.” No replies had been filed, which I suppose meant either that the letters from Granger were fakes that had never been sent, dummies to deceive Jake, or that the people who received the pitch decided it would be more discreet not to reply in writing,
At the end of the file—with seven and a half minutes left—I found the coverage. Or, more accurately, the coverages, because there were two of them. At first glance they looked identical: title of project; a “log line” (“Cosmic exploration of the meaning of life through the life and death of one obscure woman, in the tradition of foreign [Japanese, Indian] films”); name of producer, synopsis, and, comments.
The “comments” section of the first document began, “From one of the great producers in the history of film, a concept that’s almost biblical in its sweep and complexity, and almost a haiku in its simplicity—as much a poem as a film—using one short life, spent beside and shaped by a fast-flowing river, as a paradigm for life itself, in all its . . .” You get the drift.
The second one began, “Unfilmable and probably unwatchable, this is a sad attempt at atonement by a once-successful film producer in his dotage. It opens with a death and goes downhill from there.”
I checked again. Yup, two of them, identical in format, but one was a rave and the other was the kind of pan that drives writers to alcohol and shotguns. Forgetting about the time for a moment, I read both sets of comments in their entirety. Both seemed completely sincere.
What in the world was I going to tell Jake? I checked behind the second piece of coverage, the pan, but there was nothing else in the folder. I was putting the whole thing back into the drawer when I thought I heard something.
It wasn’t so much an identifiable sound as it was a bump in the silence. It was enough, though, to freeze me where I stood. I couldn’t even let go of the edge of the file, off balance but unwilling to adjust, holding my breath.
I gave it a count of five. On five I blew the breath out and slipped the file the rest of the way into the drawer, and the instant I pulled my hand back, the phone on Granger’s desk began to ring.
It was a muted ring, a soft, melodic ring, the kind of lullaby ring that might be custom-composed and recorded for a highly irritable individual. It was a calming sound, a sound designed to lighten the heart and brighten one’s personal outlook. It terrified me.
I stood there, trying not to hear it and knowing that this was a life changer. I was thirty-eight years old. I’d been earning my way through the world by breaking into places and assuming ownership of carefully selected items since I was seventeen, without even a formal brush with the cops, although I knew that one conviction would make me their first stop in any burglary investigation for the rest of my life. And if things went way south between Kathy and me, a record could possibly prevent me from seeing my daughter until she was of age.
All that and I wasn’t even taking anything. Still, I was frozen in place, unable even to think, listening to the tinkle of doom.
After the fourth ring, an amplified voice said from a speaker overhead. “Get that, would you? It’s for you.”
PART THREE
KING MAYBE
Don’t say yes until I’m finished talking.
—Producer Darryl F. Zanuck
15
One Thousand, Eight Hundred, and Seventy-Four Twenties and Two Tens
Because I had followed orders and gone over to the phone, when the office door was pushed open, the cop’s gun was pointed directly at my heart.
“Stay right there,” the cop said. “Both hands in plain sight.”
Seemed like excellent advice. “You got it.”
The cop took a step in and stopped as though he’d walked into a force field, his eyes going to the open door on his left. He was in his mid-forties, plump and round-faced, with a short pug nose, a long upper lip, and a shaggy fringe of hair protruding beneath his cap, and there was something familiar about him, which unnerved me even further than I was already unnerved. I’ve done my best for years not to get to a point where I recognize more than a very few cops on sight. If you know them, they know you. And yet I seemed to know him.
He wiggled the gun back and forth about a quarter of an inch, just a way to put his next sentence in bold type, and said, “Anyone behind the door?”
“No. No one in the elevator either.”
“Don’t move.” He stepped toward me, fast, and used his left hand to shove the door, hard enough for it to bang on the wall. From behind him someone who wasn’t visible through the door said in a smoky, emotionless voice, “Don’t bruise the leather.”
The cop said, “The . . . the leather?”
“On the walls.”
The cop said, “Leather walls?”
The other man said, “Discuss it with your decorator. Now, trot on in there so I can get through the door.”
The cop gave me a fast, mean look that suggested he hoped I hadn’t heard that, so I said, “Just a few steps forward will do it. He’s not very big.”
The cop tightened his mouth, put both hands on the gun in the approved movie fashion, and sidestepped to clear the door.
Jeremy Granger couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred forty pounds, and even with the three-inch heels on his cowboy boots, which I put at about $60,000, he stood no more than five-five. He wore an off-white silk shirt, a black leather vest, and black jeans that looked like they’d been sewn directly on him, except that they were cut too short, undoubtedly to give everyone a chance to appreciate the boots. Young as he was—mid-forties, from what I knew—he’d had work done to redefine his cheekbones, fill the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, and build up his chin. His light brown hair was cut all different lengths, slicked straight back, and gelled into bristling points that suggested a porcupine’s quills at rest. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and rocked back and forth a little, eyeing me as though I were a car he’d just purchased and he was having second thoughts.
“Nice boots,” I said. “Howard Knight?”
He nodded just enough for me to see it, his eyes on mine.
“You don’t mind that he makes Dubya’s boots? I’m not sure I’d want to wear the same—”
“The second I saw you,” he said, and I had to listen because he spoke very softly, “I made you as one of the people who tries to disguise fear with a kind of cheap jocular aggression, like bad private-eye dialogue. When you’ve sat in the chair behind you as long as I have, you get familiar with fear and all the protective mechanisms people use to mask it. So you can keep it up if you want to, but it doesn’t fool me, which should rob you of some of the pleasure, and you should also know that I have a very short attention span and you do not want to exceed it.”
“Not when you’re talking,” I said.
He let a second go by, as though giving all of us a little time to absorb the fact that I’d almost interrupted him. “Sorry?”
“Your attention span. When you’re the one who’s talking, it seems to be infinite.”
He nodded, as though mentally checking off another expected response. “Have you ever—this is a silly question, but humor me—have you ever had power?” He raised a hand to shut me up. “Don’t bother. That was purely rhetorical. I mean, look at you, standing here, helpless as an invertebrate. Well, having power is a learning experience. A lot of it is abstract; you don’t know at first how much you’ve got and how far it goes. But one thing is immediately evident,” he said, craning his neck a couple of aggressive inches in my direction, “and that’s that you can talk forever. From the moment other people understand the lay of the land, no one ever, ever interrupts. They compete to listen more assiduously than anyone else in the room.” He almost smiled, the corners of his mouth just edging up. “Isn’t that craven? Absolutely breeds scorn. And now, just in case you doubt the extent of my power in this specific situation, go over to the window beh
ind the desk and look down.”
“Thanks anyway.”
“The man told you,” the cop said, “to get your ass over to the window and look down, and I don’t see you moving.”
“That window,” I said. “I’ll just stroll over to the window and look down. Wow, look at that. Two squad cars.”
“Got another one at the front door,” the cop said.
“Must be nice to have all this clout.”
“Culverton is an incorporated city with its own law enforcement,” the cop said. He sounded like he’d memorized it so he could recite it on public occasions. “Mr. Granger is the city’s primary employer, largest taxpayer, and biggest landowner, and he donates generously to the police and fire departments. Before he arrived, the city leased law-enforcement services from the sheriffs. Mr. Granger provided the start-up funds to remedy that.”
“And still do,” Granger said, almost smiling again.
An immature little seizure of spite grabbed hold of me and made me say, “Ate a lot of shit to get here, though, didn’t you?”
The cop’s eyes widened, but in Granger’s something flared, so concentrated and so malign that I instinctively stepped aside to let it whistle past. He got it under control and stowed it away, leaning one shoulder on his leather wall. If I hadn’t seen that flicker in his eyes, he would have looked almost too relaxed to remain standing.
“For years and years,” he said. “But I can tell you, it was a microspatter, a teeny bird dropping on a continent-size windshield, compared to the bottomless fecal seas the people who fed it to me are trying to swim through now. Or, for that matter, the tsunami of it you might be facing.” He turned his head half an inch to get the cop’s attention. “So, Officer—” He squinted at the cop’s name plate.
King Maybe Page 16
