I put my hand in the small of his back and pulled him close. He should’ve stepped back sooner, but he hadn’t because he was tough. Now he couldn’t. One of the Persian women stood up.
“Try the double chocolate banana,” I said softly.
He wet his lips, again glancing at the man he’d entered with. The man hadn’t moved. I pulled him tighter, letting him feel the gun.
“The double chocolate banana,” I said.
“The double chocolate banana.”
“To her.”
“Chocolate banana.” To her.
“Please.”
“Please.” To her.
“Good. You’ll like it.”
I let him go. He started to say something, wet his lips again, then stepped back.
The counter girl was frozen with wide bumblebee eyes. More scared now than when it started. Some days, you can’t win.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s been hell the past few days.”
She nodded and gave me a shy, quiet smile, more young girl than grown-up woman, which is the way it should be when you’re sixteen. Everything’s gonna be okay, the smile said.
I leaned over the counter and put one of my cards by the cash register.
“If anyone ever bothers you,” I said, shooting a glance at the guy in the spacesuit, “let me know.”
I walked out the door, went to my car, and drove west along Sunset toward Westwood and Barry Fein.
27
11001 Wilshire is a nine-story high-rise done up quite nicely in gray and white and glass, what the big ads in the real-estate section of the Times call “a luxury address.” There is a circular drive of gray cobblestone running up beneath a tremendous white and gray awning to the large glass lobby and two waiting doormen. A Rolls and a Jaguar were parked by the glass doors. In the lobby was a security officer behind an elaborately paneled security station who probably took great pride in collecting the mail and calling the elevator and giving the arm to peepers and process servers and similar social debris. It was not a place where you could go to a call box, press a lot of buttons, and count on someone buzzing you in.
I turned up one of the little side streets that ran north through a pleasant residential section, parked by a sign that said Permit Parking Only, and walked back to the high-rise. On the east side of 11001 there was a parking garage with a card key gate leading down, elegantly landscaped with poplar saplings and California poppies. I sat on the ground by the poplars. It was getting hotter, but the smog was manageable. After about ten minutes, the gate groaned to life, folded up into the roof of the building, and a long forest green Cadillac nosed out onto the street. By the time the gate closed, I was in the garage.
There were two cars parked in the slot for 601, a powder blue Porsche 928 and a steel DeLorean. Barry Fein was home. I looked for the elevator and found it on the other side of the garage, but it was one of those security jobs that didn’t have buttons down in the garage, just another card key slot. There would be stairs, but the stairs would go up to the lobby and the guards and I wasn’t ready for them yet. I went back to the gate, pressed the service switch, and let myself out.
It was a six-block walk to Westwood Village along elm-shaded sidewalks.
If you ignore the surroundings, Westwood Village could be the center of a college town in Iowa or Massachusetts or Alabama. Lots of fast food vendors, restaurants, collegiate clothing stores, bookshops, art galleries, record stores. Lots of pretty girls. Lots of young guys with muscles who thought playing high school football and being able to lift 200 pounds made them memorable. Lots of bicycles. In a drugstore next to a falafel stand I bought a box of envelopes, a roll of fiber wrapping tape, a stamper that said PRIORITY, an ink pad, and a Bic pen. On the way out I spotted a little sheet of stick-on labels that said things like HANDLE WITH CARE. I bought that, too.
Back at the car I tore an old McDonald’s Happy Meal box into strips, put it in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote Mr. Barry Fein on the front. I put the wrapping tape along all four edges, then across the flap on the back, making sure to keep the fiber bands even. Even in crime, neatness counts. I stamped PRIORITY twice on the front and twice more on the back, then put a sticker that said DO NOT BEND where you normally put the stamp. I looked at it. Not bad. I bent it twice, then put it on the ground and stepped on it hard. Better.
I walked back to 11001 Wilshire and went in to the guard at the reception desk. “Got something here for Mr. Barry Fein,” I said.
The guard looked at me like I was somebody else’s bad breath and held out a hand. “I’ll take it.” He’d crossed the line into his fifties a couple years back. He had a broad face and a thick nose that had been broken more than once, and eyes that stayed with you. Ex-cop.
I shook my head. “Unh-unh. Hand delivery.”
“Hand deliveries are made to me.”
“Not this one.” I waved the envelope under his nose. “My ass is in the grinder as it is. Guy tells me, get this to Mr. Fein and be careful with it, right? Like a dope I drop it and some asshole kicks it and the wind picks it up and I gotta chase it half across Westwood against the traffic.”
He was impressed. “This is as far as you go.”
I put the letter in my pocket. “Okay, you’re a hard ass and you don’t give a shit if I get chewed. Call Fein. Tell him it’s from Mr. Garrett Rice. Tell him that even though he wants this you’ve decided that he shouldn’t have it.”
The guard’s eyes never moved.
I said, “Look, Sarge, either you call Mr. Fein now or Mr. Rice is gonna call him when I bring this thing back, and then my ass won’t be the only one in the grinder.”
We stared at each other. After a while his mouth tightened and he picked up the phone and pressed three buttons. One of the doormen had come inside and was looking at us. The guard put down the phone and scowled at me, not liking it that I’d showed him up.
He said, “You think I’m letting you upstairs with the piece, forget it.”
He was good. The way I’m built, most people never see the gun under the light jacket I wear. I grinned and spread the jacket. He reached across, fingered it out, and put it under his desk. “It’ll be here when you come down,” he said.
“Sure.”
“When you get out of the elevator, turn right, then right again.”
I took the elevator up to six, got out into the H-shaped hall, turned right, then right again by a little gold sign that said 601 amp; 603». Blue-gray carpet, white walls, cream light fixtures, Italian moderne artwork. It was so hushed and so clean and so sterile, I wondered if people really lived there. Maybe just androids, or people so old they stayed in bed all day and fed from tubes. I thought of Keir Dullea as an old man in 2001.
At the end of the hall a blond man stood in the door to 601 waiting for me. He was blond the way straw blonds are blond, so light it was almost white. He wore a white LaCoste shirt and white slacks and white deck shoes, all of which made his dark tan look even darker. On the young side, maybe 24, with a boyish face, and built the way you’re built when you lift for strength rather than bulk. Like Pike. Unlike Pike, he was short, not over five- eight.
“Mr. Fein?” I said.
“I’m Charles. Are you from Mr. Rice?” His voice was higher pitched than you would’ve guessed, and soft, like a sensitive fourteen-year-old’s. Five-eight was short for this kind of work.
“Yeah. I’m supposed to give this to Mr. Fein.”
Charles took the envelope, opened the door, and stepped to the side to let me in. The first two knuckles of each hand were large and swollen, the way they get doing push-ups on them and pounding sacks of rice and breaking boards. Maybe five-eight wasn’t so much of a problem for him.
