Stalking The Angel

I said, 'You gotta be angry.' Mr. Sensitive.

'To be angry is to waste life,' she said, not moving. 'One must have a cruel heart.'

Great.

I finished my circuit of the house and found my way back to the den. Sheila was there, sitting on a bar stool, sipping from the short glass. She was wearing a man's denim work shirt buttoned over the gown and she'd done something about her makeup. She looked good. I wondered how anyone who drank so much could stay that lean. Maybe when she was on the court she played harder than I had thought.

I said, 'The house is tight. All the windows are secure and the doors are locked. The alarm is armed and in order. With Hatcher out front, you're not going to have a problem.'

'If you say so.'

I said, 'Your daughter saw you kiss me. You might want to talk to her.'

'Are you scared Bradley's going to fire you?'

A pulse began behind my right eye. 'No. You might want to talk to her because she saw her mother kiss a strange man and that had to be frightening.'

'She won't tell. She never says anything. All she does is sit in her room and watch TV.'

'Maybe she should tell. Maybe that's the point.'

Sheila drained the glass. 'Bradley's not going to fire you, if that's what you're worried about.'

The pulse began to throb. 'I'm not worried about it. I don't give a damn if Bradley fires me or not.'

Sheila set the glass down hard. Red spots flared on her cheeks. 'You must think I have it pretty good, don't you? Big house, big money. Here's this woman, plays tennis all day, what does she have to gripe about? Well, I've got shit is what I've got. What the hell's a big house if there's nothing in it?' She turned and stalked out the way she'd seen women do a hundred times on Dallas and Falcon Crest. Drama.

I stood by the bar and breathed hard and waited for something else to happen, but nothing did. Somewhere a door slammed. Somewhere else a TV played. Maybe this was a dream. Maybe I would wake up and find myself in a 7-Eleven parking lot and think, Oh, Elvis, ha-ha, you really dreamed up some zingo clients this time!

I let myself out and got in the Corvette and had to stop at the gate to let a yellow Pantera with two teenagers in it pass. Hatcher was in his T-bird, a smug grin on his face.

I leaned toward him. 'If you say anything, Hatcher,' I said, 'I'll shoot you.'

Chapter 7

At nine-forty the next morning my phone rang and Jillian Becker said, 'Did I wake you?'

'Impossible. I never sleep.'

'We're back from Kyoto. Bradley wants to see you.'

I had fallen asleep on the couch, watching a two A.M. rerun of It Came from Beneath the Sea with Ken Tobey and Faith Domergue. The cat had watched it with me and had fallen asleep on my chest. He was still there. I said, 'I went by Bradley's house last night. Someone called and scared the hell out of Sheila.'

'That's one of the reasons Bradley wants to see you. We're at the Century City office. May we expect you in thirty minutes?'

'Better gimme a little longer. I want to think up something real funny to see if I can make you laugh.'

She hung up.

I lifted off the cat, went into the kitchen, filled a large glass with water, drank it, and filled it once more when the phone rang again. Lou Poitras. He said, 'I made some calls. Those two guys who sixed you yesterday were Asian Task Force cops.'

'Gee, you mean Nobu Ishida isn't a simple businessman?'

'If ATF people are in, Hound Dog, it's gotta be heavy.'

Poitras hung up. Asian Task Force, huh? Maybe I had been right about old Nobu. Maybe he was the mastermind of an international stolen art cartel. Maybe I would crack The Big Case and be hailed as The World's Greatest Detective. Wow.

I fed myself and the cat, then showered, dressed, and was turning down Century Park East Boulevard forty minutes later. It was clear and sunny and cooler than yesterday, with a lot of women on the sidewalks, all of them wearing lightweight summer outfits with no backs and no sleeves. Century City was once the back lot of Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. Now it is an orchard of high-rise office buildings done in designer shades of bronze and black and metallic blue glass, each carefully spaced for that planned-community look and landscaped with small pods of green lawn and California poplar trees. The streets have names like Constellation Boulevard and Avenue of the Stars and Galaxy Way. We are nothing if not grandiose.

The Century Plaza Towers are a matching set of triangular buildings, thirty-five floors each of agents, lawyers, accountants, lawyers, business managers, lawyers, record executives, lawyers, and Porsche owners. Most of whom are lawyers. The Century Plaza Towers are the biggest buildings in Century City. They have to be to squeeze in the egos. Warren Investments occupied half of the seventeenth floor of the north tower. Rent alone had to exceed the Swedish gross national product.

I stepped off the elevator into an enormous glass and chrome waiting room filled with white leather chairs that were occupied by important-looking men and women holding important-looking briefcases. They looked like they had been waiting a long time. A sleek black woman sat in the center of a U-shaped command post. She wore a wire-thin headphone set that curved around to her mouth with a microphone the size of a pencil lead. 'Elvis Cole,' I said. 'For Mr. Warren.'

She touched buttons and murmured into the microphone and told me someone would be right out. The important-looking men and women glared enviously. Moments later, an older woman with gray hair in a tight bun and a nice manner led me back along a mile and a half of corridor, through a heavy glass door, and into what could only have been an executive secretary's office. There was a double door wide enough to drive a street cleaner through at the far end. 'Go right in,' she said. I did.

Bradley Warren was sitting on the edge of a black marble desk not quite as long as a bowling alley with his arms crossed and a J. Jonah Jameson smile on his face. He was smiling at five dour-faced Japanese men. Three of the Japanese men were sitting on a white silk couch and were old the way only Asians can be old, with that sort of weathered papery skin and eternal presence. The other two Japanese men stood at either end of the couch, and were much younger and much larger, maybe two inches shorter than me and twenty pounds heavier. They had broad flat faces and eyes that stared at you and didn't give a damn if you minded or not. The one on the right was wearing a custom-cut Lawrence Marx suit that made him look fat. If you knew what to look for, though, you knew he wasn't fat. He was all wedges and heavy muscle. The one on the left was in a brown herringbone, and had gone to the same tailor. Odd Job and his clone. Jillian Becker sat primly on the edge of a white silk chair, framed neatly in a full wall of glass that looked north. She looked nice. Yuppie, but nice.

'Where's Bush?' I said. 'Couldn't he make it?'

Bradley Warren said, 'You're late. We've had to wait.' Mr. Personality.

'Why don't we cancel this meeting and schedule another to begin in ten minutes? Then I can be early.'

Bradley Warren said, 'I'm not paying you for jokes.'

'I throw those in for free.'

Today Jillian Becker was wearing a burgundy skirt and jacket with a white shirt and very sheer burgundy hose with tiny leaf designs and broken-leather burgundy pumps. With her legs crossed, her top knee gleamed. I gave her a beaming smile, but she didn't smile back. Maybe I'd go easy on the jokes for a while.

Bradley Warren slid off his desk and said something in Japanese to the men on the couch. His speech was fluid and natural, as if he had spoken the language as a child. The older man in the center said something back to him, also in Japanese, and everybody laughed. Especially Jillian Becker. Bradley said, 'These men are members of the Tashiro family, who own the Hagakure. They're here to make sure every best effort is made to recover the