SCOTT SCHELLING felt his cell phone vibrate in his coat pocket. This was the third time tonight, and each time, he could feel his heartbeat quicken with excitement. The news was better and better each time. He glanced at the other end of the room. Ray Klein was about midway in his cocktail-party speech about the fully integrated electronics conglomerate, so there was plenty of time to answer the call.
He made his way through the vast living room slowly, careful not to look as though he was in a hurry. Doing business at these parties was considered rude. But he was anxious to return Tiffany’s call. Her first call had been the most important one. She had conveyed the message from Paul that everything had gone as he had hoped. That meant that Wendy Harper was dead at last. Scott had been in a state of buoyant good spirits since that moment, which he recognized as a turning point in his life. For six years—the years when he had been working to build his reputation and gain power at Crosswinds Records—he had been afraid.
He had tried to be cautious about having his picture taken or being on television, but he still had to do his job and live his life, and they were the same. Work was social. Scott Schelling had always taken women to parties and used his business relationships with musicians to impress them. He had talked to women in the way he had talked to the musicians. He told each of them she was the very best, the one he wanted above all the others. He implied as clearly as he could that he would give them everything they could ever want, just because they were special. He would give the woman of the moment a sample, a taste of what was to come. It would be a watch or a bracelet, usually, something that had cost enough to let her know he was not the same as her old boyfriends.
Scott had been very generous about exposing the new woman to the talent right away, to demonstrate that he was an important man. He let her meet the stars, dance with them, drink with them, talk to them. But being with music celebrities was a mixed experience for a young woman. Many of the stars were wild and sloppy, drinking heavily, or disappearing for a few minutes and returning with a manic craziness and dilated pupils. Offstage, stars were often crude and boorish and even frightening. The woman could see the freak show, be dazzled and fascinated, but after a surprisingly short time, Scott would feel the woman clinging to his arm again, half-hiding herself behind his reassuring dark suit coat and his sobriety and reliability.
Scott stopped to say hello to Bill Calder, the Entertainment Division Comptroller, then eased by Calder’s wife, confiding, “Excuse me, my phone is ringing,” and out the open arch into the cactus garden. He liked Klein’s Santa Fe house. It was adobe, with big timbers in the ceilings and every portal curved. When he was certain that nobody was near him, he took out his telephone, pressed Tiffany’s number, and said, “It’s me.”
“Scotty, it’s both of us—Tiffany and Kimberly—on a conference line. We wanted to be positive you wouldn’t be needing us any more tonight.”
“Did you have someone meet the gentleman who called earlier?”
“Do you mean Paul?”
“Yes,” he said.
“I called the number you left me.”
“Good. If everything’s taken care of, there’s no reason to hang around. Just reconfirm the time of my flight tomorrow morning and turn out the lights. And make sure somebody remembers to feed my dog tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Scotty,” Tiffany said. “See you Monday morning.”
He hung up. He inhaled, and as his lungs expanded he felt even happier. He felt a crazy, impulsive wish to do something for those two, like give them both a huge raise. But he couldn’t do that every time he felt happy. And Bill Calder, who was no more than fifty feet away from him right now, would see the raise and want to know the justification. Maybe Scott would take them with him on a trip. There was one scheduled for later next month to France and Germany for some conference or other.
He put away his phone and made his way back to the party. The people at this party were alien to Scott Schelling. The presidents of all the other subsidiaries were married, and they brought their wives—all blond and tall and twenty to thirty years younger than their husbands, but all showing face-lifts and teeth with the whiteness of a porcelain sink. He was never sure what to make of these women because there was no way to read their expressions.
Their husbands were slightly easier for him, because he could recognize the hostility and suspicion when he talked to them. As he stepped inside from the desert garden, he saw that Taylor Gaines had been watching him. Gaines was the head of the finance subsidiary of the parent company, the one that used the profits from each of the divisions to make loans. Gaines said, “Hello, Scott. Got to keep on top of the trends even while you’re here, don’t you?”
“That’s right, Taylor. If you’re not ahead, you’re behind.”
Scott hurried down the hallway and noticed he was moving past framed antique drawings and maps from the Spanish era. His girls had done their job beautifully when they had bought an old map as a present for Jill Klein. As he had the thought, he remembered that they had not needed to strain much to accomplish it. Ray Klein had probably told them what to buy.
Everything that happened seemed to be controlled by Ray Klein. Ray Klein wanted the girls to please Scott Schelling with their efficiency so Scott would keep them on his staff. That way they could keep feeding Ray Klein information. Klein wanted Scott to feel good about his relationship with him, to feel that he had done well and Klein appreciated and liked him. Klein wanted his wife, Jill, to have a nice addition to her collection so she could feel involved and admired, and not have as much brain space to observe her husband’s relations with Martha Rodall, vice president of the Public Relations Division. All this was what Ray Klein was famous for: managing his people.
Scott slipped past white-shirted waiters serving tiny blue-corn tamales, ahi tuna on small beds of rice, and cocktails, and into the center of the party, just close enough to Ray Klein to be sure that Klein included him in any mental roll-call he was taking, but not close enough to be an obstruction or a distraction. Scott made sure he had been seen, and then smiled and shook hands with Sam Hardesty, the head of the Aerospace Electronics Division. “Hi, Sam. Scott Schelling, Crosswinds Records. How are you tonight?”
“Fine. Yourself?” Hardesty was nearly seventy with white hair and the build of the retired general he was.
“Great,” said Schelling. “It’s such a beautiful night, and I find getting out of Los Angeles this time of year a treat. Hell, just getting out of the office is a treat. How are your numbers going to come in this quarter?”
Hardesty flinched at the directness of the question. “I’m afraid that’s not a number I can give out just yet.”
“Oh? Classified?”
“No. But it’s inside information. You work in a different company, even though we own it. It’s against SEC rules for me to tell you.”
“Well, then, good luck with it,” Scott said. He moved deeper into the room toward the next set of executives, a pair of computer-hardware nerds from Syn-Final Microsystems, when he felt something touch his arm. As he began to turn he saw the hand. On one of the fingers was a bean-sized emerald with diamonds around it. He lifted his eyes to see Jill Klein’s face close to his.
“Scotty,” she said, her voice low and conspiratorial. “I just had to take you aside and tell you how much I love the map.” From this close, he could see that her face showed signs of surgical procedures. The skin above the cheekbones had been tightened from the sides so her oversized eyes looked permanently startled. She leaned close and kissed his cheek with pillowy lips. “It’s really gorgeous.” She smiled. “Sometimes a thank-you note just isn’t enough.”
“
“Would you like to see where I’ve hung it?”
“Sure.”
She walked him out to the fringes of the party, along a wide hallway toward the back of the house. He could hear the sounds of caterers working in a restaurant-size kitchen beyond the big doors at the end of the hall. As he walked, he tried to remember the description that Kimberly and Tiffany had recited to him so he would recognize it when he saw it. He remembered something about California being an island. The kitchen sounds made him sure they were near the dining room. Maybe she had hung it there, where the other guests would have to look at it and envy his taste and thoughtfulness.
But she turned in the other direction, up a narrow staircase that led to the second floor. She took a few steps and opened a door. “This is my personal suite.” There was a large sitting room decorated with kachina dolls and
