King Maybe (15 page)

A pretty nice step up in the world, I thought, from negotiating out of delicatessens.

Just to be completely sure I was alone, I worked my way down the corridor to the right. Doors open, offices mostly dark, all empty. Granger's legions obviously weren't bound by fierce loyalty to remain at their desks after hours. The bathrooms were also empty, so I turned and retraced my steps, pausing at the glass door until I was certain that no one was about to come in through it, and then I strolled across the visible area like someone with the whole night on his hands and a godlike right to be there. I followed the corridor to the barrier that was Ms. Miyagawa's desk, which blocked all but about three feet of the width of the hall. Behind it, in the center of the wall, was a mahogany door that undoubtedly opened onto the stairway to heaven.

The door, despite my being armed with all that info from Jake Whelan, surprised me by being locked.

I stood there, not even thinking about going any farther. What was on my mind was, first, that Jake had been wrong about something, and who was to say he wouldn't be wrong again? And second, once I got the door open—if I decided to open it—I'd be doing something I usually avoided. I'd be going into a dead end.

And third, the wind was still blowing.

One of the Unbreakable Rules taught to me by Herbie Mott, in my mind a burglar so great his face should be on Mount Rushmore, was
Always know how you're going to get out before you go in
. When I went into the Slugger's house, I had two sets of stairs and, it later turned out, a window. What I had here, if Jake was right, was a single stairway going up and an elevator that needed a key I didn't have. If I wasn't going break one of the rules that have kept me from getting arrested over the years, the thing to do was to turn around and get the hell out of there.

On the other hand.

I'd stiffed Jake with the picture,
so I owed him for that. And while I couldn't make a persuasive case to myself that I actually
liked
Jake, he'd helped me out once in a big way. I owed him for
that
.
And despite his tough talk, he might really want to make this movie, which I supposed was a sort of act of contrition.

Not to forget that he
had
promised to put a hit person on me, and it didn't seem like something to be dismissed with a shrug. In this economic climate, hits are cheap.

And the thing about the wind . . . well, that was superstition, plain and simple. I knew a burglar once who would only hit houses where the address was an even number. He passed up treasure chest after treasure chest to keep himself safe and then got busted in the house at 2222 North Doubletree Drive.

So I added all that up and made a deal with myself. I promised myself that if beneath Ms. Miyagawa's spacious desk there was no buzzer to pop that locked door, I'd be out of the building and into the heat and wind within about fifteen seconds. So I looked, and it was right there. But it
was
still windy, so I gave myself one final out: if the buzzer was loud enough to alert anyone who might be upstairs, then ta-ta,
Farscope
.

When I pushed the button, the noise sounded like someone snapping his fingers with his hand inside a pillow. I had to do it twice to make certain I'd heard it. The door opened at a touch, inviting me in, and in a second I was through it and into new territory.

The staircase was thickly carpeted and wide enough for three people abreast, and, in keeping with the overall design of the building, it curved. I stayed against the right wall as I went up, ears working overtime and hearing nothing but the almost inaudible whoosh of the air-conditioning. At the top of the stairs, I paused and waited another minute, just a last auditory survey before I committed myself all the way.

I heard no reason to turn around, so I stepped into the corridor. The second story, as I've said, was also a semicircle, so the corridor curved away from me in both directions, with a single door visible a little more than halfway down on the left. If Jake was right, it led to a rather miserly space in which the executive assistant, Ms. Percival, spent most of her waking hours and, beyond that, to Granger's lair, which took up about half the floor.

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 approach 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.