The Night Cafe (4 page)

Orange County, California

“G
abe, no more snacking. You’ll spoil your dinner.”

Hannah snatched the last of the nachos away from the poised hand of her son and carried them from the patio into the house. The western sun, low over the ocean, was making rainbows on the walls of Nora’s kitchen. For the past couple of hours, the boys—one compact, the other tall and rangy—had climbed out of the water every twenty minutes or so, water streaming off their bodies. Splattering over to the patio table, they’d practically inhaled the fruits and crackers, cheeses and nachos that Nora had set out for them to snack on while Sunday’s beef dinner roasted in the oven.

By now everyone was ravenous. The table was set, the salad made, the oven turned off and the veggies ready for steaming, but Rebecca Powell, Nora’s college roommate, was late.

Hannah scraped the nachos into the garbage disposal, then rinsed the platter and slotted it into the dishwasher. Nora was at the long trestle table in the kitchen, folding starched linen napkins into swan shapes. Their mother, just down from napping upstairs, was putzing around the room, looking for something to clean or polish. Hannah watched her mother’s slightly frenzied hunt. It was pathological. The woman would probably end up ironing the sheets on her own deathbed.

“Ma, come and sit down.”

Instead, Nana picked up a dish towel and polished the taps and faucet at the sink until they gleamed.

Hannah sighed and turned back to her sister. “Could Rebecca have forgotten the invitation?”

Nora shook her head. “I was just talking to her last night. She won’t have forgotten. She’s probably stuck in traffic.”

“She still living in Malibu?”

“No. The gallery’s still there, but she moved into an apartment in Westwood.”

“I thought she was getting the house in the divorce.”

“Bill reneged. He got himself some shark of a lawyer and the lines suddenly shifted. I’m not sure exactly how he managed it, but poor Becs is fighting for her life here.”

“You think the shark dug up something on her? Like, maybe she had an affair, too?”

Nora’s shoulders lifted in a sad shrug. “I really don’t know. Becs hasn’t volunteered and I don’t like to ask. She’s pretty wrung out these days.”

“It’s a blessing she and her husband didn’t have children,” Hannah’s mother said. She’d moved on to wiping the brown speckled counter, even though it was already sparkling. If Rebecca didn’t show up soon, she was going to wear a groove in the granite. Hannah could sympathize. She’d inherited her mother’s restlessness, although in her case, it rarely manifested itself in an urge to clean.

“I suppose,” Nora said.

Nana’s head gave a sad shake. “Divorce is so hard on children.”

Hannah’s gaze dropped to her hands and she tried to ignore the stab in her solar plexus. Her mother wasn’t trying to make her feel crummy about her own messy divorce and lost custody struggle, she knew, but the comment stung just the same.

“Anyway,” Nora added, “I know she hasn’t forgotten about today because she asked last night if you were going to be here.”

Hannah glanced at their mother, then back at Nora. “Who, me? Why?”

“Something about a job.”

“What would she need a security contractor for? Guarding overpriced seascapes?”

Hannah had gone with Nora one time to Rebecca Powell’s Malibu art gallery. The place specialized in the kind of idealized, light-dappled images of coastal California, conveniently sofa-sized, that tourists seemed to favor.

“I don’t know why she needs your services, but here she comes.” Sure enough, through the big, multipaned window next to her sister, Hannah saw a bright red BMW convertible roaring up the driveway. Nora set aside the last in her flock of linen swans and got to her feet. “You can ask her yourself.”

It was courier work, it seemed.

Rebecca didn’t broach the subject until well after dinner. Neal and the boys were in the den, watching a football game, and Nora and Nana were loading the dishwasher. When they brushed off all offers of help, Hannah and Rebecca escaped the warm kitchen and took their coffee out onto the softly lit, tented gazebo on the patio.

“It’s for a client,” Rebecca said, after explaining what she needed from Hannah.

She smoothed her cream linen slacks and crossed her dainty, espadrille-clad feet at the ankles before lifting her china cup to her lips. Rebecca was one of those L.A. women whose voluptuous breasts didn’t seem to belong to her stick-thin body, like she’d ordered them from some mammary mail-order house—Boobs ’R Us. At least she’d avoided the clichéd long blond tresses, opting instead for short, ketchup-red spikes that made her look more arty than bimbo-esque.

“My client ordered a painting and he wants it delivered to his vacation home in Mexico.”

“He never heard of FedEx or UPS?”

“It’s a fairly expensive piece so he wants it hand-carried. A painting by August Koon.”

Hannah shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

Rebecca leaned forward to settle her coffee cup in its saucer on the patio table. As she did, her dangly silver earrings tinkled and a silver charm necklace swayed in the cleft of her ample breasts. Hannah’s personal inclinations left her lusting after manly biceps, not bosoms, but it was hard not to be distracted by that much cleavage. At dinner, she’d caught Nolan’s and even ten-year-old Gabe’s eyes wandering repeatedly to the deep V of Rebecca’s turquoise cashmere sweater although, she’d been happy to note, Neal had had eyes for no one but his wife. Bless his plodding, loyal heart.

“Koon’s work is what they call
po-mo
. Postmodern,” Rebecca said. “Not what I normally carry in my little gallery, but he’s local and fairly trendy at the moment. His work gets pretty good reviews, although to be perfectly honest, I think he’s overrated.”

“And this client? He’s a regular of yours?’

Rebecca hesitated. She might have been frowning, except her skin from the eyebrows up seemed frozen smooth. Damn Botox. It made reading faces really tough. Take now, for example. Instead of looking puzzled at the question, or cagey, or maybe just discreet, Rebecca only succeeded in looking dim. It was all but impossible to know what she was thinking.

“He hasn’t bought from me before this, but he has a home in Malibu—one of several, I gather, scattered all over the world. Anyway, he called a couple of weeks ago and said he’d been in my gallery a couple of times. I don’t know that I can really place him, but when he asked me about purchasing this Koon on his behalf, I jumped at it.”

“I didn’t realize you did that. I guess I just assumed you sell what you’re showing.”

“I haven’t really done much of this before. I mean, once or twice, I’ve acted as agent for a buyer who wanted something different from an artist I was showing, but never an artist in August Koon’s price range. I’d love to do more of this, though. Much better than running a gallery.” Rebecca shook her ketchup-red spikes. “All that financial overhead. Long hours. Trying to guess which way the market’s going.”

“Is being a buyer a full-time gig?”

“It can be. Most wealthy buyers prefer to work anonymously through a broker to keep the price down.”

“So this Koon deal is a biggie?”

Rebecca’s right hand seesawed. “Middling big. The purchase price is just over a quarter mil, plus my commission. Normally, the agent charges ten or fifteen percent, but when he called the other day, my buyer offered twenty percent before I’d even had a chance to name a rate.”

Hannah did the math in her head, then whistled. “Fifty grand for a few hours’ work. Nice little business you’ve got going there, Becs.”

“I wish. Believe me, I don’t usually get to play in this big sandbox. That’s why I’m not about to say no to this. Whatever this buyer needs, I’m happy to try to get it for him, even if I’m not crazy about his choices. Who am I to look a gift horse in the mouth?”

“I don’t know,” Hannah said. “Schlepping artwork…it’s not really what I do.”

Rebecca looked embarrassed—or that’s what Hannah thought she was meant to look. Her face did seem to flush, but it didn’t exactly register emotion. “No, I didn’t think it was, really. Although,” she added, “I guess I don’t know exactly what it is you
do
do. I mean, I know you used to be a cop, and Nora mentioned that you’re overseas a lot now, and that sometimes you do bodyguard work for celebrities. I saw the news after you rescued that kidnapped doctor, too, of course.”

Hannah nodded. “It’s kind of a mixed bag, what I do. Pays the bills, though.” Most of the time, she thought. At the moment, she had a whopping tax bill that she was paying off in installments, the aftermath of the big reward she got for the doctor’s rescue—a reward she didn’t keep in the end, donating it instead to the widow of her partner in that caper. She’d forgotten about the tax angle. Dumb move, but when the IRS dropped the big bill on her, she chose not to pass it on to her partner’s widow and negotiated a payment plan instead. No good deed goes unpunished.

“Would you be free to take a run down to Mexico this week?” Rebecca asked. “It’s a quick in-and-out thing. And all your expenses would be covered, of course.”

Hannah winced. She didn’t like the idea of taking work from family or friends—or even friends of family. It was too hard to negotiate her usual steep fee, especially with someone whose messy divorce too closely echoed her own.

“You could do it in forty-eight hours,” Rebecca added. “My buyer authorized up to ten thousand dollars for courier fees, plus expenses. That includes first-class airfare for you and the painting. He wants it hand-carried on board.”

Whoa. Ten grand. For two days’ work
.

“Where in Mexico?”

“Puerto Vallarta. He’s got a home down there. Like I said, one of several. I gather he’s got places in NewYork and London, and…where else? Tel Aviv, I think. The man is not hurting for money, from the sounds of things.”

“Tel Aviv? Who is this guy?”

“His name is Moises Gladding.”

Double whoa. Moises Gladding
. Not the first time Hannah had heard that name.

“Moises Gladding is a pretty shady character, Rebecca.”

“You know him?”

“I know
of
him. He’s an arms dealer. They say he supplies arms to some of the shadiest regimes and insurgency movements on three continents—and sometimes to both sides of the same conflict.”

“Really?”

Hannah frowned. “And Gladding’s been in your gallery? Recently?” Last she’d heard, some Congressional oversight committee had been trying to subpoena him to testify about a reported illegal arms shipment to a right-wing paramilitary group in Venezuela that was trying to overthrow the regime of Hugo Chavez. One of Hannah’s security buddies had told her that somebody, probably some spook out of Langley, was suspected of having given Gladding a heads-up and helped him slip out of the country ahead of the legal notice to appear—which would explain why Mr. Gladding couldn’t carry his own damn painting to Mexico.

“I’m not sure when he was last in the gallery,” Rebecca said. “Like I say, I can’t really place him, and the request to make this purchase for him came by phone.”

Hannah sat back on the patio chair, watching the light dance on the surface of the swimming pool, reflecting on the trees overhead, turning the yard into a magic fairyland. “You sure you want to be doing business with a guy like that, Becs?”

“It’s just a painting. Somebody’s going to get the business, so I don’t see why it shouldn’t be me. But I really need your help. I don’t know who else to ask. I’d carry it down there myself, except I can’t afford to leave the gallery for two days. Please, would you think about it?”

Hannah sighed. Ten grand was a nice little bite out of her tax bill. She really had no business walking away from easy money, especially since her dance card wasn’t exactly full at the moment. At the same time, experience had taught her to trust her gut about certain people, and instinct told her that anything involving a character like Gladding could come back to bite her in the ass.

Still, as Rebecca said, it was just a stupid painting.

“I’ll need to see this painting before I agree to carry it,” Hannah said. “And to supervise the packing of it. No way am I getting on a plane carrying a sealed package I haven’t thoroughly examined with my own eyes.”

Rebecca actually giggled. “Oh, thank you, thank you! Hannah, this is
such
a huge help to me, you have no idea. You won’t regret it, I promise.”

Lord
, Hannah thought.
Moises frigging Gladding. I sure hope not
.

It was well after nine when Hannah finally got home from her day at Nora’s. She’d taken Gabe home to his father’s first, enduring the weekly gut-wrench of saying goodbye and then watching him walk inside the house with the very pregnant woman who’d taken Hannah’s place in her son’s life.

Her ex, a high-profile criminal defense attorney, made his living helping celebrities avoid the consequences of their bad behavior. Cal was good at his job—very good. It had rewarded him with a gate-guarded mansion off Mulholland Drive, a gorgeous second wife, and the money to convince the courts that he and Christie offered a safer, more stable home environment for their son than Hannah could. The fact that the judge had probably made the right decision didn’t make it any less painful. Or galling.

Pulling into the short driveway that fronted the row of garages next to her building, she hit the opener switch and watched the door rise. Her condo was on a quiet, tree-lined road that ran steeply uphill from Sunset Boulevard. The low brick building, constructed in the nineteen-twenties, had originally housed offices. Sometime during the real estate boom of the eighties, it had been converted to row town houses, but pleasingly so, retaining period details like deep crown moldings, gargoyled pediments and a few interior walls stripped back to showcase the red brick. It was a rare thing in L.A., real brick. Since the tightening of earthquake codes, nobody built with it anymore. The walls of Hannah’s building had been reinforced with rebar during the conversion. Even so, she suspected it would crumble like a house of cards when The Big One hit, but like everyone else in the city, she lived in a state of perpetual denial.