King Maybe (16 page)

What in the world was I going to tell Jake? I checked behind the second piece of coverage, the pan, but there was nothing else in the folder. I was putting the whole thing back into the drawer when I thought I heard something.

It wasn't so much an identifiable sound as it was a bump in the silence. It was enough, though, to freeze me where I stood. I couldn't even let go of the edge of the file, off balance but unwilling to adjust, holding my breath.

I gave it a count of five. On
five
I blew the breath out and slipped the file the rest of the way into the drawer, and the instant I pulled my hand back, the phone on Granger's desk began to ring.

It was a muted ring, a soft, melodic ring, the kind of lullaby ring that might be custom-composed and recorded for a highly irritable individual. It was a calming sound, a sound designed to lighten the heart and brighten one's personal outlook. It terrified me.

I stood there, trying not to hear it and knowing that this was a life changer. I was thirty-eight years old. I'd been earning my way through the world by breaking into places and assuming ownership of carefully selected items since I was seventeen, without even a formal brush with the cops, although I knew that one conviction would make me their first stop in any burglary investigation for the rest of my life. And if things went way south between Kathy and me, a record could possibly prevent me from seeing my daughter until she was of age.

All that and I wasn't even
taking
anything. Still, I was frozen in place, unable even to think, listening to the tinkle of doom.

After the fourth ring, an amplified voice said from a speaker overhead. “Get that, would you? It's for you.”

PART THREE

KING MAYBE

Don't say yes until I'm finished talking.

—Producer Darryl F. Zanuck

15

One Thousand, Eight Hundred, and Seventy-Four Twenties and Two Tens

Because I had followed orders and gone over to the phone, when the office door was pushed open, the cop's gun was pointed directly at my heart.

“Stay right there,” the cop said. “Both hands in plain sight.”

Seemed like excellent advice. “You got it.”

The cop took a step in and stopped as though he'd walked into a force field, his eyes going to the open door on his left. He was in his mid-forties, plump and round-faced, with a short pug nose, a long upper lip, and a shaggy fringe of hair protruding beneath his cap, and there was something
familiar
about him, which unnerved me even further than I was already unnerved. I've done my best for years not to get to a point where I recognize more than a very few cops on sight. If you know them, they know you. And yet I seemed to know him.

He wiggled the gun back and forth about a quarter of an inch, just a way to put his next sentence in bold type, and said, “Anyone behind the door?”

“No. No one in the elevator either.”

“Don't move.” He stepped toward me, fast, and used his left hand to shove the door, hard enough for it to bang on the wall. From behind him someone who wasn't visible through the door said in a smoky, emotionless voice, “Don't bruise the leather.”

The cop said, “The . . . the leather?”

“On the
walls
.”

The cop said, “Leather walls?”

The other man said, “Discuss it with your decorator. Now, trot on in there so I can get through the door.”

The cop gave me a fast, mean look that suggested he hoped I hadn't heard that, so I said, “Just a few steps forward will do it. He's not very big.”

The cop tightened his mouth, put both hands on the gun in the approved movie fashion, and sidestepped to clear the door.

Jeremy Granger couldn't have weighed more than a hundred forty pounds, and even with the three-inch heels on his cowboy boots, which I put at about $60,000, he stood no more than five-five. He wore an off-white silk shirt, a black leather vest, and black jeans that looked like they'd been sewn directly on him, except that they were cut too short, undoubtedly to give everyone a chance to appreciate the boots. Young as he was—mid-forties, from what I knew—he'd had work done to redefine his cheekbones, fill the lines around his eyes and the corners of his mouth, and build up his chin. His light brown hair was cut all different lengths, slicked straight back, and gelled into bristling points that suggested a porcupine's quills at rest. He put his hands in the pockets of his jeans and rocked back and forth a little, eyeing me as though I were a car he'd just purchased and he was having second thoughts.

“Nice boots,” I said. “Howard Knight?”

He nodded just enough for me to see it, his eyes on mine.

“You don't mind that he makes Dubya's boots? I'm not sure I'd want to wear the same—”

“The second I saw you,” he said, and I had to listen because he spoke very softly, “I made you as one of the people who tries to disguise fear with a kind of cheap jocular aggression, like bad private-eye dialogue. When you've sat in the chair behind you as long as I have, you get familiar with fear and all the protective mechanisms people use to mask it. So you can keep it up if you want to, but it doesn't fool me, which should rob you of some of the pleasure, and you should also know that I have a very short attention span and you do
not
want to exceed it.”

“Not when you're talking,” I said.

He let a second go by, as though giving all of us a little time to absorb the fact that I'd almost interrupted him. “Sorry?”

“Your attention span. When you're the one who's talking, it seems to be infinite.”

He nodded, as though mentally checking off another expected response. “Have you ever—this is a silly question, but humor me—have you ever had power?” He raised a hand to shut me up. “Don't bother. That was purely rhetorical. I mean, look at you, standing here, helpless as an invertebrate. Well, having power is a learning experience. A lot of it is abstract; you don't know at first how much you've got and how far it goes. But one thing is immediately evident,” he said, craning his neck a couple of aggressive inches in my direction, “and that's that
you can talk forever
. From the moment other people understand the lay of the land, no one ever,
ever
interrupts. They compete to listen more assiduously than anyone else in the room.” He almost smiled, the corners of his mouth just edging up. “Isn't that craven? Absolutely
breeds
scorn. And now, just in case you doubt the extent of my power in this specific situation, go over to the window behind the desk and look down.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“The man told you,” the cop said, “to get your ass over to the window and look down, and I don't see you moving.”

“
That
window,” I said. “I'll just stroll over to the window and look down. Wow, look at that. Two squad cars.”

“Got another one at the front door,” the cop said.

“Must be nice to have all this clout.”

“Culverton is an incorporated city with its own law enforcement,” the cop said. He sounded like he'd memorized it so he could recite it on public occasions. “Mr. Granger is the city's primary employer, largest taxpayer, and biggest landowner, and he donates generously to the police and fire departments. Before he arrived, the city leased law-enforcement services from the sheriffs. Mr. Granger provided the start-up funds to remedy that.”

“And still do,” Granger said, almost smiling again.

An immature little seizure of spite grabbed hold of me and made me say, “Ate a lot of shit to get here, though, didn't you?”

The cop's eyes widened, but in Granger's something
flared
, so concentrated and so malign that I instinctively stepped aside to let it whistle past. He got it under control and stowed it away, leaning one shoulder on his leather wall. If I hadn't seen that flicker in his eyes, he would have looked almost too relaxed to remain standing.

“For years and years,” he said. “But I can tell you, it was a microspatter, a teeny bird dropping on a continent-size windshield, compared to the bottomless fecal seas the people who fed it to me are trying to swim through now. Or, for that matter, the tsunami of it you might be facing.” He turned his head half an inch to get the cop's attention. “So, Officer—” He squinted at the cop's name plate.

“Biehl,” I said. “B-I-E-H—”

“Officer Biehl, I think you can go now. For the moment anyway.”

The cop's eyebrows came together over the bridge of his nose, an expression that subtracted many points from his apparent IQ. “Go? Where?”
“
I
don't care. To your car, I suppose. Or the commissary. Go someplace comfortable. Get a doughnut.”

“But this guy . . . I mean, you gotta—”

“Mr. Bender is a professional with a rich trove of experience,” Granger said, “and he knows when he's fucked.”

I said, “Yes, actually, I do.”

“So, good, good. You can run along, Officer, Officer . . .”

“Biehl,” I said. “You want me to spell it again?”

“Not necessary. Interesting spelling, though, isn't it?”

Biehl said, “Is it?”

Granger raised one hand and wiggled the tips of his fingers at the cop. “Bye-bye.”

“Those must be
some donations,” I said. I was sitting on the couch, and Granger was in the Regency chair across the table from me.

“It takes so little to make them happy,” he said. “Now that everyone hates them for shooting unarmed people on what seems to be a racially selective basis, and now that they've been outfitted by the Department of Defense until the friendly old cop on the beat poking, along in his shirtsleeves, looks like one of the emperor's troops in
Star Wars
. And then there's the mind-set that goes with all that firepower.”

“You're going to say that thing about the nail, aren't you?”

“As the ancient Japanese saying goes,” Granger continued as though I hadn't spoken, “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

“Actually, that ancient saying was popularized in 1966,” I said, “by a psychologist named Abraham Maslow. The Japanese saying is ‘The nail that sticks up will be hammered down.'”

Granger looked at me, waiting for me to shift in my seat. When I did, mostly to move things along, he said, “I can get that cop back up here anytime you cease to interest me.”

“But you won't,” I said.

He sucked in the corners of his mouth.

“You've gone through a lot to set this up,” I said. “Stringing Jake along about his movie—”

“Not entirely,” he said, and then he waved his words away. “I mean, yes, I used
Ultra Violet
or whatever it's called to persuade Jake to get you in here—”

“To set me up,” I said. “Good old Jake.”

“But you shouldn't blame him. He wants it so badly. And actually, I'm not entirely opposed to the idea of the film.”

“Really. Who wrote the coverage about it being . . . I don't know, some old hack's swipe at redemption?”

“I did.”

“And who wrote the version you probably showed Jake, about how it could do everything except prevent global warming?”

“I did.”

I let my spine touch the back of the couch for the first time. “I had the same reaction, sort of.”

“Which one?”

“Both of them.”

He treated me to the first real smile I'd seen, giving me a glimpse of either a quarter of a million dollars' worth of cosmetic dentistry or the set of teeth evolution has been working its way up to for millions of years. “Yes,” he said, “Jake is a terrible old ball of rags, but the
idea
has something behind it, even if it's only a test of hubris. At first I thought that was why he might have given it to me, thinking that my ego was so big I'd take the dare, but the two times we talked about it, his sincerity was heartbreaking. You know what I mean? He's not
used
to being sincere. He's awful at it. And then, you know, you can't
completely
dismiss his sense of what makes a movie. You've undoubtedly seen the ones that made him famous.”

“Not since I was six or seven.”

He gave me a gaze that in a more demonstrative face might have been described as
interested
. “Why not?”

“Well, don't take this personally, but I think of Hollywood as the beached whale of popular culture.”

“I'm sure you can sustain the metaphor, but—”

“Slowly caving in, crushing itself under the weight of its budgets and its compromises.”

Granger nodded, but he was clearly just waiting to get his revenge for my having interrupted him. “Probably more effective left unsaid. And the
other
reason you shouldn't completely blame Jake for roping you in here is because I told him about the upside, for you, of my proposal, and he probably thinks he's doing you a—”

“You went through all this to make a
proposal
?”

“If there were no upside, it would be a threat, I'll admit it. But there
is
an upside, and it's considerable. That makes it a proposal. You're here to discuss how you avoid the threat and profit from the upside.”

I leaned back and closed my eyes.

“Here it is, the elevator pitch. You listening?”

“Sorry, I always fade out when people begin to talk about the upside. It's usually so embarrassing.”

“You can sit up and listen or you can go take a ride with Officer . . . Officer . . .”

“Biehl.” I opened my eyes. “You have trouble with names, don't you?”

He shrugged.

“Why do you suppose that is?”

“Contempt,” he said. “Now, listen to me, it's not complicated. I'm going to divorce my wife. She doesn't know that yet. Before I let her in on my plans, I want to remove some things from the list of community-property items. You're going to steal them.”

“From where?”

“My house, of course.”

“What are they?”

“Odds and ends. Some very good jewelry I gave her in various guilty moments. Most importantly, a painting. By Turner.”

I said, “You're shitting me.”

“A good one,” he said, “even relative to other Turners. Probably the best in private hands. It's a sunrise at sea.”

“So you set it up for me to rob the house, and I go in with a shopping list of the stuff you want. And you trust me not to take other things?”

“Of course not,” he said. “You can take anything that appeals to you. I'll have pulled out the little pieces I actually care about the day before, but there will be plenty left. Treat the place like a supermarket on one of those shows where people race up and down the aisles with a shopping cart.”

“Taking your stuff.”

“Of
course.
” His tone suggested that we were approaching the edge of his attention span. “If you take only
her
things, it would be a trifle obvious, wouldn't it? You can take all you can carry. That's part of the upside.”

“What's the other part?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

I said, reflexively, “Seventy-five.”

“Fine,” he said.

I said, “Wait.”

“This is the mark of the small-time mind,” he said. “Underpricing yourself to begin with and then thinking you can negotiate when the door's been closed.”

I can absorb a lot for $75K. “Paid how?”

“In small bills, used and not sequenced, half up front and half when you give me the things I want you to take. You can sell everything else you grab. Do you have a good fence?”