Library of the Dead (8 page)

"What do you want? I'll get it for you."

"Over in the kitchen cupboard to the right of the sink, I got a nice bottle of Jack. Don't you go puttin' no ice in it."

Will found the bottle, half full. He unscrewed the top and sniffed. Could someone have poisoned it? Is that how this was supposed to go down? Then, an inspired thought: I need to protect this man
and
I could use a drink. He poured himself two fingers and downed it fast. Tasted like bourbon. A nice little buzz started. I'll wait for half a minute to see if I die, if not, the man gets his nightcap, he thought, impressed with his own logic.

"Find it, chief?" Clive called out from the other room.

"Yeah. Be right there."

Since he'd survived, he brought out a glass and handed it to Clive, who sniffed his breath and remarked, "Glad to see you helped yourself, my man."

Nancy glared at him.

"Quality control, like a Roman food taster," Will said, but Nancy looked horrified.

Clive started sipping and talking. "You know what, Miss FBI, I'm going to send you some CDs of my group, the Clive Robertson Five. We're just a bunch of old-timers but we still got our thing going on, if you know what I'm sayin'. We still cookin' with gas, though my man, Harry Smiley, on drums, he passes plenty of gas too."

Almost an hour later he was still talking about life on the road, keyboard styles, the music business. His drink was finished. His voice trailed off, his eyes fluttered closed, and he began to softly snore.

"What should we do?" Nancy asked quietly.

"We've got an hour till midnight. Let's have him stay right there and wait this out." He got up.

"Where're you going?"

"To the bathroom. You okay with that?"

She nodded sullenly.

He hissed at her. "What? Did you think I was going to get another drink? For Christ's sake, I needed to make sure it wasn't poisoned."

"Self-sacrifice," she observed. "Admirable."

He took a leak and came back angry.

He strained to control his volume. "You know, partner, you need to get off your high horse if you want to work with me." He demanded, "How old are you?"

"Thirty."

"Well, sweetheart, when I got into this game, you were in junior high, okay?"

"Don't call me sweetheart!" she hissed.

"You're right, that was inappropriate. In a million fucking years you'd never be my sweetheart."

She responded with a full blast of whispered fury. "Well that's good news because the last time you dated someone in the office you almost got fired. Way to go, Will. Remind me never to take career advice from you."

Clive snorted and half stirred. They both went mute and glared at each other.

Will wasn't surprised she knew about his checkered past; it wasn't exactly a state secret. But he was impressed she had brought it up so quickly. It usually took him longer to push a woman to her boiling point. She had balls, he'd give her that.

He had taken the transfer to New York six years earlier, when Hal Sheridan finally kicked him out of the nest after convincing the H.R. group in Washington that he could handle a managerial assignment. The New York office thought he was an acceptable candidate for Supervisor of Major Thefts and Violent Crimes. He was sent back to Quantico for a management course, where they crammed his head with everything a modern FBI supervisor needed. Sure he knew he wasn't supposed to screw the admins, even the ones in another department, but Quantico never put a picture of Rita Mather in their training manuals.

Rita was so perfectly luscious, so fragrant, so inviting, and so allegedly spectacular in bed that essentially he had no choice. They hid their affair for months, until her boss in White Collar Crimes didn't ante up the raise she was expecting and she asked Will to intervene. When he demurred, she blew up and outed him. A huge mess ensued: disciplinary hearings, lawyers up the wazoo, H.R. into overdrive. He came within a hairsbreadth of termination but Hal Sheridan intervened and brokered a quiet demotion to let him finish out his twenty. On a Friday, Sue Sanchez reported to him; on the Monday, he reported to her.

Of course he considered resigning but, oh, that pension--so near and dear. He accepted his fate, took his mandatory sexual harassment training, did his job adequately, and kicked up his drinking a notch.

Before he could retort to Nancy, Clive stirred, his eyes blinking open. He was lost for a few moments then remembered where he was. He smacked at his dry lips and nervously checked the fine old Cartier on his wrist. "Well, I ain't dead yet. Okay if I go pee on my own without federal assistance, chief?"

"Not a problem."

Clive saw that Nancy was upset. "You all right, Miss FBI? You look mad. You're not mad at me, are you?"

"Of course not."

"Must be mad at the chief then."

Clive rocked himself upright and painfully straightened his arthritic knees.

He took two steps and abruptly stopped. His face was a mixture of puzzlement and alarm.

"Oh, my!"

Will whipped his head around, scanning the room. What was happening?

In a fraction of a second he ruled out a gunshot.

No shattered glass, no impact thud, no crimson spray.

Nancy cried out, "Will!" when she saw Clive tipping past his balance point and nose-diving the floor.

He fell so hard his nasal bones pulverized on impact and splattered the carpet with an abstract pattern of blood resembling a Jackson Pollock painting. If it had been captured on canvas, Clive would have been pleased to add it to his collection.

P
eter Benedict saw his reflection and marveled at the way his image was chopped up and scrambled by the optics of the glass. The front of the building was a deeply concave surface, soaring ten stories over Wilshire Boulevard, almost sucking you in off the sidewalk toward the two-story disc of a lobby. There was an austere slate courtyard, cool and empty except for a Henry Moore bronze, a lobulated and vaguely human conception off to one side. The building glass was flawlessly mirrorlike, capturing the mood and color of the environs, and this being Beverly Hills, the mood was usually bright and the color a rich sky blue. Because the concavity was so severe, the glass also caught the images from other panes, tossing them like a salad--clouds, buildings, the Moore, pedestrians, and cars jumbled together.

It was wonderful.

This was his moment.

He had reached the pinnacle. He had a scheduled and confirmed appointment to see Bernie Schwartz, one of the gods at Artist Talent Inc.

Peter had fretted about his wardrobe. He'd never done a meeting like this and was too sheepish to inquire about dress codes. Did agents wear suits in this day and age? Did writers? Should he try and look conservative or flashy? Buttoned-down or casual? He opted for a middle ground to play it safe--gray pants, white oxford shirt, blue blazer, black loafers. As he drew closer to the disk, he saw himself, undistorted, in a single mirrored pane and quickly looked away, self-conscious of his bony litheness and receding hairline, which he usually hid under a baseball cap. He did know this--the younger the writer, the better, and it appalled him that his balding nut made him look way too old. Did the world have to know he was pushing fifty?

The revolving doors swept him into chilled air. The reception desk was fabricated from polished hardwoods and matched the concavity of the building. The flooring was concave too, made of thin planks of curved slippery bamboo. The interior design was all about light, space, and money. A bank of starlet-type receptionists with invisible wire headsets were all saying, "ATI, how may I direct your call. ATI, how may I direct your call?"

Over and over, it took on the quality of a chant.

He craned his neck at the atrium, and high up on the galleries saw an army of young hip men and women moving fast, and yes, the agents did wear suits. Armani Nation.

He approached the desk and coughed for attention. The most beautiful-looking woman he had ever seen asked him, "How may I help you?"

"I have an appointment with Mr. Schwartz. My name is Peter Benedict."

"Which one?"

He blinked in confusion and stammered. "I--I--I don't know what you mean.
I'm
Peter Benedict."

Icily, "Which
Mr. Schwartz
. We have three."

"Oh, I see! Bernard Schwartz."

"Please take a seat. I'll call his assistant."

If you hadn't known Bernie Schwartz was one of the top talent agents in Hollywood, you still wouldn't know after seeing his eighth-floor corner office. Maybe a fine art collector, or an anthropologist. The office was devoid of the typical trappings--no movie posters, arm-around-star or arm-around-politician photos, no awards, tapes, DVDs, plasma screens, trade mags. Nothing but African art, all sorts of carved wooden statues, decorative pots, hide shields, spears, geometric paintings, masks. For a short, fat, aging Jew from Pasadena, he had a major thing going for the dark continent. He shouted through the door to one of his four assistants, "Remind me why I'm seeing this guy?"

A woman's voice: "Victor Kemp."

He waved his left hand in a gimme sign. "Yeah, yeah, I remember. Get me the folder with the coverage and interrupt me after ten minutes, max. Five, maybe."

When Peter entered the agent's office, he felt instantly ill at ease in Bernie's presence, even though the small man had a big smile and was waving him in from behind his desk like a deck officer on an aircraft carrier. "Come in, come in." Peter approached, faking happiness, assaulted by primitive African artifacts. "What can I get you? Coffee? We got espresso, lattes, anything you want. I'm Bernie Schwartz. Glad to meet you, Peter." His light thin hand got squashed by a small thick hand and was pumped a few times.

"Maybe a water?"

"Roz, get Mr. Benedict a water, will ya? Sit, sit there. I'll come over to the sofa."

Within seconds a Chinese girl, another beauty, materialized with a bottle of Evian and a glass. Everything moved fast here.

"So, did you fly in, Peter?" Bernie asked.

"No, I drove, actually."

"Smart, very smart. I'm telling you, to this day I won't fly anymore, at least commercial. Nine/eleven is still like yesterday to me. I could've been on one of those planes. My wife has a sister in Cape Cod. Roz! Can I get a cup of tea? So, you're a writer, Peter. How long you been writing scripts?"

"About five years, Mr. Schwartz."

"Please! Bernie!"

"About five years, Bernie."

"How many you got under your belt?"

"You mean just counting finished ones?"

"Yeah, yeah--finished projects," Bernie said impatiently.

"The one I sent you is my first."

Bernie closed his eyes tightly as if he were telepathically signaling his girl: Five minutes! Not ten! "So, you any good?" he asked.

Peter wondered about that question. He'd sent the script two weeks ago. Hadn't Bernie read it?

To Peter, his script was like a sacred text, imbued with a quasimagical aura. He had poured his soul into its creation and he kept a copy prominently displayed on his writing desk, three-hole-punched with shiny brass brads, his first completed opus. Every morning on his way out the door, he touched the cover as one might finger an amulet or stroke the belly of a Buddha. It was his ticket to another life, and he was eager to get it punched. Moreover, the subject matter was important to him, a paean, as he saw it, to life and fate. As a student, he had been deeply moved by
The Bridge of San Luis Rey
, Thornton Wilder's novel about five strangers who perished together on a collapsing bridge. Naturally, when he started his new job in Nevada he began to dwell on the notions of fate and predestination. He chose to craft a modern take on the classic tale where--in his version--the strangers' lives intersected at the instant of a terror attack. Bernie got his tea, "Thank you, honey. Keep an eye out for my next meeting, okay?" Roz cleared Peter's line of sight and winked at her boss.

"Well, I think it's good," Peter answered. "Did you have a chance to look at it?"

Bernie hadn't read a script in decades. Other people read scripts for him and gave him notes--coverage.

"Yeah, yeah, I got my notes right here." He opened the folder with Peter's coverage and scanned the two-pager.

Weak plot.

Terrible dialogue.

Poor character development, etc., etc.

Recommendation: pass.

Bernie stayed in character, smiled expansively and asked, "So tell me, Peter, how is it you know Victor Kemp?"

A month earlier, Peter Benedict walked into the Constellation with a hopeful spring to his step. He preferred the Constellation over any casino on the Strip. It was the only one with a whiff of intellectual content, and furthermore, he had been an astronomy buff as a boy. The planetarium dome of the grand casino had a perpetually shifting laser display of the night sky over Las Vegas, exactly as it would appear if you stuck your head outside while someone turned off the hundreds of millions of lightbulbs and fifteen thousand miles of neon tubing that washed out the heavens. If you looked carefully, came often enough, and were a student of the subject, over time you could spot each of the eighty-eight constellations. The Big Dipper, Orion, Andromeda--a piece of cake. Peter had found the obscure ones too: Corvus, Delphinus, Eridanas, Sextens. In fact, he only lacked Coma Berineces, Berineces' Hair, a faint cluster in the northern sky sandwiched between Canes Venatici and Virgo. One day he would find that too.

He was playing blackjack at a high-stakes table, minimum bet per hand $100, maximum $5,000, his baldness covered by a Lakers baseball cap. He almost never exceeded the minimum but preferred these tables because the spectacle was more interesting. He was a good, disciplined player who usually ended an evening a few hundred up, but every so often he left a thousand richer or poorer, depending on the streakiness of the cards. The real thrills flowed his way vicariously, watching the big money players juggling three hands, splitting, doubling down, risking fifteen, twenty grand at a time. He would have loved pumping out that kind of adrenaline but knew it wasn't going to happen--not on
his
salary.

The dealer, a Hungarian named Sam, saw that he wasn't having a good night and tried to cheer him up. "Don't worry, Peter, luck will change. You will see."

He didn't think so. The shoe had a count of minus fifteen, highly favoring the house. Yet, that knowledge didn't change his play, even though any reasonable card-counter would have backed off for a while, come back in when the count climbed.

Peter was an odd duck of a counter. He counted because he could. His brain worked so fast and it was so effortless for him that having mastered the technique, he couldn't
not
count. High cards--ten to ace--were minus one; low cards--two through six--were plus one. A good counter only had to do two things well: keep a running tally of the total count as the six-deck shoe was dealt out, and accurately estimate the number of undealt cards in the shoe. When the count was low, you bet the minimum or walked away. When it was high, you bet aggressively. If you knew what you were doing, you could tilt the law of averages and consistently win; that is, until you were spotted by a dealer, the pit boss, or the eye-in-the-sky and booted and banned.

Peter occasionally made a count-based decision, but since he never varied his bet, he never capitalized on his inside knowledge. He liked the Constellation, enjoyed spending three-or four-hour stretches at the tables, and was scared of getting kicked out of his favorite haunt. He was part of the furniture.

That night there were only two other gamblers at his table: a bleary-eyed anesthesiologist from Denver in for a medical convention, and a nattily dressed silver-haired exec who was the only one putting serious money into play. Peter was $600 down, pacing himself and languidly drinking a comped beer.

With a few hands to go before the shoe got reshuffled, a young rangy kid, about twenty-two, in a T-shirt and cargo pants, planted himself into one of the two empty chairs and bought in for a grand. He had shoulder-length hair and a breezy western charm. "Hey, how's everybody doing tonight? This a good table?"

"Not for me," the executive said. "You're welcome to change that."

"I'd be pleased to be of any assistance I can," the kid said. He caught the dealer's name tag. "Deal me in, Sam."

Betting the minimum, the kid turned a quiet table into a chatty one. He told them he was a student at UNLV majoring in government and, starting with the doctor, asked everyone where they were from and what they did for a living. After blathering about a problem he was having with his shoulder, he turned to Peter.

"I'm local," Peter offered. "I work with computers."

Prompting, "Cool. That's cool, dude."

The executive told the table, "I'm in the insurance business."

"You sell insurance, dude?"

"Well, yes and no. I run an insurance company."

"Awesome! High roller, baby!" the kid exclaimed.

Sam reshuffled the shoe and Peter instinctively started to count again. After five minutes they were well into the new shoe and the count was getting high. Peter puttered along, doing a little better, winning a few more hands than he lost. "See, I told you," Sam told him cheerfully after he won three hands in a row. The doctor was down two grand, but the insurance guy was out over thirty and he getting testy. The kid was betting erratically, without any apparent feel for the game, but he was only down a couple hundred. He ordered a rum and coke and fiddled with the swizzle stick until it accidentally dropped out of his mouth onto the floor. "Oops," he said quietly.

A blonde in her late twenties in tight jeans and a lemon-and-lime tube top approached the table and took the empty chair. She put her expensive Vuitton bag under her feet for safekeeping and plonked down $10,000 in four neat stacks. "Hello," she said shyly. She wasn't gorgeous but had a dynamite body and a soft, sexy voice and she stopped the conversation dead. "I hope I'm not barging in," she said, stacking her chips.

"Hell, no!" the kid said. "We need a rose among us thorns."

"I'm Melinda," and they amiably dispensed their minimalist Vegas-style introductions. She was from Virginia. She pointed to her wedding band. Hubby was at the pool.

Peter watched her play several hands. She was fast and sassy, betting $500 a hand, making border-line draws that were paying off pretty well. The kid lost three hands in a row, leaned back in his chair and said, "Man, I am hexed!"

Hexed.

Peter realized the count was plus thirteen with about forty cards left in the shoe.

Hexed.

The blonde pushed a stack of chips worth $3,500 forward. Seeing this, the insurance guy stepped up and bet the max. "You're giving me courage," he told her. Peter stuck to his $100, the same as the doc and the kid.

Sam quickly dealt and gave Peter a strong nineteen, the insurance guy fourteen, the doc seventeen, the kid twelve, and the blonde a pair of jacks--twenty. The dealer was showing a six. She's a lock, Peter thought. High count, dealer probably draws and busts, she's sitting pretty with her twenty.

"I'm going to split these, Sam," she said.

Sam blinked and nodded as she put up another $3,500.

Holy shit! Peter was dumbstruck. Who splits tens?

Unless?

Peter and the doc stood pat, the kid drew a six and stayed on eighteen. The insurance man busted out with a ten and spat out in disgust, "Son of a bitch!"

The blonde held her breath and clenched her fists until Sam dealt her a queen on one hand and a seven on the other. She clapped and exhaled simultaneously.