Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (12 page)

And here’s what I love about living in
Malibu: the street that I would logically take to get down the
canyon is called Rambla Pacifico. It’s simply the most direct route
to the Pacific Coast Highway. But you can’t take that street,
because a mud slide happened on it more than 10 years ago and so a
big chunk of it has been closed ever since. In most communities in
the country this would be an outrage: unthinkable. In Malibu, where
a lot of people’s house taxes are more than most American
homeowner’s annual incomes, the road repair is not encouraged. It’s
pretty much an added deterrent to wannabe star searchers if there
is no road to get to their favorite movie or rock star’s house. It
also, of course, makes it tougher for those same movie and rock
stars to get home, but there’s a price for everything, or so
everyone keeps saying. At some point you just have to start
wondering if they’re right.

So, because Rambla is not available — nor
likely to be anytime soon — I took Las Flores Canyon Drive, which
swoops you down to the Pacific Coast Highway in a sort of
roundabout fashion. Not the most direct route, but supremely
beautiful. On this day, however, I didn’t look at the gnarled
Eucalyptus trees that line the sides of the road. I didn’t pay
attention to the cotton candy clouds floating over the horizon or
the sun-tipped sea
.
Nor did I marvel at the lovely homes
along PCH as I headed down the coast, or the occasional glimpses I
caught of surfers or sailboaters or even the happy visual cacophony
that is Santa Monica Pier once I got to where PCH joins up with the
Santa Monica Freeway. I saw an internal stockticker — not such a
newsflash, I guess — and I kept seeing Ernie’s face. As it was when
we’d been together, and as I’d seen it at Club Zanzibar.

Taking the Santa Monica Freeway there’s an
off-ramp where if you go left — north — you head towards Beverly
Hills. Turn right you’re in Culver City. Guess which direction I
chose? As I drove, I struggled with my bag, looking for the print
out of the press release that just happened to have the Langton
Group’s Culver City address on it. Quite the coincidence. At least
I have a subconscious mind that believes in being prepared.

By LA standards, it didn’t take me long to
find what I was looking for. A couple of false starts, a stop at a
gas station to consult my Thomas Guide — the seriously thick book
of maps that I’d quickly discovered is the secret to finding
anything in LA — and I located the Langton Building, way down at
the end of Arizona Crescent which is off Arizona Avenue which is
off Centinela. The route was so convoluted, by the time I found the
building there was absolutely no way I could convince myself that I
was just planning on cruising by to take a look from the car.
Although, had I been doing only that, the look from the car would
have been impressive. From the vantage point of the single
undergrad architecture course I’d taken, I recognized the Langton
Building as having been designed in the Zig-Zag Moderne style.
Probably built in the early 1930s, it looked like a friendly Art
Deco fortress and, together with its parking lot, it occupied most
of a whole city block. It looked as though the Gunnarson family had
been doing things up in style for a very long time.

From the driver’s seat of my nondescript
sedan I could see, along with the usual corporate array of late
model cars, a couple of even more nondescript vehicles than mine
parked haphazardly in the lot, the telltale mickey mouse ears — you
know, those flat, black plastic discs on the car roof — fairly
shouting: high tech equipment inside. I knew from watching
television that this was likely to mean some sort of cop-like
creatures were lurking in the vicinity. Something really
was
happening here.

Part of me had been thinking — hoping? —
that, as I drove by, I’d see Ernie walking from his car to the
building — or the other way around — and I’d ever so casually
cruise into the parking lot, have a repulsive little reunion and
say: I was in the neighborhood, now tell me, what the hell is up?
And, of course, he’d tell me. It’s a funny fact that every time you
picture something like that — something complicated going smoothly
— when actually faced with the reality you always say to yourself:
Just what the hell was I thinking?

So that’s what I did now: I berated myself
for my recent naiveté. Then, still without anything that could be
called a goal or a plan and with Ernie nowhere in sight, I cruised
into the parking lot as casually as possible, slid into a spot
marked “visitors” and sauntered determinedly to the entrance.

In my work, I’ve often had the opportunity
to meet people on the telephone prior to meeting them in person:
clients, coworkers, even office drones. In my experience, when you
finally get around to seeing them face-to-face, telephone-met
people never look like the pictures their voices have drawn. I
remember, for instance, a guy I dated briefly a few years ago. A
broker who also worked at Merriwether Bailey, we’d had reason to
have telephone conversations a couple of times before our
conversations started getting warmer and more familiar.

His voice seduced me. I don’t know what it
was, but it held all of the right cadences to exactly push my
buttons. Maybe the feeling was mutual but, despite company policy
to the contrary, we exchanged home phone numbers: each eager to
take what had blossomed into an odd little telephone romance to
more personal levels. Which we did. Nothing too weird. Just first
date-type conversations, but all on the telephone.

It didn’t seem strange to me: that location
of our company, alone, occupied four floors of an office tower and
he worked on a different floor than I did and in a different
department. There was virtually no chance we’d meet at the water
cooler or in a photocopy room. And even if they’d had company
picnics at Merriwether Bailey, I probably wouldn’t have bothered
going.

Considering the business we were in, neither
of us was in a big hurry to take our relationship from virtual to
reality. If you’re working 60 to 80 hours a week, a romance that
requires no more maintenance than a pleasant half hour chatting in
the evening can look pretty good. After a while, though, we were
ready for some face-to-face conversations. To be honest, I was
pretty curious to see the man behind super voice.

I don’t want to say I was disappointed when
I finally met him. It wasn’t that he was gross, or anything. He was
actually, when I think about it, reasonably attractive. He just
wasn’t at all what I was expecting.

What was I expecting? Once I’d met him, I
wasn’t sure anymore. I just knew he wasn’t it. But, what the hell,
I let it ride. And he let it ride, or whatever, because we kept
seeing each other for a while. Which was pretty weird. Every time I
didn’t see him — on the telephone or in the dark — in my head, he’d
go back to looking like the guy he’d been before I met him. It was
startling, because when the lights came back on, it would always
give me this teeny jolt. Like: What the...? Oh, yeah. It was
disconcerting.

Who knows, if we’d kept seeing each other,
maybe my mental image of him would have aligned with reality, but
we didn’t. And I don’t even know who ended it. I just noticed one
day that he hadn’t called me and I hadn’t called him. And, more
importantly, I didn’t care. I guess that’s what they call fizzling
out.

Here and now, standing in the
really-quite-impressive lobby of the Langton Building and trying to
catch the eye of the receptionist, I was startled. She looked
exactly
as I’d pictured her. Right down to the tired-looking
mauve twinset (OK: maybe I hadn’t imagined it mauve) and the
well-cut but over-processed hair. It was remarkable. Nor was it a
pleasant surprise, because her voice hadn’t painted a particularly
pleasant picture and, what with that terminator crack, I hadn’t
left things on the best footing.

Right now she was a picture in studied
busy-ness. It was getting to be late-afternoon — maybe four-ish —
but there was no sign of people leaving the office and the phones
looked pretty lit up. Abnormally busy for this time of the day, I
wondered? Or maybe I was just being paranoid again.

As I entered the office, she fixed me with a
quelling glance, held up an imperious hand that told me she’d be
with me when it was appropriate, and kept saying: “Langton
Regional, how may I direct your call?” into her headset. It was the
nasal voice that I remembered from earlier, so there was no
mistaking her. I tried to compose my face in a pleasant and patient
mask until she freed up a moment to talk to me.

Being patient was made easier by the fact
that, while I waited, I kept my whole being tuned to... I don’t
know... possibilities, I guess. Or at least a hint at the reason
I’d come. I listened for an oddness, a wrongness, something off. I
listened to her side of curt conversations, and I listened to —
forgive me for sounding New Age, but I’d just moved to Southern
California , so I guess I felt entitled — the
vibe
of the
office. And, really, I heard a whole lot of nothing. Nothing
interesting, anyway. And the reception area was constructed in such
a way that the rest of building with its — presumably — teeming
offices filled with busy workers might as well not have
existed.

After a while I got bored and I did the
thing I knew would get her instant attention and, if not, get me
closer to what I wanted anyway. Without telegraphing my intent in
any way, I calmly walked towards the opening that separated the
airlock of reception from the rest of the office. That did it.
Before I could even see what was beyond, she’d whipped off her
headset and was on her feet to, it seemed, physically stop me if
need be.

“Excuse me,” the same nasal voice. And she
didn’t say it like she actually wanted to be excused from anything.
“Just where do you think you’re going?”

I smiled brightly in the face of her obvious
disapproval. “I could see how busy you were,” I said sweetly, “so I
just thought I’d make my own way.”

“And you are...?” She did not say it
sweetly.

“I’m here to see Mr. Billings.” Again, I’m a
broker.
Or, at least, I was one recently enough that I know
how to get things without giving anything back. Emotionally,
physically, whatever. It goes with the territory.

I once again got the feeling that this
request produced the slightest hesitation, as though she were a bit
unsure of what to do under the circumstances. And I noticed she
cleared her throat before she answered, something that struck me as
being based on nervousness, though I might have been jumping at
shadows again. “He’s in... he’s in a meeting,” she said.

“He’s here then?”

She made a sound that could be taken for
assent, but was not entirely clear.

“Well, call him then, please. He won’t want
to have missed me.” I tried to look directly into her eyes.

She didn’t look back into mine. “I can’t,”
that throat clearing again. “I can’t call him. In the meeting.”

“Fine,” I said and turning away from her, I
headed for the inner sanctum. “I’ll go find him myself.”

“You can’t. OK. I’ll. Call. Him.” She did
not physically stop me, but the effect was the same.

I turned towards her, arms crossed. “OK
then. Call him.” It came out sounding like a challenge. And,
really, I wanted her
not
to be lying. I wanted Sal’s
information and all of my hunches put to rest. I
wanted
Ernie to be back there somewhere, doing CEO-appropriate stuff. But
I didn’t think so. Not really.

She was back at her desk, putting on her
headset. “What did you say your name was?”

“I don’t believe I did.”

“And you’re with...?”

“I’m an old friend.”

This last was a mistake. She was rude and
possibly underpowered, but she wasn’t dumb and I could see
something click into place as I said the words.

“You called earlier,” it wasn’t a question.
And I noticed the headset was back on the desk. Without her head in
it.

“That’s right.”

“I told you then that he’s unavailable. Why
are you here?”

“So he isn’t here?”

“I didn’t say that!”

“You did. You said it when I called
earlier.”

“But I didn’t say it now.”

“Look, if he’s here, just call him and tell
him I’ve come to see him. He
will
see me. And I happen to
know he’ll be quite annoyed with you if you don’t.” This last was
an overstatement, but I thought the situation warranted it.

“What kind of game do you think you’re
playing?” She said it coldly. I had the feeling that she suddenly
felt she understood something that I was completely in the dark
about. At a loss, I shot for the same tone I’d started with.

“You’re telling me he’s not here?” I asked
less than politely.

“You’d better show me some identification,”
she said, surprising me. This was, to the best of my knowledge,
outside the realm of a receptionist’s duties. Though, if nothing
else, this incredibly odd request confirmed that things were not
all they seemed to be at the Langton Regional Group. When
receptionists start asking for identification from perfectly
innocent (!) visitors, you know they’ve gotten orders from someone
to do so. Someone not at all corporate who probably carries a
gun.

“Excuse me?” It was all I could think to
say.

“You heard me. If you are who you say you
are — or who you
aren’t
saying you are — you won’t mind
showing me your driver’s license.”

“This is ridiculous,” I told her. “I’m not
going to show you my driver’s license. That’s crazy.”

She was adamant. “If you don’t show me your
driver’s license, I’m calling security.” Which, any way you sliced
it, was weird and getting weirder. And the weirdness was catching,
I guess. Because, as she continued in this vein, it gave me my
answer: Ernie wasn’t on the premises, or why wouldn’t she have just
called him?