Gridiron - Philip Kerr

'I must be hearing things,' he mumbled.

He wondered if Sam knew he would be fired as soon as the security systems were fully functional. He himself had no qualms about the loss of a couple of security guards. There was no point in having a dog and wagging its tail yourself.

'It's possible that what you heard was the sound of the elevator doors opening, sir. While we were speaking I brought a car up here so you would not be kept waiting.'

'Thoughtful of you, Abraham.'

'Is there anything more you wish me to do, sir?'

'I doubt it, Abraham. If there was, I guess you would have done it already. Isn't that right?'

'Yes, sir.'

-###-

Mitch was still mad at himself when he drove into the office the next morning for the weekly project team meeting. Why had he agreed to go to a Chinese restaurant, of all places? He ought to have thought that some of the demonstrators from the piazza might be there and might have recognized him. The meal, although good, had taken longer than they had expected and it was already late when they discovered the car. By the time the AAA turned up with a replacement windscreen it was well past midnight. So when Mitch finally made it home Alison had been spoiling for a fight. He even had to show her the AAA paperwork before she believed his story. Then, after breakfast, just as he was getting ready to leave the house, she returned to the subject, having taken a closer look at the AAA docket.

'What were you doing at the Mon Kee Restaurant in North Spring Street anyway?'

'What do you think I was doing? I was having a quick bite of dinner.'

'Who with?'

'With some of the guys on the project team, of course. Look, honey, I told you I was going to be late last night.'

'Come on, Mitch,' she said. 'There's late and there's late. You know that if you're going to be later than midnight you call. Who precisely was there?'

Mitch glanced at his watch. This was going to make him late for the meeting.

'Do we have to do this now?' he pleaded.

'I just want to know who was there, that's all. Is that so unreasonable?'

Alison was a tall, subterraneanly-voiced creature of considerable elegance, with dark, Gothic shadows under her brown eyes. Her straight hair was long and lustrous but she had started to remind Mitch of the Charles Addams character, Morticia.

'Is it such a big deal that I should want to know who my husband was with until one a.m.?'

'No, I suppose not,' he said. 'All right then, there was Hideki Yojo, Bob Beech, Aidan Kenny and Jenny Bao.'

'A table for five?'

'That's right.'

'Did you make a reservation?'

'For Pete's sake, Alison. It was just a kind of spur-of-the-moment thing. We'd all been working late. We were hungry. You know I would have been home before midnight if it hadn't been for the asshole with the tyre wrench. And I would have called, right? But I was so mad about what happened that it put everything else out of my head. And I'm sorry, really sorry, to have to admit that included you, sweetheart.'

'You should have a car phone. Other people have car phones, Mitch. Why don't you? I like to be in touch with you.'

Mitch took her bony shoulders in his hands.

'You know how I feel about car phones. I have to have some time to myself and the car is about the only place I can get it. If I had a phone I'd have people from the team calling me up all the time. Mainly Ray Richardson. Fix this, Mitch. Fix that. Look, I'll be home early tonight, I promise. We can talk then. But I really do have to go now.'

He kissed her on the forehead and left.

Mitch was twenty minutes late for the meeting. He hated being late for anything. Especially when he was the bearer of awkward news. He was going to have to tell them the latest bulletin on the Gridiron's feng shui. There were times when he wished Jenny made her living in some other way. He could anticipate what they were all going to say and it grieved him that the woman he loved was going to be abused in his presence.

'Mitch,' said Ray Richardson, 'Glad you decided to make it.'

He decided to wait for the right moment to give them the bad tidings. The project team and Bob Beech were seated in front of a 28-inch television screen that was receiving the first pictures down the line from the Gridiron. Mitch glanced at Kay, winked and then sat down beside her. She was wearing a see-through black blouse that permitted an uninterrupted view of her bra. She smiled encouragingly back at him. On-screen was an image of the atrium and the rectangular pond that surrounded the dicotyledon tree.

'Kay? said Richardson, 'are you finished making Mitch feel welcome?

You know, that's a nice blouse you're wearing.'

'Thank you, Ray,' she smiled.

'Has anyone noticed how Kay wears a lot of these see-through blouses? I mean, you always know what colour brassiere she's wearing, right?' Richardson grinned unpleasantly. 'It came to me just the other day: Kay is to the brassiere what Superman was to Y-fronts.'

Everyone laughed except Mitch and Kay.

'That's very amusing, Ray.' Kay wiped the smile from her face and stabbed a button on her laptop as if she was trying to poke Richardson's eye out. Joan's laughter irritated her the most. What did a fat bitch like that have to laugh about? Kay wondered if either of them would laugh if she reminded Richardson of a night only a few months ago when the two of them had found themselves alone in the kitchen and she had let him put his hand inside her brassiere. Not to mention her panties. She was glad it had not got much further than that.

A 3-D drawing of the new round pond for the tree filled the screen. With her thumb on the thimble-sized mouse Kay steered the picture right round the image. Everyone continued to look at her.

She felt herself colour. 'Look, are you interested in the design, or my brassiere?'

'Well, if you're offering a choice — ' Levine uttered a loud guffaw.

'I'm sorry, Kay, I was just kidding. No, that looks just fine,' said Richardson. 'But did it really take a whole week to get it designed?'

'Why don't you ask Tony?' said Kay.

Richardson turned. 'Tony?'

'Well, yes, Ray,' said Levine. 'It did, I'm afraid.'

Richardson shot Levine his most sarcastic look. Mitch winced on the younger man's behalf.

'Tony, why must you be so literal?' snarled Richardson. 'I'm saying why did it take so long? Why? It's a fishpond, not Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome. We're one of the biggest architectural practices in the country and it takes a week to draw something like this? What kind of business are we running here? CAD is supposed to speed up the way we work. In a week I could design a whole goddamn ocean marina, let alone a fucking fishpond.'

He shook his head and sighed, as if pitying himself for having to put up with such fools and incompetents. For a moment he doodled on a piece of paper. Mitch, who knew him best, recognized that he was sulking.

Richardson squared his jaw belligerently and turned his malevolent attention to Aidan Kenny.

'And what's wrong with this bloody hologram control system of yours?'

'A few teething problems is all, Ray,' Kenny said cheerfully. 'Yojo spent last night trying to fix it. May have even done it by now, for all I know.'

'For all you know,' Richardson whispered. He made a great show of trying to contain his impatience. 'Well, hadn't we better ask him?

Jesus…'

Kenny turned to Kay. 'Could you put us in the computer room, please, Kay?'

Kay punched another button on her laptop and the CCTV camera cut to Hideki Yojo, still sitting in his chair. For a moment everything looked quite normal. Then, as the various members of the team began to notice the colour of his face, the blood on his mouth and on the front of his shirt, there was a collective gasp.

'Jesus Christ almighty,' exclaimed Willis Ellery. 'What's happened to him?'

Kay Killen and Joan Richardson covered their mouths simultaneously, as if they both thought they were going to vomit. Helen Hussey took a deep breath and turned away.

Somewhere in the computer room an insect was buzzing with hungry anticipation. The sound had such high fidelity that for a brief moment Marty Birnbaum actually waved his hand in front of his face.

'Hideki,' shouted Tony Levine, 'can you hear us? Are you OK?'

'He's dead, you goddamned idiot,' sighed Richardson. 'Any fool could see as much.'

'His eyes,' said David Arnon. 'His eyes — they're black.'

Kay was already cancelling the image and conducting a picture search for Sam Gleig, the security guard.

Richardson stood up, shaking his head with a combination of anger and disgust.

'Someone better call the police,' said Ellery.

'I don't believe it,' said Richardson. 'I just don't believe it.' He stared almost accusingly at Mitch. 'Christ, Mitch, do something. Sort it out. This is all I bloody need.'

-###-

In LA it was easier to become a security guard than a waiter. Before becoming a guard Sam Gleig had served time in the Metropolitan Detention Centre for possession of narcotics and an illegal weapon. Prior to that, he had been a Marine. Sam Gleig had seen plenty of dead bodies in his time, but he had never seen a body quite like the one sitting in the Gridiron's computer room. The dead man's face was as blue as the shirt of Sam's own uniform, almost as though he had been strangled. But it was the eyes that really got to Sam. The man's eyes looked as if they had burned out in their sockets like a couple of spent lightbulbs. Sam walked up to the desk and felt under the wrist for a pulse. It was best to make absolutely sure, although Hideki Yojo was obviously dead. Even if he had doubted the look of it there was the smell. You could never mistake the smell. Like a room full of used diapers. Only usually it was a while before a body got to smell this bad.

Releasing Yojo's wrist Sam's hand brushed the base of the desk lamp. He cursed and quickly drew his hand away. The lamp was red hot. Like the screen on the desk it had been on all night. Sucking the burn, he went over to one of the other desks and for the first time in his life dialled 911.

-###-

The call was passed on to the central dispatch centre, coordinating the many responses of the LAPD from its bunker underneath City Hall. A patrol car driving west along Pico Boulevard was ordered to attend the Gridiron before the computerized report appeared as E-mail on the screen of the captain of the LAPD Homicide Bureau in New Parker Center. Randall Mahoney glanced over the report and then opened the duty roster file. Using his mouse he dragged the piece of E-mail across the screen and dumped it into the computerized in-tray of one of his detectives. That was what he was supposed to do. The new way. Then he did it the old way. He lifted his bulk out of his chair and wandered into the Detectives' Room. A burly-looking man with a face like a catcher's mitt caught his eye. He was sitting behind a desk and staring at the blank screen of his computer.

'It might help if you switched that fucking thing on once in a while, Frank,' growled Mahoney. 'Might save my fuckin' legs for one thing.'

'It might,' said the man, 'but we can all of us use a little more exercise. Even an athletic-looking specimen like yourself.'

'Wise guy. What do you know about modern architecture?' asked

Mahoney.

Detective Frank Curtis ran a thick, heavy hand through the short, steel-grey curls that were grouped stiffly on the top of his head like the springs of an old bicycle saddle and thought for a moment. He thought about the Museum of Contemporary Art where his wife had worked until she was replaced by a CD-ROM of all things, and then the design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall he had seen in the newspapers. A building that looked like a collection of cardboard boxes left out in the rain. He shrugged.

'Even less than I do about computers,' he admitted. 'But if you're asking me what my aesthetic opinion of modern architecture is, then I'd say most of it stinks.'

'Well, get your ass down to that new building on Hope Street. The Yu Corporation building. They just found a 187 there. Computer guy. Who knows? Maybe you can prove that the architect did it.'

'That would be nice.'

Curtis collected his sports coat off the back of his chair and glanced across the desk at his younger, handsomer partner, who was shaking his head.

'So who the fuck are you?' said Curtis, 'Frank Lloyd Wright? Come on, Nat, you heard that Captain of Detectives.'

Nathan Coleman followed Curtis to the elevator.

'I knew you were a fuckin' philistine, Frank,' said Coleman. 'I just didn't figure you for Goliath.'

'Is this something you have an opinion on, Nat? Modern architecture?'

'I saw a movie about an architect once,' he said. ' The Fountainhead. I think it was supposed to be Frank Lloyd Wright.'

Curtis nodded. 'Gary Cooper?'

'Right. Anyway, I was thinking. The architect certainly did do it that time.'

'Did what?'

'He blew up a building when the builders altered his plans.'

'Did he? Can't say I blame him. I've often wanted to kill the guy who did our new bathroom.'

'I thought you said you'd seen it.'

They drove Nathan Coleman's red two-seater Ford Cougar alongside the vertical Freeway surrounding the downtown heart of LA like a system of valves and arteries before turning south towards Hope Street. Along the way Curtis realized that for the first time in his life he was paying attention to the area's monolithic architecture.

'If I meet the architect, I'm going to ask him why all the buildings have to be so big.' Coleman laughed.

'Hey, Frank, this is America, remember? It's what distinguishes our cities from other places. We invented the tall-building metropolis.'

'And why does this whole area look like Mesa Verde National Park?

Why can't they build a downtown that looks like a place for people?'

'They got a strategic plan, Frank, to improve this area. I read about it somewhere. They're trying to give downtown a whole new identity.'

'You mean like the witness protection programme? You ask me, Nat, it's those fuckin' architects who designed these fuckin' buildings who need new identities. If someone in this town tried to murder Frank Gehry they'd probably give him the Congressional Medal of Honour.'

'Who?'

'You know that shitty-lookin' building on Olympic Boulevard? The Loyola Law School?'

'With the chain-link fencing and the steel walls?'

'That's the one.'

'That's a law school? Jesus, I thought that was a gaol. Maybe it says something about Frank Gehry's opinion of lawyers.'

'Maybe you're right. Anyway, Frank Gehry is the leading exponent of LA's fuck-you school of architecture.'

'Could be the guy's just a realist. I mean, LA's not exactly the kind of city where you want people thinking they can just drop by and say hello.'

They turned on to Hope Street and Curtis pointed. 'That looks like it there,' he said.