TWENTY-THREE

Mace tossed his gear into his canvas bag. He searched the room, stuck Wylie’s cell phone and car keys into his jacket pocket and grabbed the bottle of bourbon, adding that to the bag, along with the two sets of binoculars. He went over the apartment, more carefully this time. When he was convinced that he’d left nothing obvious, he zipped the bag shut.

He was not unmindful of the fingerprints and DNA samples he’d left behind. There just wasn’t anything he could do about them.

He stood at the window, pulled the curtain back and looked down on Wylie’s body. As best he could tell, it hadn’t attracted any attention, but it wouldn’t be long before somebody started screaming. He didn’t want to be around for that.

He raised his eyes for one last look at Angela Lowell’s draped windows.

He left the apartment and moved quickly to the Lexus Wylie had been using. He unlocked the door and gave the interior a quick search. Satisfied that the laptop that Wylie had been using to track the Mustang was the only thing worth taking, he grabbed it. He was backing out of the vehicle when he saw an odd-looking black box, the size of a thin cigarette pack. Curious, he studied it for a beat, discovered it was nothing more than smartly packaged chewing gum and slipped it into his now bulging jacket pocket.

Then he got the hell away from the Florian.

A block down Sunset, he pulled over to the curb and used Wylie’s phone to put in a call to Paulie. After a couple of rings, voice mail kicked in. Mace broke the connection and tried the office.

‘Mr Lacotta is unavailable,’ a pleasant female voice informed him, ‘but if you’d just give me your—’

‘Tell him it’s Mace and it’s important.’

‘I’ll be happy to give him the message, Mr Mace. If you’d—’

‘No message. I need to talk to him now.’

‘I’m sorry, but Mr Lacotta is in a meet—’

Mace hung up on her.

He tossed Wylie’s cellular and computer on the passenger seat, put the car in drive and, forcing himself to stick to the pace the traffic was setting, headed west. Twelve minutes later, he was descending into the sub-basement parking facilities beneath a building on the eastern edge of the Century City complex of business offices and high-end retail stores.

Four minutes after that, he joined the throng of mainly smartly dressed young men and women who seemed happy to be returning to work after lunch at a time of more than ten percent unemployment.

Mace ignored them as he pushed through the revolving doors and entered the astringent-scented, chilly lobby. Two security officers, manning a desk as long as a wild west saloon bar, seemed to be performing the useful service of mentally undressing the continuous parade of attractive females. He strolled past them to join a crowd waiting at a bank of elevators.

In front of him, a thin young man wearing a two thousand dollar suit and a Dodgers cap backward on his head was regaling a similarly garbed but capless corporate turk with a tale of the marketplace. ‘So I told the towel-head to take a hike and

he says, “Why get upset? This is business.” And I say, ”Cause the B’nai B’rith wouldn’t understand, you Arab bastard.”’

‘Holy shit! Then what?’

‘The son of a bitch has the brass to raise the ante to eighty thou.’

‘Damn. Hard to turn down.’

One set of elevator doors opened and Mace was swept in along with a dozen others, including the two young conversationalists.

‘Turn down?’ the Dodgers cap said, as he pressed the ‘24’ button. ‘He goes up to a hundred and ten thou.’

Mace was too far away from the buttons to press his floor, so he called out, ‘Could someone please hit twenty seven?’

No one responded.

Maybe they were too intrigued by Dodger cap’s tale. ‘So I got him up to one hundred and twenty thou. And he’s telling me he respects my faith and he really wants to make this deal which has nothing to do with our religious beliefs. Yadda, yadda, yadda. And he throws out one hundred and twelve.’

‘No shit?’

‘We close at one hundred and fourteen.’

The door opened on the twenty-fourth floor. As the two men exited, Mace heard Dodgers cap say, ‘And, bottom line, I’m not even Jewish.’

The doors closed on his self-satisfied chuckle.

Mace had already been on edge. And he didn’t appreciate the self-involved passengers ignoring his request a second time. He pushed a man out of his way and reached over a plump woman just in time to stop the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor.

He squeezed out of the sardine can to a spotless off-white hall. To his right, the hall led to an exit stairwell. To his left, restrooms. Directly in front of him was a polished wooden door that read ‘Mount Olympus Industries’ in shiny brass letters. It was the only door on that side of the building, which meant that Mount Olympus occupied the complete floor. Definitely a step up from the company’s old offices, which had been in a bungalow in the Studio City Business Park.

The reception area was designed to resemble an exotic port of call. Softly lit. The walls were a pale, pastel violet. Air circulated, as cool as an ocean breeze. It carried a hint of perfume and possibly suntan lotion, though Mace wouldn’t swear to that. Stunted potted palm trees were placed at various key points in the room. The furnishings, comfortable looking chairs and sofas, were constructed of faded rattan and leather, with cushions covered in bright island prints.

There was a wall that curved inward on an entryway to what Mace assumed was the working office. Just to the right of the wall, a receptionist was seated behind a kidney-shaped rattan desk. She was a beautiful, very black woman with an orchid in her hair. She was wearing a pearl-gray suit over a blouse that picked up the color of the walls. Mace was a little let down that she hadn’t gotten into the spirit of things with a sarong. But she did compliment the decor. Which was more than he could say about the big, raw-boned dude with a crew cut giving him the stink-eye from a chair to his left.

The receptionist was observing Mace, too, but in a much friendlier manner.

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ she said. ‘May I help you?’

She sounded a little like she might have been the woman who’d answered the phone. ‘I’d like to see Mr Lacotta.’

‘Ah. And you have an appointment, Mr . . . ?’

Mace walked past her through the entry to a room where half a dozen employees sat in cubicles, busy with tasks that he could not begin to imagine.

‘Sir!’ the receptionist called behind him.

He double-timed it past the cubicles and faced four closed doors. He figured Paulie would want windows and a nice big corner space.

‘Really, sir . . .’ The receptionist’s heels were clicking nearer on the floor tiles.

He headed for the corner door and had it open before she could stop him.

It was a Paulie-type office. Dark leather, smoked glass. Drapes covering the windows. A rich, thick carpet. An absolutely pristine desktop. Signed portraits of the Lakers and the Dodgers on one wall. A shelf with uniform, buckram-bound books. The only thing that surprised Mace was Paulie’s absence.

‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ the receptionist said, anger removing a thin veneer of practiced cordiality.

‘This is Lacotta’s office, right?’ he asked.

‘It is.’

‘He’s not here,’ Mace said stupidly.

‘No he isn’t. Now leave these premises or I call security.’

Mace stepped back out of the office and without pause headed for the next door.

‘Damn you,’ the receptionist said, and rushed after him.

He opened the door to a conference room. Lacotta and three guys in suits sat at a long table. Two had notepads in front of them. All had coffee cups.

They turned to stare at him.

Paulie didn’t seem too disturbed. ‘Mace?’

‘It’s important,’ Mace said.

‘So’s this. Gimme a couple minutes.’ Paulie looked past him to the receptionist. ‘Teddi, get Mr Mason some juice or something.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said though clenched teeth. She reached past Mace to pull the door shut in his face.

‘What kind of juice would you like?’ she asked flatly as they returned to the reception area.

‘Any beer?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘Then forget it.’

He moved to a chair. The raw-boned man gave him a lazy glance, then shifted his interest to the copy of Forbes open on his lap.

Eighteen minutes later, by Mace’s watch, the conference room door opened and the four men exited. Paulie led his guests to the elevator, where they shook hands. Mace judged the mood to be more strained than cordial.

The raw-boned man got to his feet and sauntered to the others. He paused beside a thickset man in a tailored blue pinstripe suit. A banker, maybe. Or a politician. The occupations seemed interchangeable. The raw-boned man whispered something in the other’s ear and they both stared openly at Mace.

He gave them a wink and a friendly wave.

They did not seem amused.

The elevator arrived and they and the other two men departed.

Paulie walked toward him, his face unreadable. Mace stood and followed him into his private office.

As soon as he’d closed the door, Paulie wheeled on him. ‘This is a goddamned place of business, not a barroom. You used to have some control, some class. What the fuck’s the matter with you?’

‘We have to talk.’

Lacotta checked his watch. It was big and gold-rimmed. ‘OK. Come. I wanna show you something.’

He headed for a door to the left of his desk, leading Mace to a small windowless room that seemed to be a mini-gym. Black pads on the carpet. A couple of campaign chairs, several pairs of bright red dumb-bells and an exercycle. The only unusual element was some kind of space age fixture in the center of the ceiling, a shiny black box with black metal tubes telescoping from it, aimed at three of the room’s four walls.

Paulie removed his coat and placed it on an empty chair.

Mace said, ‘It’s important. It’s about Wylie.’

‘Cool your jets,’ Lacotta said. ‘Check this out.’

He moved to the exercycle, straddled it and pressed a button on its dashboard. The room was thrown into darkness. Within seconds, lights streamed from the metal tubes and the three blank walls were turned into a 270-degree cyclorama of a beautiful rural bike path. Birds were singing. Clouds floated by.

Mace was not impressed. His patience had worn through. He stepped forward to drag Lacotta off the exercycle. And a remarkable thing happened. A fully dimensional but oddly transparent young woman in shorts and a halter appeared at the left of the room and walked to the right. She blew Mace a kiss.

‘What the hell . . . ?’ Mace said, momentarily stymied. There was something about the semi-transparent woman that reminded him of the giant dog he’d seen at Tiny’s.

‘It’s a prototype of a system called Simureal,’ Lacotta said. ‘Something, huh?’

A male jogger appeared from nowhere. His image pixilated a little before he disappeared. Holograms! Mace remembered the dying security officer. He’d thought the man’s last words had been ‘dog’ and ‘whole’. He’d been trying to say that Tiny’s big white dog was a hologram.

Intriguing, but not why Mace had come to Lacotta’s office.

‘Paulie . . .’ he began.

‘Wait. Watch this,’ Lacotta said, his feet turning the pedals.

The scene changed. It was as if the room were zooming forward along the path, keeping pace with Lacotta’s pedaling. Dimensional images of fellow cyclists and joggers appeared and disappeared.

This may have been entertaining to someone sitting on a cycle, pedaling, but for Mace, standing still in the room, it was annoying and disorienting. ‘Listen to me, you son of a bitch.’ he shouted. ‘Stop this goddamn thing.’

‘Can’t stop the future,’ Paulie said. ‘You got any idea the kind of money people spend on exer—’

‘Wylie’s dead,’ Mace said.

It took a few seconds for the words to work their way past Paulie’s exuberance.

Then he stopped pedaling. He pressed the machine’s off button and the holographic image froze and disappeared. The ceiling lights went back on. He sat on the machine, frowning for a beat.

‘Dead,’ he said. ‘How?’

‘The group who picked me up near Tiny’s grabbed him in the garage at the Florian. The big guy, the one with the mentality of a kid, got him in a bear hug. When I found him he needed a doctor. But he didn’t want one, because he thought you wouldn’t like it.’

‘A good kid.’

‘Was,’ Mace said. ‘He got out of bed and ran out of the door to prove he didn’t need a doctor. He made it as far as the pool.’

‘Jesus! How . . . ? Why didn’t you . . . ?

‘Why didn’t I what, Paulie? What more could I have done? I left him dead in his own blood beside the Florian’s swimming pool and got the hell out of there. You might want to phone your buddy the manager with instructions. While you’re at it, make damn sure he forgets I was ever there.’

Paulie slipped off the exercycle, dazed.

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Better phone.’