Or was it too easy?
Of course, chances were the door up there was locked. And possibly, just by opening that door behind me, I’d already set off an alarm. In which case I would need a healthy line of patter if some armed bodyguard was awaiting me behind that final door. Otherwise I would wind up killing some flunky, and wouldn’t that be sloppy.
But no bodyguard or anyone else was waiting.
In the glow of a hanging daisy-petal lamp, I found myself in a modern kitchen that was everything the one in the stakeout pad across the street wasn’t, starting with gleaming appliances — gold refrigerator, avocado range — surrounded by clashing colors and patterns, the gold-and-green geometric wallpaper offset somewhat by dark wood cabinets.
Signs of life included dirty dishes in the avocado sink and empty beer cans (Bud) on a round orange-topped table with white orange-cushioned chairs made of a substance not known in nature. I guess you sat there drinking orange juice in the morning. Or Bud.
A hallway off the kitchen took me past mostly open doors on both the left and right. Suddenly, here on the third floor of a building with a strip club two floors below and a magazine office one floor down, I might have been in a well-outfitted suburban home, the kind where a really hip young exec and his bride and his little brood were happily nestled.
Door number one, Monty: left — a wood-paneled den with yet another shag carpet (orange), a wet bar with four stools and, in an echo of the club below, a pool table; but also a wall of shelves with a 25” TV and fancy stereo-and-speaker set-up with several hundred LPs to choose from, and a pair of overstuffed brown-leather easy chairs.
Door number two: right — the master bedroom, avocado walls, yellow-and-green bedspread, Victorian brass bed, oak furnishings, Tiffany style bedside lamp. Arty framed charcoal over the bed — a reclining nude woman, her back to us.
Door number three: left — guest bedroom, French Provincial, blindingly ivory including the shag carpet. Good luck to the cleaning lady. Big framed Toulouse-Lautrec can-can print, on a side wall.
Door number four: right — the only closed one, bleeding light at its bottom edge, the muffled sound of country western also seeping out — Johnny Cash?
Door number five: left — gold-and-black bathroom with a hot tub for two and double sinks, big mirror. Black toilet. Just one. Maybe next time.
Finally the hall emptied out into a good-size living room. Not a formal one, but for entertaining, with another wet bar and leather overstuffed chairs and a low-slung armless couch and plush throw carpets on the wall-to-wall pile, in every shade of brown imaginable. Framed geometric designs broke up the brown-and-tan walls with yellow and purple dabs, and a futuristic monstrosity that I guessed was one of those new projection TVs crouched in a corner like a robot trying to hide from spacemen.
Barely audible from the club two floors down came the raucous rock that Brandi and the rest stripped to, helping pay for all this. Was that the Stones? “Only Rock ’N’ Roll”?
With the little .25 in hand, I returned to that closed door and opened it (unlocked of course), shouldering in quick, gun first.
The big modern mahogany desk, its surface piled with paperwork, faced me and so did the man seated behind it.
Most of the space in the room was taken up by the desk, the wall behind the man in the swivel chair given to shelves of books, some erotic knickknacks, and a small stereo system with stacks of cassette tapes nearby. Johnny Cash was indeed singing — “Ring of Fire.”
Also on the desktop were a phone, some pens, an ashtray with a cigarette going, a can of Budweiser and a .357 Colt magnum. My host’s hands were flat on the desk, very casual, spread apart but not terribly near the gun.
He was medium-sized with just a little heft to him, in his early thirties, his eyes dark blue and wide-set and rarely blinking in a smooth, faintly smiling baby face, his hair black and curly and vaguely Caesar-ish — Julius, not Sid. His shirt was a light pink polo with climax over the breast pocket.
“Are you here to kill me?” Max Climer asked, calm as pass-the-butter. “Or are you the other one?”
Five
“If I were here to kill you,” I said, with a little lift of the .25-inhand, “this conversation would already be over.”
The benign baby face formed a faint smile, then he nodded and said, “Please,” gesturing to a black-leather button-tufted chair over by a side wall where shelves were given over to neatly arranged stacks of magazines, Playboy and Penthouse and lesser competitors, but also Time, Newsweek, Forbes, Business Week. Lower shelves bore banker’s boxes with felt-tip designations: LEGAL, POLITICAL, RACIAL, SEXUAL MORES.
I dragged the chair over — it was heavy — and settled into it.
“There’s a name I was told to give you,” I said, and gave it to him. What exactly its significance was, the Broker hadn’t said. I guessed it was one of Climer’s investors. Anyway, he acknowledged it with another nod.
“So, then,” he said, his voice mid-range with a Southern drawl but no twang, “you’re here to help me.”
Johnny Cash was singing “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” Not loud, but with us in the room.
I set the .25 on the desk. The nearby .357 dwarfed it. “Here to help if I can,” I said. “But it’s tricky.”
He leaned back in his own button-tufted leather chair and folded his hands over his belly, rocking a little. “Tricky how?”
“As you know, a mutual friend, actually mutual business associate, has reason to believe someone wants you dead. I’m here to try to keep you alive.”
Amusement tweaked his thin lips. “A lot of folks wouldn’t mind seein’ me dead. But I’m not sure who might consider that worth spendin’ good money on. That’s what we’re talkin’ about here, right? A contract killing?”
“Mr. Climer, this is nothing to take lightly.” I gestured around us vaguely. “Let’s start with your security in this building.”
The unblinking blue eyes were half-lidded, as if he might be on something, but I didn’t think he was, not counting Budweiser.
“I have half a dozen boys downstairs, all ex-bikers,” he said. “My bartenders are equally adept at defending this fort. They have guns behind the bar and baseball bats, too.”
“That’ll come in handy,” I said, “if you join a softball league. You do realize that my little gun and I just walked up here, armed, and waltzed into your inner sanctum? With no trouble at all. The door downstairs, off the Cocks and Pussycats, was unlocked, and so was every door after that.”
The faint smile was still there, but at least it was a little fainter now. He tapped the grip of the .357 lightly with his fore-and middle fingers and said, “Maybe I figure I can take care of myself.”
“A gun only works when it’s in your hand and you’re firing it — that is, firing it before the other guy does. If I wasn’t on your side? You’d have got a bullet in your head before you opened your mouth.”
Some defensiveness came into his tone; barely discernible, but there. “I travel with an armed chauffeur.”
“Not in this penthouse you don’t. Can we agree your inhouse security needs work? By which I mean, it sucks?”
“You have a point,” he conceded.
“Yale locks on every one of those doors would be a start.
Anybody worth half a shit could open one with two picks, but using ’em on that door down in the club, out in the open, would be a good fucking trick.”