Leo went behind his desk and looked back at her. He didn't sit down.
"What's the matter?"
She gestured toward the lineup of boxes completely covering one wall. There must be fifty cases, she guessed.
"Leo, you never kept the swag in your own house. It's not only dangerous but stupid. You – "
"Relax, would you? It's all totally legit. I bought it – ordered it through the distributor. It's an investment."
"In what?"
"The future. You watch. The millennium celebration is gonna liquidate all stores of champagne. Around the whole fucking world. What's left will sky-rocket in value and I'll be sitting pretty. Every goddamn restaurant in town will be coming to me. You should see my garage. I'm hoarding five hundred cases of this stuff. Six thousand bottles. I double my wholesale price and take home a couple hundred K minimum. You want to buy in on it? I've got investors."
She came into the room and looked out through the doors at the glimmering surface of the pool. It was lighted from beneath the surface and glowed like blue neon in the night.
"I can't afford it."
She could see the automatic vacuum slowly moving across the bottom, the water tube trailing behind it and the debris bag rising, undulating in the water like a ghost.
She could hear the background hiss of the nearby freeway. It was the same at her house in Hollywood. She wondered for a moment if it was a coincidence that they both had places so close to the freeway. Or was it something about thieves. They needed to know the escape route was close.
"You'll be able to buy in after we do this thing here," Leo said. "Come on, sit down."
He sat down and opened the middle desk drawer. He took out a pair of half-cut reading glasses and put them on. There was a manila file waiting on the desk. Leo was all business. He could just as well have been preparing to go over a tax return with a client as the details of a hot prowl burglary. He actually had studied accounting at UCLA until he realized he wanted to manage money that was his, not somebody else's.
Cassie came over and sat down in the padded leather chair at the desk opposite Leo. She looked up at a string of red coins that was hanging from the ceiling directly over the desk. Leo caught her stare and waved up at the coins.
"That's the cure. The remedy."
"Cure for what?"
"For the feng shui. They're I-Ching coins. They make up for the lack of harmony. That's why I have them hanging right here. Where I do my work is the most important spot in the house."
He gestured to his desk and the open file.
"Leo, you were always paranoid but I think you're finally wigging out."
"No. I believe it. And it works. Another thing is the stars. I consult the stars now before making a plan."
"You're not instilling confidence in me. You mean you're asking some astrologer for a blessing on your moves? Leo, don't you – "
"I don't ask or tell anybody anything. I do it on my own. See?"
He turned and pointed to a row of books held between bookends on the credenza behind him. They all had titles that appeared to be taken from astrological circumstances. One title was Calendar of Voids and another book was called Investing in the Stars.
"Leo, you used to just quote your Jewish grandfather who said things like 'Never pick up a penny that is heads down.' What about him?"
"I still believe in him. I believe in it all. The important thing is to believe. Not to hope, but to believe. There is a difference. I believe in these things and so that helps me do what I have to do and accomplish what it is I want to accomplish."
Cassie thought it was a philosophy that could have come from nowhere else but California.
"That's the beauty of it," Leo was saying. "I'm covered from all directions. It's good to have any edge you can get, Cass. Max used to say that, remember?"
Cassie nodded somberly.
"I remember."
A long pause of uneasy silence and sad memories went by. Cassie looked out at the pool. She remembered swimming with Max one night after they thought Leo was asleep. Then the pool light came on and they were naked.
She finally looked back at Leo.
He had opened the file on the desk. There was a quarter-inch-thick stack of hundred-dollar bills in the file along with a page of neatly printed but indecipherable notes torn from a yellow legal pad. One of Leo's precautions. He always kept notes in a coded language that only he knew. He was studying the notes on the yellow paper.
"Now, where do I begin?" he said to himself.
"How about with the reason you said I won't like this one."
Leo leaned back in his chair and studied her for a long moment.
"Well," Cassie finally said, "are you going to tell me or is it written in the stars somewhere for me to read?"
He ignored the jab.
"This is the deal. It's in Las Vegas, which I already warned you about. It's a lot of cash, I am told. But it's a contract job and – "
"With who?"
"Some people. That's all you need to know. Everybody has a part. Nobody knows everybody else. Not even me. We got a guy watching the mark right now and he's just a voice on the phone that tells me things. I have no idea who he is. He knows me by phone but he doesn't know about you. See? It's safest that way. Different players hold different pieces of the same puzzle. Only nobody sees the whole puzzle, just the piece they hold."
"That's fine, Leo, but I'm not talking about the bit players. You know who it is you're setting this up for, right?"
"Yeah, I know them. I've done business with them in the past. They're good people. In fact, they're investors."
He pointed to the wall of champagne cases.
"Okay," Cassie said. "As long as you vouch for them. What else won't I like about this?"
"What else? The big what else is that it's the Cleo."
"Jesus Christ!"
"I know, I know."
He raised his hands as if surrendering in an argument. He then leaned back in his chair and took off his glasses. He put one of the ear hooks in the corner of his mouth and let the glasses dangle.
"Leo, you expect me to go back into that place, let alone Las Vegas, after what happened?"
"I know."
"I'm never going to set foot in that goddamn place again."
"I know."
She got up and stood with her face just inches from one of the sliders. She looked out at the pool again. The vacuum was still moving. Back and forth, back and forth. It reminded her of her own existence.
Leo put his glasses back on and spoke to her in a calming and measured tone.
"Now can I say something?"
She gestured for him to go on though she still didn't look at him.
"Okay, let's remember something here. You called me, I didn't call you. You asked me to set up a job. You said you wanted it big and you wanted it soon. And you wanted it to be cash. Have I got all of that right?"
He waited for an answer but she didn't say anything.
"I'll take your silence as a yes. Well, Cass, this is that job."
She turned to face him.
"But I didn't say – "
He held up his hand, silencing her.
"Let me finish. All I'm saying is that I brought this to you for consideration. You don't want it, fine. I'll make some calls and I'll go with someone else. But, girl, you were the best I ever knew of on the hot prowl. You are a true artist, if ever I knew one. Even Max would have admitted that. He was the teacher but the student got smarter. So when these guys came to me and told me about this thing, I started thinking it was you all the way. But, hey, I'm not forcing you to do anything. Something else will come down the pipe and I'll call you then. I don't know when that will be, but you'll still be first on my list. You will always be first, Cassie. Always."
She slowly came back to her chair and sat down.
"You're the artist, Leo. A great bullshit artist. That speech is your way of saying I should do it, isn't it?"