Slow Burn (5 page)

"Is there
anything else we can do to facilitate your work?"

"Yes,
sir," I said. "I can think of a bunch of things."

He folded his
arms across his chest as I spoke. When I'd finished with my list, he uttered a
single word. "Done," he said.

Sir Geoffrey
was dialing the reception desk as Alomar saw me to the door, locking my elbow
like an undertaker, stepping halfway out into the hall with me. "When you
meet with Ms. Meyerson, Mr. Waterman . . ." he whispered in the doorway.
"Yeah?"

"If she
shows you a videotape . . ." He checked the hall. "Uh-huh?"

"Whatever
you do ... do not laugh."

As the young
woman in the red blazer whispered into the phone and smiled at me, I leaned
back against the reception desk and surveyed the palatial lobby. A dozen
separate conversation areas were scattered over the enormous Chinese carpet
covering the center of the room. Around the perimeter, a wide mezzanine split
the distance between the floor and the ceiling, its elegant marble rail lending
an almost classical air to the room.

"Mr.
Waterman," she said to my back. I turned. "Sorry about the delay. It
turns out you were correct," she cooed. "We have a lovely room for
you on the ninth floor. Nine-ten."

The gold name
tag read Marie. She was about thirty, short and about a size smaller than the
jacket she was wearing. Her brown hair was cut severely high at the nape of her
neck, giving her head the appearance of moving forward through space. Despite
the deep green contact lenses, her eyes showed the strain of one who had always
struggled to see. She slid a pair of electronic keys across the desk at me.

"Are those
both room keys?"

She said they
were.

"I'll need
about three more, please."

She gave me
that smile again. "Certainly, sir." From the drawer in front of her,
she pulled out a half-dozen blank keys. Using an electronic keypad on the desk,
she keyed in a code and ran three keys through the slot. Neat as can be, we
make a new key.

As she slid the
keys across to me, a door behind the counter opened and a woman stepped into
the registration area. She wore a deep blue silk suit and matching shoes. About
five-five or so and very solidly put together like a gymnast, she crossed the
area behind the desk and made her way to Marie's side. "Mr.
Waterman," she said.

The sound of
the voice startled Marie. Her narrow eyes stretched wide at the sight of the
woman. "Oh, Ms. Ricci," she blurted.

"Thank
you, Marie," the woman said.

Marie, who'd
instinctively begun looking around for something useful to do, quickly
translated the silence, realized that she'd missed her cue and exited stage
left in a flurry of paperwork.

The woman
extended her hand. "I'm Gloria Ricci."

Her hand was
smooth and dry. The kind you wanted to hang on to. Up close, she was about my
age. Somewhere between forty and fifty, with the wide oval face of a farm girl
hiding the observant eyes of a red-tailed hawk. "Pleased to meet
you," I said.

"Marie has
taken care of your needs, I trust?"

"Perfectly."

"Good. I
wanted to assure you that the resources of this hotel are completely at your
disposal. Should you require anything further, please don't hesitate to
ask." She stuck two fingers into her side pocket and pulled out a business
card and a small gold key. Ms. Gloria Ricci, General Manager, Olympic Star
Hotel. 'I've added my home number to the back," she said. "The key
allows access to all floors. Regardless of the time of day, please don't
hesitate—Ah, here he is," she finished.

Marty Conlan
nearly tripped over his jaw when I turned to greet him. "Long time no see,
Marty."

"Ah,"
Ricci said from behind me. "I somehow expected that you two would already
be acquainted."

Since Marty
seemed disinclined, I jumped right in. "Yeah," I said, "Marty
and I go way back. You don't know how lucky you are to have a guy like Marty on
board." What the hell. One good turn.

As Ricci
directed her attention his way, Marty held his face together pretty well. Other
than the arrhythmic tic in the corner of his right eye, he seemed almost
placid. "Mr. Waterman will be acting as security liaison for the
convention. I trust you will provide him with whatever resources he might
require."

"Depends
on what he requires," Conlan said.

She fixed him
with her gaze. "Should Mr. Waterman require any assistance whatsoever, I'm
sure that you will be more than happy to assist in any way possible. Isn't that
correct, Mr. Conlan?" Her voice held an edge of authority. Apparently
Marty thought so, too.

"Anything
at all," he said with a smile so tight it threatened his dentures.
"Anything at all."

"Funny,
Ms. Ricci," I piped up, "but Marty and I were just discussing being a
team player. Weren't we, Marty?"

The veins on
Marty's head looked like a relief map of Tibet. He nodded slightly and checked
his watch.

Gloria Ricci
said, "I'll leave you gentlemen to work out the details." She turned
on her heel and exited in a rustle, as Sir Geoffrey would say, from whence she
came. Marty's expression changed to that of a kid who's been sent to his room
without dessert.

I started
across the lobby toward the escalator. Marty yapped at my heels like a terrier.
"You broke his goddamn thumb, you know that, don't you, you big dumb
jackass. You broke that kid's thumb."

"He needs
to learn some manners."

"What am I
gonna tell the brass? Huh? What?"

"Tell them
he hurt it pulling it out of his ass." "The son of a bitch will be
claiming he's permanently disabled. You know that, don't ya?" "From a
broken thumb?"

"These
kids are like that, man. They get a blood blister, they're looking for
workman's comp."

Halfway across
the wide expanse of lobby, I stopped and pointed back toward the elevators.
"Are those the only way down?"

"Except
for the stairs and freight elevator in the back." "Is the freight
elevator keyed?" "Yeah. Why?"

I again started
toward the escalator. "I'm going to need to put a couple of guys here in
the lobby."

"Not those
friggin' bums, you're not. You may think you've got big-time juice with the
suits, but you start hanging that crew of yours around here in the lobby, I
don't care if if s old Sir Larry Olivier watching out for you, you're all gonna
find your asses back out in the street where they belong."

He had a point.
The Olympic was the sort of place which considered matching shoes and a full
set of teeth to be pretty much de rigueur. My crew was great for the streets.
Out there, they were virtually invisible. We've trained our eyes not to see the
poor and the homeless. We tell ourselves that these people had their chance.
That the rewards of the free society were once theirs for the taking, and they
blew it. That they were either unwilling or unable to carpe the diem when
opportunity knocked ... so screw 'em.

'Til clean a
couple of them up," I promised.

"This I
gotta see."

Me, too, I
thought. I tried something else.

"Why in
God's name did you put Meyerson and Del Fuego on the same floor? Wasn't that
just asking for trouble?"

"They
insisted, goddammit. So worried that one was

going to have
something the other one didn't have. One more room. One more chair. Christ. The
fourteenth floor has the only two identical suites."

I changed the
subject. "Have you got cameras on all the floors?"

"That’s
proprietarial information."

"Well, in
the event that you do, turn on fourteen and eight."

"They're
only on the private floors. Fourteen through eighteen." "Why only the
private floors?"

"Same
reason as everything else—the suits won't pay for it."

"Well,
fire up fourteen, then."

"What I'd
like to be able to fire up is nine, so I could keep an eye on you. I hear
you're going to be our guest."

As we walked, I
reached over and tapped him on the chest. "That's right, and remember,
Marty, a guest is a jewel that rests upon a pillow of hospitality."

"My
ass."

"There's
an idea 1 hadn't thought of." "What?"

"You could
tell the brass he broke his thumb pulling it out of your ass."

"Har,
har," he hacked at my back.

I stepped onto
the escalator and started down. Marty stood at the top and watched my descent.
He looked sad, like a hound dog caught with its nose in the kitchen garbage.
From my lowered perspective, the bags under his eyes seemed to nearly reach his
ears. I waved bye-bye.

Five
minutes
and fifteen dollars later, the Fiat magically reappeared in the
circular drive.
The front of the little car scraped slightly as I bounced out onto
University Avenue and gunned it up the hill toward the freeway.

I don't care
what the poet said; around here, September is the crudest month. Just about the
time the kiddies are headed back to school, when the resorts are closing up for
the season and those of us still propelled by the agrarian calendar feel a need
to buckle down in preparation'for a long, rainy winter, the weather has this
annoying propensity to get nice and to stay that way.

The digital
readout on the Safeco Building alternated between eleven-fifteen A.M. and
seventy-nine degrees as I pushed the Fiat north toward home, getting off at
Forty-fifth, winding my way down under the bridge, heading west toward Fremont.

Fremont
is a neighborhood for people who don't
have to commute. One of those bohemian pockets of urbanity to which there is,
quite literally, no quick or easy route. On a bad day, covering the few miles
from the freeway to Fremont can take thirty minutes. Today was a bad day.
Still, I was going to miss the place.

You want
Guatemalan Expressionist art, we got it. You want a giant concrete sculpture of
a troll eating a VW, we got that, too. What about an intact Cold War rocket,
repainted and mounted atop a building?

Say
no more.
And That’s not the best of it. Lenin is the best of it. Directly across
North Tlurty-fifth Street stands a sixteen-foot, seven-ton, bronze
statue of Vladimir Lenin,
striding out with his greatcoat open to the breeze and his thick boots
threatening to shatter the pavement beneath his feet.

A
local
entrepreneur named Lew Carpenter found the statue in the newly
liberated Poprad, Slovakia, where it lay as a toppled symbol of
Communism's fall. The rest is, as
they say, history. Lenin now stands with his back to The Fremont Hemp
Company,
striding directly toward The Rocket. Two defanged symbols of the Cold
War,
forever reaching out, but like Keats's lovers, never quite making
contact. Art,
once again, outlives politics. Dude.

It was
eleven-forty when I kicked the paper through the open front door. I stood in
the doorway, watching it slide across the hardwood floor and bump into the
nearest card-board box. One of about forty such boxes into which my gross
lifetime product was presently stored.

Moving is an
experience that becomes increasingly difficult with age. When I was younger,
moving wasn't a problem, because I didn't actually live anywhere, I crashed
wherever it was convenient. Friends used to keep entire pages of their address
books blank, knowing that the constant changes in my address and phone number
would require all that space and more.

Today, the
sight of my bare walls gave me the willies. I had to force myself over the
threshold, over toward the phone and the Rolodex, which rested on the big
wardrobe box. I checked the number and dialed my aunt Karen in Building
Permits.

I figured my
stock was high with Karen. Just a couple of months ago, I'd managed to show up
at the wedding of her youngest daughter, Mary Alice, in a suit, with a present.
What a guy.

She answered 
the phone before it rang.  "Building Permits." "Karen, it's
Leo." "Hey, good-lookin'." ''I need a small favor."
"Of course you do."

Before I could
tell her what I wanted, she jumped in. "You know Jean's boy Harvey is getting married again."

I could see it
coming. "What’s with these people? They get married like other people
change their socks."

She ignored me.
"Two weeks from next Sunday. That's the thirtieth."

Five minutes
later, we'd exchanged my ass at the wedding for a complete rundown of Jack Del
Fuego's permit situation. I thought I had it made. No way. "By the way,
Leo. About the gift."

"Yeah?"

"No more
bun warmers."

"I never
know what to buy," I protested.

"Get
Rebecca to help you. Now that you two . . ."

"We two
what?"