Nothing Lasts Forever (4 page)

The problem was the newness of the place. As recently as the nineteen fifties, most of Los Angeles and its suburbs lay undeveloped. A dozen years ago, when Leland first started coming here, critical stretches of the Freeway remained to be built, and the city was still in fragments. Now Los Angeles was the first postindustrial megalopolis, the giant city of the future, lying in an infant's sleep under a churning, poisoned sky. "Do you live in Los Angeles?" "No, sir, I live in Compton, California." Californians like to say the word. If he had been in New York or Chicago, the answer would not have been "Valley Stream,
New York"
or "Cicero,
Illinois."
It was as if people here wanted to assure themselves that everything was where it was supposed to be, as if someone could tear it up overnight.

As a police problem, the place was a nightmare. If the size and sprawl of the city were not enough, Los Angeles was the only city Leland knew that was bisected by a mountain chain, the Santa Monicas, running from east to west and encompassing such communities as Bel Air, Sherman Oaks, and Studio City, as well as the separate, surrounded city of Beverly Hills — among others. In many areas, ground patrol had proved ineffective, and so the police had taken to the air, in helicopters. It worked. You could run from someone hammering above you, but you couldn't hide.

The limo was off the Freeway now, heading east on Wilshire through the fashionable neighborhood of Westwood. Bel Air rose to the left, hidden in its money. For the next five miles, million-dollar homes were not unusual. In this town people who had never had money before were suddenly truly rich, and they didn't care what they paid for the things they wanted. Rolls-Royce did better here than in India in the days of the Raj. And money was pouring in from all over the world, as old regimes collapsed. In a few years Los Angeles was going to be the most expensive — and corrupt and dangerous — city on the face of the earth.

"What are you going to do for Christmas?"

"I think I'm going to watch a whole lot of TV. My boy built me one of those big-screen sets — you know, with the projector."

"Is he in electronics?"

"No. This is my youngest boy, he's just twenty-one. He's an actor, but he's real good with his hands. He got an ordinary TV, a lens, and a screen, and there I am. Four feet across, just like a movie. The Rams will look big in defeat this year. I'll tell you, this old world is turning into something else."

Leland said he agreed and let the conversation die. He had had enough glimpses of strangers' lives today. It was a comfort to know that the younger generation was no more in awe of the new technology than his had been of Model A's or biplanes, but Leland thought he saw important differences. The old technology got people out into the world and into contact with others. This stuff was for
consumers
locked in subdivided little warrens, people who lived like cattle being raised for slaughter.

People themselves were different out here, eccentric like the English, exuberant in exploring new permutations of themselves. Hula Hoops came from this part of the world. The skateboard. Drive-ins. There were people here so in love with what they had invented for themselves that they spent Christmas every year sunning themselves on the beach. Never mind that the water was too cold for swimming.

Wilshire was all but deserted. A car crossing here and there. A woman yanking the leash of an ugly, forlorn dog. Christmas decorations. Block after block of lush store displays, through Beverly Hills and back into the darkness of Los Angeles again. He was beginning to feel as if he belonged here. A truck was parked alone at the curb two blocks from the Klaxon building, the only vehicle on the block. The lights changed and the limo came to rest across the street from the front entrance.

"Mr. Leland, you go in the front and I'll take your luggage down to the garage to Ms. Gennaro's car. Tell her the keys will be tucked under the front seat — she knows. And you have yourself a Merry Christmas, all right?"

"Sure. You, too — but don't ruin your eyes."

"Right." He grinned, happy with a loving son. "Right."

Leland noticed something on the far corner, nosed in at the curb. It was a big Jaguar sedan of the kind he had owned, to his regret, in the late sixties. The car had been nothing but trouble for Leland, and as much as he'd wanted to enjoy the car, he'd had to get rid of it. This one was in perfect condition. Someone was sitting inside. CB antenna on the trunk. The limo moved forward, into the light of the entrance of the Klaxon building.

Leland said good-bye to the driver and went up the flight of small steps when he thought of the car again and looked back. The man behind the wheel had the CB microphone up to his face — and as far away as he was, he saw Leland looking back at him and tried to get the microphone down. Leland had seen something he shouldn't have, but the trouble was that the other fellow thought that, too. Leland kept going across the small, raised plaza to the glass doors where an old white guy in a gray uniform sat at a desk reading a paper. Perhaps coincidentally, but certainly interestingly, he was out of the line of sight of the Jaguar. The old man saw Leland coming and got up and unlocked the door.

"My name is Joe Leland. I'm expected. Are you an ex-cop?"

"Yes, sir."

"So am I. I'm going for my wallet."

The old man read Leland's identification carefully. "New one on me, but I've been out of uniform fifteen years. Looks good, though, with a nice, raised seal. I know you're expected. What can I do for you?"

Leland told him about the Jaguar. The old man blinked and looked out toward Wilshire, although there was nothing to see from this position.

"There's a jewelry store across the street, and a kind of mom-and-pop combination liquor store and deli. Everything's closed tonight. I'm going to call it in. You take the elevator at the end, thirty-second floor. I don't know what the hell's the matter with people these days. Remember when Christmas Eve was a night off, and all you got was a stabbing or two?"

"Sure, and when you got there, the murderer was sitting in a chair, still telling the victim how wrong she was."

"An old-fashioned Christmas."

"They're running light tonight, aren't they?" Leland asked.

"If people knew how few cops were actually working some nights of the year, there'd be hell to pay. If you were armed, we could roust him ourselves."

"Lay off," Leland said. "How many kids out there working the holiday, all of them needing a good collar? I think I'll watch it from upstairs. I'll be able to see it, won't I?"

"No, the party's around the other side of the building."

"Party?"

"Something special. They put something over on the Arabs or somebody. The place is full of young cunt, kids, everything. I gotta make that call before that turkey out there goes gobble, gobble, gobble."

The old man did the gobbles in falsetto, and Leland was finally figuring out that he had been doing Gary Cooper in
Sergeant York
when the elevator doors closed and Leland snapped his fingers and said, "Damn!" out loud.

Who had been on the other end of that conversation with the son of a bitch in the Jaguar? Where was he? You don't need a radio to knock over a deli — or a jewelry store, either, for that matter. What were they up to?

Leland really didn't know how Steffie had gotten this job. She had come out here with Gennaro, her husband, after college, at a time when she was not on speaking terms with her mother and her relationship with her father was only beginning to mend. Gennaro had looked like Leland, trim, with close-cropped, dark hair — this shortly before the hair explosion. Leland's own hair had been almost completely gray then, but there was no mistaking what was going through her mind, however unconsciously. Gennaro was a bit too eager to make an impression, one of those kids determined to look you in the eye when he was talking. Cops took that as a sure sign of a liar, but Leland was in a period of compromise with himself, he thought, and what the hell, a marriage was a step up for Steffie, even one that was so obviously a first marriage.

They were going to California, Gennaro told him. He had an M.B.A. and a couple of remote connections made in college, and he was "working with the draft board," as he put it — what the hell, Leland said to himself, figuring his influence with his daughter was nonexistent anyway.

Now Leland didn't even know if Gennaro was making his child support payments. For a while he was living with an actress in Malibu, going to all the right parties, and then a few years ago Steffie told Leland the guy had a place in Encino, wherever that was, south of the boulevard, which was supposed to mean something, too. At the time, according to Steffie, he was trying to be a better father to Judy and Mark — malarkey, because Leland hadn't heard either one of them mention their father in all the time since.

Leland began to hear something faintly as the elevator approached the thirty-second floor. The doors rumbled open and he was hit by a blast of thumping disco. Strobe lights flashed against the walls. Jesus, Stephanie wanted him to find her in this? Did she have the kids here? A half dozen people had spilled out here into the corridor, holding drinks, passing joints, and writhing to the music. Beyond them, in what looked, in the dark, like the whole southwest quadrant of the building, fifty or sixty adults and teenagers flailed to a sound so loud, so acoustically true, or both, that it made the prestressed concrete floor vibrate like the loft of a barn.

"Hi," a blonde said, "Merry Christmas. You smoke this crap? It's good commercial Colombo."

"The doctors at the sanatorium told me not to. Do you know Ms. Gennaro? She wanted me to meet her here."

"Do you know what she looks like?"

"Always have. I'm her father."

"Jesus. I'm sorry. Excuse me. Wait a minute." She ankled out to the middle of the corridor. "You see that door over there? Mr. Ellis's office. The last time I saw her, she was in there with the other big wheels. Oh, Christ, excuse me. Hey, forget I said that, huh? Please. Tell her Doreen said Merry Christmas — and congratulations."

"What for?"

"This!"

"What's
this?"

"You don't know, do you? Mr. Ellis and Ms. Gennaro just put over a one hundred and fifty million dollar deal! Hey, go find out! Let her tell you — then come back and join the party! We'll take care of you!"

"I'm too old for your mother!"

"But not for me, you old fox!"

He winked and blew her a kiss.

"That's Gennaro's father," he heard her say, giggling, when he was supposed to be out of earshot. He didn't look back, because he didn't exactly like the way she had said his daughter's name.

The desks in the big room had been pushed back against the walls to create a dance floor, and Leland had to elbow his way through the onlookers who were three-deep most of the way around. Ellis's door led to his secretary's office, but the furnishings here were a big step up from the brightly colored metal and plastic outside. Thick green carpeting, rosewood walls, and an imitation stained glass ceiling fixture, all for a secretary. Like everybody else, the Klaxon executives took advantage of tax-deductible, business expense provisions in the revenue code to fit themselves out with the kind of accoutrements that would make a pharaoh's jaw drop. The door to the inner office was ajar, but the thumping of the music vibrating beneath his feet did not let Leland hear anyone on the other side. He rapped his knuckles on the doorframe.

"Who is it? Come in."

Three men turned in their chairs. Steffie, beyond them on the sofa, leaped to her feet.

"Daddy! Merry Christmas! You're just in time!" She rushed across the room, hugged him, and kissed his cheek. In his arms, she felt too soft and out-of-condition to suit him. With her arm around his waist, she turned to the others, who were standing now, and introduced him. Ellis, behind the desk, was in his forties; the man Leland's age was a Texan named Rivers, executive vice president for sales; and the boy in his twenties, Martin Fisher, was Stephanie's new assistant.

Rivers was the first to shake his hand. "Welcome, Mr. Leland. A pleasure and an honor. We heard about your accident in St. Louis. Well, it doesn't look like much." Stephanie looked at his forehead. Rivers turned to the boy. "Do you know how many German planes this man shot down?"

"Oh, yes." He was looking at Leland, trying to match what he had been told to the man standing in front of him.

"It's ancient history," Leland said to him. "Your parents don't even remember it."

"Not true," Ellis said, stepping in front of the desk, smiling. "Not true at all. Welcome. Perfect timing. This is the biggest day of our lives." He pumped Leland's hand with an unpleasant energy that put Leland off at once.

"I heard something about one hundred and fifty million dollars."

"That's right," Ellis said. "It's the biggest contract Klaxon has ever done outside of petrochemicals."

"We're in the bridge-building business, Daddy. In Chile."

"Show him that watch," Ellis said to her.

"He'll see it later," she said.

"I've got a model of the bridge upstairs in my office, Mr. Leland," Rivers said.

"Call me Joe. I feel old enough without a graybeard like you treating me like Santa Claus." Or Lucky Lindy, he thought, as images of the past few hours rose in a flurry, stirred like leaves in a wind.

"I was in the South Pacific, myself," Rivers said.

"The whole thing should be put on bubble gum cards, as far as I'm concerned," Leland said. "Stef, I'd like to clean up a little, if I may. It's already been a fourteen-hour day. I'd also like to use the telephone."

"Something wrong?" Rivers asked.

Leland shook his head. He was thinking of the old cop downstairs, but what he had seen on Ellis's desk, a rolled-up dollar bill, made him want to be cautious. "I want to call San Diego." Leland gave Steffie a smile. "Something nice happened on the plane."