And yep, you guessed it – not two minutes later, my phone was vibrating like a mad thing and playing “Sharp Dressed Man” at max volume.
“Devon, is your head on straight now? Big guy, I was about to charge over there and –”
“Ms. Daniels, this is Mr. Killane’s housekeeper, Dolores Hadfield.”
Excuse me?
My brain fumbled for what I could remember about Mrs. Hadfield, but although I’d talked to her on the phone now and again – including that time in San Francisco when she’d clued me in on Devon’s preference for mayo-free roast beef sandwiches – I’d never met her in person. My mental impression of the woman extended only as far as fifty-something, head of his household staff, tough on the outside but a marshmallow on the inside – and then her clipped, no-nonsense voice broke into my frantic thoughts.
“Ms. Daniels –”
“Please, call me Ashley – and Mrs. Hadfield, is Devon all right? What’s going on?”
“Well, Ashley, I was calling to ask you what’s going on, but let me guess – Mr. Killane had a bad morning at work, didn’t he?”
“Fifty-fifty, Mrs. H – it was a good morning in that a big project he’s been working on came off without a hitch, and a bad morning in that he had to stress himself right down to the bone to pull it off.”
“Then I’ll throw another guess at you – it had something to do with his shitty excuse for a family, right? It’s all over the news that those assholes are all going to jail, and when Mr. Killane dragged himself in here a few hours ago looking like he’d gone fifteen rounds with the devil, I put two and two together, so –”
Whatever, lady. “Please, ma’am, can you just tell me if Devon is okay? He insisted on going home by himself to lie down, and said he’d call me once he was feeling better –”
“Ashley, everyone here at the house knows how much you mean to Mr. Killane, and if you make him happy, then you’re all right as far as we’re concerned. But you should know the man well enough by now to realize that sometimes you have to give him what he needs, not what he wants or insists on.”
“Swell, I’ll make a note of that. So is he okay, or what?” My voice skated up a notch, and I sat hard on the urge to start sniffling like a whiny little baby.
Tough old mom that she was – I’d never heard that she had kids, but in that moment, I was certain of it – Mrs. H heard my nerves jangling anyway, and laid out the scene at House Killane without further delay.
“Ashley, when Mr. Killane came in earlier, dripping sweat and barely saying a word to anyone, I just figured he was spiraling through another of those mood swings of his – but when he wouldn’t settle down, when he kept wandering into one room after another, staring at them as if he’d never seen the inside of his own home before, I knew something more was going on.
“I followed him and I tried to get him talking, but no luck. He just kept walking all over the house, peering into every room and glancing out the windows, as if he was looking for something or someone.
“Then after I watched him walk six laps around the fourth floor library, he stopped. He stopped, he turned to look at me, and then he said, clear as a bell and twice as calm, ‘Mrs. Hadfield, I believe I need to go lie down for a bit.’ He walked over, handed me this phone of his –”
“Mrs. H, he never lets that phone out of his sight, it’s like an umbilical cord.”
“Don’t I know it – anyway, there I was holding the phone and wondering what I should do, while he marched up the nearest staircase and disappeared into a spare bedroom on the fifth floor.”
“So then he got some rest?”
“Not as such. When I poked my head in to check on him, he was just sitting on the edge of the bed, still fully dressed and shaking like a leaf. I’ve looked in on him every thirty minutes or so since then, and he hasn’t moved an inch, unless you count shaking even harder as moving. I decided to call you when I saw he was hyperventilating – oh, and he spoke up long enough to say, ‘Mrs. Hadfield, for whatever it’s worth, I rather think I’m having a heart attack.’”
“Jesus, lady, call 911!”
“Ashley, you know as well as I do that he’s not having a heart attack, no matter what he thinks.”
“Oh, so you’re a doctor now?”
“Ashley, we’ve all seen this behavior from him before – the sweating, the shaking, the chest pains – and given how close you are to Mr. Killane, I decided to call you and see if you could come over here and be the one to talk him down.”
I looked around to realize I’d been churning around the perimeter of my apartment at a frantic pace, tearing along as if someone was chasing me. Forget this, I was going over there. I swerved over to the closet to shuck on my coat and pull on the first pair of boots I came to – and then it hit me.
“Mrs. Hadfield, um … what do you mean, exactly, by ‘we’ve all seen this behavior’? How is it that you assumed I’d know he’s not really having a heart problem?”
I heard her hesitate, I heard her sigh like a mother dealing with a bratty kid, and I somehow heard her roll her eyes.
“That man – I would have hoped if you hadn’t seen it for yourself, he’d at least have the decency to tell you, so you wouldn’t be shocked out of your socks if … anyway, I take it this means you don’t know about his attacks?”
Attacks?
21. Freak
I didn’t bother telling the bodyguard on duty outside where I was going, since I figured the sight of my Mercedes peeling out into the street at fifty miles an hour would be clue enough that he just maybe should follow me.
A drive to the exclusive peasants-keep-out suburbs where the rich and obnoxious lived would normally have taken about forty-five minutes from my place, but I shaved that down to twenty by means of speeding, cutting through parking lots and alleys, praying all the cops were busy eating doughnuts, and more speeding.
Halfway there, I dared one glance into the rearview mirror – no more than that, because as fast as I was going, I needed to concentrate on objects in my immediate path – and saw the familiar black SUV slewing around a corner behind me, my undoubtedly frantic security guy doing his best to keep me in sight.
I braked it down a bit once I arrived in the tony part of town, because a) this was just the sort of neighborhood where lowly types like me would be reported to the police just for breathing, much less rocketing around corners on two wheels, and b) my GPS couldn’t find Devon’s place.
Knowing him, it wouldn’t have surprised me if he’d paid Google Maps to claim his address didn’t exist – but some old-fashioned cruising around and looking led me to a back road that fed into a side road that wound around a series of terraced hills, until I rounded one last switchback turn to arrive at, voilá, the most private of private residences this side of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude.
I swung into a vast circular driveway paved with bricks in a thousand faintly different shades of red, brown, and bone white, bricks inlaid in swirling patterns that might have been hypnotic if I’d had the time to gawk at crap like that.
As it was, though, I ignored the artistic aspects of brick paving, barely glanced at the three-tiered marble fountain in the center of the driveway, and didn’t even notice the life-size topiary hedge animals until I nearly mowed one down as I screeched to a halt.
I jumped out of my Mercedes and was immediately confronted by two towering guys in tailored black suits that didn’t do much to hide their intimidating hugeness or their holstered pistols.
Security Guy One nodded. “Ms. Daniels, it’s a pleasure to see you today. Next time, though, you might want to give your escort a bit more of a heads-up about your travel plans – I took his call letting us know you were coming, and I think you just about gave the kid a seizure.”
Security Guy Two stared. He just stared at me and didn’t say a single thing. Man, he was good at staring. It felt like a mountain was staring at me. God help anybody that tried to approach the house without permission, because that guy
would have stared them to death.
My bodyguard of the moment – was this one Bill? Brad? Brent, maybe? – pulled up and parked behind my car. He scrambled out of the black SUV looking rattled and sheepish, but not quite in seizure mode.
“Hey, guys – Ms. Daniels, I appreciate that you were in a hurry, but you don’t want to know what would have happened if I hadn’t called ahead, not to mention that it’s my job if you get away from me and then something happens to you.”
A familiar no-nonsense voice rescued me.
“How in hell the human race ever survived with men in charge, I have no idea.”
Mrs. Hadfield called out this comment on society as she stalked down the walkway from the front steps of the house, shaking her head and scowling like someone with murder on her mind. Once she made it down to the edge of the driveway, she planted herself next to me and glared at the security guys as if they were kids she’d caught shooting off bottle rockets at three in the morning.
“If you’ve got eyes, you can see the girl is in a state, so why are you gentlemen standing here lecturing her on the finer points of security procedures? She’s here at my request, she’s in a hurry, and I might also mention that as Mr. Killane’s personal assistant and girlfriend, she outranks all of you.”
Security Guy One apologized with a smile that he didn’t hide very well, Security Guy Two stared like an alien monolith, and Bill/Brad/Brent shuffled his feet and avoided eye contact while mumbling, “Sorry, Mrs. Hadfield” in a small voice.
“Now go back to interrogating squirrels and cuffing imaginary bad guys or whatever it was you were doing out here, and this young lady and I will be on our way. Ashley, follow me.”
I tailed Mrs. H into the house like a good little girl, half because she radiated a mom-authority-figure vibe that no human could resist, and half because I would have followed the Antichrist into the house if it meant getting to Devon’s side as fast as possible.
Outside, Devon’s place looked like one of those staggeringly elegant mansions that you see on staggeringly dull PBS series about wispy British types with more money than brains. The rose-red façade was lined with windows framed in white marble, as well as wrought-iron balconies ideal for looking down on the unwashed masses. White pillars with spirals of groomed ivy climbing up them flanked each door, while gargoyles grinned from oh-so-twee decorative turrets. The entire rambling, multi-storied building was surrounded by manicured formal gardens, gardens so perfect that a single leaf dropping onto a raked gravel path probably would have set off a dozen alarms.
Once Mrs. H and I mounted the wide-enough-for-an-army front steps and the gold-trimmed mahogany double doors thumped shut behind us, all that proper Victorian snootiness disappeared.
Inside, the house underwent a radical personality change.
It was like stepping straight from the oozing-with-privilege part of the 19th century into an over-the-top modern art gallery.
The wall were retina-burning white, abstract paintings the size of not-so-small cars hung everywhere, and sculptures that looked like frozen explosions in a junkyard loomed in the corners. The furniture I could see was all minimalist squares and circles of glass and black leather and chrome, and looked more like stuff you’d pose next to than anything real humans would sit on or put things on or use for any practical purpose at all.
I shook my head and tried focusing on my shoes to overcome the dizzy feeling I got from all that aggressive modernity – but the white ceramic floor tiles beneath my feet displayed writhing patterns of black lines that twisted through a dozen different optical illusions before I stopped counting and looked up at the ceiling instead.
The ceiling was a bland cream color and soothing by comparison – or it would have been, if it weren’t for the red eyes of the security cameras up there following our every move.
Mrs. Hadfield glanced around, and then turned to me.
“Hideous, isn’t it?”
“You said it, ma’am – seriously, are we sure the boss even lives here?”
“Follow me, and I’ll explain on the way.”
Mrs. H marched away from the foyer and turned down the nearest hallway without a look back. I hustled after her, wondering why everything associated with Devon Killane had to be mysterious and complicated.
The hallway led into a series of three monstrous interconnected rooms – monstrous in size, since each one could have held about a dozen copies of my apartment, and monstrous in terms of being more in-your-face modern and trendy than any human being should have to tolerate.
The toughest badass-mom housekeeper ever swept along, calling back over her shoulder as we left the third room and turned into a short hallway.
“It all seems like a bit much when you’re new to it, but you’d be surprised how quickly you can get used to crap like this when you work around it every day – anyway, your instincts are right, Mr. Killane doesn’t live on the first floor at all. These rooms are strictly for entertaining – business associates, actors, models, celebrities, they all seem way more interested in being photographed in the right fashionable setting with the right powerful assholes than in having what normal people would call fun, so he obliges them with this weird décor. He hates it himself, won’t even come in through the front door if he can avoid it.”
The hallway led us to an elevator, and one swipe of a keycard later, we were on our way up. The interior of the elevator was plain brushed steel, the numbers flickered from one floor to the next in a thoroughly conventional way, and I sighed with relief at the blissful normality of it all – until I thought of Devon, of how he was somewhere above me in this warren of oddities, hurting and needing my help.
“So where is he, Mrs. Hadfield? I mean, you’re taking me straight to him, right?”
“Relax, Ashley, we’re just a few minutes away from whatever Mr. Killane and his brain are up to right now. The second floor is more eye-bleach masquerading as art, the third floor is servants’ quarters, an auxiliary kitchen, storage, that kind of thing – and here we are, floor three, no waiting.”
The doors slid open and we stepped out into a hallway with a well-worn hardwood floor and plaster walls painted a neutral pale blue – no art, no oddness, just a bland working environment ideal for servants dealing with the demands of maintaining an enormous private mansion like this. But where was Devon?
“Ma’am, on the phone you said Mr. K was in a spare bedroom on the fifth floor – so why are we getting off on the third floor?”
Mrs. Hadfield bustled away down the hall, swerving around one corner and then another. I hurried after her, wanting an answer and also not wanting to get lost up here.
Once again, she called back over her shoulder – man, this woman walked fast.
“We’re on the third floor because this is as far as you can go using the main elevators. The last time he had the house remodeled, Mr. Killane wanted to make sure that none of those trendy party idiots could get anywhere near the rooms where he actually lives, so to access his private floors – from the fourth on up – you need a keycard just to get here to the third floor, and then you have to swipe a different card and punch in three codes to access the private security elevator that takes you to the upper floors. Hang on, we’re almost there.”
We turned down a long corridor featuring more blah paint, plain wood flooring, and one unmarked door after another. I heard the muffled voices of other staff members coming from a few of the rooms, muted salsa music drifted down the hall from somewhere, and then we turned a final corner to find ourselves in the company of the boss’s mega-secure Secret Elevator of Obsessive Privacy.
The elevator doors were blood-red – strictly for purposes of intimidation, I assumed – surveillance cameras swiveled to follow our movements, the card slot hummed like a murder-cyborg powering up for action, and the intricate keypad would have looked right at home in CIA headquarters.
Mrs. Hadfield muttered to herself while she punched her way through the sequence of codes – I heard somet
hing like ‘paranoid crap’ and ‘Millard Fillmore’s birthday, dear God’ – and then the doors slid open with a condescending beep, permitting us access to the elevator’s sacred interior.
Well, it let me in – Mrs. H stayed outside.
“You’re not coming, Mrs. Hadfield? I haven’t been in this asylum before, I don’t even know where –”
She leaned in, hit the button for the fifth floor – I was surprised the machine didn’t demand a fingerprint or a blood sample or something – then held the doors open with one hand.
“Once you get out on five, go straight to the windows, then turn right, head down the hall, and it’s the second door after the elephant.”
The elephant? Hell, as long as it wasn’t going to stomp me flat or something, then whatever – anybody who hung around Devon Killane for long learned to roll with the weirdness.
“So why aren’t you coming along, Mrs. H?”
She ignored my question. “Just call if you need anything – and don’t worry, you’re a smart girl and you have good instincts, so you’ll be fine.”
Why was everybody complimenting my instincts today? “But don’t you think – ”
She shook her head and stepped back, still with a hand on the door.
“I don’t think, Ashley, I know – I know he doesn’t need his grouchy old housekeeper right now, or a doctor, or a therapist, or the man in the moon, for that matter.”
She pulled her hand back, and as the doors slid closed, she looked me right in the eye with her ‘mom knows best, so deal with it’ face – man, she could cow a charging rhino into submission with that look.
“He needs you, Ashley.”
I stepped out onto the fifth floor with no idea what to expect, other than no more modernist cubist surrealist existentialist bullshit crap passing itself off as art.
Five Minutes Late: A Billionaire Romance Page 23