Conti walked slowly to the desk and dropped a meatloaf hand on my shoulder. He shrugged at Mandy. “Guess you have to take that up with the Captain. Ms. Danzig.”
CHAPTER 42
Conti didn’t take me to a conference room or to another office suite. Instead, he led me into an elevator, out again, up a short flight of metal stairs, through a metal door, and onto Bray Consolidated’s rooftop helipad. There was a chopper waiting there, a sleek white machine with the Bray coat of arms on its side. Its engines were idling and its rotors spinning slowly. The pilot donned his headphones and adjusted his mike when he saw us coming. Fuel vapors pricked my eyes.
Leather seats faced each other across a leather-lined passenger cabin. Conti waited until I climbed into a window spot and then took a seat opposite. He pulled the hatch shut and pointed at my seatbelts while he fastened his. When I’d buckled up, he tossed me a set of headphones.
“The jack’s in the armrest,” he said, positioning his own headphones over his ears. He swung his mike down and spoke to the pilot. “We’re all good back here, Jerry.”
Jerry’s twang came through my headphones. “Roger that, Tiger. We are wheels up.” The engines revved, the cabin vibrated and swayed, and then the rooftop slanted away.
I looked out the porthole at the world rotating below—the 405, the cemetery, Brentwood, and, to the north and west, the brown, shadowed folds of the Santa Monica Mountains and a bright haze off the Pacific.
Conti’s voice was in my ear again. “You’re not gonna puke, are you?” His shark grin was wide. I shook my head. “Then you want a drink?” He pressed on the divider between his seat and the next, and a panel slid away to reveal a bar. I shook my head again and he shrugged. He reached in and pulled out a small bottle of tonic water. He opened it and drank.
“I thought you’d put up more of a fight,” he said. “Or at least ask questions.”
I pulled my own mike down. “What’s the point? I want to talk to the guy who can make things happen. Apparently, that’s not Amanda.” Conti snorted. “I guess now we’re going to see that guy.”
“Got that right,” Conti said.
I looked through the porthole again. The ridges and ravines of the Santa Monicas were closer now, and away to my left I could see a white strip of beach and the PCH running alongside. “I thought Bray lived in Bel Air,” I said.
“That’s one place. Malibu’s another.”
The chopper dipped lower over a canyon—Topanga I thought, from the tortuous road that wound down to the ocean, and from the size of the homes on its slopes. Pools and tennis courts and vast decks were like shining tiles on the parched hillsides, a mosaic that spelled out money in the Ur-language of real estate.
“Keep an eye out—you almost always see tits around here, a couple pairs at least, lying out in the sun. Nice ones too. Don’t know if they’re real or not, but from up here they look good. Sometimes the chicks wave.” I looked at Conti and shook my head.
He squinted at me. “You don’t like tits? Or you see so many in your line of work, the magic is gone?”
I ignored his questions. “Bray senior keeps an eye on Mandy’s appointments?”
Conti barely shrugged. “It’s his company and his building. Everything goes on there is his business.”
“And he pays you to watch over it?”
“That’s as good a job description as any.”
“That include babysitting?”
“Ask him yourself. We’re almost there.”
The engine sounds changed, and so did the vibrations through the cabin, and we slid to the right. The sea rotated in the cabin window—slate blue, with breaking waves like lace. There was a stretch of sand like a tawny thigh, then the green of an irrigated hillside, and then a slab of white cement as we hovered above a helipad. And then we were down.
The pad was on a terraced slope far above the ocean and the PCH, but below the hilltop. I followed Conti up a stone path through manzanita and yarrow and salt air, and another man followed behind us. He had a crew cut and made no effort to hide the gun beneath his suit jacket. The ocean swayed and sighed behind us, and gulls hung overhead.
Near the crest of the hill we came to a line of wind-twisted scrub oak. Beyond were a meadow, a horse paddock, stables in whitewashed stucco, and then the main event—a Spanish Renaissance palace in white stone, with a green tiled roof and leaded glass windows. It looked like the Beverly Hills City Hall, only larger and without the tower.
Conti led me past a fountain full of mottled koi, and up steps to a wide patio. The highway was invisible from this vantage, and so was the beach—the view was all ocean and sky—two things Harris Bray could yet aspire to own. Unless they were his already.
There was furniture on the patio—wrought-iron chairs and glass-topped tables—and signs of recent entertainment, but no guests. The only other people were four waiters in white shirts and black vests, moving silently among the tables, clearing empty highball glasses, hors d’oeuvre plates, and crumpled cloth napkins. Conti stopped and put out his hand.
“Cell phone,” he said. I dug my phone out and gave it to him. He powered it down and gave it to the crew-cut man. “You’ll get it back when you leave. Arms out to the side.” Conti demonstrated, and the crew-cut man ran a wand up and down my body, pausing at my belt and wristwatch.
“He’s good,” Crew Cut said. He hung back while Conti and I crossed the patio to a set of French doors on the far side. The doors were open, but Conti stopped at the threshold.
“A minute,” he said softly. He slipped a cigarette from his breast pocket and dangled it, unlit, from his lower lip. He turned to watch the ocean, and I looked inside.
The room was a rosewood chapel, with paneling and bookshelves that ascended to a coffered ceiling, and a red-tiled floor covered in Persian rugs. The books were leather-bound, and so was much of the furniture. The green silk drapes were pulled back, and sunlight fell on an ebony standing desk. There was a phone on it, a keyboard, a thin monitor, a highball glass with something amber at the bottom, and a stack of papers. A leather chair crouched before it—a place for supplicants to sit and stare upward and await the word of God.
Harris Bray stood behind the desk, nearly motionless. He was dressed not for an afternoon in Malibu, but for a board meeting in New York, or maybe a centerfold in Forbes. He wore a snow-white shirt, gray tie, navy trousers, navy suspenders, and gleaming wingtips. His navy suit jacket hung from an ebony peg on the side of his desk.
Bray wasn’t handing down law just then, but listening to a man’s voice from a phone speaker. I couldn’t make out the words, but the voice was pleading and desperate, which seemed to make Bray angry. His jaw was rigid, and his large mottled hands clutched at each other. His own replies were curt and chilly—ice on a windowpane. His words too were lost to me, but his scorn hung like a fog in the air.
My glimpse of Bray, in the PRP corridor, was of little more than a looming shadow, and the photos I’d seen were of a beige Rotarian—an auditor or a pasty tax attorney—if not genial, then at least reassuringly bland. In person, up close, he was not. Cameras hadn’t captured his crowding, aggressive presence, his heavy, sloping shoulders, long arms, and thick, hard torso. And they’d softened and civilized a face that in reality was brutal and crudely made—hacked from ice, and animated by contempt.
Bray wore rimless glasses, and behind them his eyes were flint splinters, and as jangly as Kyle’s. His nose was a hatchet, and his mouth a bitter seam, too long and nearly lipless. His skin was pale even against the collar of his white shirt, but pink patches bloomed on his cheeks whenever the man on the phone spoke. Flushing isn’t necessarily a symptom of hypertension, but I wondered if something wasn’t ready to rupture beneath that ridged white scalp. He leaned forward as he listened, and his hands strangled one another.
Bray’s frozen whisper rose to a growl, and he stabbed a thick finger at his phone. The pleading voice cut out, and Bray smoothed his tie. He read something on his comput
er screen and tapped at his keyboard.
“He’s here?” he said without looking up.
Conti nudged past me and through the French doors. “Right here, Cap.”
Eyes still on his screen, Bray pointed at the chair in front of his desk.
I shook my head. “I’ve been sitting all day.”
Bray sighed and looked at Conti, who took my elbow. “That wasn’t an invite,” Conti said, ushering me to the chair.
I sat, and Conti retreated to the patio. I watched Bray scan his monitor for a few minutes, and type in rapid bursts. The color was gone from his face, and so was any expression. When he looked at me again it was disconcerting, like locking eyes with a statue.
“Do you know why you’re here?” he asked. His voice was low and rumbling now, and like an inquisitor’s—uncomfortably close, but without a trace of warmth.
“I assume you were listening to my conversation with Mandy.” Bray shot a glance at the patio and Conti. “He didn’t say anything,” I continued, “I’m a good guesser. So my guess is that you didn’t like how Mandy was handling things, and decided to take over.”
Bray pursed his lips minutely. “My niece has strengths, but she doesn’t always recognize when the time for conversation has passed. It’s a limitation of her sex, I find.”
“Does that mean you didn’t bring me here to talk? Because I thought that was the purpose of meetings—to converse.”
Bray lifted the highball glass from his desk, turned it in his hand, and extended it toward me. He tapped on the black shield, red maces, and Latin script printed underneath. “You know what this is?” he asked.
“Your company logo?”
He made a disdainful noise. “It’s our family crest, and our motto—sine missione. I don’t expect you know what the Latin means. It translates as—”
“ ‘Without quarter,’ if I remember from high school. Sine missione—without quarter.”
Bray lifted an eyebrow. “My niece forgets that these aren’t simply words. They are a fundamental principle of operation. A code of behavior. A way of being. Without quarter.”
“Did you bring me out here to threaten me, then? Because if that’s the purpose—”
“My niece is the one who threatens, doctor, and promises. She’s the one who pretends to listen to what people say, and pretends to care. She can even charm at times. In your case, she’s threatened to bring pressures to bear on you if the child is not returned to our family immediately. And she’s made promises as well—implied that certain benefits might accrue if you bring him home. I don’t operate on those terms.
“Instead, I act. I don’t say that harm may come—I do harm. And not only to you, doctor. So the purpose of this meeting is not to converse. It’s for me to describe the mace that’s poised above your head, and above the heads of those you care for.”
He checked his watch again, and took a sheet of paper from the small pile on his desk. He cleared his throat. “And so, as of nine-fifteen this morning, Southland Liberty Development Corporation became the sole owner of Kashmarian Properties, assuming its various assets and obligations, including and particularly the property which currently houses your clinic and is your residence. Southland Liberty, by the way, is a division of Eureka Pacific Real Property, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Bray Real Estate Development. I—”
“You can’t do that. My lease gives me the right of first refusal on any sale of the building. I’m supposed to receive notice of a proposed sale.”
“You have a lease with a corporation, doctor, and that hasn’t changed. I simply bought that corporation. But by all means, consult your attorneys; take the matter up in court. My lawyers assured me this wasn’t an issue, and I’m told Mr. Kashmarian made no mention of it at the closing—though the price he was paid may have left him speechless.”
“I—”
Bray held up his white palm. “It’s in your interest to keep still, doctor. Now, in a separate transaction that took place late this morning, Southland Liberty also assumed ownership of a second property, a six-unit rental building on Roderick Road, in Glassell Park, the current residence of Mr. Luis Enrique Torres, who is your employee, and Mr. Arthur Silva, who is an information technology consultant. Your consultant.”
Bray rubbed his fingers across his marble chin and held up more papers. “We will return to Mr. Silva in a moment, but before we do, I direct your attention to these. These are two complaints, one against yourself that will be filed shortly with the Medical Board of California, and another against Lydia Torres, your nurse, that will be filed with the state Board of Registered Nursing. The complaint against you is made by a Flora Brickel, and alleges that you sexually assaulted her during a medical examination. The complaint against your nurse is made by a Patrick Goins, who alleges that Ms. Torres offered to sell him a dozen oxycodone tablets, though no doctor had prescribed the medication for him, and that she also offered to sell him a forged oxycodone prescription.”
I wasn’t aware of standing, but suddenly I was up and halfway around the desk. Bray took a step back and Conti was on me, with an arm across my throat and a gun in my kidney.
“You don’t want to go that way, doc,” he whispered in my ear.
I didn’t fight, but I didn’t move either. I stared at Bray. “That’s bullshit! Flora’s a mean drunk, who’ll say anything for the price of a box of wine, and Goins is a pimp and a junkie. I haven’t seen either one of them in over a year, and those complaints are nonsense.”
Bray smiled, small and nasty. “I’m sure. And the licensing boards may reach the same conclusion—eventually. But Tiger’s people assure me that Ms. Brickel and Mr. Goins will remain committed to their stories. And who knows how many corroborating witnesses or other complainants may come forward in the meantime.” Bray looked at Conti. “Sit him down.”
Conti led me to my seat and stood behind me. “And now back to Mr. Silva,” Bray said, and the smile broadened across his brutal face. “He has many other clients besides yourself, all over the city—a thriving little business. But I doubt it will survive after his clients are made aware of certain files hidden on their servers, certain photos and videos that only someone with Mr. Silva’s access could have placed there. I’m referring to quite disturbing images, doctor—altogether sickening, I’m told, and entirely illegal. People in this city may tell themselves they don’t mind living alongside of homosexuals, but I doubt their liberal attitudes extend to pederasts.”
I tried to stand, but Conti dropped a hand on my shoulder. Bray looked at his watch and sighed. “As I said, the mace is raised, and not just above your head. And it will come down, I assure you. The only person who can stop it is you, Dr. Knox. You have twenty-four hours to decide if you and your nurse will spend the next eight or ten months defending yourselves before licensing boards, if your clinic will be evicted from its current space, if you and some of your employees will be evicted from your respective residences, and if your consultant will lose his business and be brought up on child pornography charges.”
His words barely sounded through the rushing in my head. My pulse was bounding, and I could feel it in my carotid. My face was hot. I took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. I smelled eucalyptus and sage and sea air, leather and liquor and old paper. Harris Bray propped his forearms on his desk and stared down at me, as if I was an ant beneath a lens and he was waiting for the first wisp of smoke. I took another deep breath.
“If you were listening to me and your niece, then you heard Elena’s story. You know—”
“Let me stop you there, doctor, because you’re already spouting irrelevancies. It doesn’t matter one iota what I heard or what that woman has to say—you might as well be reciting last month’s weather reports. The only thing that matters to your situation—and the situation of your makeshift family—is what you decide to do about the child. Everything else is noise.” Bray’s eyes were somehow darker and shining, and they bored into mine.
“If you were listen
ing,” I continued, “then you know Elena insists that Alex is her son. DNA testing will confirm—”
Bray made an irritated wave. “I heard all that. I also heard Amanda ask you if you wanted this to devolve into a custody battle. She didn’t think it was to your advantage, and I couldn’t agree more.”
“DNA—”
“Assuming the results are what you think they will be, do you really think we can’t produce adoption documents, doctor?”
“Valid ones?”
He smiled. “I imagine only Elena would say otherwise, but she wouldn’t be able to prove it. And then will follow much legal posturing about the best interests of the child, who is the more fit parent, and so forth. It will be lengthy and expensive and tedious, but the results are a foregone conclusion.”
“And you’re not worried about Elena’s story getting out? You must see it’s beyond damning—to your company, your family—to your son especially. If the press got ahold of—”
Bray laughed, a rough barking noise. “Is that a threat, doctor? Are you threatening me with the press? Do you really think any news outlet would run that story? What editor or news director would do something so foolish? Assuming you could find a reporter stupid enough to write it.”
“A story like that would sell a lot of advertising.”
Another bark, and his nasty smile got wider. “Are you really so naïve? The people who make these decisions answer to management—chief operating officers, presidents, CEOs—who themselves answer to boards of directors. I happen to sit on several boards, doctor, including the boards of media companies, and I assure you that, while they might find an incremental bump in ad revenues appealing, they would find my lawsuits completely terrifying. The huge legal fees, the years of distraction, the potential for crippling judgments against them, not to mention the reputational wounds—they would simply have no appetite for it; the cost-benefit equation would never make sense. Though, really, I doubt my lawyers would ever have to take things that far.”
“No?”
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