Syndrome Part 20

"My creepy kid brother works for him." She sighed. "It's a long story.

Be there in a couple of minutes." She clicked off the phone.

"Betty, thanks a lot. I've gotta run." She turned and gave Knickers a last rumple of the ears. "Be good, baby. I'll pick you up by six at the latest."

"What wrong?" Misha was concerned, twisting a white towel he was holding. "Big problem?"

"Nothing's wrong. Actually, something probably is wrong. I just don't know what it is yet." She headed out the door.

The design firm her father had started and she'd kept going, now with some architecture thrown in, was on the ground floor of an old industrial loft building whose upper floors had been converted into rental apartments in the early 1980s. The owner was an ex-wrestler named Oskar Jacobi, who had turned Zen master (after a fas.h.i.+on) and had a studio upstairs, on the second floor. He had drifted from wrestling into karate during his thirties and thence into the life of the mind, or rather the life of "no-mind," in his late forties. Now he taught meditation as well as karate and insisted they be learned in that order. He served as his own superintendent, mopping the halls and setting out the garbage on pickup days.

The ground floor was zoned commercial, and Citis.p.a.ce had a lease for all of it, which meant she had tons of s.p.a.ce. Oskar had given Ally's dad, Arthur, a ten-year lease, which was now a fraction of the going rate. They both knew that, and she'd more than once offered to renegotiate or move, but he said he didn't need any more income and, besides, he liked having her as a tenant because she reminded him of her father. It was a generosity perfectly in keeping with his philosophy that excess money corrupted the spirit.

She'd done the place as a sort of Spanish desert flower, with burnt- orange tile floors and all the natural materials she could cram in. A lot of her clients wanted the hard-edge industrial look in their lofts, which was fine by her, but she found it too cold for a daily working environment. The front was una.s.suming, with small lettering on the window. Citis.p.a.ce was not a walk-in business. And she had no metal gates over the windows. What's to protect?

When she marched through the door, everybody looked up from their coffee and computers, and Jennifer led the applause. Winston Bartlett.

Had they finally made the A-list? This could be the start of something big.

Chapter 8

_Monday, April 6

9:56 A.M.

_

Ally stepped out of the cab, holding the large leather-bound portfolio, and checked the number on the card against the bronze plaque above the door. Winston Bartlett lived like a nineteenth-century robber baron.

The building had five stories and was adorned with Italian marble window lintels that glowed like mother-of-pearl.

Already she liked his sense of style. Bartlett was New Money, but this place had the solemn dignity of Old Money. The front door was eight feet tall and solid mahogany. The odd thing was, there were two doorbells. One read w. BARTLETT and the other read E. BARTLETT.

That was when she remembered she had read somewhere that he had a wife named Eileen. But why did she have a separate doorbell? Winston Bartlett had a tabloid reputation as a womanizer. Perhaps they lived apart. If so, there it was, for all the world to see.

She found herself examining the late Greek Revival columns on either side of the door. They were marble and meticulously cleaned of soot, whose ubiquitous presence in New York meant that eventually everything not regularly scrubbed turned gray. It told her that Winston Bartlett liked things to be immaculate and that he was a stickler when it came to details.

She glanced up and noticed that she was being observed by a security camera. She was reaching out to push the bell for w. BARTLETT when the door magically opened. A tall, trim j.a.panese man in a crisp black suit was standing in the doorway. But he had a muscular build that would be more appropriate for a bodyguard than a butler.

"h.e.l.lo," she said. "I have an appointment with--"