Philip Kerr - Gridiron

'Why don't you ask Tony?' said Kay.

Richardson turned. 'Tony?'

'Well, yes, Ray,' said Levine. 'It did, I'm afraid.'

Richardson shot Levine his most sarcastic look. Mitch winced on the younger man's behalf.

'Tony, why must you be so literal?' snarled Richardson. 'I'm saying why did it take so long? Why? It's a fishpond, not Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome. We're one of the biggest architectural practices in the country and it takes a week to draw something like this? What kind of business are we running here? CAD is supposed to speed up the way we work. In a week I could design a whole goddamn ocean marina, let alone a fucking fishpond.'

He shook his head and sighed, as if pitying himself for having to put up with such fools and incompetents. For a moment he doodled on a piece of paper. Mitch, who knew him best, recognized that he was sulking.

Richardson squared his jaw belligerently and turned his malevolent attention to Aidan Kenny.

'And what's wrong with this bloody hologram control system of yours?'

'A few teething problems is all, Ray,' Kenny said cheerfully. 'Yojo spent last night trying to fix it. May have even done it by now, for all I know.'

'For all you know,' Richardson whispered. He made a great show of trying to contain his impatience. 'Well, hadn't we better ask him?

Jesus…'

Kenny turned to Kay. 'Could you put us in the computer room, please, Kay?'

Kay punched another button on her laptop and the CCTV camera cut to Hideki Yojo, still sitting in his chair. For a moment everything looked quite normal. Then, as the various members of the team began to notice the colour of his face, the blood on his mouth and on the front of his shirt, there was a collective gasp.

'Jesus Christ almighty,' exclaimed Willis Ellery. 'What's happened to him?'

Kay Killen and Joan Richardson covered their mouths simultaneously, as if they both thought they were going to vomit. Helen Hussey took a deep breath and turned away.

Somewhere in the computer room an insect was buzzing with hungry anticipation. The sound had such high fidelity that for a brief moment Marty Birnbaum actually waved his hand in front of his face.

'Hideki,' shouted Tony Levine, 'can you hear us? Are you OK?'

'He's dead, you goddamned idiot,' sighed Richardson. 'Any fool could see as much.'

'His eyes,' said David Arnon. 'His eyes — they're black.'

Kay was already cancelling the image and conducting a picture search for Sam Gleig, the security guard.

Richardson stood up, shaking his head with a combination of anger and disgust.

'Someone better call the police,' said Ellery.

'I don't believe it,' said Richardson. 'I just don't believe it.' He stared almost accusingly at Mitch. 'Christ, Mitch, do something. Sort it out. This is all I bloody need.'

In LA it was easier to become a security guard than a waiter. Before becoming a guard Sam Gleig had served time in the Metropolitan Detention Centre for possession of narcotics and an illegal weapon. Prior to that, he had been a Marine. Sam Gleig had seen plenty of dead bodies in his time, but he had never seen a body quite like the one sitting in the Gridiron's computer room. The dead man's face was as blue as the shirt of Sam's own uniform, almost as though he had been strangled. But it was the eyes that really got to Sam. The man's eyes looked as if they had burned out in their sockets like a couple of spent lightbulbs. Sam walked up to the desk and felt under the wrist for a pulse. It was best to make absolutely sure, although Hideki Yojo was obviously dead. Even if he had doubted the look of it there was the smell. You could never mistake the smell. Like a room full of used diapers. Only usually it was a while before a body got to smell this bad.

Releasing Yojo's wrist Sam's hand brushed the base of the desk lamp. He cursed and quickly drew his hand away. The lamp was red hot. Like the screen on the desk it had been on all night. Sucking the burn, he went over to one of the other desks and for the first time in his life dialled 911.

The call was passed on to the central dispatch centre, coordinating the many responses of the LAPD from its bunker underneath City Hall. A patrol car driving west along Pico Boulevard was ordered to attend the Gridiron before the computerized report appeared as E-mail on the screen of the captain of the LAPD Homicide Bureau in New Parker Center. Randall Mahoney glanced over the report and then opened the duty roster file. Using his mouse he dragged the piece of E-mail across the screen and dumped it into the computerized in-tray of one of his detectives. That was what he was supposed to do. The new way. Then he did it the old way. He lifted his bulk out of his chair and wandered into the Detectives' Room. A burly-looking man with a face like a catcher's mitt caught his eye. He was sitting behind a desk and staring at the blank screen of his computer.

'It might help if you switched that fucking thing on once in a while, Frank,' growled Mahoney. 'Might save my fuckin' legs for one thing.'

'It might,' said the man, 'but we can all of us use a little more exercise. Even an athletic-looking specimen like yourself.'

'Wise guy. What do you know about modern architecture?' asked

Mahoney.

Detective Frank Curtis ran a thick, heavy hand through the short, steel-grey curls that were grouped stiffly on the top of his head like the springs of an old bicycle saddle and thought for a moment. He thought about the Museum of Contemporary Art where his wife had worked until she was replaced by a CD-ROM of all things, and then the design for the Walt Disney Concert Hall he had seen in the newspapers. A building that looked like a collection of cardboard boxes left out in the rain. He shrugged.

'Even less than I do about computers,' he admitted. 'But if you're asking me what my aesthetic opinion of modern architecture is, then I'd say most of it stinks.'

'Well, get your ass down to that new building on Hope Street. The Yu Corporation building. They just found a 187 there. Computer guy. Who knows? Maybe you can prove that the architect did it.'

'That would be nice.'

Curtis collected his sports coat off the back of his chair and glanced across the desk at his younger, handsomer partner, who was shaking his head.

'So who the fuck are you?' said Curtis, 'Frank Lloyd Wright? Come on, Nat, you heard that Captain of Detectives.'

Nathan Coleman followed Curtis to the elevator.

'I knew you were a fuckin' philistine, Frank,' said Coleman. 'I just didn't figure you for Goliath.'

'Is this something you have an opinion on, Nat? Modern architecture?'

'I saw a movie about an architect once,' he said. ' The Fountainhead . I think it was supposed to be Frank Lloyd Wright.'

Curtis nodded. 'Gary Cooper?'

'Right. Anyway, I was thinking. The architect certainly did do it that time.'

'Did what?'

'He blew up a building when the builders altered his plans.'

'Did he? Can't say I blame him. I've often wanted to kill the guy who did our new bathroom.'

'I thought you said you'd seen it.'

They drove Nathan Coleman's red two-seater Ford Cougar alongside the vertical Freeway surrounding the downtown heart of LA like a system of valves and arteries before turning south towards Hope Street. Along the way Curtis realized that for the first time in his life he was paying attention to the area's monolithic architecture.

'If I meet the architect, I'm going to ask him why all the buildings have to be so big.' Coleman laughed.

'Hey, Frank, this is America, remember? It's what distinguishes our cities from other places. We invented the tall-building metropolis.'

'And why does this whole area look like Mesa Verde National Park?

Why can't they build a downtown that looks like a place for people?'

'They got a strategic plan, Frank, to improve this area. I read about it somewhere. They're trying to give downtown a whole new identity.'

'You mean like the witness protection programme? You ask me, Nat, it's those fuckin' architects who designed these fuckin' buildings who need new identities. If someone in this town tried to murder Frank Gehry they'd probably give him the Congressional Medal of Honour.'

'Who?'

'You know that shitty-lookin' building on Olympic Boulevard? The Loyola Law School?'

'With the chain-link fencing and the steel walls?'

'That's the one.'

'That's a law school? Jesus, I thought that was a gaol. Maybe it says something about Frank Gehry's opinion of lawyers.'

'Maybe you're right. Anyway, Frank Gehry is the leading exponent of LA's fuck-you school of architecture.'

'Could be the guy's just a realist. I mean, LA's not exactly the kind of city where you want people thinking they can just drop by and say hello.'

They turned on to Hope Street and Curtis pointed. 'That looks like it there,' he said.

The two men got out and started to walk towards the building.

Dominated by a Fernando Botero bronze on top of a fountain, and lined with silver dollar eucalyptus trees, the Hope Street Piazza was a pointed, elliptical shape measuring about forty metres end to end. As it narrowed towards the farthest of the two extremities, a series of white marble steps rose through a shortened perspective that seemed to make the approach to the building something grander and more monumental. Frank Curtis paused in front of the fountain, glanced up at the fat lady reclining above it and then at the small crowd of Chinese men and women who were grouped behind a police barrier near the foot of the steps.

'How do they do it?' he said. 'These scene-of-crimes buzzards. What is it? Some kind of ghoulish telepathy?'

'Actually, I think they're here to demonstrate,' said Coleman. 'About the Yu Corporation's human-rights record or something. It was on TV.'

He looked up at the sculpture. 'Hey, you ever fuck a really fat one?'

'Nope,' laughed Curtis, 'can't say I have.'

'I did.'

'As fat as this little girl here?'

Coleman nodded.

'You're an animal.'

'It was something, Frank, I tell you. You know what? It made me feel like I'd done my bit for the human race.'

'Really?' Curtis was more interested in reading the sign beside the fountain:

Warning

For your own safety please do not drink the water in this fountain. It has been treated with an anti-corrosion agent to protect the sculpture. Consume it at your own risk.

'Too bad if you're a thirsty illiterate, eh?' said Curtis.

Coleman scooped some water in the palm of his hand, sipped some, spat it out again and then grimaced.

'There's no danger of anyone drinking that,' he said. 'It tastes like car polish.'

'Some of the folks round the Nickle like a nice drop of car polish. It's quicker than methylated spirits.'

They continued towards the building, unaware of the nature of the hexagonal concrete paving beneath their feet. Called Deterrent Paving it was part of the same harassment strategy, which also included the fountain's supply of Choke Water devised by Ray Richardson himself against the area's many derelicts. Every night one hexagonal block in seven was raised hydraulically to a height of eight inches, like the armour on the back of some pale antediluvian creature, to discourage any homeless people from sleeping there.

The two men stopped at the foot of the steps and, shielding their eyes against the strong sun and the reflected white glare of the concrete facade, stared up at the colourless cluster of tubular steel columns and horizontal trusses that denned the Gridiron's front elevation. The building seemed to be divided into ten zones, each suspended from a truss by a single line of steel hangers. Each of these massive horizontals was supported in turn by a steel mast made of clusters of individual steel columns. In spite of himself Frank Curtis was impressed. This was what he imagined when he thought about science-fiction: some inhuman, white-faced machine, a blank-faced emissary from a palsied, godless universe.