Never Street by Loren D. Estleman Read Free Book Online Page A

skyscraper with a lobby out of Cecil B. DeMille, complete with sparkling blue lights mounted under the thirty-foot ceiling and a bronze ballerina pirouetting among exterior pools, looking faintly afraid to be caught downtown without a stun gun and a can of Mace under her tutu. A black security guard in gray twill pants and a white short-sleeved shirt with a gold badge over the breast pocket watched me read the directory and walk to the elevators, one hand resting on the flap of his holster. It was time to think about a new suit as well.
    I found the reception area behind a brass-bound door with the outline of an attenuated woman in an evening dress etched Deco-style on the glass. An Asian woman in her late twenties, less attenuated, sat behind a glass desk—not kidney-shaped after all—tapping a set of coral nails against the handset of a slimline telephone, obviously on hold. She had on a champagne-colored silk blouse with a matching floppy bow tie, pink buttons in her ears, and at least three coats of lacquer that turned her face into an ivory mask. Her straight black hair was cut in a page boy that threw off blue haloes.
    She lifted a pair of razor-thin eyebrows when I stopped in front of the desk; then just as I opened my mouth, jerked her head down and spoke into the telephone. “Yes. Oh, not long, seven and a half minutes or so. No, my right hand needed the exercise anyway. Well, if he’s left for the day, don’t you think you might have found that out and told me when I still had circulation in that hand? Yes, I’d be grateful when he checks in if you’d tell him I called. Thank you so much.”
    She clapped the receiver into its cradle. “Idiot. Are you here to see Mr. Webb?”
    I nodded. “Did they make you listen to Country or the Best of Broadway?”
    “Sondheim. Do you suppose anyone ever listened to ‘Send in the Clowns’ voluntarily?”
    “You played ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ for me yesterday.”
    A nose got wrinkled. “If I had anything to say about it, you’d get Mozart. Are you Mr. Walker?” She had a finger on a leather-bound appointment book lying open before her.
    I said I was. She relayed the information through an intercom and sat back, steepling her fingers. “He’ll be out in a minute. This is about Mr. Catalin’s disappearance?”
    “I heard he left pretty abruptly.”
    “Right in the middle of a meeting. He swept past this desk and right on out without a word.”
    “Was he in a hurry?”
    “I wouldn’t say that, exactly. But he was preoccupied. It wasn’t like him not to say a word to me in passing. Do you think you can find him?”
    “I didn’t say I was looking for him.”
    She was deciding whether to be annoyed by that when Leo Webb came in through a plain glass door behind the desk and shook my hand. He was my height and slender, a year or two older than his partner, although his shaved head and hairless face blurred the distinction. His suit was tailored snugly and there was something about the knot of his silk tie that said he’d given it a jerk and a lift just before his entrance. His eyes were like glass shards, pale and hard.
    “How do you do? Sorry about that mix-up over the phone. We had a theft from our studio in Southfield last week. A roomful of equipment walked out an unlocked back door with the alarm turned off. I wanted to strap every employee there to a lie detector but my lawyer says no. I’m shopping for a new lawyer.”
    “That Bill of Rights is a bitch,” I agreed.
    He steered me through the door and down a short hallway hung with eight-by-ten portraits of nobody I knew into his office, an enchanted grotto crusted over with Renaissance paintings in heavy carved frames and plaster cherubs teetering on Greek columns. There was a mahogany Empire desk with gold inlay, as big as a bed, and behind it a throne upholstered in wine-colored velvet perched on a swivel.
    “Props.” Webb palmed the head of a three-foot fountain sculpture in what looked like