A Gambling Man (Archer #2)(53)
He eyed the marquee in the lobby, and it showed that the place was fully leased, to businesses with impressive-sounding names. Overcoming his fear of enclosed spaces, Archer rode an automatic elevator car up to the top floor. It had been a bit easier to beat his phobia this time, because the elevator was mostly all glass wrapped in chrome. He thought Earl from Dash’s building might go crazy riding up and down all day in the thing. And he assumed at night that one might get some unsettling reflections. He, for one, didn’t want delusions occurring at a hundred feet in the air.
But then again, they probably exist at street level, too.
A PAIR OF REFLECTIVE GLASS DOORS with platinum wrappers greeted Archer at the entrance to Kemper Enterprises. Two large rubber plants in thousand-pound cast stone pots with lions in raised relief on their sides guarded this portal. Since there was no sunlight in the hall Archer wondered how these beauties could manage, but when he touched them and then smelled them, he realized they were fake.
He opened one of the doors and stepped through. It was then that he realized the revealed anteroom was just a tease. There was no one and nothing here. Just four walls painted black and a hat and coat rack, stuck in one corner, that was bereft of both hats and coats.
The door set directly across from him was thick oak and he found out it was locked. He saw the buzzer and the voice box, so he buzzed and prepared to use his voice.
A woman answered, “Yes?”
“Aloysius Archer here to see either Mr. Kemper or Mr. Wilson Sheen.”
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but they should be expecting me. We met this morning at Willie Dash’s office.”
“Oh,” said the voice, and Archer heard what he expected to hear—the door being buzzed open.
He gripped the knob, pulled, and stepped into la-la land, at least at first blush. His opinion didn’t change much on the second blush.
The room was cavernous, awash in light, indeed so much light that stepping from a dark hall into a darker anteroom and then into this burst of illumination made Archer’s eyes squint, his pupils contract, and his head momentarily pound. The windows were floor-to-ceilings and let in as much of the descending California sun as was humanly possible. There was not a drape to be had in the whole space, apparently.
There were six uniform desks, each lined up with the other. And on a raised dais behind them was one desk, twice as large as the others. Six women sat in the lower section. They all looked to be in their twenties, well scrubbed, professionally dressed, efficient, earnest, smart, ambitious, and platinum blonde right down to the part in the middle of the scalp. They could be sextuplets, down to their bone marrow. Carriage typewriters clicked and clacked, phones rang, and a stock market tape rattled along on one walnut-carved credenza spelling doom or fortune, depending on one’s Wall Street position. There was a frenetic energy here that was hard for Archer to wrap his head around. These ladies seemed to be living life at a different speed from the rest of humanity.
Since the hat rack outside was empty, he figured they must keep theirs in their desk drawers.
The walls were upholstered in what looked to be brown leather two-by-two tiles. On these walls hung paintings of seascapes and landscapes and mountainscapes, as well as other scapes Archer had never contemplated before. A marble statue of a naked woman and baby stood in one corner. Real plants whiled away their time in cast stone pots that dwarfed the ones in the hall. The overhead light fixtures were grand chandeliers with about a thousand pieces of cut crystal each, and they looked like a bitch to clean and even more of a bitch to raise to the ceiling. And that ceiling. It was flat metal copper plates acid-washed with blue, black, brown, and teal slashes. It looked like something you’d see in Europe before the war took its pound of flesh and everything else.
The rug underneath his feet sank in two inches under his weight, and Archer didn’t think he’d hit rock bottom yet. To Archer’s mind there was too much woodwork everywhere, like an overabundance of makeup on an aging film star; in trying to hide every perceived flaw, it succeeded in wiping out all that was authentic.
Yet the whole outfit made Willie Dash’s operation look like a plot in a desperate Depression-era Hooverville with cardboard homes and not an ounce of hope in sight. Despite that, Archer found himself preferring Dash’s humble space over this over-the-top setup.
The large desk on the raised dais was occupied by a very different sort. She was in her thirties, tall and well shaped, and so brunette that in the sea of platinum she looked like the puppy that had gone lost. Her face held starkly intelligent features, and her eyebrows, as dark as the hair, acted like antennae, sniffing out everything before it became an issue. She was dressed all in black except for a high white collar and slips of white around the ends of her long dress sleeves. Her hair was thick and wavy and graced her head like a tiara. She had stacks of files on both sides of her desk, a phone in the middle next to an open ledger book, and no typewriter in sight, which told Archer that in addition to her heightened position behind the half-dozen ladies, she was the boss of this little dynasty. And unlike the frenetic activity going on around her, this lady exhibited an aura of languid calm, like the eye of a hurricane.
She suddenly harrumphed, and one of the platinums obediently rose like a pet on voice command and came over to greet Archer. She was dressed in a tailored brown pants suit with dark heels, a white blouse, a yellow carnation in her buttonhole, and a splash of yellow in her breast pocket. An earthy-colored cravat was around her throat. She looked like she was just about to step onto a magazine cover for smartly dressed professional women who wanted to take over the world by 1950.