Double Tap

CHAPTER ONE

It was a little after five on a Friday afternoon and the traffic on Prospect was already bumpered up like a train wreck: the start of your average fall weekend in La Jolla.

The pathfinders-those who left the office early-and a few day-trippers were already out in strength, reconnoitering the boutiques’ so that by Saturday morning the Village would be under full siege.

Male heads turned like an orchard of radar dishes homing in on the growl of the Enzo’s V-12 overhead cam engine as Madelyn Chapman cruised by. The sleek red Ferrari was an item of curiosity even here in this parish of plenty. At slow speeds it purred like a panther on the prowl.

Usually chained to her desk until late into the evening, this afternoon she left the office before five to run an errand. She was anxious to complete it and get home before the out-of-towners froze the roads in gridlock.

Madelyn’s eyes scanned for a parking space. She wasn’t about to start circling the block. Nor was she going to leave the new car in a public garage where some bozo could carve obscenities into the paint job as a manifesto against affluence.

Instead she steered the racy red sports car into a vacant white-curbed space in front of La Valencia, one of the trendy boutique hotels on the main drag. The sign out front read: Valet Only. Behind it stood the hotel’s pink-flamingo walls and the Spanish-tile-covered portico leading to the garden entrance.

Two young men in white dress shirts and dark slacks stood near the entrance looking at the Ferrari. They were probably wondering which of them would get to play Mario Andretti in the tight garage under the hotel. One of them grabbed the initiative and sprinted to the driver’s door, opening it before Chapman had a chance to unbuckle her seat belt.

“Welcome to the La Valenc-Oh, Ms. Chapman. Didn’t recognize you.”

“Jimmy.”

Madelyn made a practice of pouncing on the valet spaces whenever the Village was busy. Never one for walking half a mile in heels, she treated the hotel as if she had a lifetime lease on valet space out front.

“Nice wheels!” The kid was taking it all in. He noticed the paper license plate taped to the rear window. “I take it you just picked it up from the dealer.”

“Actually they delivered it yesterday.”

He glanced at the silver stallion, Ferrari’s trademark, on the hood. “What do they call it? The model, I mean.”

“It’s called the Enzo,” said Madelyn. “After the company’s founder. The salesman’s pitch was that the car has the spirit of Enzo Ferrari.”

The car was one of a limited edition with the pedigree of a formula racer, the toy of oil sheiks and a few Hollywood stars who could balance California’s state budget with one of their movies. Its price hovered in the range of the national debt.

Stepping out of the low-slung racer in a tight skirt and heels was like doing the limbo. Still, Madelyn managed it with agility and grace. At forty-three she looked ten years younger, with a body that didn’t destroy the illusion, something she worked hard to keep. Young men still looked at her with a gleam in their eyes.

She fished some green from her purse as the kid watched and then took one of his hands in both of hers.

“Now, Jimmy, I want you to keep the car here at the curb. Understand?”

“Well, I don’t know. My manager. .” He felt the tickle of the papers’ edges as she moved the crisp folded currency against his open palm.

When she let go of his hand, the valet looked down and spotted Franklin’s portrait, not once, but twice. He smiled and came to commercial attention. “Thank you, Ms. Chapman.”

“And my car?”

“Stays at the curb,” said the kid.

“Good.” She offered a confident smile. It had become a common expression for Madelyn, who over the last decade had grown accustomed to getting her way.

“Do you have any idea how long you’ll be?” he asked.

She looked at the money still in his hand.

“Not that it matters,” he added.

“I don’t know. Twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.”

“No problem.”

He gently closed the driver’s-side door. She started moving toward the sidewalk, her arm on his shoulder. “And if your manager comes out and tells you to move it, what are you going to say?”

“I’m going to tell him a hot car in front of the hotel on a Friday night is good advertising. I’ll tell him it’s one of a kind.”

“What else?”

The kid looked at her, fresh out of ideas.

“You tell him the car belongs to me, that I kept the keys”-she dropped them in her purse-“and that if he even thinks of having it towed, I’ll buy the hotel before morning and fire his ass.”

The kid smiled at the thought. “Yes, ma’am!”

She wasn’t about to turn over a $700,000 sports car so that two valets could flip a coin to see which of them got to do wheelies around concrete pilings in the basement.

She started to turn to go, then turned back. “And, Jimmy, I don’t want any dings or dents or dimples in the doors or anywhere else when I get back.”

He was already shaking his head.

She smiled. “The only dimples allowed here are yours.” The kid blushed again, then looked up at his colleague, who was already beginning to show signs of a sneering smile.

Jimmy pushed the money into his pocket.

She mouthed the words watch the car as she blew him a kiss and walked away, passing under the Whaling Bar and Grill sign on the pink awning overhead.

The other valet broke into a full smile and started laughing under his breath until finally she was out of earshot. “Hey, Jimmy, come over here. Lemme do your dimples.”

“Yeah, right. Kiss my ass.”

The other kid puckered up his lips and puffed a few kisses at him, blowing them off the palm of one hand before offering up a donkey laugh.

“You know what you can do with that,” said Jimmy.

“Maybe if you got dimples back there, she’ll do those for you, too,” said his friend.

Jimmy didn’t say anything. He just smiled, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the two crisp bills she’d just given him. He held them up high, stretched between the fingers of both hands, shifting them back and forth so that the other kid’s smile faded.

“She gave you two hundred bucks?”

“No shit,” said Jimmy. And it wasn’t even dark yet. Friday night in La Jolla.

Madelyn walked under brightly colored awnings past shimmering display windows with their exotic wares. She couldn’t help but smile to herself. Two hundred dollars for a few minutes of parking. Twenty years ago that would have been half a week’s salary. She had come a long way, so far and so fast that at times she couldn’t remember all of the critical way-points in her career or, for that matter, some of the people who had offered directions. Looking back was not something Madelyn was good at. It took all of her vision, energy, and focus just to keep moving forward.

Several of the shop owners looked up and took notice as she passed. Chapman’s face had become high-profile, a celebrity of sorts among the regulars in the Village, especially those in the commercial community. Her name and picture had been in the business and society sections of the local papers and magazines on a regular basis for at least four years now. Her company, Isotenics, Inc., of which Chapman was CEO and chairman of the board, had gone public less than a year after she moved it from Virginia to California. Madelyn held a block of shares that gave her the controlling interest. This was the cornerstone of her empire, though she had diversified into real estate and other investments.

She owned a total of six houses in different states, including a horse property in Virginia, a condo in Alexandria near the Pentagon, and a town house in New York. But La Jolla was home.

Eight years ago she had decided that her company would lease land out by the university, near one of the technology parks that sprouted during the euphoric days of the dot-com binge. It was a time when the words high tech were all you needed on a business card for banks to lavish loans and investors to queue up and buy your stock.

When the storm came, most of her competitors went down like paper boats in a typhoon, but not Chapman. Madelyn had taken her company into the safe harbor of government contracts. As with her taste in clothing and cars, Madelyn’s sense of timing was flawless. In a time of terrorism, her computer programs had been tailored to the needs of national security.

Her company was now one of the largest employers in the state, with its stock still on an upward arc. The value had tripled in the last year alone. It is said that timing is nature’s way of telling us we are in rhythm with the seasons. If so, Madelyn Chapman was in sync not only with the moon but with the planets, the stars, and even the black holes in the dark and distant vacuum of space.

In an age when information was everything, Chapman’s company possessed the keys to the defense-software kingdom. She controlled Primis.

Two blocks down, Madelyn reached her destination. She stopped in front of the gallery’s main window to study a few of the new pieces on display. Like liquid crystal, the glass flowed in every form imaginable. Translucent colors fused with brilliance in all the hues in the visible light spectrum. There were large, cavernous oyster shells of glimmering violet and swirling amber, and tubular tulip blossoms in shades of purple running to blue and green, free-form glass in shapes that could only be matched by the rich variations of nature. Some of the labels carried names of artists now familiar to her, while others were still earning their spurs.

It had been several weeks since her last visit to the gallery. The owner, a man named Ibram Asani, had been making inquiries on her behalf. He had become her agent of sorts in Madelyn’s latest addiction, the acquisition of fine art glass. She had developed a collector’s eye, and Asani was helping her to refine it.

Iranian by birth, having immigrated with his family to the United States when the Shah fell in the seventies, he had arrived in this country with nothing. He now owned his own gallery in one of the most exclusive shopping locations in Southern California.

As Madelyn walked through the door, a mellow electronic tone announced her entrance, and Ibram turned to look.

Asani’s eyes lit up. He put his hands together as if in prayer to the deity whose authority was over all things mercantile. “Ah, my good friend, Ms. Chapman. So good to see you. I assume you received my message.”

“Indeed I did.”

“One moment. I will be right with you.” Asani turned toward two women who were examining a smaller object under glass in one of the cases.

A shop owner who missed his calling in diplomacy, he excused himself and left the women to peruse on their own as he walked briskly toward Madelyn and the scent of money.

“Ms. Chapman, how are you?”

“Fine, Ibram. And you?”

He wrinkled up his face, an expression somewhere between the Middle East and Europe. “No complaints. Business has been good.”

“My secretary told me that you called. Something about a new piece by Yadl Heulich?”

“Shh.” He held his finger to his lips, and looked toward the two women, neither of whom paid any attention. “Yes, it came in yesterday. A truly unique piece. It is one of his early private commissions.” Asani cupped one hand to his lips and leaned in to her ear. “It is from an estate.” The way he said it-in a whisper-made it sound as if he had stolen the item in question. “I don’t think they knew the value.” He smiled and shrugged. “At least, the executor did not.” Something that Asani would no doubt quickly rectify. “A friend alerted me and I was able to purchase it. I want you to understand, there is no obligation. I did not intend to purchase it on commission.”

“I understand.”

“I would have bought it for the gallery even if I did not think you would be interested.”

“Can I see it?”

“Of course. It is incredible.”

He went to the phone on the counter and used the intercom to call to the storage area at the back of the gallery. A few moments later Asani’s son pushed a small cart through the doorway and into the gallery’s main room as his father stepped around a display case and quickly walked over to provide direction. The cart was specially designed, its top recessed like a deep bowl with deep foam rubber lining the sides so that the object on it was cradled and cushioned like an embryo in a womb.

As they reached the counter, Asani, with a quick, efficient motion, whipped a rubber pad from a shelf under the cart and laid it out on the counter. He shooed the boy away and alone he lifted the shimmering blue sphere from its foam cradle and placed it carefully on the rubber pad.

Madelyn looked at it, moving closer. She had never seen anything like it in her life. Her gaze was fixed on the glass as it glittered in the light. As she moved, the glass took on subtle changes of texture and color. Its form was a near-perfect sphere, its gossamer swirls of blue and white suffusing with light, turning to brilliant indigo just inside the surface of the orb as you looked at it straight on. In their purest form the colors reminded Madelyn of photos taken by astronauts that captured the curvature of the earth from space at dawn.

Asani looked at Madelyn, who appeared to be in a trance as she studied the object. The shop owner smiled, wondering whether his calculator possessed enough digits to cipher the sale and its consequent tax.

Madelyn came to, just long enough to ask a question: “Does it have a name?”

“Ahh, yes. The original owner, the man who commissioned it-he and the artist agreed that it would be called Orb at the Edge.”

He escorted her to the inner sanctum at the rear of the gallery, a small office where he opened negotiations for the purchase. After haggling over the price for several minutes, Asani tried to excuse himself from the room for a moment. A call of nature, he told her. Madelyn looked at her watch and told him she was late for an appointment and would have to leave. While she had a dinner engagement at eight, there was nothing pressing, neither was she left behind the door when the brains were dispensed. If Asani left the room at that point, her offer would be withdrawn and she would walk. Madelyn had no intention of getting into a bidding war via long distance with some acquisitions director for a museum her company was probably sustaining through its program of corporate contribution to the arts.

Finally they agreed on a price and Madelyn cut a check. Asani wanted to deliver it personally the next day, but Madelyn would have none of it. The shop owner and his son went to work packaging the piece.

Madelyn was much more content with the boxed blue sphere on the seat next to her as she maneuvered through traffic. It occupied her attention sufficiently that she missed the change when the traffic light went green. The driver in the car behind her tapped his horn. She could see him gesticulating in her rearview mirror: Rich bitch in the Formula One can’t drive.

“Relax.” Madelyn looked at him through narrow little slits from behind her dark glasses. “Keep your shirt on.” She touched the gas with her foot and the Ferrari inched forward, slowly gaining speed. For the first time since getting the car, she regretted not having automatic transmission. That way she would have had one hand free to protect the box if it lurched forward at a stop. Instead she kept one eye on the cardboard container, the other on the road, her right hand alternating between the shift lever and the box on the seat next to her.

The sleek racer never got past thirty or out of second gear. Finally she turned into her driveway and pressed the button on the remote. The double iron gates began to swing open.

A few seconds later she was in the garage, the overhead door closed behind her. She left the briefcase with her laptop along with a stack of important mail from the office in the car. Then, with the strap of her purse over one shoulder, she wrestled the large box through the passenger-side door. She slammed the door closed with one hip to get it out of the way and caught the strap of her purse in the crook of her arm as it slid off her shoulder. In four-inch heels she maneuvered around the Ferrari. The box containing Orb at the Edge wasn’t as heavy as it was awkward, too big for her to get her arms around. Another woman might have waited for help, but not Madelyn. Ever since she was a kid she resented women who employed their feminine wiles to get some man to do what they should be able to do for themselves. Given the tools and a book of directions, she would be as good at repairing cars as she was at crafting software.

She made it to a small potting table at the end of the garage near the door to the backyard. She carefully set the box on the table, then slid the purse off her shoulder, dropping it on the floor. She hiked the waistband of her skirt up a couple of inches. It had slipped down as she was grappling with the box.

Madelyn was puffing a bit, studying the door leading to the kitchen twenty feet away. She looked around for something she could use.

Six minutes later she stood in the kitchen, in the middle of a small sea of litter, packing tape, and bubble wrap strewn across the floor and over the countertop. A smile formed on her lips, the joy of owning such beauty, as she took in the Orb at the Edge. Gingerly she picked it up and walked through the kitchen and down the hall. Madelyn made her way to the large oval ebony table in the entryway. The moment she had seen the piece in Asani’s gallery, she had known where she wanted to put it. It would be the first thing anyone saw when entering the grand hall.

She set it in the center of the table, shimmering glass over the gloss of ebony. She looked at it, then stepped back a few feet to gain perspective. As she moved backward her heel caught on something. She nearly tripped. Recovering just enough to catch herself, she turned and looked down.

Who the hell would leave a pair of running shoes lying on the floor in her entry hall? They weren’t hers. They were too big. The maid, she thought. What was she going to have to do to find good help?

Before she could utter a word in anger, her attention was drawn back to the glass sphere on the table by a beam of reflected light. The Orb was now emitting a streak of red from the cobalt blue. The color was so intense as it left the glass and entered her eyes that the pain was severe. She closed her eyes, turned her head, and brought one hand up toward her face.

Before the neural path into her brain could be traversed, the kinetic force translated into the violent snap of her neck. Her raised arm dropped, propelled downward by forces greater than gravity as the discharge of energy exploded through her head to her hand. Instantly the pain in the optic nerve vanished, replaced by a brief burning sensation in one finger, and then nothing. Her head dropped onto one shoulder, a quizzical expression on her face. The second impact buckled her knees and Madelyn’s body flooded to the floor like a boneless sack of flesh.