Perri O'Shaughnessy - Keeper of the Keys

She called again. “Where are you?” she asked Jacki’s voicemail. She didn’t like the plaintive tone of her voice but out it came. “Jacki, I need you to call me right away.”

Where could she be? Jacki always kept her cell phone one inch from her ear. Kat called Raoul’s cell phone, but he didn’t answer. Then she called Raoul at UCLA.

Raoul’s assistant answered. “Can I help you?” asked a calm voice.

“I need to speak with Raoul urgently. It’s his sister-in-law, Kat,” she added, just in case he had what Kat’s boss called a jiggle list, a list where some people got through and some remained forever banned from access. Family generally made the cut, although not always. Everyone had an uncle Gerald, someone you never, ever wanted to speak with.

“Raoul’s out,” the voice said automatically. Then, “You’re his wife’s sister?”

Under the circumstances, the frightening change of the voice on the other end of the phone from calm to solicitous, made Kat want to waffle. “Yes,” she finally admitted.

“She’s at the UCLA Medical Center.”

“She’s having her baby?”

“I don’t know about that. They took her in an ambulance.”

Ambulance? Weren’t those big white vehicles repositories of urgently sick people who might not make it? Didn’t they screech up the street, awakening babies and dogs and making people grind their teeth? “Why?”

“I’m afraid there’s been an accident. She got hit by a car.”

A tap, tap, tap at his office door interrupted Ray. He had rolled in about three-thirty in the afternoon, entirely missing the Antoniou deadline, missing the meeting.

“Come in.”

“Here at last. Praise God,” said Denise. “However.”

“Hi, Denise.” The good news was, she was still willing to talk to him.

She stepped inside the door to his office carefully.

“I want to tell you things can’t go on this way.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean we need you here. We need a leader.”

“Where’s Martin?”

“He came in for the meeting. When you didn’t show up, he sent Antoniou away and left. He didn’t even talk to Suzanne. I think he’s feeling scared, just like we all are. What’s going on? You’re never here anymore.”

Ray shifted in his chair. “I’m sorry.”

Denise sat down hard on a bench under the window. The light picked up a brash red in her dark hair. “Ray, I’m thinking of quitting.”

“Don’t do that.”

“We’re all frightened. Wondering. About Leigh. I’m worried about you every minute. I don’t want to leave you, but…”

Ray said, “What’s that got to do with Antoniou?” But it was obvious. His personal problems were wrecking the firm. “Look,” he said to that unwavering stare. “Don’t quit. I need you. This will all blow over soon. I’ll get Antoniou to sign on. I promise. Don’t worry about it. We put you in a tough position.” She relaxed slightly at this. “This temporary situation isn’t going to change anything. The firm is top priority for both Martin and me.”

“We need this commission,” Denise said. “But-”

“What?”

“When Antoniou got here and looked at the plans, I definitely got the impression he’s unhappy.”

“What doesn’t he like?”

“The design?” And this was accompanied by a look almost of pity. He doesn’t like my design, Ray thought, the incredible modernist manse that would jut like a ship’s prow off the bluff, the glass, the movable walls, the copper cladding, all the great ideas Ray had painstakingly culled and synthesized. Antoniou had nodded and nodded and nodded again as Ray described his vision. The son of a bitch-with a sinking feeling, Ray thought, I don’t have the energy to start all over on this thing.

Thinking aloud, he said, “I just have to sell him on it. What time is it?”

“Almost four. Uh, but…”

“Yes?” He waited.

She gulped. “Please, Ray. Maybe you should see a doctor. You don’t look good. You’re all banged up and your eyes look all starey.”

Martin arrived a few minutes later from his daily visit to the trattoria’s wine bar, bleary-eyed. “Thanks to your no-show, Antoniou is hedging. When you didn’t make the meeting, he refused to sign off on the preliminary design fee. He refused to write a check. You insulted him, Ray. Nice going.”

“I’m surprised you couldn’t handle him without me, Martin. You’re the persuader. That’s your job. You didn’t need me.”

“It was you he wanted to talk to. Because he-can’t-stand-your-design.”

“I’ll make it up to him.”

“Good. Because he wants you to meet him on his boat this evening. He has a yacht he keeps at Newport Harbor, right off Balboa Island. Near a place called Blackie’s.”

“Oh, no,” Ray said, wondering how he could ever do this.

Martin consulted his watch. “You can just make it by six. He needs to show you he’s the boss, make you meet him on his territory. He’s difficult, Ray.”

“I’ll grab the drawings and get going.”

Denise said, “I have some old Dramamine pills. Let me get them for you.”

“I have a baseball cap in my office,” Martin said.

“I have a Windbreaker,” Denise offered.

He packed up the portfolio with Denise’s drawings. Glancing at the calendar, he saw that it had been six days since that last fight with Leigh, and four days since he had punched Martin.

But all this disarray had been decades in the making, starting with his mother’s journeys. He was quite sure of that, but he couldn’t say why.

Antoniou awaited him at one of the Newport Harbor docks, wearing a captain’s hat that covered his bald pate and probably made his kids giggle. In his sixties, he had blinding white teeth under a gray mustache and a handshake that would make a weaker man cry. Ray made sure not to grimace. The bright summer evening was windless, the sea calm.

The client didn’t seem angry, about to pull the job. He put his arm around Ray, gesturing and talking about the harbor and the fish catch.

They walked a long way up the dock, passing dozens of boats, small, large, metal, multi- and single-hulled. While Antoniou talked about a race around the world won by a giant catamaran in sixty-two days, Ray steamed.

Martin was the schmoozer. Martin went out with clients to odd ethnic food places, sailed on their crummy boats, danced with the wives or cracked jokes with the husbands. Ray shouldn’t have to do this stuff. He was the artist.

Near the end of the dock, they stopped at one of the largest boats Ray had ever seen. White-painted double hulls lifted huge decks and a central saloon. Aisles along each side led to a wide wooden deck, where a green nylon net drape hung over the water.

“That’s the place to be when we get going,” Antoniou said, pointing forward. “It stays cool. Meanwhile, what can I get you to drink?” He led Ray into the cabin, which held leather plush seating in a luxurious booth arrangement, a stainless-steel long bar on one side, and a chef banging away behind it.

Antoniou saw Ray looking and smiled and rubbed the tips of the fingers of his right hand together. Yeah, I have plenty, the fingers boasted.

They set off, motoring slowly out of the harbor toward the open sea. Apparently, such large catamarans could have motors and did not necessarily teeter on one hull. Antoniou assured him that it had a high stability quotient, that he wanted a boat where he could play with the kids and not worry that one of them might take an unexpected plunge. “Someday I’ll go for one that’s suitable for racing. Maybe when the grandkids are teenagers, and all this starts to look stodgy.”

The crew, at least two additional people, took care of the work. One steered, another scurried around doing whatever needed doing, including serving a platter of shrimp in cocktail sauce, crab cakes, and crunchy bits of toast. He left Antoniou and Ray the heavy task of popping a champagne bottle.