The Private Concierge. Suzanne Forster

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СКАЧАТЬ had it that the King of Rumors was agoraphobic. Seth Black of Gotcha.com had been outed as housebound by rival gossip Web sites. That’s what had given Rick the idea of staking out the man’s surprisingly modest apartment in the Hollywood Hills area. Either online gossip didn’t pay well—which wasn’t likely since the gossip sites were now scooping the mainstream media and forcing the big guys to go to them for entertainment news—or Black was a frugal man. Possibly he was too housebound to relocate. Regardless, he’d broken Ned’s murder-suicide story hours before the mainstream press had, and Rick was curious how the thirty-two-year-old agoraphobic got his information.

      Rick bowed his head for a moment and dug his fingers into the aching muscles of his temples. He could feel the fatigue of his nonstop day. He’d been parked down the street from Black’s place for going on two hours, but so far he’d seen no one except a telephone repairman, who got no answer when he knocked on the door of Black’s ground-floor apartment. Rick had tried Black’s number before he drove over, but the phone went right to voice mail. He was beginning to wonder if Black was home, and if this surveillance idea was a good one.

      That morning, after Rick had the epiphany about Lane Chandler, he’d tracked down the address of Jenny Shu, Ned’s housekeeper, and he’d gone over to pay her a visit. It didn’t surprise Rick to find Jenny upset, but he hadn’t expected a complete collapse. She’d been with Ned for years and Rick knew her well, so of course, he’d knelt down to hug the tiny Asian woman, and of course, they’d cried. Her sobs had ripped right through him, and Rick, who had been stoic until now, broke. Grief had washed through him until he shook, and Jenny had tried her best to comfort him. Maybe it was as simple as seeing someone else who knew and loved Ned.

      Rick was sure his meeting with Jenny was a large part of what had exhausted him so completely. When they’d regained their composure, she’d patted his face and told him how sorry she was. She invited him in for tea, but he’d known he couldn’t take her up on that. Reminiscing about Ned would have killed him. The pain she’d already touched into had almost killed him. He did manage to ask her about the package, but she’d seen nothing that matched his description, and he was satisfied with that. He couldn’t ask her about what she’d witnessed when she arrived at the scene. Neither one of them could have handled that conversation. Maybe another time. Maybe.

      After that, Rick had gone home to eat and get some rest. Good intentions, but somehow he’d found himself at the computer for another look at Seth Black’s site. That’s where he’d discovered that Black, with the help of Jack the Giant Killer, was routinely scooping not only the mainstream press, but all the other online sites, and that Black had been the first one to break the news on virtually every TPC client. From there Rick had gone to see Mimi, knowing in the back of his mind that a meeting with Black was inevitable.

      Rick figured Black relied on the local paparazzi for pictures and salacious tidbits, but he had to be getting the more personal details from an inside source. A family member, friend or employee were the obvious ways, but given the nature of a concierge service, it only made sense that considerable client information was stored away somewhere, which had Rick wondering if TPC had a mole, someone intent on extortion as Ned’s card had suggested. If clients confided in their private concierges the way they did in their hairstylists, there should be plenty of blackmail material to go around.

      Still, drug busts? Child porn? That wasn’t info you confided to anyone.

      TPC had branch offices in San Francisco and Las Vegas, and according to the Web site they would soon be expanding across the country, but Rick was only interested in their corporate offices here in L.A. He’d found an employee tree with the names of some of the company’s key players, but rather than run a background check on each of them, which would probably yield nothing, he’d decided to stake out Black’s place to see who showed up. Even if the inside source wasn’t a TPC employee, he was curious, especially about the mysterious Giant Killer. And Rick was betting that some of the really juicy stuff was hand-carried to Black since everyone knew that e-mail was no longer secure for anyone, including the country’s chief executive.

      Rick took a swig from a can of Coke that had gone flat. His last serious attempt at eating had been the Chinese takeout that morning, and he hadn’t thought to bring any food with him. Maybe that’s why he was perspiring and dizzy. It was warm outside, and hotter in the car.

      He patted the front pocket of his jeans and realized he’d left something behind this morning, a bottle of prescription pills. They were probably sitting on the nightstand at his place. He forgot them half the time anyway, and when he did take them, he felt like shit, worse than before. He ought to flush them down the fricking toilet, but he couldn’t. He was dead without them. Well, dead sooner.

      He shook off the morbid thought and focused on Black’s place. There were still no signs of life, so to speak, but Rick had planned for that. He’d brought a five-by-seven envelope, addressed to Black, in case he needed a reason to go to the door himself.

      He grabbed it and let himself out of the car.

      Whoa, something was wrong. The cracks in the sidewalk appeared to slide back and forth as he approached the four-story apartment building, causing him to weave like a drunk. He stopped to get his bearings, and as he glanced up, he saw the mail slot open on Black’s door. Someone was peeking through it from the other side, Rick realized. The slot was nearly at eye level and large enough to get a glimpse of a man’s face.

      Rick rushed over to the stoop. “Mr. Black! Seth! I need to talk to you. It’s urgent.” The slot banged shut and Rick heard the scrape of a sliding bolt, which meant there must be some way to lock it. He pounded on the door, hoping if he made enough noise Black would be forced to answer. He might not want his neighbors calling the cops, especially if he was trying to keep his work location a secret. There were also zoning laws.

      Finally, the slot popped open and a gun barrel poked through. “Shut up, you fucking loony, or I’ll shoot you!” Black hissed.

      Interesting approach, Rick thought, moving out of Black’s line of fire, which was severely limited, as was his intelligence, apparently. Rick decided to appeal directly to the man’s entrepreneurial instincts, otherwise known as greed.

      “I’m willing to pay for information,” Rick said. “Any price you want.”

      “Yeah?” The gun barrel disappeared, replaced by eyes as black and beady as the suicidal mouse who’d taken over Rick’s kitchen. “What kind of information?”

      “Are you Seth Black? Can I see proof?”

      “You aren’t seeing anything until I know who you are and what you want.”

      Rick slipped a fake business card through the slot. It identified him as an IRS agent. There was a cell-phone number and an e-mail address, both of which were accounts in the fake name on the card.

      “What do you want to know?” Black asked after he’d looked at the card.

      “I want whatever information you can get me on a Century City company called The Private Concierge, and I’m particularly interested in its president, Lane Chandler.”

      “Is she in some kind of tax trouble?”

      “I want to know about Lane Chandler’s dark side and what’s really going on in that concierge service. You call me with that kind of information, and I’ll tell you what kind of trouble she’s in. Share and share alike.”

      “You’re crazy, man,” Black grumbled.

      “Maybe,” Rick said, “but I pay well.” He drew a hundred-dollar bill from the envelope СКАЧАТЬ