Lay Your Sleeping Head by Michael Nava

Author:Michael Nava [Nava, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Korima Press
Published: 2017-02-23T23:00:00+00:00

I sat in my car in the parking lot at the edge of the Old Quad. Katherine Paris had given up on her son a long time ago. She would be no help. I started my car and without any idea of where I was going, I drove.

“I’d like to see Mr. Gold,” I told the receptionist, a smartly dressed young woman sitting beneath a Rothko at a semi-circular desk with the most elaborate phone console I had ever seen.

She responded with an unsmiling, “Do you have an appointment?”

“Tell him it’s Henry Rios,” I said. “He’ll see me.”

She hesitated, then picked up the phone, pushed a couple of buttons and said, “There’s a gentleman out here who wants to see Mr. Gold.” She listened to the response, glanced at me disapprovingly and replied, “No he doesn’t, but he said Mr. Gold would see him without an appointment. His name is—”

“Henry Rios,” I said.

“Henry Rios,” she repeated.

She waited. I waited. Then she said, “Yes, all right. I’ll tell him.” She hung up, plastered a smile on her face and said, “He’ll be right out.”

In the corner of the room was an enormous globe of the world. I drifted over to it and spun it. Behind me, the receptionist cleared her voice censoriously. So I went to the window and looked at the golden hills behind the red-tiled roofs of the campus. It was one of those bright end-of-summer days when every corner of the world seemed sunlit and all darkness banished.

“Henry.”

I spun around as Gold exited a heavy door in the wood-paneled wall. He was jacketless and wearing suspenders. Under different circumstances, I would have mocked him for that yuppie affectation, but his face was grim. He was not happy to see me.

“Hello, Aaron, got a minute?”

He glanced at the receptionist. “Sure, let’s go downstairs and grab a cup of coffee.” He smiled insincerely at her. “Hold my calls?”

“Of course, Mr. Gold,” she said.

He walked me out of the office and into the elevator. When the door closed, he said, “What are you doing here, Henry?”

I hadn’t seen Gold since the day he had rescued me from the squalor of grief, self-pity and empty booze bottles. I had called him a couple of times but when he hadn’t called back, I let it drop. The truth was, the more convinced I became that Judge Paris was behind Hugh’s death, the more reluctant I was to have anything to do with Gold. Robert Paris was his firm’s client. That drew an adversarial line between Gold and me.

“Good to see you too, Aaron,” I replied. “It’s been a couple of weeks.”

The elevator door slid open. We stepped into a crowded foyer.

“I’ve been busy,” he said curtly.

I followed him out of the building, down the street and around the corner to a coffeehouse I had never noticed before. Inside, it was all hanging Boston ferns and unpainted planks of wood. A chalkboard menu advertised dishes that all seemed to have tofu as their main ingredient.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.