(1969) The Seven Minutes Read Online Free PDF Page A

was the Zelkin pot of hope. And four weeks later, like a vision out of the blue, there was the Osborn pot of gold. And then it was that Barrett had known he had made it, finally made it.
    With surprise, he emerged from his reliving of the recent past, to find that he had automatically turned off Wilshire Boulevard onto San Vicente Boulevard and that he was almost home. On Barring-ton Avenue he headed the convertible toward The Torcello (the owner had never quite forgotten that honeymoon in Italy), the six-story building constructed around a patio and a swimming pool where he had leased a three-room apartment after his first year in Los Angeles.
    Reaching the building, Barrett swung his car into the cavernous opening beside the entrance walk, and drove into the subterranean garage. Getting out of the car, he checked his watch. There was still an hour before his appointment with Abe Zelkin. Plenty of time to shower again, change into a lighter suit, and rehearse what he would tell Zelkin.
    He came around the convertible, bent down and removed the carton heavy with his past, and then jauntily made his way to the
    elevator. It carried him smoothly to the third floor of The Torcello. He went down the corridor, opened his door, deposited the carton in a dark recess of the guest closet, and then went to dial the switchboard.
    The living-room shutters were closed against the sun, and his apartment was cool. The room seemed less his own, and less comfortable, than it used to be, although admittedly it was smarter. This was Faye’s doing. Like so many wealthy women with time on their hands, she carried a decorator’s card. When she had first laid eyes upon his furnished apartment, she had shuddered. The taste these landlords have. What’s the period they’ve done it in? Early San Fernando Valley?’ Soon the landlord’s sloppy, cushiony sofa had been replaced by an expensive reproduction of an austere Chippendale camel-back sofa. Soon, too, the walls had been covered with hemp-cloth, the lighting had become recessed, and a late-Victorian rolltop desk and a French country-style chair of walnut and cane had dominated one corner. After the first beachhead, the invasion of good taste had continued. He had submitted to a glass-and-steel coffee table, too low to have any use whatsoever except as an object upon which to nick his shins and fully awaken him in the morning. Most recently, the telephone had been inconveniently tucked out of sight inside a carved wooden cabinet that had found its way to Decorators’ Row on Robertson Boulevard from the Swiss Village in Paris. On the cabinet stood a lamp and two fragile pieces of Limoges. Whenever he was alone, as he was now, Barrett would reverse the position of the Limoges and the telephone.
    Removing the telephone from the cabinet, Barrett placed the Limoges inside, set the telephone down next to the curved arm of the sofa, and dialed the switchboard operator in the lobby.
    ‘Mike Barrett here. Any calls?’
    ‘Oh, I’m glad you’re back, Mr Barrett. Two longdistance calls, urgent, in the last half hour. They were both from the same party. A Mr Philip Sanford in New York. He wants you to call him the minute you get in. He left his business and home numbers.’
    ‘Let’s see. It’s only twenty after three in New York. Try his office.’
    Rising from the sofa, stripping off his shirt and tossing it aside, he went into the kitchenette for a soft drink. As he prepared it, his mind went to Phil Sanford. There were two things odd about Sanford’s successive calls. He telephoned at long intervals, but when he did, a few times each year, it was always in the evening. Furthermore, the calls were always casual, unhurried, the reaching put of a lonely friend for a reaffirmation of friendship. Poor Sanford got little warmth from his wife and none at all from his tyrannical father. But this morning’s calls apparently had not been social. They had been urgent. And now Barrett wondered