It had been a shitty morning at his downtown office: he’d spent most of it in talks with aggressive publicists, and on top of that the air-conditioning was out. Marty dialled his secretary. ‘Jennifer, can we get this thing fixed? I’m sweating like a goddamn pig in here.’ He replaced the receiver and mopped his brow with a silk polka-dot handkerchief. Marty’s office was an exercise in minimalism—a large white space sliced through with black leather and chrome. Back in the seventies when he had first started up, he had employed a then-little-known Norwegian designer to draw up the plans. It was still, in Marty’s view, the most stylish office in town. Outside the emerald tops of palm trees rustled in the breeze of a pure blue LA sky. It reminded him of a David Hockney painting. Marty took a slug of coffee and it scalded his throat. He felt unbearably hot—and it wasn’t just down to the air-con. It was his client Cole Steel’s arrangement with Lana Falcon: the whole thing was enough to give him a coronary.
