Julian Ashby got out of the driver's side himself. He was sixty-one, tall in a way that had started to bend a little at the top, with close-cut gray hair and reading glasses tucked into the breast pocket of a midnight tuxedo. He did not wait for Teo to open the door for him. He never did.
"Mr. Barrientos," he said. "They've got you on the big night again."
"Every big night, Mr. Ashby. They say I'm the only one who can fit the long cars in the side lot."
"That's because you look at the lines before you look at the car." Ashby handed over the key fob, a heavy, smooth thing that felt like a river stone. "You still drawing?"
Teo felt his face go warm. "A little. On my phone. There's an app."
"An app." Ashby shook his head, mock-grave. "Paper, son. The hand remembers what the screen forgets. I'll bring you a sketchbook next time. My daughter tells me I hand out sketchbooks the way other old men hand out peppermints."
"How is she? Your daughter?"
The architect's face changed then, opened up in a way Teo had not seen before. "Thirty-seven weeks. Due on the twenty-fifth. My wife's with her tonight, so I'm here alone, giving a toast to people who'd rather be talking about themselves." He lifted his hands. "First grandchild. A girl. I've already designed her a bookshelf. Twice."
"Congratulations."
"Not yet. Congratulate me on the twenty-fifth." He nodded toward the doors. "Wish me luck in there. I've got to say nice things about a building I love to a room with at least one man in it who wanted to put a twenty-eight-story glass box on top of it."
He went in. Teo took the Maybach around to the side lot, a narrow strip of reserved spaces behind a wrought-iron fence along the east wall of the hotel, where the Marlowe put the cars it did not want sitting out on the street. He backed it into the first row, the spot nearest the gate, where the floodlight from the service entrance fell across the hood. He sat for a moment in the quiet of the cabin, which smelled of leather and something faintly like cedar, and looked at his own hands on the wheel.