Follow Her Home (13 page)

Stokel, Levinson & Cook occupied six floors of the Gas Company Tower at 555 West Fifth. The soaring building came into view from miles away, its mercury windows reflecting blue skies. The tower was shaped like a lighter by design. Even in the shadow of the US Bank building it stood massive and alluring, gleaming with promise.
Find a big enough thumb, and I'll light the world on fire
.

Luke drove with one hand on the wheel, the other lying useless in his lap. “Are you okay?”

I scratched my head. “I'm rattled. But I've been rattled. I want to get to the bottom of this and nail that bastard. It won't help if I let him cow me even more.”

“Sometimes, Song, you cow me.”

We slipped into the underground parking structure on Olive and circled the garage to the reserved spaces. Mr. Cook's spot was beautifully empty, and Luke pulled into it with liquid grace.

“So what're we doing?”

“Well.” I pounded my fists in a light drumroll on my thighs. “Okay, we're going to Miller's office.”

“I don't know where that is.”

“That's okay. We know where Diego's office is, yeah? He should have a roster. They print one every month. Don't you remember?”

“I forget that you worked there sometimes.”

“We were cubicle neighbors for three months.”

“Right. So what's the plan?”

When Marlowe was stumped, he followed leads—the stray address, the stranger to question—and the leads would generate more leads until he had answers he could hold in his fist.

“We hit up Miller's office. Search his desk. Search his computer.”

“What are we looking for exactly?”

Even Marlowe didn't always know what he was looking for, so I hoped for the best. I shrugged. “You know, clues.”

“Will they have bright blue paw prints on them?”

“Well, we don't know what they'll look like, so anything that might help. E-mail access would be nice.”

“Too bad we have all the hacker knowledge of a couple of cheese rolls.”

“Doesn't your crowned-prince status get us anything?”

He shrugged. “It'll get us in the office.”

We made our way to the elevators and rode up to the lobby. It was as gratuitously grand as I remembered it, three stories of sparkling aluminum, glass, and stone, with a water garden on display, stout fountains gurgling onto marbled tile. The wall clock read 4:18.

A middle-aged security guard noticed our entry. She was small and unimposing, not much more than a head and shoulders above the check-in desk. She wore burgundy lipstick and a tired smile that peeled at the edges. I nudged Luke with the boniest part of my shoulder. “Do your thing, crowned prince.”

He nodded and I loitered near the elevators. Luke talked to the guard in large gestures. His moving figure blocked her from view, but within a minute, he was walking back to me with two visitor badges. Both of them were printed with his face.

“I am not this ugly.”

“It's just to get us through the sensors. You don't even have to wear it.”

I slipped the sticker into my bag and we passed through to the elevators. I pushed the button for the forty-fourth floor, and it lit up in a ring of vermillion. Our journey was short and noiseless. The doors rolled open and we stepped onto close-mown taupe carpet. Luke led the way through frosted-glass doors to a row of numbered offices. Under the numbers hung name plaques in engraved silver. We tried not to look suspicious, and had the good luck to avoid any weekend litigators. Diego's office was at the western end of the row. We let ourselves in, relieved that the heavy wood doors lacked locks.

I plopped down into Diego's chair, which was less welcoming than it looked. His dark wood desk held nothing but a fat computer and two framed photographs. One showed him and Jackie on their wedding day, faces near goofy with happiness. The other was of us at our graduation—Luke with one arm around me and the other around Diego, the three of us linked in one long smile.

I picked it up and turned it for Luke to see. “Remember when we were twenty-one?”

“Ha, yeah.” He took the frame and peered into it. “Not that anything's changed, really.” His tone was weary, and I took in the serious expression on his face. Luke often joked about his financial dependence on his father, how it made him a child and kept him from acting his age. I decided it was best not to explore this mood.

“Well, not for us. And not until a couple days ago.” I opened the top drawer of Diego's desk. “Holy shit.”

“What?”

I picked up a waxy square of paper, holding it gently. On it was a black-ink fan interrupted with splotches of white.

Luke walked behind me and looked down over my shoulder. “That's not,” he stuttered, “that's an ultrasound, isn't it?”

“Motherfucker.” My voice came out in a whisper. “Did you know?”

“No. I guess you didn't either.”

I bent my neck to see if I could make out anything human. “I can't believe he didn't call us when it happened.”

“He's probably waiting to tell us in person.”

I laughed. “Oh, of course. That was his important news. I can see why he didn't want to announce it today, bad luck and all. I have to say, though, that if I were thinking clearly, I would've guessed that. He's pretty transparent.”

“I wonder how long it's been.”

“Probably not long. Do you see so much as a bean's worth of human in here?”

Luke brought his face to the ultrasound and shook his head. “I'm sure it's cute, anyway.”

“Should we call him?” asked Luke.

“No. Diego already dislikes what I'm doing. I don't think he'll be happy to know that I went searching around in his business. And anyway, we're not here to snoop through Diego's life.”

I rifled through the drawer and found a pink stapled pamphlet with
STOKEL, LEVINSON
&
COOK—JULY
printed in block lettering on the cover. I flipped through the pages and found Gregory Miller listed under “Los Angeles Attorneys.”

“He's on the forty-sixth floor.” I extended a hand and Luke grabbed it and pulled me up.

“Let's do it.”

We left Diego's office and took the elevator up two stories to an identical floor. We went through another set of frosted-glass doors and rounded the office, looking for Gregory Miller's nameplate. All the doors were closed, and halfway around the floor we found it. I touched the engraved name. The etched letters were cold. “R.I.P., Greg.”

Luke opened the door. “Spooky.” He turned on the light.

The office faced Fifth Street through a wide window that let in the thickening blue of the evening sky. I followed Luke inside. Miller's desk faced the door, which shared a wall with a large Matisse print hung in a simple black frame. His desk was cluttered silly with papers, pens, paperweights.

“Well.” I gave my knuckles a good crack. They burst in sequence like bubble wrap. “Let's rummage.”

I settled into Miller's chair, a leather recliner with a healthy spring to its back, and turned on the computer. “It would appear that we need a password.”

Luke came around and stood behind me. “Shucks. Try ‘password.'” I tried it, along with a couple iterations of Greg's name with Lori's.

“Couldn't he have left it on a Post-it on his monitor?” I pouted. “We'll need a hacker friend if we plan on doing this again. In any case, plan B.” I pulled out every drawer of his desk in succession with exaggerated force and let them bounce back loudly on their rollers.

I tugged with a little less force at the top drawer so that it gaped open, revealing its contents with easy candor. It held an assortment of odds and ends, office supplies, a few folders, some loose paper. I removed everything but pens and paper clips and laid it on the desk. I then closed the top drawer and did the same with the middle drawer. More folders, more documents. The bottom drawer was the deepest, and it held folders in shades of manila, swamp green, and clay, hanging on to its sides by plastic tabs. Some were empty, some fat and sagging. I loosed the tabs and stacked the folders on the desk in sloppy piles.

Luke whistled.

Marlowe never seemed to wade through piles of paper, but that was a different day, before paper trails were long enough to trap every kind of sin. When he found a clue, it was clear and isolated—a name or phone number would stick out like a palm tree in an ocean—and all he would have to do was snatch it and move on. This was a law office in the twenty-first century, a place where records were kept with artisanal precision. We were looking at one office in one building, but it was filled with thousands and thousands of words, numbers, and objects. “We're looking for anything.”

“Clues.”

“Right. This should be mostly legal documents and whatever.” I grabbed a stack of folders and pulled it onto my lap. “I guess just take some of this and cull through it for anything that could help.”

Luke sat in one of the chairs on the opposite side of the desk, a plush affair in aged, oaky reddish leather with a resilient rounded seat. He reached for a stack near the edge of the desk and picked it up in a noisy flutter. “Yes, ma'am.”

I sifted through the first pile, discarding what I'd viewed into the bottom drawer as I went along. I heard riffles and thuds coming from Luke's side as he thumbed through pages and dropped the occasional stack onto the carpet.

“I think this is roughly what Diego calls ‘doc review.'”

“Yeah.” I sighed. “It kind of sucks. Have you found anything?”

“Couple phone numbers. Take-out menus.”

“Better than me. I got zip.”

“I think I got the top drawer. You're stuck with all that legal jazz.”

“Yeah.” I stretched out my arms and got back to doc review.

My fourth pile of nondescript folders waned in my lap. The bottom folder was the fattest yet, and I groaned and gave it a violent glissando flip.

The bottom half of the papers refused to rise with the top, falling back to the folder after a brief start upward. I felt my heart rate pick up speed like a runner hitting his stride. I ran my fingers through the pages and found where the stack had stuck. Wedged between two stapled packets was a thin gray flash drive on a silver key ring. I picked it up with care and looked for a label. Nothing printed outside of a factory. I dangled the key ring by the tweezers of my thumb and middle finger.

“Luke. I think this is what a clue looks like.”

 

Eight

Marlowe was no armchair detective, but he knew a clue when he saw one. He picked up the dirty books, the discarded scraps of paper, anything and everything he might find hidden in the band of a hat. There was never any question of a found object's significance. Marlowe was smart, but even he needed some hints to end up with answers.

We took our time and finished combing through Miller's office. It was almost seven when we were done.

“I think that's everything.” Luke wiped his palms together, twice, with the dry-chalk sound of a mission complete.

“Give me your stuff. Let's keep it all together.”

He handed me a thin stack of papers and I added it to my own. I folded them down the middle and stuffed them into my purse.

“Nothing else? No scented handkerchiefs or mysterious keys?”

I smirked. “No. I think we can get out of here now. We found what we needed in that USB drive.”

What I didn't tell him was that I was certain, that the question was not whether the jump drive was important, but what was on it. There was an eerie sense of logic to the last couple days, the clean lines that construct the plots of noir. The tinted BMW was from another mode of life—I was done with red herrings the second a murderer bludgeoned the back of my head.

Luke led the way out the door. I scanned the office with that feeling you get when you leave a hotel room, the knowledge that you'd better check under the sofa because there's no coming back.

We padded softly to the elevator lobby, and I thought of Mr. Cook's empty office on the forty-eighth floor. “Luke,” I said, “we have to check out your dad's office.”

He paled.

“Look, I'm hoping almost as much as you are that we find nothing in there. But if there is, I have to know.”

He nodded weakly and gave a grunt that had been a word at its conception. I summoned the elevator and it came, quick and obedient. I stepped in first and pressed the smooth dimple of the button for the forty-eighth floor.

The elevator deposited us into a lobby plush with dark wood and frosted glass. I led the way through the door on our left and padded across the freshly vacuumed carpet to the corner office. I'd been in Mr. Cook's office before for a few informal chats that always included Luke, but as we approached I was aware of how different it felt. It grew dark and imposing as it took over my field of vision—cavernous, ominous, pregnant with secrets. The massive door felt heavier, and, after everything I had seen in the last twenty-four hours, I was surprised to find it unlocked.

The office looked, in fact, exactly as I remembered it. A long couch took up one wall, and on the other end was a large mahogany desk with a dark leather office chair. The wall held Mr. Cook's Harvard Law diploma, along with a few framed photographs. Luke and his mother were the subjects of most of these.

Erin Cook was once a striking woman, tall and slender and blond as the sun. She was five years younger than Mr. Cook, and they had met when he was in law school and she was a junior at Wellesley. Luke once confessed that he might have divorced his mother if he were in his father's shoes. Her depression often made her hard to deal with, but Mr. Cook met her again and again with patience. I felt for Luke—the villain of the hour was the person he admired most.

“Are you going to tell your mom about your dad and Lori?”