Shows how fast any given day can go downhill.
* * *
On our way downtown, Jeri and I passed Sjorgen & Howard Title Company, Jonnie’s closest foray into the murky world of law. S&H Title was reputed to be his most successful business venture, the cash cow from which all else had sprung. In fact, to give credit where credit is due, it was Wendell Sjorgen’s cash cow, not Jonnie’s, started in 1958 when Wendell was two years out of Harvard Law. Be that as it may, Jonnie hadn’t managed to run the business into the ground after his father’s death, which either meant Jonnie had a head for business, or enough sense to leave well enough alone and let others run the place. Probably the Howard of Sjorgen & Howard.
Jeri parked on Mill, half a block from the title company.
“You up for a little sleuthing?” she asked.
“Oh? Am I invited?”
“I asked, didn’t I?” She got out. “Consider this an employment interview.”
I was still miffed about being bandied about, unemployed and vulnerable, at least until tomorrow, say around “ten-ish.” She hadn’t said more about that, only that she couldn’t give me the final okay without looking into a few things first.
Well, maybe she did. Maybe I would’ve, too. It still felt like a hazing stunt, watching me squirm on the hook, dangling over the water.
I took off the golf hat and left it in the car. It was starting to make me feel like a gigantic leprechaun.
“Christ, Mort. Ditch the moustache, too,” Jeri said.
I peeled it off as we approached the two-story building, stuck it in my shirt pocket, opened the door for her.
As she went through, I said, “Think I’ll need my gun?”
She chucked me in a rib with an elbow as neatly as Jackie Chan as she passed by. Which reminded me, I still hadn’t asked her about that judo or Aikido stuff.
I held my side as we approached a secretary wearing a headset phone, tucked behind a three-quarter circle of blue Formica. She greeted us with a toss of glossy, black ringlets and a tremendous smile. The smile congealed into an uneven grimace when she saw who I was. Blood drained out of her face, an interesting thing to observe.
Jeri said, “I’d like to speak to the most senior person here, please.”
Heather—according to the nameplate on the countertop—gave me a nervous look, then tried to make sense of Jeri’s request. “What?”
Jeri ran it past her again. Heather said, “Uh, that would be Mr. Howard.”
Not the original, from what I’d picked up on the news, one of those fast-flying tidbits on the periphery of the case. Jefferson Howard would be about a hundred ten years old if he were alive today, which he wasn’t. The Howard Heather was offering us was almost certainly not even Jefferson’s son. His grandson, maybe.
Heather hit two numbers on a console and spun partway around in her chair for privacy. I took a quick look around. Dark-blue carpet, small waiting room with faux Period wing chairs in gold damask, Max Warner lithographs on the walls: geese flying into pastel sunsets. The phrase “cash cow” went through my mind again. Heather hung up. “He’ll be out in a minute.”
All through the office, people were staring.
At me. Work had come to a standstill at Sjorgen & Howard as everyone gawked at the genius who’d located their missing boss.
I turned to Heather. “I don’t suppose a Mr. Rudd stopped by the other day? Tuesday?”
She looked at me, eyes wide. “Yes, he did.” Her voice was airless and breathy. “He also spoke with Mr. Howard.”
Of course she remembered him. He’d made the six o’ clock news. And, having watched the news, she remembered what had happened to him. And there she was, trapped behind a desk—
Jeri bumped me with a shoulder as a man in his late twenties, five foot eight, wearing a three-piece tailored suit, emerged from a hallway and approached the reception desk. He wasn’t smiling. “I’m Peter Howard,” he said. “Come with me, please.”
Jeri followed him. I followed Jeri. “Right to the top man,” I said sotto voce. “That was easy.” And the top man was a boy, abrupt, and a tight-assed little priss, from the look of him.
“It was my smile,” she whispered over her shoulder.
“Might’ve been mine.” I glanced back at Heather.
“Not in a million, Mortimer.”
We went down the hall and up a flight of stairs to where the carpet was spongy and plush, russet gold, the walls paneled in walnut, the lighting indirect and expensive. Past a desk where a young, gifted pneumatic doll of a girl named Amyee was filing her nails, not papers, and into an office. Peter shut the door. Much of one wall was a tinted plate glass view of the traffic and ruined asphalt on Mill Street, a Laundromat, and a graffiti-covered corner store across the street that probably did a land office business in specialty condoms, wine, and nudie mags. There may have been a time when this had been a prime location, but that time was long gone.
We all sat down, Peter behind his desk, Jeri and I facing it. The surface of the desk was almost bare, so I figured the secretaries and actual title agents ran the business—except for Amyee, who didn’t look as if she could load a dishwasher, though she might have had other skills. In this place, it was likely that Peter was nothing but an annoying figurehead who needed appeasing at frequent intervals. In a corner of the room I saw an electric putt returner, and a putter leaning half out of sight against a mahogany bookcase that held golf trophies. Man-child Pete was twenty-some pounds overweight, with pudgy fingers and longish brown hair. He probably had a handicap of two, whereas mine was unknown, but likely to be into three digits.
“Know why I agreed to see you two?” he said. Neither Jeri nor I answered, but
