I’m licensed to carry. All IRS field agents are. Nor did the license depend on my being an active agent. It wouldn’t expire until April, year after next, and I fully intended to renew it. I put in enough hours on a firing range four times a year that I can joke about the weapon, after a fashion, but I would never pull it in a “situation” unless I was prepared to use it.
I went through a glass door and up a dingy flight of stairs to an equally dingy hallway with threadbare, curling carpet that ran the length of the office building. Past a tax consultant I’d had a few run-ins with and didn’t much like—a slippery, sleazy bastard who I might have do my taxes next year if I happen to strike it rich—past a firm that refurbished laser printer cartridges, past a dealers school, the usual blackjack and craps—and on to Carson & Rudd.
Before going in, I stood outside for a few seconds, allowing this pivotal moment in my life to sink in. Even though I didn’t have any idea who K was, I was now a private investigator, at least in training. I’d thought about calling the police and having K frogmarched away in cuffs, but something told me I shouldn’t do that. She didn’t look like the type to murder anyone in their sleep or steal the silverware. She’d had her chance and hadn’t taken it, but I’d given her a lot of thought that morning before leaving.
Mystery girl in your bed? You don’t gloss over that kind of weirdness. You don’t ignore it. It makes you think. Maybe it was karma—a cosmic reward for a good deed I’d done in a previous life.
I hoped so, anyway.
* * *
I walked in at 9:06, late. Best to set the tone early, I always say. It’s easier to rise from lowered expectations. Gregory’s secretary, Dale, was at her desk, whaling away at a computer. She’s a secretary-receptionist-PI-Gal Friday. Probably runs the place when Greg’s not looking. Five foot nine, slender and leggy, better-than-average face, reasonably good to look at, thirty years old, and as proper and stiff as a chunk of kiln-dried hickory, which, I figured, is why Mrs. Gregory Rudd—Libby—puts up with her, and Libby doesn’t put up with much. Gregory and Dale could pool their collective imaginations and still not have what it takes to throw the lock on the door and use their mold-green vinyl couch for extracurricular activities. Of course, Libby wasn’t a bad-looking woman herself. Then again, she has a bitchy streak that goes up one side and down the other. I guess the bottom line is, not all guys are pigs or creeps, and Greg was anything but either.
Regarding Dale’s lack of imagination, the half-slice of plain gag-it-down bagel sitting on a napkin by her computer pretty much told the story. She wore earphones, transcribing like mad, or something equally exciting. At least she was efficient.
I stood there, looking around. This outer room had a colorless, aseptic, institutional flavor, cross between a Social Security waiting room and something even less enticing. Dale’s desk, the green couch, two folding chairs, a desktop copier on a gray steel cart, no windows and nothing on the walls. I’d been inside my nephew’s office several times in the four years he’d been a private investigator and knew it wasn’t any livelier, except for a single grimy east-facing window. His office wasn’t too bad, if you like gray in different shades. Part of the problem was that Gregory was color-blind. To him, a standard fuchsia and a chunk of Romaine lettuce are the same shade, and—knowing Ellen’s boy—the same species. By that I don’t mean to imply he isn’t bright. He is. He has gaps in his knowledge, but then, don’t we all? What I don’t know about calculus is used as filler in entire textbooks.
Dale hadn’t spotted me yet. Greg wasn’t in sight. His door was closed, but I could hear a murmur in there, above the muted roar of Dale’s keyboarding.
Gregory—not Greg, except that I call him Greg—was what some people refer to as tight-assed. Anal retentive if you’re into psychobabble and think those fancy high-dollar words mean anything substantive. To me, anal retentive means constipated, something you could fix with any number of over-the-counter remedies.
Maxwell Rudd, my sister’s lesser half, came from an improbably long line of New England stockbrokers and lawyers stretching back to Thomas Paine and the Tea Party and beyond, as tight-assed a clan as you’d ever want to meet. Ellen and I come from a line of office managers, CPAs, and failed bankers that go back to guys who leapt to their deaths in the Crash of ‘29, or should have. For a while I’d thought there was hope for the family when Greg cut loose and became a private investigator, the first sign that maybe we weren’t all doomed, like lemmings, to a preordained end—a waist-deep, Bataan-like march through paperwork to the grave. But in the end, breeding won out. By all accounts, Greg had managed to turn gumshoeing into as dull an enterprise as filling potholes. Or worse—auditing the construction firm that filled the potholes.
That, in effect, was what he’d told me a little over a month ago when I asked if he might consider having a partner, or an assistant.
But that couldn’t be right, I’d thought back then, and still did, watching Dale hammer ninety-plus words a minute into that computer, working on her repetitive stress disorder. How could you possibly get pictures of Mr. X plowing Mrs. Y’s south forty and not at least run a moderate risk of bullets whizzing past your ears when the flash went off? How could sleuthing, which is essentially glorified sneaking around performed by so-called adults, be boring?
I was about to find out.
Dale glanced up. “Oh, Mr. Angel.” She pulled an
