Watching the empty hallway, he lifted his keychain out of his pocket and tried the lock. He kept a few skeleton keys, because you never knew when you might need them at a tiny regional airport with no staff around. When he was almost a teenager, he’d shown a startling aptitude for breaking into houses. It was penny-ante stuff, and the trespassing was more exciting to him than sifting through the detritus of people’s lives. It wasn’t a skill set he’d bragged about to anyone since he was a kid.
He found one key that slid in easily, and he gave the lock a swift, hard rap. The tumblers spun on cue and it opened wide. Nothing to it, he thought, but the words were ringed by an echo of shame. He remembered being dragged home one night in the back of a Chicago PD squad car. His terrified mother and furious stepfather were waiting. You’re nothing but common trash, his stepfather had said. You don’t belong in this family.
That recollection made him shut the door of Klepper’s office with more force than was strictly necessary.
Klepper’s laptop wasn’t there, but the office was otherwise the same, right down to the donut box, still bleeding powdered sugar on the desk. Desmond made a quick search of the room, but what turned up seemed like junk. The mess inside the top desk drawers suggested pathological hoarding. Desmond didn’t think he’d seen so many sugar, salt, and soy sauce packets outside an airport food court. There was a leather-bound calendar, but all that Klepper had scrawled into it was “Lunch at the Harvard Club” every two months or so. That left Desmond wondering how he got in, given that he wasn’t a graduate. How obsessed could one grown man be with a college?
Desmond’s biggest find was a series of scrapbooks and notebooks that detailed Gary Cowan’s career. Klepper seemed less of a friend and more like a starry-eyed fan. Toward the end of one scrapbook, there was an article that used the phrase disgraced fighter Gary Cowan. Disgraced? What had he done? He made a mental note to check on that later.
At the bottom of one drawer was a framed diploma from Loyola in Los Angeles. Desmond shook his head. He didn’t know much about law school rankings, but that was the law school Johnnie Cochran had graduated from. Even if it wasn’t a household name, it was a damn fine school and Klepper was a fool not to see that.
Before he left, he checked Klepper’s desk phone. Lots of calls to Gary. Some calls from random numbers with varied area codes. Nothing jumped out at him as suspicious, but he jotted it all down to check out later.
On his way out of the office, he stopped by the receptionist’s desk. “Tom Klepper isn’t in his office. Is there somewhere else he might be in the building?”
“He doesn’t come in all that often,” she answered. “He’s probably working from home. Or, you know, working.” She lifted her hands and made air quotes around the last word.
“He’s not exactly in demand?”
“Honey, you are the first person who’s asked for him in a donkey’s age.” She looked him up and down with her soft brown eyes, pleasantly plain next to her varicolored hair. “You’re not here because you want to hire him, are you? He owe you money?”
“More like an explanation.”
She nodded. “Good luck getting that.”
Desmond raised his eyebrows. “You ever meet his client Gary Cowan?”
The woman’s eyes lit up. “The fighter? Sure, he’s been in here a few times. Always so charming. He’s a gentleman.”
“I was kind of surprised he’s a client of Tom’s.”
The receptionist nodded. “That’s his only client, far as I know. He used to represent a lot of boxers and boxing promoters. I think he might even know a thing or two about sports law. But that all fell apart for him a while back.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t really know. But that poor man should have a lawyer protecting him from his lawyer,” she said. “Because Tom Klepper is nothing but a leech.”
❖
On the elevator ride down, Desmond plugged the various phone numbers he had for Tom Klepper into a reverse lookup directory and turned up a residential address on East Thirty-Seventh Street. Klepper’s home was a short walk away, but long enough for Desmond to get increasingly annoyed with that amphibious excuse for a man. Why hadn’t he talked to the cops like he promised? Did Klepper have such a huge drug problem he wasn’t willing to turn in his dealer until he lined up another source?
On the walk over, he texted Sabrina while he waited to cross a light. Got your message. So hard to talk right now. He planned to leave it at that, but she responded almost instantly.
My heart is broken. I can’t believe it. So very sorry.
Thank you. He couldn’t think of anything else to say.
Are you coming to NYC?
I’m in now, he answered.
Do you need a place to crash?
Already at the Hyatt, but thanks.
We need to talk, she texted back. Do you know what happened?
He didn’t answer that. He knew too much, and yet not nearly enough.
When he arrived at the brownstone, he found Klepper’s name next to a buzzer. No one answered it. Desmond pressed it for half a minute and heard the noise reverberating almost under his feet. He glanced down, realizing Klepper’s home was the street-level apartment. He took the stairs down and let himself in through a black wrought-iron gate. He knocked on the door and then tried to peer through the window, but the blinds were shut. Desmond was studying the multiple locks considering how much trouble it would be to open the door when a head popped over the side of the railing above him.
“Hey! You, there. What you doing with that door?” barked a white-haired man in
