After I tuck the last of my meager desktop accoutrements into a drawer, it’s time to complete the transformation of my office into the Brooks and Valenti conference room. Penelope helps me push the desk back into a corner. Then we drape a starched white linen tablecloth over it. Voila! Our conference room has a side table to hold a coffee pot, stainless-steel water carafe, and a dozen of Penelope’s scrumptious home-baked muffins. I head for the back hallway, where an oversized walnut folding table sits on a wheeled furniture dolly. I trundle that back to my office, where Penelope helps me wrestle it off the dolly and unfold it. God knows how old the thing is, but it doesn’t look too makeshift, not after Papa stripped it down to bare wood and refinished the wood to a museum-grade gloss. This is the Brooks and Valenti conference room table. We place the little visitor chairs from our offices around it somewhat self-consciously—we’re well aware that the result is a far cry from a typical law office conference room. We considered buying more appropriate chairs, but they wouldn’t fit in our offices. There’s nowhere to store full-size chairs in our sprawling premises, anyway. We make do.
All the while, through chatter about the Netflix movie Penelope watched last night and speculation about what we will discover at ten o’clock, the fallout from Giordano’s visit percolates through my mind. The $250,000. The “favor.” How do Giordano’s directives square with those laid down by Joe? How the hell do I balance the competing demands? Whom do I involve?
“Ah, here’s Mom,” Penelope says when we hear the front door crash closed at nine forty-four. She heads out to reception and is back within seconds to launch a paper bag from Daigle’s Deli at me. “Breakfast!”
I snag the bag in midair and dig out the first of two plain bagels. I prefer sesame seed, but Penelope banned them during our second month of operation after I’d strewn seeds all over the conference room table just before a client meeting.
“Be quick about it, partner,” she orders.
Joan Brooks, jack of all trades, plays the role of transcriptionist at Brooks and Valenti, Discount Attorneys at Law. She walks in pushing a little cart holding a court-reporter-typewriter-like thingamajig and a tape recorder.
I hold up my bagel and mutter thanks around a mouthful.
She nods while she plugs in her thingamajig and sets it up. Then she retires to her desk to play receptionist, leaving me alone with Penelope. I collapse into a chair while my partner eases the door closed and comes back to stand nearby as I polish off bagel number two.
“Anything new?” she asks with quiet concern.
I assume she’s referring to Brittany, although it could be Papa, or maybe even the R & B file. I look back at her for a long moment. Where in hell to begin?
“Tony?” she prompts softy before she reaches up and holds a finger to my temple. “I can hear the wheels grinding in there, partner. Please let me help.”
I’m surprised to feel my scratchy eyes well up like a fire hydrant being cranked open.
“Oh, Tony,” Penelope says as she pulls my head to her shoulder.
The urge to tell her everything is overwhelming. From a strictly professional perspective, she absolutely deserves to know of the connection between Brittany’s kidnappers and our case representing Billy and Rick. Not that we have time to get into that now. Maybe after the deposition.
As if on cue, the door opens, and Joan announces the arrival of our guests.
“Let them know that we’re almost ready for them, Mom,” Penelope says. Then she hands me a clutch of Kleenex to dry my eyes and blow my nose. I nod in appreciation and then, in a superhuman feat of pulling one’s shit together, turn off the tear ducts.
Penelope pauses with her hand on the doorknob and meets my gaze. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
She’s back within the minute, trailed by an exquisitely groomed woman in a plum knee-length dress who looks like something out of a fashion magazine. In her wake follows a young woman wearing jeans and an orange sweater. She falls just short of beautiful and is clearly the woman’s daughter. The fragrance of expensive perfume wafts off one or both of them, hopefully masking any residual hangover odor coming from me. Mother walks straight to me with her hand extended, drooping “just so” as a badge of her femininity. I almost feel as if I should dip to one knee and kiss the back of her hand. Everything about this woman’s appearance and demeanor spells one word: Money.
“September Larkin,” she announces by way of introduction.
September?
She notes my surprise and titters in a coquettish laugh just short of a giggle. “Mother named me after my birth month.”
I paste a smile on my face and nod. September Larkin seems to be cut from the same cloth as the Rice family and the assholes at Windy City Sky Tours… not exactly my favorite type of people.
She reaches back to clutch the hand of her daughter and drags her forward. “This is my daughter, Sapphire,” she announces proudly, feeling the need to add, “Sapphire, of course, is September’s birthstone.”
Oh, isn’t that just precious? I’m taking time away from the search for my daughter for this? The poor girl looks as if she wants to die. Penelope’s and my eyes meet in a sardonic echo of my initial reaction.
Penelope, whom September has so far chosen to ignore, steps forward and forthrightly extends her hand. “I’m Penelope Brooks, Mrs. Larkin.”
“Senior partner of Brooks and Valenti,” I add, earning myself a wry smile from Penelope. What the hell, September’s misogyny shouldn’t go unpunished.
September nods curtly at
