“Sure you did. Just coffee and conversation. I’ll get back to you later.”
3
I shoved the stand that held my old Underwood portable into a corner of my office. Eleven o’clock. The report I’d worked on all yesterday evening and part of this morning was finally done.
The red push-button phone on my desk buzzed softly. I punched the flashing button and picked up the receiver.
“Well, papoose,” Greg’s voice greeted me, “will you give me my big chance and have lunch with me today?”
As they had the night before, my defenses rose. “I plan to catch a bite here and work on my expense report.”
“Ah, Sharon, how unromantic! It’s too beautiful a day for such nonsense, and the good weather can’t last much longer. Come on a picnic with me.”
I hesitated. Greg and I had met on a case two months ago and had instantly become professional rivals. We had then begun to work on becoming friends, a tough uphill job, given our respective stormy natures and the traditional antagonism that exists between cops and private eyes. Six weeks ago, after a quarrel, I had decided things could never work out for us, and Greg, with characteristic determination, had proceeded to try to woo me back. So far I had resisted.
“Come on. Please.”
“Will you promise not to bring any chocolate?” Unlike other men, who would ply a woman with flowers, Greg had been showering me with chocolate — for which we both had a fondness bordering on the obsessive.
“Me? Why would I bring any of that along?”
“Greg, really. After that box of See’s fudge two days ago I’ve had about all I can take.” It had been on the doorstep when I’d returned from work.
“Ate it all, eh?”
“Well...”
“Listen, papoose, why don’t you stop at the deli near All Souls and pick up some beer and sandwiches? Then come down here and liberate me from my paperwork.”
I sighed. It was a beautiful day and, as Greg had said, the good weather couldn’t hold much longer. “Okay. What time?”
“Can you wait until one? I’ll have the results of the PM on Antonio by then.”
It was a bribe. I agreed and hung up.
With two empty hours on my hands, I wandered down the hall to the front desk where Ted, the para-legal worker, rattled away on his Selectric. While not new, it beat my Underwood, and I coveted it, although I realized both the volume and the quality of my typing did not justify such a machine.
“Where’s Hank?” I asked when Ted looked up.
He jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “In bed, pretending to be sick. I think he’s actually taking a mental-health day.”
It surprised me. My boss, Hank Zahn, seldom took even the vacation time he was entitled to. “If he’s only playing possum, I’d like to see him.”
“Don’t think he’ll mind. Go on up.”
I climbed to the second floor of the big Victorian that housed All Souls. Several attorneys lived there, in the free rooms that were partial compensation for the low salaries a legal services plan paid. I knocked on the door at the rear, and Hank’s voice called out a welcome.
My boss was ensconced in a king-sized bed, surrounded by books, papers and magazines. He leaned against a heap of pillows, his light-brown Brillo pad of hair tousled, a pencil tucked behind one ear.
“Come in, come in.” He waved me toward a chair near the bed.
“Is it contagious?”
“Nope. At first I thought it was food poisoning, but now I realize it’s due to the poor quality of my cooking. I made this curry last night, and it’s lucky nobody ate it but me.”
“Ted suspects you’re really taking a mental-health day.”
“The little fox could be right.”
I sat down, staring at Hank’s pajamas. They were white, with little red pigs all over them. Peering closer, I made out the monogram under each. “MCP?”
Hank glanced down, then took off his thick, hornrimmed glasses and polished them on a flowing sleeve. “Yeah. A gift from a lady friend. Funny, I didn’t think I gave the impression of being a chauvinist.”
“I think it’s a joke.”
“Maybe. I can never tell with this particular friend.” He gestured at the newspapers near the foot of the bed. “I see you had trouble at your building last night.”
“We sure did.”
“Friend of yours?”
“Someone I was fond of.”
“Greg show up?” Hank and Greg were old friends, from long before I’d known either of them.
“Yes,” I said shortly, hoping to forestall a discussion of my love life which, for some reason, fascinated Hank.
“You still pissed off at him?”
I sighed. “I am not, as you so inelegantly put it, pissed off. I merely came to the decision that the relationship would not work.”
“After you had a big fight with him.”
“Who told you that?”
“No one needed to. I know you.”
Besides being my boss, Hank was one of my best friends; he knew me better than most people. “Okay, so we had a fight.”
He put on his fatherly expression. “Tell me about it.”
There was no way around the issue. Hank, with the skill of years in the courtroom, would get it out of me one way or the other. And I felt safe confiding in him, knowing it would go no further. “It came about very innocently. I was quoting to him from a magazine article about that private eye who had bugged his own testimony before a Senate judiciary committee hearing on electronic eavesdropping. I thought it a clever way to make one’s point, but Greg didn’t see the humor. He launched into a diatribe against my profession, and you know what kind of response that brought from me. When we got down to personals, I decided it was time to leave.”
Hank scratched his curly head. “Shar, you and Greg argue all the time. It’s your nature; you both thrive on it.”
“I’m not sure I need to thrive that much.”
“He wants to make up, you know.”
“I know. I’ve got an apartment full of candy to prove it. He even gave me a foot-tall chocolate bunny he found in a post-Easter sale.”
Hank chuckled. “So why not give in?”
“No. We can’t be friends unless we respect each other’s work.”
“And he doesn’t respect yours?”
“No.”
“Well, it’s your life.” Hank rummaged around in the bed and came up with a roll of Lifesavers. I shook my head when he offered one to me, wondering what other objects the bed contained. The long red cord of one of the push-button phones that were an All Souls tradition snaked out from under the covers.
“You come up here to sympathize with me, or do you have an ulterior motive?” Hank asked, chomping on the Life-saver.
“As a matter of fact, I wanted to check on what you have lined up for me.”
He scratched his head. “You finished with the report on DeYoe versus Treakle?”
“Yes, about half an hour ago.”
“Then that’s it for now. Things are quiet — all our clients must be dead or minding their own business.”
“I suspect the latter.” The subscribers to the legal services plan were a placid lot. The report I’d just finished concerned a breach of contract over the installation of a redwood hot tub, a classy commodity for one of our clients.
“Well,” Hank said, “why don’t you take off and track down this Mrs. Antonio’s killer?”
My lips parted in surprise.
“Well, that’s what this visit is really about, right?”
Grudgingly, I nodded. “I’m not so sure it’s good for a boss to know his employee so well.”
“Good or not, I do. Take a couple of vacation days, if you like. I’ll be in touch if we need you.”
“There goes my vacation again.” I sighed.