The man behind the desk had once been very tan, now not so much. His hair and eyes and suit were brown. He was rotund in a muscular way and, like the woman who came to my office earlier that day, he strongly resembled another.
“How can I help you, Mr. McGill?” the man asked.
“May I sit?”
I indicated with a gesture of my head a large-bottomed pine chair that might have looked white against all those deep browns if it had not been burned by dozens of different cattle-brands. These sigils and signs gave the chair a darker hue and made it seem almost alive.
“Suit yourself,” the second imposter told me.
The chair had wide arms for the elbows. I used them.
“Well?” the man asked.
The only color divorced from the brunette family was the fading blue sky filling the window behind him and to the left. I considered the relief of the atmosphere and said, “Well what?”
“How can I help you?”
“I don’t know. What do you suggest?”
“You’re the one who asked for this meeting,” he said, a slight twang making its way into the words.
“Not exactly,” I replied, appreciating the accuracy of the hazy phrase.
“Are you not the private investigator — Leonid Trotter McGill?”
The fact that he knew my middle name meant either that I had been inquired about or that Phil made a report as soon as he was out of earshot.
“I am,” I said.
“And did your secretary call to arrange a meeting with Cyril Tyler?”
“Zephyra, yes, she did.” Maybe the TCPA had given my whole name.
“Then how can I help you?”
“You can bring out the real Mr. Tyler and hang up this sham.”
The brown white man did not like me. His sudden glare was very clear on that fact.
I crossed my right leg over the left and sat back comfortably. It was a relief to be with someone else who had problems with anger management.
He stood up and for a moment I wondered, idly, if he might have a gun somewhere on his person.
Instead of shooting me, the angry man with the subdued accent strode from the room, slamming the door behind him.
I remained seated, staring at the darkening blue sky. This was the respite I had needed. I took a deep breath and then let it go. I did that again and allowed my eyes to close. Solitude is a dear friend to anyone in my profession. Most people I meet I cannot trust, believe, or believe in. The only thing that separates the majority of the people I work for from the targets of my investigations is the fact that my clients pay for the privilege of my attention. There are few people I come across that I can bank on, or even feel friendly toward — and so, sitting alone, even in that unpleasant color scheme, was a balm for me.
After five or six minutes of breathing I got up to examine the odd books lined up like so many dominoes in their box. The first volume I cracked open was a pulp novel about some warrior woman named Zarra the Magnificent. The next book was one of the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I must have looked into a dozen of those cheap novels in expensive bindings. There was John Carter of Mars, Doc Savage, a volume in the Fu Manchu series, The Shadow, and other, less memorable, characters.
It must have cost thousands of dollars to rebind and case those worthless fifties reprints of the adventure magazines from the thirties. But what did that mean to a man who could dream of someone’s death and have it become reality?
There came a small sound like the sigh of a toy trumpet. I turned to my left to see that the plain brown wall had concealed a door that was now open. In that doorway stood a slender white man who looked very much like the rotund imposter and maybe a bit more like the chubby man in the photograph posing with the woman who looked like his wife.
“Mr. Tyler?” I asked.
The man hung back, not passing through the secret doorway immediately.
“Mr. McGill?”
“That’s right,” I said brightly.
He rested a finger on the door frame.
“I’ve been looking through your books,” I said. “I don’t think there’s another collection like this in the whole world.”
He brought his hands together and came through into the brown-on-brown-on-brown room.
“Have a seat, Mr. McGill,” he said. “Let’s hear what you have to say.”
8
I felt as if I were at an audition where a scene was being reenacted by successive thespians going out for the same role. The new aspirant shook hands with me before going to the chair that the previous actor sat in.
Cyril Tyler, if this was indeed Cyril Tyler, had a fleshy and moist handshake. He went around the big brown hippopotamus and sat, moving with exaggerated gestures as if he were a much larger man. This more than anything inclined me toward believing that he was who he said.
I returned to my branded chair, put my elbows back on its arms, and made that big fist with my hands.
“How can I help you, Mr. McGill?” he whispered.
I could barely hear him but resisted the temptation to lean forward.
“Come again?” I said loudly.
He smiled and then gave a slight grin.
“How can I help you?” he repeated only slightly louder than before.
I smiled and nodded, not for him but for myself. The reason I was in this dissembling profession was that I lied as much as my clients, not to mention the subjects of my investigations. I couldn’t trust them, but they couldn’t trust me, either — whether they knew it or not.
And my lying was always the best. I could tell you something that was ninety-nine percent truth, but the way I told it would be completely misleading.
“A woman came to my office this afternoon, Mr. Tyler. She said her name was Chrystal Chambers-Tyler and—”
“Chrystal?” he said, at a perfectly normal volume.
I nodded and continued. “She said that she wanted me to work for her. It seems she’s missing a valuable piece of jewelry and is afraid to tell you about it.”
“Afraid? I don’t understand,” he said, his eyes darting around the room as if there was some strange sound coming from behind the brown walls.
“I didn’t either,” I said. “She was obviously a rich and successful woman, the wife of a very wealthy man. Why would she be worried over a necklace that cost less than a million dollars?”
Tyler stood up — unconsciously, I thought.
“Where is she, Mr. McGill? And what do you mean, ‘afraid’? What did she say about me? About us? What was she wearing?”
There was nothing commanding or dominant about the billionaire. He wasn’t far from fifty but looked younger. There was something boyish about him that the years had not worn away. Tyler was the classic milksop who happens to be a billionaire but reads adventure stories so that he can imagine himself a hero in a world where deeds and not money mattered.
I liked him.
“An off-white dress and a gold chain with a single pearl,” I said, remembering the picture Bug’s program showed me. “She said that the missing necklace could be the last straw on the back of an already strained relationship. That’s a quote.”
“What strain? There’s nothing wrong between us.”
My lie was gaining momentum.
Even though I liked the man, I had no desire to let him get ahead of me. I took in a breath through my nostrils and held it three times as long as normal. I did this because I was beginning to lose myself to a feeling more dangerous than anger. I was becoming distracted by the puzzle of the man and woman, and maybe the woman and man pretending to be them.
“You know women, Mr. Tyler,” I said. “They get squirrelly at the strangest moments. Maybe she’s worried about you kicking her out if she lost something so valuable...”