by G. K. Parks
Martin came back into the living room with an apron tied around his waist, and I tried not to laugh. “Jackson, I think.” He considered it for a second. “That’s it. He’s normally there when I leave in the afternoons. He’s just the night shift guy. Seems friendly. Why?”
“No reason. He was just really helpful today.”
Martin nodded in an ‘I see’ fashion and went back into the kitchen. He continued to cook while I stared at a mostly boring screen.
There was a single camera positioned at the end of the hallway on the seventeenth floor, and the only people on the footage were Martin and me as we walked from my office to his or vice versa. I hit fast forward and watched as we exited our offices in a Laurel and Hardy fashion and got into the elevator. The tape continued without any movement until 2:17 AM, according to the timestamp.
At this point, the elevator doors opened, and a person wearing overalls and a baseball cap pushed a cleaning cart into the hallway. He kept his head down as he pushed the cart toward my office. The man stood in front of my door for a while before getting it open. It probably took him a few minutes to pick the lock, but then I remembered no one had noticed scratches or telltale tool marks on the doorknob. He must have gotten the key from security.
“Do the janitors have keys to all the offices?” I called into the kitchen.
“I think so, or they just borrow the master set from security. I’m not really sure. I’ve never worried about it.”
I ignored Martin’s unhelpful response and continued watching the footage. Maybe what had taken so long was the guy trying to find the right key to get the door opened. Once he got into the office, I couldn’t see anything else since the camera only covered the hallway. It was 2:33 when he exited. He left my door open and headed down the corridor, his face still obscured from view, and into Griffin’s office. He opened her door faster than mine, and within ten minutes, he left her office, carrying something. I paused the playback and stood directly in front of the television, but I couldn’t make out what the item was.
“What is that?” Martin asked, and I almost jumped out of my skin.
“Don’t scare me like that. Do you want me to shoot you?”
“Jumpy,” he sounded amused. “Who else would be behind you?”
“I didn’t hear you.” I stared intently at the screen. It looked like a shoebox. “You need better cameras. Some color HD ones would be a vast improvement.”
“I’ll add it to my list,” he mocked.
I hit play, and the man on the camera headed back to my open office door. He was almost inside when the elevator opened again. He turned and dropped the item into the garbage bag on the cleaning cart and ducked his head.
“Who’s on the elevator?”
Martin squinted at the television. “I’m not sure.” He got a little closer. “Looks like another janitor. See?” He pointed to the uniform. “And isn’t that a cleaning cart in the elevator with him?” He pointed to another indecipherable object.
“I’m guessing shoebox-janitor guy wasn’t supposed to be working the seventeenth floor.”
“Probably not,” he agreed.
“So who the hell is he? And what the hell is in the box?”
Sixteen
I sat across from Martin at the dinner table. We were eating the pasta primavera he made and bouncing ideas off of each other. Mark and I had done this numerous times at the OIO, and I figured it wouldn’t hurt.
“Did the bomb squad check out the building?” I asked around a mouthful of angel hair.
“Yeah, Thursday evening.” He took a sip of water. I was relieved he wasn’t drinking with dinner. “I gave them permission to do a full sweep.”
“So the box more than likely wasn’t a bomb.”
He shrugged and helped himself to another serving. We ate in silence for a few minutes. “Run through it again,” he said after we finished eating.
I rolled my head from side to side to work the tension out of my neck. I was getting sick of going over the same things and not getting different results. Wasn’t that the definition of neurotic?
“Okay, Mrs. Griffin is missing, last seen on the surveillance tape from Thursday, pre-explosion. No word from her except for a plane ticket and a bus ticket, different locations. LEOs are working on that.” I stopped to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything.
“Friday late night, shoebox-janitor guy.” Martin wanted me to continue the run-through.
“Right, he enters my office, looking for god knows what, then goes back into Griffin’s office, retrieves a box, and plans to take it back to my office.” I looked at him curiously. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why put something in my office. I mean if it were a bomb, okay. I open it, ka-boom. Or maybe it was addressed to you. I give it to you, ka-boom.”
“Stop saying ka-boom. We know it wasn’t a bomb. Suzanne hasn’t been at work since Thursday afternoon, and the box he retrieved from her office was on Friday. No one had been in there in the meantime, except the bomb squad.”
“What would she have possibly needed to have surreptitiously placed in my office?”
He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Blackmail?”
“What in the world have I done to warrant blackmail? Plus, why the need to hide whatever it was from the actual janitor? Couldn’t fake janitor have just said he was delivering a misplaced package or something?”
“Maybe the blackmail was against me,” he said quietly.
“Explain.”
He shrugged and got up to clear the table, trying to avoid the conversation.
I followed him to the sink, cornering him. “I’m waiting.”
“It’s nothing, just speculation on my part.” He was backpedaling quickly, and I gave him a serious look. “It’s just, I have a bit of a past. Wealth and power make a great aphrodisiac. Assuming anyone believes you are my permanent romantic liaison, maybe they are trying to encourage you to abandon me.” He was serious, but I couldn’t help giving him my ‘yeah, right’ look.
“Oh, please,” I rolled my eyes, “unless you have a dead hooker in the closet or some stripper who overdosed on blow, I don’t think your sexual escapades are that important.”
“Perhaps because you’re not really dating me,” he practically spat.
“Speaking from past experience?”
Obviously, he must be since he ignored me and began scrubbing the pots and pans.
I waited him out, and once the water shut off, I tried again. “Are there any serious skeletons in your closet? Dead employees? Back-stabbing deals? Under-handed business practices? Illegal drug use? Prostitution?”
“No.”
I looked into his eyes, but I didn’t think he was lying. “Are you sure? Maybe something from college or a vacation? Anything? Family secrets?”
“There’s nothing. Anything even remotely scandalous has all been aboveboard.”
“We are back to square one. What’s in the box?” I really couldn’t stand his mood swings, but I tried to get us back on track. I picked up a towel and dried the dishes. As I was doing this, I thought about the blackmail suggestion and the conversation Griffin had with me my second day on the job. There was more to the story. I could feel it. I nudged him with my elbow. “Maybe you’re right. Griffin didn’t want me around since I was just the most recent in your line of newest models. So let’s say she had a box of pictures of you with Bambi, Bimbo, and Bunny. Why didn’t she drop it off? Why tell anyone else about it and then have them break into my office to deliver it, especially after you and I weren’t going to be working out of the office any longer?”
“Maybe whoever it was figured you’d go back to work, even if I wasn’t,” he suggested, and the familiar gnawing returned to the corner of my mind.
“If you are right about this, and clearly there is no way to tell,” I provided my disclaimer, “then Griffin is involved, and maybe whatever is in the box is motive.”
“Motive?”
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“Yeah, to frame me for killing you.” As the words left my mouth, a chill traveled down my spine.
“We don’t know any of this,” he began, but it was my turn to interrupt.
“True. Until we have more concrete evidence, we’ll stick with Occam’s Razor.” I waited, making sure he understood my point.
“Least amount of new assumptions, got it. Or if you prefer, pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” he quoted the Latin and graced me with a self-satisfied smirk.
“Wiseass. But this brings us back to the current problem. We still don’t know where Griffin is, what the hell is in the box, or most importantly, who is behind everything.”
I left him to finish cleaning up while I went into the living room to re-watch the surveillance tape again. I still wasn’t getting anything more out of it. Switching to the Thursday morning tape, I let it run through. The wheels in my head were spinning, but I was stuck in the mud. I turned off the DVD player and the television and stared at the blank screen.
“Dammit.” Picking up the remote, I threw it across the room. I wasn’t getting anywhere, and I didn’t know where else to go.
“Very lady-like,” he said, entering the room.
Rubbing my neck, I looked at him. “Sorry,” I muttered.
He stood behind the couch where I was sitting. “Let me.” Before I could ask what he was talking about, he began massaging the kink out of my neck. I closed my eyes. God, that felt good.
“You don’t have to.” I opened my eyes and tried to lean away from his insistent hands, but he continued. “I just feel like we’re on the edge of something, and I’m not seeing it. I’ve watched this damn tape a hundred times, and I’m not seeing anything new. It has to be there, or I must have missed something.”
“Take the day off. Actually, take the rest of the weekend off. No more surveillance footage. No more checking on leads. Nothing. Just hang around here. Go for a swim, have a drink, do whatever it is you do for fun, and Monday, when we get the plant footage, you can start this whole process over again. Just don’t throw the remote next time. It’s hard to find replacements.”
“I can’t do that.” I finally pulled away from his massaging grasp.
“Too bad.” He came around the couch, taking the notepads and moving them onto the coffee table before sitting down beside me. “I have a banquet to attend tomorrow evening. It’s more of a ball really, black tie, very formal. Since you insist on working all weekend, I guess you’ll have to escort me.” He winked as I tried to determine if he was serious.
“I thought you were lying low. And if you wanted me to take the weekend off, I don’t see how having to work bodyguard duty can be considered time off.”
“True, but you rejected my offer of time off. Plus, it’s a party. Parties are fun.” He raised an eyebrow. “Do you need me to define the word fun for you?”
“Depends, you seem to have a pretty fucked up concept of what fun is.” I was already dreading the thought of being any place in public with him, given the explosion, the mystery shoebox-janitor, and the unknown whereabouts of Mrs. Griffin. “I thought you were going to keep your head down and avoid the crosshairs. If this is a planned event,” I remembered him briefly talking to one of the board members about it on Friday, “then there could be a bull’s-eye on your back.”
“Good thing I’ve got my bodyguard then.”
“But you said I could have the rest of the weekend off,” I whined, trying to get his previous offer back on the table. I was attempting to make an unreasonable man see reason; clearly, this was a hopeless endeavor.
“You already said you’re incapable of taking a day off, so instead, it’s a workday based on my work.” He seemed pleased with himself. Damn manipulative bastard and his unilateral decision-making. I could feel the kink returning to my neck, and I sighed loudly to express my displeasure. He grinned. “You’ll have fun. I promise.”
“What’s the security going to be like?”
Pleased I had given up, he said, “That’s the spirit.” He spent the next thirty minutes explaining where the event was being held, what it was for, and how incredibly stringent security would be. I spent the same half hour trying not to go into a coma from the boredom. “Are you even listening?”
“Huh?” I had been semi-listening; apparently, the gala was going to be in a ballroom at a five-star hotel with valet parking, cater-waiters, and things like that. Those in attendance were supporting bringing food, water, or medicine, some type of necessity, to third world countries. The guest list included the Martin Tech board members, their investors, their honored guests, some B and C-list celebrities, and other similar types. All very social and civil with the Muffys and Buffys of the crowd. He sighed and got up from the couch. “I’m sorry, what did you ask? I got the gist of it.”
“I asked if you had anything to wear.” He seemed annoyed, which annoyed me; it was a vicious cycle. He was the one manipulating the situation in the first place, and now he was annoyed because I wasn’t paying enough attention to his monotonous discourse.
“Um.” I made a mental assessment of my clothing. I could do business professional or business casual, but when it came to cocktail dresses worthy of an event of this magnitude, shopping seemed to be required. “Not exactly. Unless I can go as a former OIO agent or maybe a cater-waiter, but I’d probably need to borrow a tux for that. So I guess we can nix the cater-waiter idea.” I looked innocently at him, hoping we could nix the entire event.
“That’s what I thought.” He seemed consumed by his own thoughts.
“So, no party?”
“No, we’re definitely going.” He waggled an eyebrow. “But maybe I can be persuaded to cut out early.” He was back to being a lothario, and we had been making such progress too.
It was decided, somewhat unilaterally, that I needed to get a good night’s sleep. Apparently, Martin didn’t want to attend such an important function with a zombie. He set the motion sensors on the alarm system for the first two floors of the house. This was meant to encourage me to stay in my room and actually sleep, instead of patrolling the house late at night. However, I ended up lying in bed, listening to every creak and groan of the house settling as if it were an attacker in the shadows preparing an assault. The light began to filter in from outside before I actually fell asleep.
I dreamt I was on the seventeenth floor of the MT building, chasing after Mrs. Griffin. But the hallway was never-ending. I could see her running away, but I couldn’t catch up. The chase continued as we ran past some cops, then janitors, and finally a slew of strippers.
“Knock, knock,” Martin called from the hallway. I jumped up in bed and squinted at the clock. It was almost noon. Despite having slept five or six hours, all the dream-running made me feel even more exhausted. He slowly opened the door a crack. “Are you awake?” he asked, which I found to be a ridiculous question since I was sitting up in bed.
“Yeah.” I stretched. “I didn’t mean to sleep so late. Perhaps, I was just imagining I had the day off. Crazy notion, right?” Not that I was annoyed or bitter or anything.
He ignored the jibe. “I brought you a present.” He held out a garment bag and shopping bag. “Don’t worry, I didn’t go anywhere. Marcal ran some errands this morning.”
I eyed the designer logos as he hung the garment bag from the doorframe and put the shopping bag on the floor next to it. “Party’s tonight at eight. We’ll leave around 7:30. I like to be punctual, but you might want to make sure I got the right size.” He scrutinized my face. “Did you even sleep?”
I glared at him. My hair was probably all over the place. I had no makeup on, and he was commenting on my looks. “Get out,” I growled.
He smirked and closed the door. “Hurry up. I’m making brunch, and I don’t want it to get cold.”
Seventeen
I took a quick shower, threw on an oversized t-shirt and a pair of shorts, ran a brush through my still wet hair, and went down to the kitchen to meet Martin. H
is continued insistence to do and act how he pleased without any regard for his own safety or mine fueled my irritation toward him. I hoped he realized I wasn’t part of the Secret Service and he wasn’t the President because I damn sure wasn’t going to jump in front of a bullet to save his life and sacrifice my own, especially when he couldn’t take my advice on keeping a low profile.
I walked into the kitchen. The table was set nicely. Coffee was already poured, and there were flowers in a vase. I looked at him skeptically; perhaps this was a peace offering, a bribe, or someone had died.
“Sleep well?” he asked, flipping through the newspaper.
“Sure,” I replied sarcastically. I sat down and picked up a bagel and put some scrambled eggs on my plate. “Y’know, I’m getting the sneaking suspicion you like to cook.”
“That’s just the kind of thing that makes you such a great investigator.” He folded the paper and put it on the table.
I resisted the urge to stick my tongue out like a three-year-old. We ate in silence for a few minutes.
“This is actually really good.” I scooped up the last forkful.
“Thanks.” There was an awkward pause, and it occurred to me if we weren’t talking about his threats or his job, we really didn’t have much to say to one another. “So, what did you think?” he asked. I was confused. Didn’t I just compliment him on the meal? He sensed my confusion and clarified. “The dress?”
“Oh.” I hadn’t bothered to unzip the bag. “I haven’t looked yet.” He sighed, trying hard not to lose his patience. “I’ll go check it out, now.” I was getting tired of conceding. Was I just stubborn? Probably.
I trudged up the stairs, leaving him with the dishes. Unzipping the bag, I found a deep purple dress, so dark it was almost black, with a plunging neckline. At first glance, I thought the back was facing forward.
“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I took the dress off the hanger, figuring I might as well try it on before I murdered him. Oddly enough, he had gotten my size just right. Then again, he probably only spent time with models, so being a size two didn’t require too much guesswork on his part. The dress had a fairly modest back, considering, and a halter top front with a neckline I would have never chosen in a million years. It fell to my ankles, and the slit on the right side came to mid-thigh. “Sexist pig,” I muttered to my reflection. Okay, so maybe I looked good in a designer dress that would have been a month’s salary at my last job, if I liked the slutty look.
