Hero For Hire

by Laura Kenner

  “That’s not necessary. I’ll call a cab. You have work to do. I’ll be back…around two. If you get a call about Raymond…”

  He nodded. “I’ll call you. Promise. Until then, I’ll go through these.” He pointed to the stack of papers with the information from Raymond’s computer. “Who knows what I might find.”

  “I’M SURE GLAD YOU CAME back to sign the checks before you disappeared on us.” Lucy pushed a limp strand of hair out of her eyes, then slapped the mop into the wringer.

  Sara wondered whose neck Lucy was vicariously wringing as she squeezed the dirty water out of the mop head. The moment Sara walked through the back door, she realized she’d stumbled onto a crisis in the making. Their dishwasher had an uncanny sense of timing, spouting off like a geyser at the most inopportune moments.

  “Sorry, Luce. Timing is everything, isn’t it?” She twisted the hose clamp-screw another quarter revolution. “There. That ought to hold it.” Unfolding herself from her cramped position from under the dishwasher, she rotated her shoulders, trying to loosen her tensed muscles. During her exercise, she sneaked a glance at Lucy who stood, arms crossed, grimace in place.

  Lucy was upset—not just about the broken dishwasher hose, but about being left with more responsibility than she liked to handle. Their partnership agreement stipulated that Lucy’s responsibilities would be strictly up-front—hosting and such. She didn’t deal well with the stresses in the kitchen and now she had both her responsibilities as well as Sara’s. And Martin was no help; he became totally oblivious to people and their problems when he put on an apron.

  Sara knew it was time for a little relations repair-work, too. She tried to smile. “I guess it looks like I’m abandoning a sinking ship at the moment, doesn’t it?” Belatedly, she realized her implication—that the restaurant was the sinking ship. “I don’t mean the restaurant, of course. Just with all this water…”

  Lucy’s scowl faded away. She shrugged and a ghost of a grin lit her face. “Yeah, for a while, this did remind me of the Titanic. The water was gushing from the broken hose and I couldn’t get anybody’s attention back here because the music and the laughter were too loud.” Her brief flare of amusement faded. “You can’t form a bucket brigade when you only have one person and one bucket.”

  Sara grabbed a second mop and began to help corral the water toward the floor drain. After they finished, they both sagged toward the counter. She tried again. “Lucy, I’m sorry this is happening right now.”

  Lucy lifted her shoulders expressively. “Like you’re to blame? The way I figure it, it’s that woman’s fault”

  “Celia’s? Why? I figure Raymond had a hand in it, too.” The words conjured up an image of an intimate tableau, which made her stomach tighten. Not one hand, but a pair of hands.

  “But she seduced him, Sara!”

  “But he allowed himself to be seduced, Lucy,” she mimicked.

  Stalemate.

  Lucy remained resolute. “It may take two to tango but sometimes, one partner is doing all the dancing.”

  “So you’re saying I shoved him onto-the proverbial dance floor by setting him up just like he set me up?”

  “Well…no…but—”

  “But what?”

  “You and he…you’re so perfect together.”

  “Were, Lucy. We were good together. Not perfect Good. Now we’re not and he’s the one who started the chain of events.” It was quite the temptation to spew out the fact that Raymond had had a standing appointment to meet Celia Strauss in a hotel room where their dancing definitely became a pas de deux. But Sara wasn’t ready to prove to the world how ignorant she’d been of her fiance’s secrets. Ignorance or stupidity? She wasn’t sure which.

  Lucy remained quiet for a moment, staring at the wet floor. “What are you going to do?”

  Sara glanced down at the dirty wet knees of her pants. “Sign the checks, go home, change clothes and then go back to Will’s office and see if I can help.”

  “Oh.”

  Although she could hear the cacophony of patrons’ voices along with muted music from the front of the restaurant, it faded away as the blood rushed in her ears. Silence clung to the walls of the room like damp towels thrown across a clothesline.

  Finally Lucy spoke again. “You be careful, okay?”

  Sara reached over and hugged her friend. “Listen. I know Raymond didn’t kill her.”

  Lucy wiped away a stray tear before it dared escape and leave a visible trail of her true emotion. “Yeah—” she sniffed “—maybe Raymond didn’t, but remember, Sara…someone did.”

  Chapter Ten

  Will thumbed through the stack of papers. There were two sets of calendar pages. He compared the two, discovering they weren’t duplicates; they detailed the same period of time but the second set contained only cryptic notes and abbreviations. He knew all about the less-than-legal reasons for keeping two sets of financial books, but two date-books? Why? The whole purpose of keeping a calendar was to coordinate all your appointments and schedules.

  Unless…

  These are appointments Raymond doesn’t want anybody to know about.

  Will started comparing each page and an alarming trend emerged. In the “public” calendar, he found an appointment notation on September 26th for “Crandell, Darlene P.—Mrs. Arthur P.” On the corresponding private calendar page, there was the cryptic notation “APC.txt V#247 10k.”

  Not every appointment in the public calendar had a corresponding memo but when they did, each notation consisted of a trio of initials set up like a text-file name, then a code number starting with either a V, P or R, and a number ending in a K.

  It didn’t take a genius to come up with a possible explanation. But before Will allowed himself the luxury of formulating a theory, he turned to his own computer. A careful scan of his records substantiated his worst fears.

  Blackmail.

  In the Crandell case, Will had turned over to Bergeron a videotape of Mr. Crandell propositioning a female operative named Margaret. The former Mrs. Crandell had evidently insisted on concrete proof of her husband’s infidelity and Will had complied, generating a six-minute video of the elderly Mr. Crandell in action.

  In the Gordon-Garcia case—RGG.txt P#47 15k—Bergeron had said the wife insisted on pictures. Will took them himself. In the Landrum case—CSL.txt R#26 5k—Celia had given Will signed receipts, which proved the husband had checked into a hotel in downtown D.C. rather than gone on a business trip to Sacramento. And Will had promptly handed them over to Bergeron.

  V, P, R. Video. Photograph. Receipt.

  And the numbers? Considering Bergeron’s upscale clientele, it was plausible that he might extort ten thousand dollars from a husband with something to hide. Evidently the figure varied, depending on financial circumstances. But whose? The victim’s potential cash flow or Bergeron’s need?

  Will pushed away from the desk, contemplating his discovery. In some ways, he was almost relieved that Celia had been involved in only one of these three cases. It eliminated her as a common denominator and placed the guilt squarely on Bergeron’s shoulders.

  And mine.

  Will stood and stalked over to his fish tank. Placing a palm against the cool glass, he felt the gentle rumble of the compressor, pumping air into the water. The bubbles shot out of the tube, rose upward and performed a frenetic dance on the surface until they popped. There was usually something lulling, even hypnotic, about the chaotic motion of the bubbles but it wasn’t working this time. The cool glass heated under his hand, creating a foggy outline around his fingers.

  He was hot, all right

  Hot under the collar.

  Raymond Bergeron had played him for a fool, violating professional ethics by taking confidential material supplied in good faith and turning it into extortion. Weren’t divorces messy enough without introducing third-party greed into the picture?

  Will lifted his hand from the tank’s side, curling his fingers into a tight fist For a
moment, he stood there, muscles coiled and teeth clenched. Then he slowly willed himself to relax. Getting angry wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t the William B. Riggs way.

  How about getting even?

  Will drew in a deep breath.

  First he had to find Raymond Bergeron. Then he would figure out what to do with him. And there was still the matter of Celia’s death.

  Maybe she’d figured out about his blackmail scheme. Maybe the lawyer had killed her rather than have her reveal his secrets. The mind’s eye tried to picture Celia, virtuously trying to stop her lover from extortion. The picture faded before it was even half formed. Instead, Will got a mental image of Celia, trying to cut herself in on the deal and Bergeron unwilling to profit-share.

  Will nodded. That sounded much more like the Celia he knew. And it might just explain her murder.

  He returned to his desk and the pages. He had to check every notation, single out those cases that included Celia as an operative. If she had stumbled onto Bergeron’s extortion scheme, then it was probably in connection with a case she’d worked on.

  He started with the Landrum case, trying to recall every detail of Mr. Landrum’s wee-hours attempts to entice Celia to his hotel room. The man had slipped her a room key-card with a whisper about getting together. She’d countered by suggesting he order a bottle of champagne for their impending rendezvous while she dashed off to the rest room for a last-minute check. She’d passed the key to Will who had hightailed it upstairs to verify the man had really checked in. The conscientious hotel staff had already slid a bill under his door, so Will had taken it as his proof.

  Between the lines of Celia’s report, there were no additional details. For some curious reason, her writing style had always been diametrically opposed to her personal style. Her reports were always neat and succinct—not what you’d expect from the theatrically vampish persona she so carefully cultivated. She even turned in her report on a floppy so that Mimi didn’t have to retype—

  Will stopped.

  On a disk?

  Where there’s a disk, there’s a computer. And where there’s a computer, there might be additional files….

  He grabbed his Rolodex and allowed himself a tight-lipped smile. And where there’s a Will…

  Saturday, early afternoon

  SARA GLANCED AT HERSELF in the rearview mirror and tried to use a tissue to scrub away the oily smudge on her cheek. At first, she didn’t want to lose precious time in something as self-indulgent taking as a shower. But by the time she drove home and stumbled into her bedroom, a shower had become less a time-wasting luxury and more a soul-repairing necessity.

  Stripping off her dirtied clothes, she took refuge in the stinging hot spray, wishing she could wash away her niggling sense of guilt as easily as the mess created by the malfunctioning dishwasher.

  Two voices argued inside her. One kept harping, “What sort of idiot doesn’t know her fiancé was cheating on her?” And the second countered with the importance of trust and faithfulness. Sara cut off the water when Voice One went a step too far: “What kind of idiot falls for someone else when the first relationship is barely cold?”

  She toweled herself off. Yeah…what kind of idiot? She looked into the mirror, getting a good view of just what type of…

  She made a face. “What kind of idiot talks to herself?” To prove she wasn’t the least bit smitten, she grabbed jeans and a turtleneck from her closet rather than linger over a clothing selection. Smitten people mulled entirely too long on their clothing choice, she told herself.

  A twinge of hunger informed her that she hadn’t eaten much all day. She walked into the kitchen, reminding herself that smitten people didn’t eat much, either. Sne glanced at the contents of her refrigerator; a ravenous appetite would dispel any notions that she wasn’t the least bit infatuated with anybody, anywhere, she decided.

  Nothing caught her interest.

  She searched the pantry. Nothing there, either.

  But if I’m not hungry, that means…

  Sara snatched a package of microwavable popcorn from the pantry. She would eat! She would eat if only to prove she wasn’t—the word stuck in her mind.

  Smitten.

  As she adjusted the microwave’s timer, she realized it was one-forty. She would never eat, dry her hair, and get over to his office by two. I’d better call him….

  Rather than turn off the microwave, she stepped into her office to escape the sound of popping corn. As she reached for the phone, she realized her answering machine was blinking. Had the phone rung while she was in the shower?

  Maybe Will has already found Raymond!

  She punched the Play button. “10:32 a.m.”

  “Oh, God…Sara, I’m in so much trouble. You sicced that bitch on me—”

  Her hands trembled as she fumbled to hit the Stop button. Taking a step backward, she crossed her arms and stared at the machine. Its red power light glared back, unblinking. She knew she didn’t need to play back the tape again to recall his next words. How could she forget them? There would be that long shuddering gasp of breath and the most damning words he could ever inflict on her: “It’s not my fault, Sara. It’s not. It’s yours. You hired the slut.”

  Not my fault…

  It’s yours….

  It’s yours….

  She sank to the chair, lowering her head to the cool smooth surface of the desk.

  Raymond’s confession.

  But of what? Infidelity or murder?

  She fought her first instinct to destroy the tape. Instead, with remarkably steady hands, she hit the Fast-Forward button. Now if she could only put him out of her life so efficiently.

  The machine beeped, indicating a second message. Instinctively, she hit Play before realizing she might be subjected to yet another outburst. “1:49 p.m.” Then flinched at the sound of another male voice.

  “Sara? You there? Pick up the phone.”

  When she realized she was holding her breath, she released it with a relieved sigh.

  “It’s Will. Don’t panic. I haven’t heard anything from any of the restaurants. That’s not why I’m calling. I got a hunch about the case and I’m in the car, headed over to a friend’s place for some help. I won’t be back to my office for at least an hour, maybe two. If anything breaks open, I’ll contact you immediately. I spoke to someone named Lucy at your restaurant and she told me about the broken dishwasher.” He paused. “Sorry, Sara. Just what you needed, eh? I’m going to be busy for a while so why don’t you try to get some rest? It may be a long night Uh…if you need me, call Mimi and she’ll patch you right through. Bye.”

  The machine clicked, then stopped. No more messages.

  Sara wandered back into the kitchen where the aroma of popcorn was almost overwhelming. She pulled the steaming bag out of the microwave and stared forlornly at its contents.

  She sat at the kitchen table, opened the bag and forced herself to eat a handful.

  If you don’t eat something, you know what that means….

  “WELL?” WILL SHIFTED in the broken chair. “Can you do it?”

  Archie used his bandaged finger to push his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “Like I told you, it all depends on whether I can access the system or not.”

  Will glanced around the workroom where several dozen computers sat, all in different stages of repair. “I thought you said you could get inside any computer, anywhere.” For a moment, he wondered if Archie Koeffler had been bragging about his prowess as a repairman rather than a hacker.

  Archie ran his hand over his keyboard. “Usually I can, but there’s a sorta binary aspect we have to consider before I can go too far into this case.”

  “A ’binary’ aspect?”

  Archie rolled his eyes and sighed in the world-weary manner of a nearsighted, fourteen-year-old computer genius. Unfortunately, Archie was forty, wore bifocals and lacked the forgivable illusion of youthful inexperience. “Binary—as in switching. As in ones and zeroes?”


  Will smiled as he reached over and picked up a small

  wafer board. He flipped it in the air like one would a coin. “You wouldn’t be trying to shake me down for more money, now would you, Archie?”

  The small man blanched, intercepting the board in midair and cradling it in his palm like a cherished gem.

  “Of course not. I mean zeroes and ones. As in off or on. I can’t break into her system from a remote location unless her computer is turned on. There’s no remote command I can give to power up her computer if she turns it on and off by using a switching station or a surge protector.”

  “I understand. But we won’t know until you try.”

  Archie shrugged. “Just as long as you understand.” Under his breath he added, “Just as long as Celia doesn’t find out”

  “Archie…I told you over the phone—Celia’s dead.”

  The man cracked his knuckles, then hunched over his keyboard. “She’s the person most likely to decide to come back from the dead and haunt me. She hated for people to pry into her private life.” He turned to his monitor and squinted. “Here goes.”

  To Will, the letters crossing the screen were nothing more than gobbledygook, but Archie harrumphed, snorted, guffawed and sneered at each string of characters. For ten minutes he looked and sounded more like an outcast from the National Zoo rather than one of the preeminent computer specialists in the D.C. Metro area. But he stopped snuffling and chortling when a neatly ordered directory list scrolled across the monitor.

  “Riggs, I always said your success had more to do with dumb luck than skill. Her machine was already on—we’re in.” He tapped the monitor with his grubby fingertip. “There’s her hard-drive directory. And as an added bonus—” he typed in a command “—she’s left a disk in the floppy drive and we can access that, too. Tell me what we’re looking for and we’ll let our fingers do the walking.”

  Will handed him a disk on which he’d copied two files: the list of cases Celia had worked on during the last six months and the names of clients from Bergeron’s secret date book. “Find me any reference to these people. It could be names, initials, code names. You might be able to corroborate the file by date if not by name.”