Book of Secrets

by Chris Roberson

  Stiles's office was at the end of a long hallway, most of the lightbulbs along the way burned out and the tiles on the floor warped and ill-fitting. There was a light on inside the office, visible through the pebbled glass of the doorway, and I pushed my way in without knocking.

  I'm not sure what I expected to find inside, but an attractive black woman in her late twenties packing things up in a cardboard box was not high on the list of possibilities. Aside from her and the box, and a few sad pieces of furniture, the room was empty.

  "Yeah," she asked, obviously not pleased by the company, "can I help you?"

  "Yes, I'm looking for David Stiles."

  She straightened, and put her hands on her hips.

  "You're a bit late, honey." She said the word as a reflex, without any warmth, like a waitress who just got a lousy tip. "He's dead."

  "But…" I stuttered, taken aback. "When…"

  "Night before last," she answered. "Stupid son of a bitch fell out of his bedroom window, down six stories." She paused, shaking her head. "Wasn't just a whole lot an ambulance coulda done for him, even if they hadn't taken thirty minutes to get there."

  I glanced around the room, taking a quick inventory.

  "And you would be?" I asked.

  "Funny, I don't remember hearing your name when you came in," she said, her eyes narrowed.

  "My name is Spencer Finch," I answered, remembering to smile. I offered my hand. "I'm a reporter, and I'm working on a story I thought Mr. Stiles could help me with."

  Warily, she took my hand, her long nails grazing the back of my wrist.

  "Talitha Cummings," she said. "I worked for Stiles these past couple of years. He didn't pay much, but then he wasn't really around all that much either."

  "I see," I answered, but didn't really. "So you were his… secretary."

  Talitha yanked her hand back like it had been burned, and glared at me.

  "I am not a goddamned secretary." She straightened, her chin up. "I'm a research assistant. I did go to college, you know."

  I didn't, but nodded all the same.

  "Then maybe you could help me," I went on. "Would you happen to know what cases Mr. Stiles was working on before he… well…"

  "Went pavement diving?" she asked. "Yeah, I suppose I would know at that." She crossed her arms, and looked hard at me. "Why should I tell you?"

  I smiled broadly, and gestured towards the door.

  "Ms. Cummings, could we discuss this over lunch?"

  Without a word she grabbed her purse and was out in the hallway. As she headed towards the stairs, she called back over her shoulder.

  "You can spend all the money on me you want," she said, "but that doesn't mean I've got to tell you anything."

  Talitha directed me to a Thai place on the north side of downtown, and once there worked her way through two helpings of some sort of chicken and noodle dish, while I picked my way through a plate of ground beef and rice. While eating we talked, or rather she talked and I listened. I had overheard enough conversations between women to know what they are like, and women tend to bring the same rules to bear when talking to men. By the time we had finished the main course, I knew where she had grown up, where she had gone to school, how many siblings she had, and just what her relationship with her parents was like. That, and the fact that she found me "very easy to talk to," which I accepted as a compliment. I hear it from people a lot, women especially for some reason, but in my line of work I could hardly complain.

  From me she got my name, the name of my magazine, and the fact that I seldom, if ever, ate Thai food. If she was expecting any girl-talk out of me, I'm sorry to say she was disappointed. Men play by different rules. Women talk about themselves; men talk about stuff.

  Once the check came, and we finished off our drinks, I diverted the conversation to the proper order of business.

  "So," I asked, clinking the last ice cubes around in my now empty glass, "do you think you can tell me about the cases Stiles was working on?"

  Talitha daubed at the corners of her mouth with a broad cloth napkin, and regarded me with an amused look.

  "Well," she said, "since you asked so nicely…" She leaned forward, conspiratorially. "David had closed most of his cases in the last month. The usual, run of the mill stuff. Following some guy's wife, tracking down a runaway kid, shit like that. The only case still open when he died was a new one that came into the office last week. Some kinda snoop job for a high roller."

  "What high roller?"

  "I dunno, some big-money, land-and-oil, ten-gallon-hat cracker. Name of Price, something like that."

  "J. Nathan Pierce?" I asked.

  She straightened, and looked at me with a grudging respect. I got the impression she had been playing dumb, and wasn't expecting me to know even that much.

  "Yeah, that's the one. He called the office early last week – himself, mind you, not some flunky – and asked to speak to David. The next thing I know David's bustin' out of the office trying to slick his hair back and put on a tie all at once, and didn't come back till late in the afternoon. From then on he was working on the case, day and night, weekends too, until…"

  She paused, in what I took to be an uncharacteristic display of emotion.

  "Until he fell," I finished for her.

  "Exactly."

  "What was the case, if you don't mind me asking?"

  "I'm not sure if I should," she said. "Mind, that is. But I'll tell you anyway. Don't see as it can make any difference now." She lowered her voice slightly and continued. "There was a break-in at Pierce's place over in River Oaks a while back, and something pretty valuable got stolen. Some papers, or a book, something like that. David was supposed to find it and bring it back, and the fee was going to be enough to keep him in bad haircuts and cheap cologne for a year."

  "Why hire Stiles? No offense, I'm sure he was a fine detective…"

  "No, he wasn't," she interrupted. "He was a shitty detective. But he was a kind man, and people liked him."

  "Well, there you go. Why would someone like Pierce, a) hire a detective, and b) hire a shitty one? It doesn't make sense."

  "Honey," she said, with more warmth now, "you are asking the wrong woman. I asked David that when he came back with the case, and he looked at me like I'd just shit in his yard. You see, David was always sure he was a great detective, and just ain't never had the chance."

  "But you knew better."

  "Shit yeah. But I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I let it go."

  I sat quietly for a moment, rolling a bad thought around in my head for a while before letting it out. Finally, I had no choice.

  "Talitha, do you think there's any chance that Stiles didn't just fall out of that window? Do you think maybe he was pushed?"

  "Mr. Finch, since we're being all open and honest here…" She paused slightly, and drew a breath. "Yes, that is exactly what I think."

  Talitha agreed to let me take a look at Stiles's notes on the case, but explained that they were already boxed up, and it would take her a little while to find them. With a sly grin she suggested she could probably have them together by, say, dinner time. I swung back by the office, and dropped her off outside, arranging to pick her up there at about six. Without another word, she walked off and disappeared into the building.

  The car idling, I glanced at my watch. It was only one o'clock, which left me with five hours to kill before I knew anything more. I figured I could do a drive by of Pierce's place in town, to see what I could see, but would still have ample opportunity to get stunningly bored. I would have to think of something.

  Stopping at a Texaco, I picked up a couple of packs of Camels, a liter of Pepsi, and an enormous bag of CornNuts. I decided that if the opportunity to stake out Pierce's house presented itself, I wanted to be prepared. As it turned out, I needn't have bothered.

  The house wasn't all that far from Stiles's office, but it might as well have been on another planet. Contrasted with the cramped streets and urban
blight of that area of downtown, River Oaks was like a national park, with mansions airlifted in. The streets were wide and winding, and the houses positioned artfully on plots of land the size of football fields. Pierce's was on Lazy Lane, where the largest and most opulent of the houses could be found. They were so far above the rest that you couldn't even see them, perfectly hidden by high walls, or by hedges taller than the entire line-up of the Houston Rockets combined.

  There was a manned security guard-post at the entrance to Pierce's place, making it looking even more like a fortress than it already did. Cruising by slowly, I got a glimpse of a manicured lawn and white pillars in the distance, but nothing else. The security guard caught my eye, and in the subtlest of body language let me know it would be a good idea to move along. I eyed the pistol at his hip, and dropped my foot on the accelerator.

  Following the winding roads out of the neighborhood and back to civilization, I wondered just what I would do with the rest of the afternoon. I could find a bar and hole up somewhere, but then I would risk forgetting about my appointment all together. I could check into a hotel and catch up on some much needed rest, but then I might sleep straight through the night. As I drove, I fished around in my coat pocket for my lighter, and came up with a crumpled piece of paper. Glancing at the telegram, I figured what the hell? There were worse ways to spend the time than picking up my inheritance, though at that moment I was having trouble deciding just what they were.

  The law offices of O'Connor, Riley, and Vasquez were located in a high rise in the heart of downtown, a glass and steel obelisk rising some thirty stories into the smog. I had visited the offices only once, during high school, when the venerable R.M. O'Connor represented me against charges of breaking and entering as a favor to my grandfather. I ended up with a suspended sentence from the court, a stony silence from my grandfather, and a two hour lecture on my failure to meet expectations from R.M. O'Connor. I had seen him only twice after that, when he had come to our house on business, and I learned quickly to be elsewhere when he was around.

  O'Connor was the antithesis of my grandfather, and I was always amazed they had continued their association as long as they had. Crude where my grandfather was refined, loud where my grandfather was reserved, O'Connor was an old school Texan lawyer, who played the good-old-boy angle for all it was worth. I decided there must have been something in their past that bound the two old men together, some secret thing each saw in the other that earned their respect. For my part, I never saw it, and only and ever saw O'Connor as a swaggering old ass with a weakness for cheap scotch and western wear.

  I arrived in the offices unannounced, and found everything just as I remembered it. The height of oil boom opulence, with over-stuffed chairs and cheap reproductions of Remington paintings hanging on the wall, the requisite bronze cowboy frozen forever in the saddle, and a pair of Longhorn steer horns mounted on the wall. The wizened old receptionist, for all I knew, had not moved since I had been marched into the office by my grandfather fifteen years before.

  "Can I help you?" she drawled, looking at me over her oversized glasses.

  "I'm here to see R.M. O'Connor," I answered, stepping up to her desk.

  "Is Mister O'Connor expecting you?" she asked. She gave me an appraising look and, apparently, I came up short.

  "I wouldn't hazard a guess, ma'am," I said. "Could you just tell the old buzzard that Richmond Taylor's grandson is here to see him?"

  Her eyebrows shot up at the mention of my grandfather's name, and her hand reached for the phone. I heard her repeat my message to someone on the other end, and then set the phone back down on its receiver.

  "If you'd just have a seat, sir, he'll be with you in a moment."

  I was still trying to get comfortable on the squeaking leather when O'Connor burst into the lobby a few minutes later.

  "Patrick," he boomed, advancing on me. "How the hell are you, son? Didn't expect to see ya again so soon. You change your hair?"

  He stuck out his hand, and I stood and took it. He held my hand in that over strong, overlong way that only lawyers and used car salesmen can.

  "I'm not Patrick, O'Connor, I'm Spencer."

  He let my hand drop like he'd just seen roaches crawl out of my sleeve, and narrowed his eyes.

  "Ah," he said. "Ah. Spencer. Wasn't expecting to see you."

  I leaned around him, and shouted to the old bat pretending to work on her computer.

  "He wasn't expecting me, Mabel. You were right."

  The old man turned and headed back towards his office.

  "Come on, son," he called over his shoulder. "Let's get this over with."

  In O'Connor's office, full of the expected law books and diplomas, I signed a stack of releases and waivers and statements of indemnity, all while listening to the old goat rattle on.

  "I wasn't expectin' to see you at the funeral, mind, but you could have surprised me and showed up. You owed the man that much, at least, if you ask me. Just a little bit of respect, that wouldn't a been too much to ask, now would it?"

  "I didn't," I said, not looking up from the papers I was signing.

  "What's that?" O'Connor barked, losing his train of thought. "Didn't what?"

  "Ask you."

  "Well, that's a hell of thing, I don't mind tellin' you. All that man did for you and your brother, and you ain't even got the decency to see him be put in the ground. Not like your brother, now that he's been mentioned. He was there for the whole show, dressed up all nice, a real gentleman, your brother."

  "Where is Patrick these days, anyway? I haven't seen him in a while."

  "Oh, hell, I don't know. Flew in from Africa or some such place, he said, and was flying off again after. But he was here, all the same."

  I finished with the signatures, and capping the pen tossed it across the desk at O'Connor. I stood, reaching into my pocket for a cigarette.

  "Look, O'Connor," I said, "I have an excuse, or a reason, or whatever you want to call it, but I'm not going to waste it on you. If I happen to run into the old man sometime, I'll use it on him, but I'm not going to hold my breath." I snapped open my Zippo, and sucked the flame into the cigarette.

  "The way I see it, the old man dying means that your business with him is done, and once you give me whatever the bastard wanted me to have, your business will be done with me, too. So if you could…" I waved my arm for him to proceed.

  With a grunt and the creaking of his ancient bones, the lawyer lifted himself out of his chair and crossed the floor to a large wall safe. Shielding his right hand with his left, he spun the dial back and forth, and then with effort yanked open the door.

  I had discovered, while looking over the papers, that the house at 217 Crescent Row, San Antonio had passed into the hands of Mrs. Maria Casares, our grandfather's housekeeper in long standing, along with all the belongings contained within it, with the exception of the library, which went to my brother Patrick. Patrick also inherited a stamp collection, which I had never seen and which I learned had been the possession of my grandmother, a woman I had never met. All liquid assets, savings accounts, stocks and holdings, were divided equally and distributed amongst three charities of my grandfather's choosing. All debts, public and private, past or pending, were to be handled by O'Connor's firm, and paid as was appropriate out of a small fund held for that end. As for me?

  I ended up with a cardboard box, full of magazines, books and type-written pages, and a locked wooden case about a foot square and six inches tall, weighing about ten pounds, for which no one could find the key.

  "Here they are," O'Connor explained, "just as Richmond left 'em. Appears he knew his time was up, and had everything boxed up and ready to go. We just had to roll in and pick 'em up."

  "That was thoughtful of him," I answered, wondering idly how things would have been had the old man made that move twenty years before. "What is this shit?"

  O'Connor shot me a glare, but kept his voice even.

  "I'm not sure. He didn't rightly
say, only that this was the only product of his life's work, and he wanted you to have it."

  I was taken aback.

  "His life's work? Why would he want me to have it?"

  O'Connor leaned into me, and I could smell the cheap scotch on his breath.

  "I have no idea in hell, you little bastard. If you ask me, which you didn't, you are and always have been an ungrateful sack a shit, and I told your granddaddy as much whenever the subject came up. But for some reason this box was important to him, and he wanted you to have it. So if you don't want me to throw out my back chucking you out of that there window, you're going to pick this stuff up, walk out of here, and try your damnedest to show a little respect to the dead."