by Geonn Cannon
“So what are you looking for here? Someone who gaslighted Wilcox into pulling the trigger? Someone who was so pissed off that they manipulated him toward suicide?”
“I’m thinking about what he said when he called me. He said he had gotten himself into a situation and was trying to get out of it. I’m looking to see if there’s anything like that in his files. A bribe or a con he was working, or maybe a partnership he entered into without thinking it through. I can dig through this lost masterpiece for anything that looks like that.”
Dale had slid down onto her back, one leg bent with the other ankle resting on that knee. She stared at the ceiling and broke off a bit of her muffin. “Yeah.” She tossed the muffin bit into her mouth. “If he was making deals with mobsters or something, he’d definitely put that down. Make himself look badass.”
“Don’t eat that way,” Ari said. “You’ll choke.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Dale. Please.”
Dale rearranged herself so that she wasn’t lying flat. “What are you going to do when you find them?”
“Whatever Wilcox got involved with, it had to be illegal. Right? My theory is that he had some criminal connections and it went bad. Remember how we first ran into him? He was working with that psychic. He would investigate the client and feed the psychic everything she needed to ‘read from the spirits.’ Wilcox probably had a lot of partners like that. One of them must have finally turned on him.”
“So if you find out what it was, that means you’ll be pissing off the same people who were threatening him.”
Ari said, “I suppose.”
Dale got up and went around to Ari’s side of the desk. She bent down and cupped her face. “If I can’t eat my breakfast lying down, then you can’t be dismissive about this. Diana is involved in this. She’s the one who brought you in. Maybe she did it in a roundabout way, but she’s still part of it. Use her, puppy. I don’t want to have to rescue you again.”
“Maybe I like being the damsel in distress.”
Dale’s gaze didn’t waver.
“I promise, Dale, I’ll be safe.”
“Good.” She pecked Ari’s nose and straightened. “I’m going to go get to work. See you for lunch?”
“I’ll be here.” She lowered her voice to a soft growl. “In my dark office with my feet up, cigar smoke curling around my head, thinkin’ about killing another Jack Daniels… when she walked in with an offer I couldn’t refuse.”
“Do you want delivery or Mirch Masala?”
“I could do some Indian.”
Dale blew her a kiss over her shoulder as she left. Ari looked around for something that could serve as a fedora and came up empty. She decided she was a pretty poor noir detective anyway and went back to reading Wilcox’s notes. For all his shortcomings as a person, the man took beautiful notes. Ari was a little jealous of how easily she was able to arrange things into chronological order. She went back six months and slowly moved forward through the cases. Cheating husband, cheating wife, cheating wife, cheating husband. Ari really didn’t tend to get many of those, and she was starting to think it was because Wilcox had the market cornered.
The phone rang in the outer office. She heard Dale answer, her voice a soothing murmur coming through the wall as she spoke to the person on the other end. After a moment, the intercom on Ari’s phone lit up. She reached out and punched the button.
“Yes, Miss Frye?”
“Someone from Gilles Girard and Moreau is on line one.”
Ari frowned at the wall as if Dale could see her through it. “The lawyers who tried to make me look like an idiot on the stand? Sure, I’ll talk to them.” She picked up the receiver and hit the button as it started to flash. “This is Ariadne Willow.”
“Hello, Miss Willow. I’m not sure you remember me. Cecily Parrish.”
Blonde ice queen who liked to play with security cameras. “You’re the lady who thinks I’m a magician. Teleporting into sheds without leaving a trace.”
A soft chuckle on the other end. “Magic doesn’t exist, Miss Willow, and magicians are all just skillful liars. So in that respect, you’re absolutely right. I do think you’re a magician. I mean that with all due respect.”
“Sure,” Ari said. “It sounded like a compliment.”
“I’d like to have a meeting with you sometime this week. Whenever is convenient for you. Wednesday would be preferable to me, unless you have a conflict.”
Ari opened the calendar on her computer, but she knew it would be empty. Dale appeared in the doorway and lingered there. “I think I can find some time that afternoon.”
“Shall we say two o’clock?”
“Sure.” Ari typed in ICE QUEEN 2PM. “This isn’t going to be about Nelson Cook’s shed, is it? A true magician never reveals her secrets.”
Another soft chuckle. Ari wondered if it was a recording Parrish kept on hand to mimic human emotions over the phone. “No, we’re far too busy to dwell on past failures. We look to the future here, Miss Willow. I look forward to our meeting.”
“Me too. See you then.” She hung up.
“What was that about?”
“No idea. At first I thought she had figured out how I ‘tricked’ the security cameras, but she claimed it doesn’t have anything to do with that.”
Dale said, “You believe her?”
Ari shrugged. “I don’t know why she would lie. She seemed like the sort of person who would be smug about it.”
“True. And she was hot.”
Ari hissed through her teeth. “So hot.”
Dale chuckled and went back to her desk. Ari looked at the mark on her calendar and decided she didn’t want to waste mental energy on trying to figure out what game Cecily Parrish was playing. She closed the page and went back to Wilcox’s files.
Chapter Seven
Ari couldn’t spend all her time staring at Wilcox’s files trying to figure out his code. She was intrigued by the case, but it wasn’t a paying job. The day after she got his iPad, she received an email hiring her to serve divorce papers. It took her most of the day to track down the husband and she waited until his friends had gone to the bar for another round to drop the bomb. No need to humiliate the guy, or at least that was how she felt until he splashed the dregs of his beer in her face.
Dale was furious when Ari told her what happened. “Since when is it shoot the messenger?”
“Since always,” Ari said as she changed into a dry shirt. “The messenger is convenient, and you don’t have to see them again. No consequences to throwing a drink in my face.”
“That’s because they don’t know they could get their faces torn off if they’re mean to you.”
Ari said, “I’m not going to wolf out every time someone annoys me.”
Dale said, “I wasn’t talking about the wolf.” She made curled her fingers into talons and clawed at the air. Ari laughed and kissed her before they headed out to dinner.
She also accepted a custody case. A woman hired Ari to follow her husband to make sure he was being a responsible parent. Ari followed him for two days when the daughter wasn’t present and determined he spent his time either at work or at home. On Monday he left work with a group of friends and spent a few hours at a bar attached to a bowling alley. He bowled a frame with one of his coworkers and arrived home just before ten o’clock. She was going to follow him again on the weekend when he had the daughter, but she was confident the case would have a happy ending.
On Wednesday she was following him to lunch when she received a text from Dale. “Appointment at GGM today at 2.”
She smiled and sent a text back. “Thanks for the reminder. Lunch first?”
“You choose.”
Ari slipped the phone into her pocket and continued watching the target. She wrote down that he seemed like someone who was just filling the hours, biding his time until the weekend. She hoped that theory held up when the daughter was actually in the picture. When he went back to work, Ari wen
t to Potbelly and got two sandwiches to take back to the office. She got Dale the grilled chicken and cheddar and the Wreck Sandwich for herself. It was one of the days the wolf craved meat, so she gave it the most amount of meat one sandwich could provide: salami, roast beef, turkey, and ham.
Dale suggested stopping by the apartment to change into a more business-appropriate outfit, since the law offices were in a pretty upscale area downtown. Ari didn’t know what to expect from her meeting with Cecily Parrish, but she didn’t want to waste time changing clothes. Whatever awaited her would be met in comfortable clothes. Dale wished her luck and Ari headed out.
The address was actually in Belltown, and belonged to a black-glass monolith surrounded on all sides by new construction. Ari was forced to park a block away and walk the remaining distance. A board in the building’s lobby revealed Gilles Girard & Moreau was on the eighteenth floor. Ari had chosen to arrive at a slow time, so only one other person was waiting at the elevator bank. They stepped into the car together and the other woman pressed the button for forty. When she leaned back she let her eyes drift down Ari’s outfit before snapping forward again with obvious distaste. Ari thought about letting it go, since she hadn’t been dressing to impress anyone. But the way the woman held herself pissed her off.
“Nice suit,” Ari said.
The woman said, “Thank you.” She looked at Ari as if she wanted to return the compliment, but found nothing worth mentioning.
“No, I mean, it’s really nice. Probably has an Italian label on it somewhere. What did something like that cost you? Four figures?” The woman didn’t answer, but the corner of her mouth quirked. “Five? Wow.” Ari whistled. “I don’t have anything in my closet that cost that much. This shirt was three digits, but only if you count past the decimal.”
The woman wet her lips to hide her smirk, shifting her weight.
“But what’s the first thing you do when you get home? You toss all that shit on the bed and change into sweats. I know, I know, you need the outfit for work. So you pay highway robbery prices so you can look right at the job that pays you well enough to afford… the outfits you have to wear to get the job.” She tilted her head to the side. “Seems like a vicious cycle.”
The elevator doors opened and Ari stepped out, turning to face the woman. “The real difference between you and me?” She pinched the corners of her T-shirt to show off the logo. “I actually like this band.”
The doors closed on the woman’s sour expression. Ari turned and examined the waiting area she found herself in. There was a large oak island directly in front of the elevators where three receptionists were speaking into headsets. GG&M was gilded on the wall behind them, and to either side of the backsplash were glass doors leading deeper into the building. Ari approached the desk and waited for the first woman to finish her call and direct her gaze on the new arrival.
“How may we help you?”
“Ariadne Willow. I have an appointment with Cecily Parrish.”
“One moment please.” She pressed a button and spoke softly into her headset. After a moment she focused on Ari again. “Someone will be with you in a moment.”
The receptionist gestured at a three-sided square of padded seats in the corner. Ari sat next to a pile of magazines and chose one to thumb through. Her appointment was at two, and she’d arrived five minutes early. She made it through an issue of Time, not bothering to stop and read anything before moving on to some kind of car magazine. She knew jack-all about cars, but she had to reinforce her lesbian stereotype when she was in public. And the pictures were nice. The Economist was a last-ditch effort to fill some time, but even it wasn’t long enough, apparently.
At a quarter past the hour, Ari looked through the glass to see if anyone was on their way to retrieve her. At twenty-five past, she had exhausted all the reading material that even halfway appealed to her and looked at her phone. No messages postponing the meeting. At two-thirty-one, Ari stood up and walked to the glass doors.
“Ma’am? You can’t go in there unescorted.”
“It’s okay. I’m a detective. I’ll find her.”
She ignored the receptionist’s further protests and continued on. To her left, along the exterior wall, was a row of identical offices. The center of the office space was taken up by a glass-walled conference room. A group of people in suits were huddled around a laptop at one end of the table and looked to be locked in a heated debate with whoever was on the screen. The walls were decorated with framed newspaper and magazine articles that mentioned the firm or its associates. There were also awards. She didn’t know law offices got awards, but she supposed every profession had their own version of back-patting and gold stars.
Ari continued on, reading name placards until she reached the corner office and saw C. PARRISH - ASSOCIATE ATTORNEY. Ari knocked on the door even though the window next to the door revealed it was dark within. She went inside anyway.
The office was shaped vaguely like home plate, with the entrance at the wide end and Parrish’s desk at the point. It was the polar opposite of Wilcox’s office. Where he had gone for shabby and second-hand, Cecily had obviously spared no expense on her furnishings. Everything looked fresh off the showroom floor, shiny and untouched by every-day grime. The floor-to-ceiling windows flanked the desk like wings and let in the dismal gray light of the city. Ari walked to the south facing windows to see if Rainier was visible.
She had never been this high before, or if she had, there wasn’t an opportunity to appreciate it like this. The city spread out toward the sea and the carpet of green hills, all sewn together under a fluffy gray quilt. She was grateful that, despite the weather, the mountain was indeed out. She knew that if the office faced the other direction she would probably have a view of the Space Needle. She preferred Rainier. Far below her, she could see the shape of the streets that made it look distressingly like a rat’s maze, and a half dozen yellow cranes lurking over it all like vultures looking for their next meal.
Ari looked at the desk and saw three framed photographs next to the computer monitor: Parrish on a rock outcropping with Puget Sound behind her, a dog, and a third picture that Ari had to pick up and stare at before she determined it really was just a framed red square. No hidden image, no alternate hues that appeared when it was held in the light, just… red.
The office door opened and Cecily drifted in. “I was held up in court,” she said, seemingly unperturbed by the fact Ari was snooping.
“Sure,” Ari said, noticing the woman hadn’t apologized. She walked around one end of the desk as Cecily came around the other. She’d left the lights off when she came in. Ari wondered if it had been a calculated move or if she just hadn’t thought of it. The windows might have provided enough sunlight on a clear day, but with the clouds amassing overhead, it created a gloomy mood. Cecily took a seat and Ari did the same.
“Thank you for coming in, Miss Willow.”
Ari nodded. “I was surprised you called, given our exchange in court.”
Cecily shook her head. The light from the windows was enough to backlight her, casting shadows across the angles of her face. It also highlighted the low collar of her blouse. Her collarbone and cleavage almost seemed to be bronzed to draw the eye. Ari found her gaze drifting despite her best intentions.
“Water under the bridge,” Cecily said, her voice low and throaty. “I don’t harbor grudges. It’s not as if the case was won or lost based on your testimony. Bygones.”
“Good.”
“I will admit I was intrigued by your involvement in the case. I was almost hoping you would explain how you pulled it off.”
Ari said, “I thought our meeting wasn’t going to be about that.”
“It’s not. You brought it up. And I suppose it is relevant in a tangential way. The security camera which you so masterfully avoided. Were you curious how we found it?”
“I assumed you have an in-house investigator.”
Cecily nodded. “We did, until last week. Ro
bert decided he wanted to move on to greener pastures in Chicago, leaving us shorthanded. I want to offer you the job.”
Ari blinked in surprise. “Wow.”
“You’d be paid a retainer, which we can negotiate, and you’d be given an office here in the building. You would work cases brought to you by the partners and associates.”
“What about Bitches Investigations? What about Dale?”
Cecily said, “Your business would be moot at that point. You’d be working for us. As for Miss Frye, she could probably find other work at another office. We might even bring her onboard here. It would mean a steady paycheck for you. No more rinky-dink office—”
“Our office is fine, thanks.”
“I’m sure you think so, Ariadne, but…” She gestured out the window.
Ari stood up. “Thanks for the offer, but I’m going to have to pass.”
“Don’t be so hasty.”
“You’re asking me to give up the agency I built from the ground up. The agency Dale sacrificed to keep afloat while I was away for a few weeks. Hell, you’re asking me to cut loose the woman I love. I don’t care how much the retainer is. I’m not going to sell my entire life just to come work in an office with a nice view.”
“You would rather scrape by, hoping a client will walk through the door?”
“I’d rather remain my own boss.”
Cecily stood up. “You would be your own boss. The only change would be your clientele. All of your clients would be here, all around you.” She held her hands out to indicate the rest of the office. “The other lawyers. Me. In the course of bringing our cases to court, occasionally we need someone to gather evidence. It’s much the same work you already do, only you’ll be reporting your findings to us instead of some random Dan or Jan from Queen Anne.”
“But without Dale.”
“Again with Miss Frye. If we must find a place for her, I suppose she could work at the front desk.”
Ari said, “That’s not going to fly.”
“Maybe you should ask her. It would relieve a great deal of stress. No more worrying about how you’d pay the bills or if you could afford rent that month. You could move out of that dreary basement where you’re living now and buy a proper house.”
