The Enemy Inside (8 page)

“You’re almost always here in town. It’s almost as if you live here. I know your office is in Los Angeles, but you could use someone in Washington. I mean, it would be very convenient for you, wouldn’t it?”

He nibbled at a piece of pineapple and said nothing. “Well, it would, wouldn’t it?”

When he finally looked up at her, she smiled. A sexual ether seemed to float across the hills and valleys of her body under the blankets like mustard gas on a battlefield. Her hand drifted toward him but the plate was in the way.

Proffit felt the urge. But thankfully at his age it took a while to recharge the batteries. Time for new tactics. “I meant to ask you, one of the lawyers handling Olinda’s estate at the firm asked me if she kept a spare key to her house anywhere at the office.”

“You mean her place in Georgetown?” said Vicki.

“Yeah. She didn’t own any other property, did she?”

“No. She stayed in town almost every weekend, unless she was traveling on business. A key, let me think. . . .” Preebles put a finger to her lips, the long shapely nail against the red gloss of her lips a little smeared from their recent antics.

“We’ve looked but haven’t found one,” said Proffit. “They need to gain access in order to inventory the property at the house.”

“Of course. I understand. If she had one, it would be in the big partner’s desk. The oak antique against the wall in her office.”

“We’ve looked there. We didn’t find anything.”

“You wouldn’t,” said Preebles. “There are hidden compartments all over that thing. It’s like one of those Chinese puzzle boxes. You know, the kind with sliding wooden compartments and hidden drawers.”

“Yeah,” said Proffit. “I had one of those when I was a kid.”

“Anything she didn’t want you to find she put in that desk.”

“Really?”

“Emm. You know you need a secretary,” she said. “Why can’t you just assign me to do that? After all, you are the boss,” she said.

“You’ve seen these compartments?”

“I have.”

“How many are there?”

“I didn’t count them.”

“How big are they?”

“Big enough for a key,” she said.

“But not papers?”

“I thought you were looking for a key?”

He gave her a look as if to say, “Stop with the bullshit.”

“I suppose it would depend,” she said.

“On what?”

“On the form these papers were in.”

He looked at her, a big question mark.

She chose not to read it. “Tell me you don’t need your own personal secretary and I’ll stop bugging you.” She stirred under the blankets and rolled away from him as if she were about to get up.

“OK, I could probably use a secretary,” said Proffit. “I admit it.”

She stopped with one naked thigh already out from under the covers, settled back down, looked over and gave him the smile of victory. “If the papers were on a thumb drive they’d easily fit in one of the little hidey-holes in that desk.”

“Did she use a thumb drive?”

Preebles nodded. “She wore it on a lanyard around her neck, hanging down her top where you couldn’t see it. I saw her hide it in the desk on a few occasions when she was dressed in something where she couldn’t conceal it in her clothing. But never overnight and never when she left the office.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I checked,” said Preebles. “That’s why you hired me, wasn’t it?”

He nodded.

“I noticed that she used it mostly after certain phone calls and never on the office line. Only her cell phone. She’d talk and then take it off from around her neck, plug it into her computer, save whatever it was she was typing to the thumb drive. Then she’d take the drive out of the machine and put it back around her neck. Mostly it was like columns of numbers. She never let the little drive out of her sight. I assume it probably went up in the flames with her out in California,” said Preebles.

Proffit couldn’t afford to make that assumption. “How is it that she allowed you to see all this?”

“She didn’t know I was looking.”

“What were you doing, hiding under her desk?”

“On the bookshelf behind her,” said Preebles. “What they call a pinhole camera. It’s wireless. They sell them at the spy shop here in Washington. It showed up in a little box in the upper right-hand corner of the monitor to my computer outside her office. It had pretty good resolution. If you expanded to the full screen you could read the monitor on her computer. But I didn’t want anybody to catch me doing it.”

“Good thought,” said Proffit. She’d gone way beyond the call of duty.

“The camera toggled on and off with one key on my keyboard. Anybody came by I just turned it off and the little box on my screen disappeared. I removed the camera the minute I found out she was dead.”

“Did this camera have a tape?”

“I couldn’t afford it,” said Preebles. “Those get really expensive.”

“I can imagine. Let me ask you a question. Do you know how to get into all the little hidden places in that desk?”

She propped herself up on one arm. “I think I could remember. I know I could if I was your personal assistant in the Washington office. You need my eyes and ears. You know you do.” She plucked one of the large strawberries from the platter and dragged it lasciviously across her nipple, breaking into a smile and then giggling a little as she did it.

He could have the desk dragged out to a medical office somewhere and have it x-rayed if he had to. And then take a chainsaw to it. He made a mental note to get a safe with double locks installed in his D.C. office and have it swept for bugs hourly before he allowed Preebles anywhere near the place.

NINE

H
erman called me. He found the place. The gentlemen’s club is in a building in a commercial area a few blocks in from the pier at Ocean Beach, what is left of the amusements from the old boardwalk era.

As I cruise slowly down the main drag, its denizens are T-shirt shops and souvenir stands. An antique cotton candy machine on wheels sits forlornly chained to the side of a building in front of a taffy shop. Late afternoon, middle of the week, most of the tourist haunts are closed.

The only place showing signs of life is a microbrewery doing a brisk business, people grabbing a cold one on the way home from work. All the storefront little businesses are neatly painted, mostly pastel colors, some of them with sparkling awnings out front. What you would think of as an upscale California beach community. I know the area. There are million-dollar homes just a few blocks away.

To the naked eye the gentlemen’s club is invisible. According to what Herman told me on the phone it lurks in a back alley under a sign posing as D
ARKSTONE’S
B
AR AND
G
RILL
with an arrow pointing up a flight of stairs.

I pull into one of the diagonal parking spaces out on the street. I’m driving my old Jeep, a 1980s vintage Wrangler that I’ve stored for years. I use it for work from time to time just to keep the engine alive. I’ve had it since before Sarah was born. I retain it for sentiment as much as anything else. A time machine for going back to the past whenever I’m behind the wheel, if only for a brief illusion.

Home is not the same anymore. Joselyn and I have been living together for more than a year. She has been away on a project in Europe for two months now, her job with the Gideon Quest Foundation. During a recent excursion up north, she suffered a traumatic incident; I nearly lost her. She fell under the influence of a man who was suffering from mental war wounds and who very nearly took her life. She is recovering, but we are still working to restore our relationship. It was difficult for me to see her go, but it was necessary to give her some space as part of the process of recovery. I’m looking forward to her getting back. Joss, like me, is also a lawyer, but one who left her practice to do good works—in this case as director of a foundation dedicated to the nonproliferation of weapons of mass destruction. After my being alone for years, my wife deceased, the Fates brought Joss and me together while the tensions of a world gone crazy seem to keep us apart. I am missing her and wishing she were here. We keep in touch on Skype.

Sarah is gone, no longer living near me, now on her own up in Los Angeles. She has a new job, a career, and friends. I see her only occasionally on weekends. She is busy with her own life, getting on, and getting away. She’s had enough of my law practice and the problems that it caused in our lives. I can’t say that I blame her. Growing up without a mother—Nikki died of cancer when Sarah was young—was only part of it. Having to hide out from a psychotic named Liquida, a killer hired by the Mexican cartels who crossed my path like a black cat, the result of my practice, was enough to send Sarah packing.

She has no interest in being a lawyer or anywhere near a courtroom. I have at least cured her of that. I have often wondered why it is that children, when they come of age, often shy away from what their parents do for a living. The tailor’s son won’t make clothes and the banker’s boy wants to be a doctor.

A few of Sarah’s friends have come to me asking for letters of support to law schools. Of course, when they’ve asked me about a career in law, I do what every other lawyer does. I lie. What others perceive as lucrative and glamorous, your own kid sees up close for what it is, rancorous, dispute-ridden, and sometimes dangerous. They should ask Sarah. Criminal law is largely long hours, seedy clients, uncertain pay, and short-tempered judges, the stuff of which ulcers are made. How do you tell that to some bright-eyed grad with sufficient grades to get into Stanford? You don’t want to pop their balloon with the barbed stinger of cynicism. Listen, kid, the only reason the system tolerates you at all is that it grinds on and could not grind without you. Like the tango, human dispute is impossible without at least two to argue. The criminal defense lawyer’s sole claim to existence.

Suddenly, a shadow from the other side of the car. Herman taps on the window. I reach over and unlock the door. He slips into the passenger seat and closes the door behind him.

“The place is upstairs.” Herman points down the street toward a line of buildings on the other side. “It’s hopping,” he says. He’s already checked it out. “Place is like an old speakeasy. You don’t see or hear a thing ’til you get inside. Then they got a subwoofer give you a nosebleed,” he says.

“Late on a weekday in the afternoon I can’t imagine they’d be doing that much business.”

“Guess again,” says Herman. “Lotta pent-up libido in this town. Not what it used to be when the navy was young.” Herman is right. San Diego used to be a military town, mostly navy and marines. At one time, I am told, the shore patrol combed the bars and clubs downtown like they owned them. But that was decades past. Whoever is running Darkstone’s Bar and Grill is probably paying somebody to look the other way.

“Did you have any trouble getting in?” I ask.

Herman shook his head. “As long as you pay the cover, they open the door,” he says. “Top of the stairs they got a steel door thick as a safe, speaker system, and a camera. You talk nice, they let you in. Inside’s like an air lock. Once the door closes, they own you. They frisk you with a metal wand, check your ID, look you up and down and see if they smell a cop. If not, you pay and they let you in.”

“How much?”

“That’s the rub,” says Herman. “A hundred bills.”

I look at him in disbelief.

“They take a credit card,” he says. “I guess they figure, you can pay, you must be a gentleman. You get two drinks and you can talk to the girls. Anything more, the sky’s gonna be the limit,” he says. “I’m only guessin’, of course.” He smiles at me as he says it.

“You’re sure she works there?” I am talking about the girl we know as Ben, the one who invited Alex Ives to the party and the fiery crash afterward that he can’t remember.

“Yeah. I talked to one of the girls who works there, showed her the picture I got from the tattoo shop owner, and the gal ID’ed her. Says her name is Crystal. Stage name, of course. None of them use their real names at work. Said Crystal works the evening shift, four to whenever things go slack. They try to catch the guys going home from work. Noon until two or three in the afternoon, and then four thirty until closing.”

I look at my watch. It’s twenty past four. “She should be there,” I say.

“Give her a few more minutes,” says Herman. “If the shift starts at four thirty, she’s probably backstage getting ready. Don’t wanna appear too anxious. I already rented a room at the hotel down the street.” He points.

I see the blue neon sign.

“Room number seven.” He hands me the key. “We need a quiet place to get her to talk.”

I take his lead on this. Herman is streetwise. He certainly has more experience in this realm than I do. We sit in the car.

“We need to think this out. What we’re going to do,” I say. “Why don’t
you
approach her, figure out how to get her to the room. Once she’s inside we can both talk to her.”

“She’s more likely to go with you. Oversize black guy with a shiny shaved dome is more likely to put her on edge.”

“Statistics show that most serial killers are middle-aged white guys.”

“Be that as it may,” says Herman. “You keep the key. We approach her inside the club, start talking about Ives and the accident, she’s liable to wanna go to the ladies’ room, powder her nose,” says Herman, “and disappear. That’s if things go well.”

Herman gives me a briefing on what the place looks like inside, dark with a lot of mirrors, colored smoke, and laser lights. Cocktail tables and booths with a bar along the far wall. An elevated stage with a pole out front for dancing.

“I didn’t see any muscle. Nothing at the door. But you can be sure there’ll be some,” he says. “Chances are if there are problems they won’t be calling the cops.”

“You’re saying a frontal assault is not the height of prudence.”

“I don’t know about Prudence, whoever she is, but if the one we know as Ben makes a stink it could get damn ugly,” says Herman. “We’ll be up to our armpits in bulging bouncers, or worse, the business end of a sawed-off shotgun.”