She had Bill and Dewey out looking for two men who had jumped bail posted by the Open Bars Bail Bond Company. Neither suspect was violent, but both were out on crimes that were serious enough to rate bail over one hundred thousand dollars. The reward on either one would keep the agency open for another month or two.
Emily returned her attention to the filing cabinets behind Phil’s desk. She had been going through the files for a week, ever since the day after Phil’s death, starting with the ones that appeared to be the most recent, and moving backward to the older ones.
She had never heard any of the names she was now reading in the files, and there was nothing about the cases that seemed dangerous. Almost all of them were civil lawsuits, in which the agency had been hired by one side to investigate the other. No investigation seemed to have turned up anything especially damaging. There were no pieces of paper in any of the files that contained threats. There were no notations that said anybody was angry, or even dissatisfied.
At times the Kramer agency had taken on investigations that had to do with real crimes. Now and then Phil had been hired by a defense attorney to find exculpating evidence that the cops had missed or withheld. But she had not been able to find any cases from the past couple of years that had involved criminal charges, or even a file in which the police were mentioned prominently. She kept moving through the records, going back in time, not knowing precisely what she was looking for.
Then she sensed someone was in the doorway behind her. She looked up from the file she had taken out of a cabinet, composed her face in a motherly expression so she wouldn’t scare April, and spun the desk chair around.
Ray Hall had been watching her.
“Hi,” she said.
“You’ve got Dewey and Billy chasing bail jumpers?”
Emily nodded. “We’re broke, Ray. I’m picking the low-hanging fruit so we can all pay our bills this month.”
Hall closed the door. “What’s April doing?”
“I’m teaching her skip-tracing. She can do it on her computer while she’s answering the phones.”
“She told me you’re answering the phones.”
“If she told you that, then she could have told you what she was doing.”
“What’s in the files?”
“I’m still trying to find cases we can collect fees on.”
“Find any?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“There’s one other thing I haven’t found, and it puzzles me,” Emily said.
“What’s that?”
“Phil’s cases.” She watched Ray. “I’ve been going through the files for the past year or two, and I can find pieces of paper with his handwriting on them, but they’re just bills and correspondence. He’s not the investigator in any of the cases. Do you have any idea of what he did with the cases he worked?”
Ray Hall stared at her, and she wondered if the complexity she read in the look was really there, or if she was just imposing it on him. After a few seconds, he answered, “It’s something I still haven’t figured out. In the past year or two I haven’t known of any investigation he was doing on his own.”
“Any? Not one?”
“None that I know of.”
“Why not?”
Ray shrugged. “It’s not unusual that the owner of an agency would decide that the best use of his knowledge and experience isn’t taking telephoto shots of a workmen’s-comp case playing basketball.”
“So what did he consider the best use of his knowledge and experience?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you’ve been wondering about it, trying to figure out the answer?”
“Yes,” he said.
“But you didn’t mention it to me.”
“I didn’t notice that he was working cases, but he must have been. I haven’t figured out a way to find out what any of the cases were. I searched that desk the morning after he died before you got here, but I found nothing. Whatever he was working on, he didn’t write it down in any of the usual places.”
“Do you know any reason why he wouldn’t?”
“No. Not yet.”
The telephone rang, and she could see April through the glass watching to see whether Emily really would answer it. Emily held up a finger to tell Ray Hall to stay for a minute, and said in her best receptionist voice, “Kramer Investigations.” After a moment, she said, “Yes, Detective Gruenthal. It’s me,” and Ray Hall walked out.
Emily watched him through the glass wall. She thought she saw April’s eyes meet his and stay there for a moment, but he didn’t slow down on his way to the door. For an instant, Emily felt her chest constrict. Could Ray Hall be involved with little April? She wasn’t sure why the idea mattered so much to her. She wanted to go after him and make him stay while she got rid of Detective Gruenthal, but it was too late to do it gracefully.
She closed her eyes and listened to Sergeant Gruenthal telling her the same things Ray Hall had already told her about the night of her husband’s death. She was struck by the number of sentences he began with “We don’t know if,” or “We don’t know who,” or “We don’t know what.” When his pauses began to convey the message that he felt he had fulfilled his responsibility to her, she said, “Thank you. I’m glad you called. Please let me know if anything new comes up.”
She hung up and went out to the front desk where April was working on the skip-tracing list. Emily noticed the sheets April had printed and said, “Very good, April. Why don’t you go to lunch now?”
“All right.” April got up, pulled her purse out of a desk drawer, and disappeared out the door.
Emily went to Phil’s office and retrieved her purse, waited for a moment to give April time to ride the elevator down, then locked the office door and took the stairs. She knew the space in the basement garage where Ray Hall parked, and she thought there just might be a chance of catching him. When she arrived, she saw that Ray’s space was empty. There was still April.
Emily went to her car, got in, and started the engine. She lowered her window, and heard another car coming up the ramp from the floor below. Emily ducked down until she heard the car go by, then sat up and looked. April’s red Honda Civic was moving toward the exit.
Emily pulled out of her space and drove up the aisle to the exit, then turned right and found herself about a block behind April’s red Honda. Emily felt guilty, but she had to do this. Everything for the past week had been mysterious to her, and anything she noticed might be important. If something was going on between April and Ray Hall, she couldn’t ignore it.
Emily kept her distance. She gave April plenty of chances to get ahead and lose her, but whenever she thought she had, there would be the little red Honda. She followed April onto the freeway, and then to the exit for Forest Lawn Drive, the one that Emily took each time she came to the cemetery. April drove along the road beside the freeway for a distance, and Emily kept thinking she would take it all the way to Griffith Park. Emily hoped that April was going to have lunch in the park, not meet Ray Hall at one of the motels beyond it on Barham or Ventura.
April turned right at the big gateway into Forest Lawn Cemetery. Emily slowed down, gave April time, then turned in, too. She made a hard right and parked in the lot beside the chapel, where her car wouldn’t be seen from the cemetery. She got out and walked to the end of the building, then stopped at the corner to see where April had gone. At first she assumed that April was going to drive to a different section, maybe to visit the grave of a relative, but she didn’t. She stopped the Honda, got out, walked across the green lawn, and stood still.
It took Emily a minute to walk to the fresh grave. As Emily approached, she thought that April had not seen her coming, but then April turned around and said, “You followed me.”