When I mentioned my boredom to my uncle, he just smiled. “That’s the way it works, junior,” he said. “When it rains it pours, and when it snows it blows.” He must have seen the look of bewilderment on my face, because he took pity on me and told me, “Take my word for it, human nature being what it is, we’ll get business eventually. You can always count on people doing stuff to each other that requires our skills. Or at least my skills. In the meantime, how’s your crossword puzzle coming?”
It was Sudoku, but I didn’t bother correcting my uncle, and as it turned out I didn’t have time to answer his question anyway, because no sooner had he stopped talking than a beautiful, shapely brunette walked into Callahan Investigations. She was tall and slim, anywhere from late-twenties to early-forties—It was impossible to narrow it down any more than that—decked out in a form-fitting, knee-length maroon summer dress, and she walked in like she owned the building, which, for all I knew, maybe she did.
Also, she was crying. Tears ran down her face in great rivulets, twin streaks of dark eyeliner making her look like the worlds saddest but sexiest circus clown.
The woman’s grief didn’t stop her from sizing up the employment hierarchy, though. She took one look at me, still frozen in place with my feet on my desk, mouth half-open from surprise, and immediately turned to address Brick. My uncle, of course, was already on his feet, pulling out a chair and sweeping our visitor into it.
“I need to speak with Mr. Callahan,” she sniffled, swiping at her eyes with a tissue.
“Well then, you’ve come to the right place,” answered Uncle Brick. “This place is positively dripping with Callahans. In fact, until you entered, there was no one in here besides Callahans.”
She paused for just a beat, then continued, slowly getting her sobbing under control. “It’s my husband,” she said.
Brick nodded sympathetically. “It always is.”
“No, no, you don’t understand. He’s dead and I’m certain he was murdered.”
“I’m very sorry for your loss,” Brick said, “but what makes you think he was murdered?”
“Because he knew he was in danger. He is…” the woman paused and sobbed again, dabbing at her dazzling eyes with a tissue and only serving to smear more eyeliner around them. “I’m sorry, he was an accountant, and he told me he had stumbled on to something he wasn’t supposed to see. I believe it was that something that got him killed.”
“You should go to the police, Ms…”
“Billingsley,” she answered. “Margaret Billingsley. Call me Maggie, everyone does.”
Brick handed Maggie Billingsley a glass of water he had hurriedly drawn while she was introducing herself. She accepted it gratefully and continued, “I’m sorry, I’m not being clear. I’ve talked to the police, but they are of the opinion Robert’s death was accidental. I don’t have any proof that he was even in any danger, all I have is what he told me, and the police are completely disregarding that. This is why I need to speak with Mr. Callahan.”
Brick smiled. “Like I said, you already are speaking to Mr. Callahan. Two Mr. Callahans, in fact.”
She shook her head. “No, I need to talk with the other Mr. Callahan. I believe his name was Dennis.”
My uncle and I shared a look. “I’m sorry, but Dennis Callahan is no longer with us,” Brick told her.”
“Well, what agency does he work for now? Robert told me he had given proof of his situation to Dennis Callahan of Callahan Investigations, and that if anything happened to him, I should go see Mr. Callahan immediately.”
My uncle knelt in front of the grieving woman and gently took her hand. “I’m afraid you don’t understand. Dennis Callahan is dead, Ms. Billingsley.”
The woman stared at Brick as comprehension dawned in her eyes. “Oh, my,” she said. “What do I do now?”
“I don’t get it,” I remarked. “Wouldn’t he have said something to you?” It was two hours since we had been visited by Maggie Billingsley. Brick and I had escorted the beautiful widow to her car after promising to find whatever it was her husband had entrusted to my father’s care.
“Not necessarily,” Brick answered. “He may not have had a chance to. I was out of town working on another case at the time. Then he went and got himself shot, and that was that.”
The only sound was a barely audible whoosh…whoosh…whoosh as the wood-tone ceiling fan gently circulated the air in the stuffy office. Brick was lost in his thoughts and I in mine.
“Well, where would he have hidden it?” I asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it? We don’t even know what we’re looking for. A photograph or tape-recording would seem to be the most likely possibilities, but who can say for sure?”
My uncle chewed thoughtfully on the end of a pencil and I made a mental note to buy my own pencils. “It seems to me that we need to start by digging through Denny’s things and seeing what turns up.” He looked at me through eyes narrowed with concern. “Do you think you can handle that, son?”
I was standing even before he had finished the question. “Let’s go,” I said.
My father and I were not particularly close—how could we be when I had lived three thousand miles away for the past ten years?—but I had been in town for two weeks now and I still hadn’t gotten around to going through his things. This would be the perfect opportunity, though. Brick and I were in search of a clue and I knew that was something Dad would have appreciated were he still residing on the north side of the grass.
After Dad had been killed my uncle moved all his belongings to a storage unit, one of those aluminum boxy-looking shed things that you rent by the month. He knew I would eventually get around to sorting through all the stuff and figured leasing one of those places would be cheaper than continuing to pay the rent on Dad’s empty apartment. Had he known I was going to come to Boston to stay I could have moved right into Dad’s old place, but I’m glad he didn’t. I think there would have been too many ghosts there for me to be comfortable anyway.
We rolled up to the storage unit in Brick’s silver Mercedes. Something had been eating at me the whole ride over and I decided now was as good a time as any to voice my concern. “Uh, what if Dad hid whatever it is we’re looking for in his old apartment and it’s still there?”
It sounded like a perfectly reasonable question to me, intelligent even, but Brick seemed to find it the funniest thing he had heard all day. “Well, sonny,” he told me, trying but failing to keep the laughter out of his voice, “that’s why they invented breaking and entering.”
It was a warm day and it felt brutally hot with the sun beating down on that big metal storage unit. The unrelenting sun quickly turned it into a giant oven. After two hours we had worked our way through roughly half of my dad’s belongings and all we had to show for it were two empty bottles of Gatorade and a purple bruise on my forehead that looked remarkably like Lake Huron. The bruise I earned when I stood up too quickly and lost a brief but violent conflict with a metal support beam on the inside of what I was beginning to think of as an oversized coffin.
“Here’s a stupid thought. Maybe we’re looking for something Dad left on his computer.”
“Nah,” Brick answered with a dismissive wave. “He wouldn’t have put anything sensitive on a computer. It’s too easy to hack into the damn things. Hell, we’ve got thirteen year-old kids breaking into DOD computers just for the fun of it, whole new classes of criminals using the internet to steal money and identities. No, Denny was too smart to leave anything important enough to kill for on his computer.”