"Sevenish," Susan said.
Unless she had to, Susan never specified an exact time. Since I never knew how to time an arrival at sevenish, I always specified, knowing I'd wait anyway.
"I'll be there at seven," I said.
"Maybe you ought to try and go back to sleep," she said. "You were up awfully late."
"Good suggestion," I said.
"Yes," she said.
There was a pause.
Then she said, "And thank you."
"You're welcome," I said.
I knew the thank you covered a lot of ground. It didn't need to be exact.
Showered, shaved, wearing a crisp white shirt, with my jeans pressed and new bullets in my gun, I arrived at the office a little past noon, carrying a ham and egg sandwich and two cups of coffee in a brown paper bag. I took off my raincoat and my new white Red Sox cap, sat at my desk, and ate my sandwich and drank my coffee with my office door invitingly open and my feet up on the desk so anyone going by could see that I had some new running shoes. Except for the fact that I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, I was the very model of a modern major shamus. After I finished my sandwich and the first cup of coffee, I considered what options the day offered. I decided that the best one was to drink the second coffee, which I had commenced to do when Hawk showed up carrying the red Nike gym bag. He took two coffees out of the bag and put them on the edge of my desk and sat in a client chair and put the gym bag on the floor.
"Want another coffee?" he said.
"Absolutely," I said. "Doubles my options."
"Got your computer disks," he said.
"Good," I said. "Give us something to do."
"What's this `us'?"
"You're not computer literate?"
"Been keeping company," Hawk said. "With a woman works for a software outfit. One night she show me the wonders of the Internet."
"Your reward probably for being such a studly," I said.
"Studly be its own reward," Hawk said. "Anyway, that more than I want to know about computers."
"You don't groove on the information highway?"
Hawk snorted.
"What I like," I said, "is how this wondrous artifact of science is primarily useful as a conveyance for dirty pictures."
"Of ugly people," Hawk said.
"Sadly," I said.
"Confirms your faith," Hawk said.
"My faith is unshakable, anyway," I said.
Hawk reached into the gym bag and produced a white paper bag, from the white paper bag he produced a donut. He took a bite of the donut and leaned forward and put the bag on the desk.
"Now here's a real bridge to the twenty-first century," I said and took a donut.
"Quirk tell you anything last night?" Hawk said.
"They hadn't ID'd him yet," I said. "Nobody wanted to search the body."
"Let the ME do it," Hawk said.
"That's what Quirk said. Stiff had a gun, though. It fell out of his pocket when they were taking him away."
"So maybe he ain't from the United Way," Hawk said.
"Or maybe he is," I said.
I swung my chair around so I looked out my window. It was still raining, which in Boston, in April, was not startling to anybody but the local news people who treated it like the Apocalypse. I liked the rain. It was interesting to look at, and I enjoyed the feeling of shelter on a rainy day. When I was a little kid in Wyoming, the darkened days outside the school room window had given me something to contemplate while I was being bored to death. Something about its implacable reality reminding me that school was only a temporary contrivance. While I was thinking about the rain, the morning mail came. There was a check from a law firm I'd done some work for. There was some junk mail from a company selling laser sighting apparatus for hand guns. I gave the brochure to Hawk. And there was a letter from the Attorney General's Public Charities woman with a list of the principals involved with Civil Streets. With my feet propped against the windowsill I went through the list. It told me that Carla Quagliozzi was president and gave me her address. I already knew that. It listed a number of people on the board of directors, none of whom I knew, except Richard Gavin. His address was Gavin and Brooks, Attorneys-at-Law, on State Street. Son of a gun. I sat for another moment thinking about that. Behind me I heard Hawk crumple the brochure on laser sights and deposit it in the wastebasket beside my desk. I looked at the rain for a while longer.
"Okay," I said and swung my chair back around and got up and walked over to the narrow table that ran along the left-hand wall of my office. There was a computer on it. I turned it on.
"Gimme the disks," I said.
chapter twenty-four
I AM INEXPERT with a computer and hope to remain so. I had bought one initially because Susan had one and took to it easily and had become almost immediately convinced that no office should be without one. When I did use the computer, which was rarely, and I ran into a problem, which was whenever I used the computer, I called Susan and she straightened me out. Today I ran into a problem at once. When I started up the computer and slipped in a copy of Sterling's hard disk, I couldn't get any of the folders open. I tried the other disks from the disk file we'd taken from Sterling's office. Everything was locked. Hawk was sitting in my chair with his feet up on my desk watching me.
"Need a code," he said.
"Thank you, Bill Gates," I said.
"Trying to be helpful," he said.
"Consultants!" I said in a loud mutter.
Susan did not seem the appropriate resource in this case, so I got up and went to my desk and called Sean Reilly.
"I've got some disks," I said, "that I can't get open."
"Locked?"
"I assume so."
"I'll come over."
I said thank you, but he had already hung up.
"Help is on the way," I said.
"He going to bring donuts," Hawk said.
"I don't think Sean ever ate a donut," I said.
"Then how much help he going to be?"
Reilly arrived in about ten minutes, which was the time he took to carry his black plastic briefcase down Boylston Street from the Little Building where he had an office. He walked in, gave me a brief nod, and sat down at the computer table. I introduced Hawk. Sean gave him a brief nod as he opened the briefcase and took out some software.
"You related to Pat Riley?" Hawk said, his face blank.
"No."
Sean was a medium-sized, mostly bald guy, with a patchy ineffective beard. The thin fringe of long hair that remained around the perimeter of his head was not much more effective than the beard. He wore a red plaid flannel shirt, the collar of which was folded out over the double-breasted lapels of a gray sharkskin suit. On his feet were green rubber boots with brown leather tops, in deference, I hoped, to the rain. He slid a disk into the computer and leaned forward looking at the screen. His hands moved over the keyboard as if he were playing Mozart.
"Unlock everything?" Sean said.
"Yep."
He ejected the first disk and slipped in another one, his gaze still locked onto the screen. He nodded as if to affirm a truth.
"Take about half an hour," he said.
"Fine."
He paused. We waited. He stared at the screen without moving.
Finally he said, "I don't like people watching me."
"Ahh," I said.
Hawk and I got up and went out and leaned on the wall in the corridor.
"People normally kick you out your own office?" Hawk said.
"Just artists," I said.
Hawk said, "Sean on his way to a costume party, you think?"
"I told you, he's a computer geek," I said. "To him that's dress-for-success."
We loitered in the hall another twenty minutes, while Sean Reilly practiced his black arts. Hawk took the opportunity to brush up on his surveillance skills by watching the receptionist in the design office across the hall.
"Are you objectifying that young woman?" I said.
"Absolutely not," Hawk said. "I thinking about her with her clothes off."
"Oh," I said. "No problem there."