“I told her that I had decided that I don’t want to be the First Husband, after all.” Todd smiled ruefully. “I’m going back to my nice ivory tower. Olivia was right about that, too. I wasn’t cut out for the real world of politics. I was born for the academic side of things.”
“You’re leaving the campaign?”
Todd nodded. “The news will be kept low-key, of course. I’ve stayed in the background all along so as not to distract the media’s attention from Eleanor and her message. If we handle it right, I doubt that anyone will even notice that I’ve eased out of the picture.”
Jasper started to respond. He stopped, sensing a new presence on the scene. He turned his head and saw Dixon standing in the doorway.
“Use ’em and lose ’em, is that the Chantry family motto?” Dixon asked thickly. “Hey, maybe someone should call up old Crawford Lee Wilder and tell him there’s another story here in Seattle. He could call it Dark Muse II, the sequel.”
“Go to hell,” Todd said wearily. “You’ve got what you want.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Dixon demanded.
“You’ve resented my relationship with Eleanor from the start. I should think you’d be glad that I’m out of the picture.”
“You’ve left her high-and-dry, you bastard.” Dixon took two steps forward and flung the contents of his glass straight into Todd’s face. “You’re so fucking stupid, you don’t even know how much damage you’ve caused.”
Before Todd could react, Jasper moved. He grasped Dixon’s shoulder and spun him around.
“This has gone far enough,” Jasper said quietly. “You’re drunk, Haggard. It’s time you left the party.”
Dixon’s enraged eyes widened in the darkness. “You stupid sonofabitch. I figured you were screwing Olivia because you intended to screw her out of Glow, Inc. But I had it backward, didn’t I?”
“I’m warning you, Haggard.”
Dixon uttered a shrill bark of laughter. “She’s the one screwing you, isn’t she? That’s what this is all about. She’s setting you up the same way she set up Logan Dane. Be careful you don’t get a sudden urge to run with the bulls in Pamplona. Or maybe take a dive off a tall building?”
Jasper slammed Dixon up against the wall with enough force to make the boards shudder. He pinned him there and lowered his voice to a whisper.
“One more word out of you, Haggard, and I will throw you off the edge of this balcony. It’s not a real tall building, and you’re drunk, which means you’ll probably land softly. I bet you’ll only break a leg or two.”
Dixon scowled, eyes bleary with alcohol and rage. “Let me go. I’ll have you arrested.”
Jasper smiled slowly. “That will look great in the papers, won’t it? I can see it now. LANCASTER CAMPAIGN MANAGER IN DRUNKEN BRAWL.”
Dixon blinked rapidly and seemed to sag. Jasper thought he saw a flicker of common sense surface somewhere in the blurred gaze. Or was it fear?
Olivia appeared in the doorway. The light in the hallway behind her enveloped her in an ethereal blue glow. But there was nothing otherworldly about the expression that snapped in her eyes.
Jasper wondered what had brought her out onto the veranda. Unerring instincts for avoiding potential disaster at Light Fantastic productions, no doubt.
She glanced at Todd and then peered into the shadows where Jasper still held Dixon against the wall.
“Is there a problem?” she asked crisply.
“No, ma’am.” Jasper gave her a bland smile and took a firm grip on Dixon. “Haggard, here, was just leaving. Had a little too much champagne. Todd and I are going to help him into a cab. Isn’t that right, Todd?”
“Right.” Todd moved with gratifying speed. He took Dixon’s other arm and gave Jasper a knowing, appreciative, man-to-man look.
Jasper wondered if he and Todd had suddenly developed one of those male bonds he’d heard about.
Together they got the silent, subdued Dixon down the back stairs and out to the sweeping drive, where a line of cabs waited.
Haggard did not protest when they stuffed him into a taxi. Jasper slammed the door and stepped back. He stood with Todd and watched the vehicle’s taillights disappear down the driveway.
“I think, in his own weird way, he loves her,” Todd said eventually.
Jasper looked at him. “What about you? Did you love her?”
“I guess not. I can’t say I’m really torn up or anything. Mostly what I feel is a sense of relief, if you want to know the truth. Hell, I should have gotten out weeks ago.”
“You mean when Olivia first warned you not to get personally involved with Lancaster?”
“No.” Todd frowned in surprise. “When Uncle Rollie told me that I ought to steer clear of the Lancaster campaign.”
Jasper went cold. “Rollie told you to stay away from the Lancaster campaign?”
“It was the last piece of advice he ever gave me. The very next day he and Wilbur left on that photo safari.”
Jasper could have sworn that somewhere in the distance he could hear the ominous grinding sound of a steel trap closing.
“Damn,” he said very softly. “I should have thought of that.”
24
Olivia waited until the elevator door closed behind Jasper and Silas. When they were safely on their way to the fourth floor of the storage facility to check out Jasper’s phony complaint about a water leak near locker four-ninety, she went into action.
She slipped into the small office and hurried to the rotary file that contained the names of people who had rented lockers at Pri-Con Self-Storage. She flipped through the cards until she hit the G’s.
Melwood Gill had to be in the file, she thought. If she could not find a locker registered in his name, the search was at a dead end.
It was only five minutes after eight. Her car was the only one parked in the tiny lot. She was still surprised by how swiftly Jasper had agreed to the scheme she had concocted to search Silas’s files. She had expected him to argue that it was too risky.
It was another measure of the heightened urgency she sensed in him, she thought. She had first noticed it after the Camelot Blue event had ended. It was as if whatever had happened between him and Dixon and Todd had ratcheted up the stakes.
She still had a lot of questions about what had taken place out there on the upper veranda at the Enfield Mansion. The answers she had pried out of both Todd and Jasper had been extremely vague. All she really knew was that when she had outlined her plan to search Silas’s office, Jasper had accepted it without much argument.
Her scheme was the essence of simplicity. Jasper’s job was to distract Silas by inventing a problem on the fourth level. While both men went upstairs to contemplate the magical appearance of water on the floor near Rollie’s locker, she would go through the files. It was Jasper who had suggested pouring a quart of real water on the floor so that Silas would have something to look at once he was conveniently out of the way.
Simple. Except that there was no card for Melwood Gill in the rotary file.
Her hand hovered in midair above the cards.
She had been so sure she would discover that Melwood Gill had rented that last locker on the fourth floor.
Frantic, she went through the G’s a second time. Gamberling, Geyser, Gonerly. No Gill.
Damn. Despair swept through her. Jasper’s logical deduction, so obvious on the surface, had been wrong. Maybe Melwood had managed to remove all of Rollie’s files from Pri-Con Self-Storage without Silas seeing him, after all.
But how had he gotten inside the facility in the first place if he had not had the excuse of having rented one of the lockers?
She glanced toward the elevator. Jasper could not keep Silas occupied up there on the fourth floor forever. She whirled to look at the file cabinet in the corner. She forced herself to think.
If she had been in Melwood’s place, what would she have done? For starters, she would probably try to muddy the waters a bit, just in case so
meone else came looking for the files.
She would have rented the locker under a fictitious name.
She groaned. If Melwood had used an alias, she would never find him in the rotary file. It did not contain any billing addresses, just names and locker numbers.
But if Gill had rented a locker here at Pri-Con, the transaction would have taken place during the past few weeks. What kind of records got filed according to date?
Invoices.
She scanned the labels on the file drawers and saw the one she wanted immediately.
She jerked open the drawer, half afraid that Silas’s filing system would be exotic or indecipherable.
But it was not. It was very straightforward and extremely neat. The numbered, dated invoices were arrayed before her in an orderly fashion.
Maybe there was something to be said for good filing habits, after all, she thought as she started through the most recent invoices.
Her automatic reflex was to look for a name that Melwood might have used. She remembered reading somewhere that people who changed their names tended to choose new ones that began with the same initials as the old ones. Martin Gore or Melvin Gantry, perhaps.
But she could not count on that logic, she decided. Better to look for a familiar address.
It was suddenly there, right in front of her, an invoice in the name of Mr. John Jones at Melwood’s Queen Anne address. Locker four-sixty-three, rented three days after news of Rollie’s death had reached Seattle.
So much for the quaint theory that people selecting aliases went with identical initials.
A squeak followed by a sighing groan warned her that the elevator was in motion.
She slammed the file cabinet drawer shut and rushed out of the office.
She was lounging against a brick wall, trying to look bored, when the elevator doors opened a few seconds later. She hoped she did not look as flushed and excited as she felt.
“I tell you there’s no way that water could be from a plumbing pipe,” Silas grumbled as he stalked out of the elevator. “I know every pipe in this place, and there ain’t any up there in that corner.”
“Must have been from the last rain.” Jasper’s shuttered gaze went straight to Olivia.
She gave him her best business-as-usual smile. “Find the source of the leak?”
Silas bristled. “Ain’t never had any rain leaks up there in that corner. But hell, this is Seattle. Just about every building in town leaks. If you think I’m gonna refund Mr. Chantry’s rent just because of a little water that didn’t do any damage, forget it.”
“Take it easy,” Jasper shot Olivia another quick glance. “We’ll keep the locker until Ms. Chantry winds up the estate. Isn’t that right, Olivia?”
“Absolutely. It’s a very convenient solution to our storage problem.” She tried not to grin in triumph as she straightened away from the wall. “In fact, if you two have finished diagnosing the leak, I’d like to get busy upstairs. We’ve got a lot to do today.”
“Nice work.” Jasper walked out of the elevator and started down a gloomy corridor on the fourth floor. He had a large box cradled under one arm. The box was very light. The only things inside were the tools he anticipated he might need to cut through padlocks or pry open steel filing cabinets.
“I thought so.” Olivia followed him off the elevator. “Of course, I couldn’t have pulled it off if you hadn’t come up with the idea that Uncle Rollie’s files had never left the building.”
“I keep telling you, that’s why guys like me get the corner office and the—”
“Okay, okay, enough with the mysterious act. Your theory about Melwood having a locker up here has been proven true. Tell me why you’re acting as if this situation is a lot worse today than it was yesterday?”
“Last night your brother and I had a short man-to-man talk about his relationship with Eleanor Lancaster.”
“What about it?”
Jasper glanced at the locker numbers on his left as he went down the aisle. Four-fifteen, four-seventeen, four-nineteen. Four-sixty-three would be in the rear of the building.
“He told me that you weren’t the only one who had warned him not to get involved with Lancaster,” he said.
“Someone else gave him the same advice? Who was it?”
“Good old Uncle Rollie.”
There was a short, terse silence behind him. And then the full implications of what he had just said hit her.
“Good grief.” She paused briefly and then hurried after him. Her footsteps echoed on the concrete floor. “You mean…?”
“That Rollie may have launched one of his now-famous inquiries into the private lives of his relatives before he left on that photo safari trip?” Jasper turned down another aisle. “And found something he didn’t like in the background of Eleanor Lancaster? Something that made him think Todd should steer clear? Yeah, I think it’s a real possibility.”
“Jasper, that would mean that Melwood could have found that information, whatever it was, and tried to blackmail Eleanor Lancaster with it.” Olivia sounded thunderstruck. “My God. He may have been blackmailing the next governor of this state.”
“We don’t know that for certain yet. But I’d say it’s a real possibility.”
“Oh, my lord,” Olivia said. “Eleanor would not brush aside any kind of threat that jeopardized her future in politics. Something tells me she would be very dangerous if cornered.”
“I got the same impression.”
“Why didn’t you say something last night?”
“I wanted to find the missing files before I went any farther with the theory.” Jasper paused in front of a locker. 463 was painted on the plywood door. A new padlock gleamed in the shadows. “But thanks to you, I think we may have accomplished that.”
He set down his box, lifted the lid, and removed a pair of bolt cutters. Olivia hung over his shoulder, watching intently.
It only took a moment to sever the padlock.
“Don’t get too excited.” Jasper dropped the broken lock into his pocket. “We may find only another empty locker.”
“I don’t think so.” Olivia pulled the door open.
The weak glow of the flickering fluorescent fixture overhead spilled partway into the dark locker.
Jasper whistled softly. “I told you that your uncle and I had a lot in common when it came to filing.”
“Apparently Melwood did, too,” Olivia whispered.
Rows of sturdy cardboard file boxes were stacked halfway to the ceiling on freestanding, bolt-together metal shelving. Each box was neatly labeled. A small desk and a stool had been set up at the rear of the locker. A flashlight sat on top of the desk. A single file box stood on the floor near the stool.
“All the comforts of home.” Jasper moved past Olivia into the shadowed locker. He picked up the flashlight. “I’m surprised there isn’t a hot plate and a mattress.”
“Uncle Rollie’s secret files.” Olivia looked stunned. She bent down to get a better look at one of the labels. “This is incredible. Some of these boxes go back forty years.”
“Gill broke into Rollie’s locker, moved everything, including the metal shelving, into this one, and then went through the boxes looking for information he could use in his extortion scheme.”
“Poor Melwood. He just wasn’t—”
“Please,” Jasper interrupted. “Don’t say it.”
“Sorry. It’s gotten to be kind of a habit.” Olivia lifted the lid off one of the boxes and peered inside. “We’ll have to go through these one by one to find the same damaging information that Melwood found.”
“Not necessarily.” Jasper studied the box on the floor beside the stool. “When I went through Gill’s desk yesterday, I noticed that he had a habit of keeping the papers he was working on at any given moment in a convenient hot file.”
Olivia watched him crouch in front of the box and raise the lid. “You think he may have had one for his special blackmail stuff?”
Jasper aime
d the flashlight at the neatly arranged folders inside the box. Chantry, Dane, Lancaster, Sloan.
“He had a hot file, all right. This box is it.”
He plucked the Sloan file out of the box and opened it. The single page inside bore the name of a very exclusive, very high-priced agency that specialized in discreet corporate investigations.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Rollie, old buddy, you’ve taught me a good lesson. Maybe it is possible to be a little too obsessive about files and information. As God is my witness, when this is all over, I’m going to destroy everything in my records that could possibly come back to haunt anyone.”
“Good idea,” Olivia murmured.
Jasper dropped his own file back into the box. He set Gill’s flashlight on the desk, picked up the hot file box, and turned toward the door. “Go grab that platform truck. I want to get this stuff out of here. I think we can fit most of them into your car.”
“What’s the rush?” Olivia asked. “We know where they are now.”
He met her eyes. “If we found these files, someone else might be able to find them, too.”
Her mouth tightened. “Good point.” She turned and went out the door.
Jasper put the hot files box near the door, turned and started dragging more boxes off the top shelf. He stacked them on the floor, one on top of the other. In the distance he heard the low rumble of the heavy casters on the platform truck.
Olivia parked the cart in the aisle and started stacking boxes on it.
It took a surprisingly short amount of time to load half the file boxes onto the cart.
“It’s going to take two trips,” Olivia observed.
“Let’s get this load downstairs.”
Jasper took hold of the metal steering bar and pushed the load toward the elevator. Olivia went ahead to press the call button.
The elevator cab had not arrived by the time Jasper got the platform truck past the last row of lockers. He saw Olivia frown and punch the call button again.
“Wouldn’t you know it?” She glanced at him. “Another customer must have arrived. Whoever he is, he’s commandeered the elevator. We’ll have to wait until he’s finished loading or unloading his stuff.”
Flash Page 24