by Josh Cook
If she encountered the key in a data stream, she saw the color. The colors could combine, compound, and grow so that at the end of a data stream, she would know its exact nature and value from its color swatch. A large magenta swatch told her exactly the types and amounts of keys that the data stream contained. The sifting, inherently, was the organizing and analyzing. The breakthrough was a matter of course. When it came time to put together an accordion folder for Trike, she just arranged the swatches and colors in whatever order she thought most productive and it was done.
In the early stages of this technique, Lola made color charts to keep it all straight. Later she supplemented her mental structure with color Post-it notes or marker lines. After a few years of practice, that too, became unnecessary.
Unless the case was like two data tornadoes fucking on top of an information hurricane. Then Lola made a color chart.
When Lola got to The Incorporation and the Lawyers she made a color chart. And wanted to shoot herself. And the nearest three innocent bystanders.
It wasn’t translating the lawyerese that bothered her. Everybody who wanted to hide something but still had to write that something down somewhere knew that it’s not enough to just lock up the file, you’ve got to lock up the meaning of the file in its own words. Through the years of practice, Lola was damn near close to fluent.
The complexity of the incorporation wasn’t the problem, either. People have been hiding shit in complex documents ever since paper made complex documents cost-effective. If a few sub-clauses referencing appendices in previous addenda make your eyes cross, detecting is not your ideal profession. And Lola did have the colors and the color charts.
It wasn’t even the cost of all those lawyers at all those hourly rates. The amount of money rich people were willing to spend to make and keep even more money infuriated Lola for a while, but she encountered it too damn often to stay furious.
It was the inefficiency.
If the goal was to obscure an incorporation, there were a hundred different ways to do it, most of them legal, and all of them at least as effective and a hundred times easier than whatever it was Lola now faced.
Even the color chart made Lola’s eyes swim.
It was like the pointlessness itself was the point, which was all well and good for certain modes of human expression, but not for crime.
As Lola assembled the accordion folder for Trike, she thought, “Wish I’d known in college that I was this good at this stuff. Who knows where I might have ended up if I’d majored in a science and done art on the side?”
The thought stopped Lola mid-filing. Were all of those career opportunities gone forever?
Could she become a research apprentice? Sure, she’s finding missing children and putting criminals in jail, but she could throw her brain at cancer. If she needed another degree for that, well, could getting it be harder than acquiring and making sense of Archibald Bodkin’s research notes on Guam? And what would a few more student loans really mean if she could research for a steady paycheck instead of the occasional stipend and inconsistent reward money?
Regardless, the lawyers represented a potential avenue of research. Lola put together a spreadsheet of all the firms, their specialties, the particular lawyers who worked on the incorporation, and the estimated driving times to those nearby.
A day and a half of research and Lola wasn’t sure what she’d found. Another $100,000 just about gone.
She texted Trike to see if he was still at the stakeout. He texted back that he was done with the stakeout and back at the office. She’d meet him there.
Lola organized everything she’d printed out and annotated into six accordion folders. One was for the purchase of the house. Three exposed the Miss Martha Clifford estate. Two recorded the odyssey of incorporation. She packed it all up and took a bus to the office.
When she got there, Trike was standing behind his desk, looking down at five notebooks.
“That’s not good,” Lola said. She thumped her backpack next to Trike’s desk, then sat down in one of the client chairs.
Trike didn’t look up. “That didn’t sound good either.”
“It’s not,” Lola said, unpacking the folders.
Trike glanced up. “If I’m not mistaken, and this is me we’re talking about, I’d say you just dumped a truckload of bullshit on my floor.”
“I did.”
“That can’t all be about the purchase of the house.”
“It’s not.”
Trike looked at Lola, scrunched his eyes. “You know, I originally thought that response would be a relief, but now that I’ve heard it, I’m terrified.”
“You should be. I can start with the good news if you like.”
“Proceed.”
Lola put the Miss Martha Clifford estate folders in a pile on one side of Trike’s desk. “The purchase of the house was as simple as it could be, but it was purchased from a front estate set up by Mina Kennedy.”
“Well, hello there, evidence of organized crime.” Trike clapped his hands together and rubbed them in glee.
“Except there is no evidence that Joyce House Limited was in any way suspicious or aware of the estate. From what I could tell, the sale was completely and totally on the up-and-up.”
“Coincidentally purchased from an international smuggling syndicate?”
“Looks that way.”
Trike popped two pieces of nicotine gum into his mouth. Chewed furiously. “Coincidence is the void. Can’t wait to see how you follow up that little emotional roller coaster.”
“So I figured there might be something in Joyce House Limited itself, and initially, there really wasn’t, so I looked into its incorporation.”
Lola piled the incorporation folders on Trike’s desk. “And discovered an incorporation spread out over sixteen different law firms, none of which usually does incorporation.”
“Sixteen?”
“I mean, look at the fucking color chart I made.” Lola waved a complexly colored piece of paper. “I haven’t had to make one of these since The Case of the One-Armed Adulterer.”
Trike sighed. He rubbed his eyes, pulled on his nose, and data-faced for 153 seconds. Then he threw the third notebook from the left out the window. He sat down and started to say something. But he stopped and threw the first notebook on the right out the window.
“You could have used those for something else, you know,” Lola said.
“Lola, sometimes something has just got to go out the window.”
“Stakeout didn’t turn anything up?”
“Stakeout did not.”
Trike folded his arms in front of him on the desk. Set his head down.
Lola waited for him to say something. His dramatic sulks were often moments of deep intellectual process before a major breakthrough. Other times, Trike was just someone who couldn’t tell when a silence was awkward.
“What about the police?” she asked.
“They suck and I hate them.”
“No, I mean, have you heard anything useful from them. Crybaby.”
Trike picked his head up. “I have not heard anything from them.”
He jumped up from his desk. Dashed to the office phone on Max’s desk. There were eight messages. None from the police. He double-checked the mail. Nothing there. He sat back down at his desk.
“Lola, in my own quest for self-knowledge, it has come to my attention that I’m not terribly popular with our fair city’s law-enforcement agency—”
“I’ve seen them burn you in effigy.”
“Really?”
“Yep. It was at a Halloween party, so there was an atmosphere of mischief, but there wasn’t much debate about who was getting the torch.”
“Probably when things started going wrong with my car. Damn cop voodoo.”
“The trunk and the doors were broken when you bought the ecru asphyxiator.”
Trike popped a piece of nicotine gum into his mouth. “Is that what you’re calling my car now?”
“It is.”
“Automobiles and personalities aside, it is a waste of money to hire me and then cut me out of the investigation. They’ve held information from me three times—once for legal reasons, and twice in the foolish, almost charmingly misguided belief that in doing so they would discern the truth before I did—but even in those instances, they told me what they were doing. I mean, at the very least, they should have finished all the forensics. And they were still pursuing possible interviews.”
“Maybe they’re mailing the reports to you.”
“Why would they do that?”
Lola shrugged. “Cheaper?”
“Ostensibly, someone’s life is on the line, and though the police make the Joads look like spendthrifts, their miserliness is rarely fatal.”
Trike leaned back in his chair. Interlaced his fingers across his stomach. Sighed.
“Okay. Go home for tonight. I’m going to have to sift through this pile here before I know what I’ll need from you next. If you’re bored, feel free to swing by the police department and see if you can find out what’s up with the radio silence. But don’t bother if you’ve got another lead you want to pursue, or really, if you want to do anything else at all. Read a book. Learn a trade. Take up Scotch. Whatever.”
“I’ll go say hi. They tend to be a little more polite to me.”
“Can’t blame ’em, really. Dame like you. And, of course, every now and again someone at the newspaper gets it in their head to print what I say about the cozzers.”
“Yeah. Let’s blame the newspaper.”
“Will do. You want a ride home?”
“I thought you were going to stay here and sift through the folders.”
“Might take them home with me.”
“It’s still not on the way.”
“Might not be going home. Might just drive around. And when you’re just driving around, everywhere is on the way.”
Lola gave Trike a look. “What are you planning?”
Trike shrugged. “I may or may not have plans. You know how it can be.”
“Sure. But no, I’ll take the bus. Less chance of carbon monoxide poisoning.”
“Well then, let me drop the folders off in my car and walk you to the bus stop.”
“No. I’ll help you bring the folders to your car and if you want to hang out while I wait for the bus, I would like that very much.”
Trike slapped a nicotine patch onto his forearm. “Never an inch with dames like you.”
“Not one single inch.”
COCAINE, ASSAULT RIFLES, AND STOLEN ART
The whole case made Trike want to do something with his hands. Preferably something illegal. And there was this Amateur Victorian Restorers of America Association hanging around with the bad kids. Trike decided to see what that kid packed for lunch.
And he hadn’t broken into a place in a while. In Trike’s line of work, sometimes you’ve got to get through a locked door before somebody dies. So even if his investigation of AVRAA turned up nothing applicable, it still gave him a chance to keep his picking skills nimble.
The office of the Amateur Victorian Restorers of America Association was in a two-story neocolonial house with a long driveway, a four-car parking lot, and an acceptably maintained lawn. It had one full-time employee, the executive director; a website; and a library open to the public from two to five on Fridays. It published an annual guide to Victorian homes Restored by Amateurs in America. AVRAA looked like a hobby organization for the twelve wealthy individuals on the board of trustees.
Until Trike got to the front door.
Everybody locks their doors. Very few lock their doors with a high-security double-cylinder deadbolt, a Mortise Lock, and an Abloy Electromechanical Industrial lock. If someone were bleeding out, Trike would have gone through the window. Fifteen minutes later he was inside.
He went to the executive director’s office first. Every drawer in the desk had an individual high-security lock. The cabinets had Abloy Exec high-security cylinder locks. One chest had a Brinks Shrouded Padlock.
He’d picked locks like those before. Cocaine, assault rifles, and stolen art were behind them.
Office supplies. Old budgets. Publicly available tax records. Files on homes restored were behind these. One part of Trike’s brain ran screaming madly into the wild American night. It came back.
He spent two hours and eight minutes on the office and still had the library and storage closet to go. A question occurred to him.
“Why spend money on locks like these, but not on a security system? If you’re spending seven thousand dollars on locks, whatever you’re protecting is probably worth two hundred fifty a month to make sure the police know when somebody’s picked them all. Besides, burglars don’t pick locks. They smash shit. For someone with a little talent looking to be delicate, this is just a time dump—”
Trike’s brain went three ways. The first got him out of the building without leaving a trace. The second prioritized the places someone might target: Lola’s place, Max’s place, his place, the office. The third ran probable setups that could have been set up while he was picking locks to nothing.
Trike decided to swing by Lola’s first. Given AVRAA’s location, of course. Even if he didn’t get there in time to help, he’d get there in time to help clean up the mess she made of any intruders. Then he’d call Max and head over to the office. Then home for a polite conversation with any traps, ambushes, or other affronts to the sanctity of his domicile.
Trike checked his phone when he got back to the car. No messages. He started the car and pulled into the street. He talked through the logic of the situation while he drove, hands occasionally phantom-smoking.
“Over two hours and what I found wasn’t worth an intern at the free weekly. Assuming there isn’t a psychopath who’s using the locks to make sure the Cubans don’t steal vital restorative technology, there are two branches of possibility: the setup was specifically for me, and it was not. If it was for me, they’d have thrown it together in the small amount of time since The Joyce Case started. Not unrealistic for many of the locks, but the shit on the door had to be installed. Ordered on Thursday, installed yesterday. Not impossible, but I’d end up as one damn suspicious locksmith. Of course, they wouldn’t know I’d come tonight. Just had to be ready when I did. Lookout at the corner back there for when I drive in and out. Mischief and mayhem in the middle.
“If it’s not for me, it branches in some strange ways. Could’ve been set up for whoever ended up investigating The Joyce Case. Any shamus worth the slang would want to get on the other side of that door once they saw the locks on it. Not much of a problem to find out the important places to a hypothetical dick. Most probably wouldn’t have gotten here as soon as I did. Some might not have bothered at all. Keep the receipts and return the locks when the show is over. Leave the fancy shit on the door, call it a capital investment.
“And then it goes to all the shit it could be that doesn’t have anything to do with Joyce. No substantive reason this should be connected, no matter how amateurish the renovations to his Victorian house are. In America. Association.”
Trike arrived at Lola’s place. There was one light on in Lola’s living room. That meant she was knitting to late-night AM radio. Her basic insomnia. Trike gave her a call just to be sure.
The phone rang. The light went out. They’d set a trap connected to her cell phone. And Trike tripped it.
“Lola!” Trike shouted when the phone was picked up on the third ring.
“LOLA!” he shouted again, rushing into action when there wasn’t an instant answer.
“JESUS CHRIST, WHAT?” Lola shouted back.
“Are you okay?” Trike asked, half hanging out of the back passenger-seat window.
“Except for the burst eardrum, yeah, I’m fucking fine.”
“Why are you out of breath?”
“I’m not out of breath.”
“You’re Lola-level out of breath.”
“What about the light?” Trike asked, less frantically hanging half out the back passenger-seat window.
“What light?”
“It went off when your phone rang.”
Lola sighed again. “It was a whole big thing, and I mean a Lola-level whole big thing, and I’ll tell you the whole big thing at some point, but the executive summary is, I couldn’t come up with something to use that old bike for, so I turned it into a pedal generator to charge my phone and laptop.”
“And run that light,” Trike said. Trike shifted from acting to observing and saw Lola’s faint outline facing away from the window. From her height and angle on the bike, he knew she’d moved her coffee table to make room for the bike and whatever structure she added to ensure that the non-exercise bike was exercise-bike stable at Lola-level speeds. There was only one place a coffee table made from half a repurposed long board could fit in Lola’s small apartment.
“The light tells me it’s working,” Lola said. “And why the fuck are you calling me from outside my apartment, anyway?”
“Just in case something unusual happened, I’m not going to tell you exactly what I’ve been up to this fine, though unseasonably damp, evening, to ensure that even under the strictest of definitions, you are not accessory to anything, but there is a chance I was intentionally occupied for a sufficient amount of time in order for harm to be done to me and/or the people with whom I work.”
“I’d have rather served time than listened to that sentence,” Lola said.
“What’s done is done. Anything weird happen tonight?”
“No.”
“Were you home all night?”
“Don’t have the money to go anywhere else.”
“Okay. Good. No. Never mind. I’m going to give Max a call, then swing by the office before heading home. You call me if anything weird happens.”