“You already replaced your laptop?” I said.
Gloria shook her head. “I took mine home over the weekend,” she said. “So all we need is a replacement for you.”
“Where’d you get the kindergarten table and chair?” I said.
“The office supply store is letting me borrow this until tomorrow morning until we decide what to do about the rest of our furniture,” Gloria said. “I told them our situation and about the insurance replacement policy and they said I could decide later. Which reminds me, I talked to Ned Sweeny about replacement furniture. I asked what happens if after we replace everything we find it all again.”
“Are we stuck with two of everything then?” I said.
“No,” Gloria explained. “We have the option of returning the new stuff to the office supply store within thirty days, or, and I like this option, the insurance company would take the old furniture and let us keep the new stuff. I mean, after all, they’d have to get something for their money, wouldn’t they?”
“I know we may even come out ahead on this whole thing,” I said, “but it just bugs me to have this loose end hanging over my head. I want to know, no, I need to know who took it all and why. But then that’s just me.”
“So what do you want me to tell them at the office supply store?” Gloria said. “Do we replace it all now or are you hot on their trail?”
“Better tell them to bring it all over,” I said. “I’m getting nowhere with this case. We may never find out who or why and we can’t go on scrunched up behind that little desk forever.”
It was nearly eleven o’clock when Dad walked into the office, took a quick look around and then looked at me. I could see he was trying his darndest to suppress a smile. “You weren’t kidding,” Dad said. “They really cleaned you out, didn’t they?”
“I hope you don’t need to use the bathroom,” I said.
“Why?” Dad said and then remembered. “Oh yeah, they took the toilet paper. Now that’s a thorough burglar.”
I explained to Dad what I’d already done to try to recover our equipment. I told him about the moving and storage company, the truck rental agency and how everything so far had led to a dead end.
“What about the guy’s license?” Dad said.
“Checked it,” I said. “That’s a phony, too.”
“So now what are you going to do?” Dad said.
I shook my head. “My idea well is running dry,” I said. “What about you? Is there something obvious that I’m overlooking?”
“Fingerprints?” Dad said.
Gloria got up from behind the tiny desk. “Gloves, apparently,” she said. “They didn’t leave any prints in here.”
“I was thinking more about the rental truck,” Dad said. “Did they check it for prints on the steering wheel or in the back?”
“It’s already been driven by the lot boy,” I said. “And he’s taken it through the truck wash already this morning. Any other ideas?”
“I’d sit and think about it,” Dad said, looking around the office, “but there’s no place to sit.”
I turned to Gloria. “What about that floppy disk you found?” I said.
Gloria reached into her purse and produced the disc. “I don’t have a three and a half inch drive in my laptop,” she said. “I don’t know how you’re going to check the contents.” She handed me the disc.
“Maybe I can take it to the computer store,” I said. “They should be able to read it for me. I’ll be back later. Dad, you want to come with me?”
“Might as well,” Dad said. “There’s nothing to do here.”
Dad and I drove six blocks to a store that sold and serviced computers and offered software training. I found a clerk in the back of the store. He looked up from his workstation and smiled.
“Good morning,” he said. “May I help you?”
I handed him the disc. “Do you have a drive here that can read this disc?” I said.
“Sure,” he said, extending his hand. “Let me have it.”
I gave him the disc and he slipped it into a different computer sitting next to him. He clicked an icon on the screen and a list of files appeared. He highlighted one of the files and hit Enter. The clerk motioned to me to come behind the counter and have a look. Dad joined me and both our mouths fell open when we saw what appeared on the screen. It was a picture of my office, fully furnished. It looked fairly recent, too. I turned to the clerk.
“Can I see what’s in the other files?” I said.
The clerk highlighted the next file and opened it. It was another shot of the interior of my office from a different angle. The other dozen files contained the same subject matter, all from different angles. I noticed there were twenty-four files in all. Twelve of them had the .jpg extension and the other twelve had something else.
“What are those other files?” I asked the clerk.
“Those are index files,” the clerk told me. This looks like a disc from one of Sony’s older digital cameras. They have a slot in the side for floppy discs and the photos go right on to the floppy disc. It was cutting edge at the time. Almost no one uses them anymore since the advent of flash drives and cards.
“Could you transfer those .jpg files to a jump drive for me?” I said, producing a USB stick from my pocket.
The clerk inserted my jump drive into the USB slot on his computer and then highlighted all the files and dragged them to the drive designated for my jump drive. I thanked him and gave him a five dollar bill for his troubles.
When Dad and I got back to the office, I gave the jump drive to Gloria and she inserted it into her laptop. When she saw what was on it, she had almost the same reaction that Dad and I had had at the computer store. “What is all this?” she said.
“The clerk told me that the floppy disc was used in an older Sony digital camera,” I said. “Looks like someone took a bunch of pictures of this office before they emptied it.”
“For what reason?” Gloria said.
I shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine,” I said. “But if they dropped this one, chances are they were switching out discs when they filled this one up and there’s more than one of these discs floating around.”
“That gives me an idea,” Gloria said. “I’ll be right back.” She hurried out of the office and down one floor to Allen Jeffries’ office. A man was just leaving Allen’s office when she arrived.
“Gloria,” Allen said, smiling. “What brings you back here so soon?” he said.
“Do you have a few minutes to spare?” Gloria said. “I’d like to run an idea past you, if I may?”
“Certainly,” Allen said. “Come on in.” He led her into his office and invited her to sit. “So what’s on your mind?”
“Let me ask you something, Allen,” Gloria said. “You deal in houses and apartments, right?”
Allen nodded.
“Do you also deal in office space?” Gloria said.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Allen said.
“And are the available offices listed with the multiple listings?” she said.
“That they are,” Allen said. “Did you want me to find you and Elliott a different office?”
“No, but thanks,” Gloria said. “If it comes down to that, I’ll keep you in mind. No, what I wanted to know was if you could tell me if any offices had recently been rented in the city and where they might be.”
“And I thought you were going to ask me something difficult,” Allen said, clicking an icon on his computer screen. He looked back at Gloria. “All right, what time period do you want to cover?”
Gloria thought for a moment. “Let’s start with everything in the last three months and go from there,” she said.
Allen typed in the parameters and hit Enter. “Well,” he said, “we got ninety-seven hits.”
Gloria sighed. “Let’s narrow that down to the last thirty days and see what comes up.”
Allen changed the time period and came up with fifteen hits. Gloria looked o
ver his shoulder.
“Try all offices rented in the past week, please,” she said.
Allen changed the time period to seven days and ended up with just two possibles.
Gloria pointed at the screen. “Could you print out the list from the thirty day search as well as this seven day search?” she said.
Allen hit a few more keys and his printer spit out two lists. He handed them to Gloria. “You have an idea, I take it?” he said.
“It’s a long shot,” Gloria said, “but it’s all we have to go on. Thanks. I’ll let you know if it pans out.”
Gloria took the elevator back to the third floor and brought her printouts into the office. She handed them to Elliott. “Allen made these printout for me of all new office rentals in the past week, and month. Suppose whoever took everything out of here took it all to furnish an office of their own. It’s as good a place as any to start. I figured we could start with the most recent and work backwards from there and see what breaks loose.”
“Well,” I said, “it’s not like we have any other leads to follow. Let’s split up. We can cover three times as many places.” I tore the month list into strips of five, five and five. The last two names were duplicated on the week list so I threw that slip away. I took one piece of the torn list and gave Gloria and Dad the other two list pieces. “Let’s all keep our cell phones on and let each other know if we come across anything at all.”
Dad and Gloria each got into their cars and drove in opposite directions on Hollywood Boulevard. I slid behind the wheel of my van and headed toward the last address on my part of the list. It was located in an office building on Highland Avenue, south of Vine. I took the elevator to the fourth floor and found room four twelve in the middle of the hallway. I knocked on the door and let myself in.
A woman turned toward me, startled to find another person in the office. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re not open for business yet. We just moved in. If you’d like to come back next Monday...”
I held one hand up. “Sorry,” I said. “Wrong office.” I left the way I’d come. This was not even close to what I was looking for.
I checked my list and memorized the next address. It took me eight minutes in the Hollywood traffic to get there. The one-story building looked like a former storefront and the door was open. I didn’t even have to step all the way in to know that I was in the wrong place. There was exercise equipment scattered around the interior. Not an office at all.
The third address from the bottom belonged to a high-rise building on Vine Street. The room I was looking for was two eighteen, in the front, facing the street. It had an outer office with a frosted glass door leading to an inner office. I let myself into the outer office and knocked on the inner office door before entering. Inside I found an entire wall of bookshelves holding law books. There was a large ornate oak desk near the window and seated behind it was a middle-aged man in a three-piece blue suit. He looked up when I entered. I held up a hand and excused myself, saying something about being in the wrong office. The man went back to whatever he’d been doing, without bothering to see me out.
Gloria pulled into the parking lot of the third address on her list, having struck out on the first two. The office she was looking for was on the third floor at the end of the hall. Even as she was walking toward the office, something felt familiar to Gloria. The minute she walked into the small outer office, she knew she’d found the place she and Elliott had been looking for. She knocked on the inner office door and stuck her head inside. A man behind a desk stood and greeted her.
“Good morning,” the man said. “May I help you?”
Gloria looked around the office and said, “I was supposed to meet my husband here,” she said, lying, “but he must have gotten stuck in traffic. Hold on a moment while I call him.”
She smiled at the man as she pulled out her cell phone and dialed her husband’s number.
“Elliott Cooper,” I said in my professional voice.
“Dear,” Gloria said. “I thought we were going to meet this morning. Where are you?”
“Dear?” I said. “Since when do you call me dear?”
“That’s right,” Gloria said, looking at her watch. “You promised to meet me five minutes ago. I’m at the place now.”
Suddenly I caught on. “Are you sure it’s the right place?” I said.
“No doubt about it,” Gloria said. “Can you make it in the next ten minutes?” She read me the address.
“I’ll call Dad,” I said, “and we’ll both meet you there.”
“Thank you dear,” Gloria said and flipped her phone shut. She smiled at the man and said, “Just as I thought. Stuck in traffic. He’ll be here in a few minutes.”
“Well,” the man said, “while we’re waiting perhaps you can explain your problem to me and perhaps I can tell you if there’s anything we can do for you.”
“I’d rather wait,” Gloria said, “so we don’t have to repeat anything once my husband gets here.”
They sat in silence while Gloria flipped the pages of a magazine she’s found on one of the tables. The minutes crept by slowly and after what seemed like a lifetime, the inner office door opened and Dad and I stepped in. My eyes finally settled on the man behind the desk and his eyes got wide when he recognized me.
“I feel like I just stepped into the Twilight Zone,” I said, looking around the room that was the spitting image of my office before someone had emptied it of everything. This one had been set up and arranged exactly like my office, right down to the corner sink that should have been installed in the bathroom but wasn’t. The only thing different about this office was the view out the third floor window. Mine looked down on Hollywood Boulevard and this one looked down onto an alley. I looked down at the desk and then back at the man behind it. “Does that third drawer still stick?” I said.
The look on his face told me that he knew he had been discovered and he had no place to run. He just stood there with a stupid grin on his face.
The first thing that came to mind was, “Why?” I looked at him, waiting for an answer. Apparently none was forthcoming. “What would make you break into my office and take everything?” I said. “From the looks of things here, I’d say you were a little more than fixated on my operation, but suppose you tell me yourself while we’re waiting for the police to arrive.”
The man sat down again and quickly realized that he was sitting in my chair. He stood up again. I gestured toward my chair. Please,” I said, “have a seat.”
He sat again and expelled a deep breath he’d been holding. “I suppose this looks a little suspicious,” he said.
Dad stepped up to the desk and leaned over, going nose to nose with the little man. “Suspicious?” Dad said. “We’re way beyond suspicious, you little weasel.”
I pulled Dad away from the desk. “Come on now, Dad, let’s let him tell us his story,” I said. “This should be very interesting.”
Dad stood back, his pulse still elevated and his ears hot and red. I could tell he’d like nothing better than to pound the little man into the carpet and stuff him into the sticky third drawer. I nodded to Gloria, who dialed Lieutenant Anderson’s office while I talked to the little man.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” the man said. “But just let me ask you one thing. Did you ever have someone you idolized and wanted to be like? I know, most people’s idols are rock singers or movie stars or sports heroes. For me, it was you.” He pointed at me for accent. For as long as I can recall I’ve wanted to be a private eye like Humphrey Bogart and Robert Mitchum and Powers Booth.”
“Powers Booth?” I said.
“You know,” the man said, “he played Marlowe on those HBO shows back in the eighties.”
“I know,” I said. “I thought he was the best Marlowe, too.” I suddenly realized I was being too nice to this thief and chopped off my end of the conversation. “Go on,” I said.
“I read something in the paper about you and your investiga
tions business just recently,” the man said. “And I followed everything that was ever written about you. Yeah, I know, it seems a bit creepy on the outset.”
“The outset, the inset, all around,” I said. “By the way, you never told me your name.”
The little man looked down, suddenly ashamed and embarrassed by what he’d done and the trouble he’d caused. When he looked up again, he cleared his throat and said, “Stanley Marsh.”
“Go on with your story, Stanley,” I said.
“Well,” Stanley said, “you probably don’t remember me, but I was in your office last Fall. I came in with some bogus story about finding a missing uncle, but I really just wanted to see your office for myself, you know, up close and personal, so to speak.”
“That’s why the pictures on the floppy disc,” Gloria said.
“I wondered where that other disc went,” Stanley said. “I still had enough pictures on the second disc to make this office look just like yours,” he said, almost proudly. “I suppose you’re going to want all of this back again.”
Dad and Gloria and I all gave Stanley our hardest stares but said nothing.
“I figured as much,” Stanley said. “But it was worth it just to have this office, even if only for a couple of days. I’m really sorry for all this trouble I’ve caused you all. If there’s any way I can make it up to you, I’d do anything as long as I knew you weren’t mad at me. I couldn’t stand it.”
Stanley broke down in tears and laid his head on the desk.
I almost felt sorry for him but I got over it almost immediately. “Hey,” I yelled, prompting Stanley to sit up straight. “You’re getting my blotter wet. Come on, get out of my chair.”
Stanley stood up and sidestepped out from behind my desk. While Dad and Gloria and I were looking over this duplicate office and how close Stanley had come to recreating the original, Stanley made a dash for the door. As soon as he pulled it open, he ran right into Lieutenant Anderson’s waiting arms. Anderson pushed him back into the room.
The Complete Cooper Collection (All 97 Stories) Page 239