The Intruders

by Michael Marshall Smith

  The thought of Gary Fisher being nervous was more compelling than what he was telling me, which appeared to have no bearing on any universe I cared about.

  Despite myself, I said, “And?”

  “He sat me down, got me coffee, explained what he needed done. Thankfully, it was something I could handle easily, and once he saw that, he just told me to get on with it. A week later there’s a note of thanks on my desk. From Cranfield, in his own hand. As the years go by, I wind up reporting to his office more and more. Finally one of the senior partners gets a little drunk and admits that Joe asks for me by name when he wants something done. This is a very big deal to me, and by now I know Joe well enough to understand he doesn’t do anything by accident. He mentioned my name to someone and put a checkmark next to it. Six months later I was made junior partner.”

  “He have you running private work on the side, things he wanted kept out of sight?”

  “You’re a cynical man, Jack.”

  “I was a cop for ten years. And I’ve been a human all my life.”

  “No, he did not,” Gary said as he steered us across an intersection. We seemed to be getting farther from the parts of Seattle that are featured in tourist brochures. “I’m sure Joe did things fast and loose back in the day—nobody gets rich playing by M.B.A. rules—but he never asked me to do anything your grandmother wouldn’t smile upon. Life went on, except I scored a bigger office and got paid a bunch more.”

  “Until?”

  “One morning the call comes in. Joe Cranfield died in his sleep. Bam—just like that.”

  We were walking more slowly now, and Gary was silent for a moment.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah. It was a blow. Okay, he was eighty-one by then, but he looked like he’d make a hundred without breaking a sweat. Barely an hour after we find out he’s passed, we get a call from some firm none of us have ever heard of. Turns out he’d used another crew to handle his personal affairs. Okay, it happens—but this is a tiny outfit based half the country away, and we’re all like, What? The guy on the phone has instructions, however, and he wants us on it right away. And this is where it started to get weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “The will. Two million to his wife, one million to each child, two-fifty K to each of his grandchildren. A little over eight all told.”

  I didn’t get what he was driving at. “How much was he worth when he died?”

  “Nearly two hundred sixty million dollars.”

  I raised my eyebrows, and Fisher smiled tightly.

  “Now you’re listening. Strictly B-list in global terms, but hardly destitute. It had been more, but it turned out he’d been unloading briskly over the last five years, to institutions, charities, schools. A hospital ward here, drop-in center there, Old Master or two on permanent loan to some tiny gallery in Europe. We knew about a lot of it, of course, because of tax issues, but no one had really had a handle on exactly how much he’d moved out. It was close to seventy million.”

  I revised my opinion of the old man, and for the better. “So where was the rest of it destined for?”

  “That’s the thing. The afternoon of Cranfield’s funeral, Lytton—one of the two named partners in this firm—turned up on our doorstep with a case of paperwork. Everyone with juice in the firm headed into the boardroom and went through it together. Cranfield left detailed instructions on how his empire was to be dismantled, and half of it was already started, triggered by Burnell & Lytton—who it turns out had overriding power of attorney. For the rest of it, Lytton basically deals with us like we’re junior clerks: Do this, do that, do it now. Joe had thought of everything—down to the dispersal of a roadside food shack in Houma, Louisiana. That was a bequest to the old woman who’d been running it all these years, and there were other things like that, random citizens getting a chunk here and there, but everything else was to be liquidated. Even his houses were to be sold. And the resulting funds, minus ten percent, were to be split among nine main beneficiaries.”

  “Who were?”

  “Battered women. Inner-city education and antidrug initiatives. Long-term medical supplies to godforsaken parts of Africa. Even a campaign to save the fucking sea otters, run by some hippie down in Monterey—who received six point five million dollars to keep up the good fight. I got to phone this guy with the news. He nearly heart-attacked right there on the line. He’d never met Cranfield in his life. Never even heard of him.”

  “Where did the last ten percent go?”

  “A trust administered by Burnell & Lytton, which fed into an international charitable network.”

  “So how did the family take this?”

  “How do you think? They went apeshit, Jack. I had men and women in their fifties, people who’d had everything on a plate since birth, coming into my office and screaming like crack addicts let down by the man. It went on for weeks. These people had lived their lives assuming they’d get a huge check someday, and now we’re telling them it was all a dream? They contested the will, of course, but it was signed, filed in triplicate, and quadruple-witnessed by judges and priests demonstrably in their right minds. We had guys who’d built entire careers drilling holes in this kind of paperwork, real wolves, and they couldn’t get their pencils sharpened. The only person who didn’t go nuts was Cranfield’s wife, and I’ll come back to that. Bottom line is that he knew what he wanted to do and he did it. Everything else was after the fact. So…the children sued us instead.”

  We’d stopped at another intersection. Over the last minutes, my mind had found its way back to the photograph of Amy. I was trying to imagine what the man’s hand had done in the moments after the picture had been taken. Gary had about another minute of me playing nice.

  “How did that pan out?”

  Fisher’s face tensed, and I got the idea that the lines around his eyes had not been there long. “Ongoing. Everyone else in the firm has turned away from Cranfield’s affairs, like a bad smell. But I couldn’t do that. A month ago I came up against something that needed sorting out, figured what the hell, and flew here to Seattle. I went to the Burnell & Lytton office.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “It wasn’t there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’d been working with these guys for three months by then, okay? I know their address and phone numbers by heart. I landed at Sea-Tac, got a cab straight there. The neighborhood is more the kind of place I’d expect to find a bail bondsman, and when I walk up to the street address, I see it’s a storefront that’s been boarded up. And not recently. Before that, it looks like it was a coffee shop. There’s a fucking tree growing out of the roof. No sign for Burnell & Lytton anywhere. There is an entry system, but it’s really, really old. There’s ten buzzers, and only the second to last looks like it’s been used since I was born. So I press that one first. No response. I press all the others. Nada.

  “By this stage I’m a little confused. I walk up to the corner, buy a coffee, call the office, double-check the address. So then I phone Burnell & Lytton. Lytton’s secretary picks up. I ask to speak to him. She says he’s out. I ask to check the address with her, say I have an important package. She reels off the same old zip code. So I ask her which buzzer you need to press.

  “And she went quiet. Just completely silent. Then she said ‘You’re here?’ And she sounded weird, really imperious, not like a secretary anymore.”

  “That’s a little strange.”

  “Yes, it is. So I find myself saying no, I’m not in Seattle, but my assistant’s sick and I want to fill out the waybill properly. She’s all friendly again, tells me it doesn’t matter, just the street address is fine. I thank her, leave a message for her bosses to call me, put down the phone. I sit there thinking for a minute, and then my cell rings. It’s one of my colleagues, back in Seattle. Lytton has just called the office, asking for me. Luckily, my assistant only told him I was out, not saying I was in Seattle. It could just be a coincidence. But it’s
odd. So I walk back to the address. Ring the buzzer, still no response. Then I call their number again. There’s no answer this time. But I realize I can hear something. A ringing sound, from above.”

  “Your call being received?”

  “You got it. I disconnected and tried again, just to check. I took a few steps back from the door, and I could hear a phone ringing somewhere in the building. I let it ring, but…In the end I walked away. Flew back home.”

  He held his hands up, telling me he was finished and also asking a question. I wasn’t sure what it was.

  “You’ve been in contact with them since?”

  “Many times. Once I got back to Chicago, it was business as usual. We’ve ground through the remaining work. It’s almost done.”

  “Did you mention your trip to either of the lawyers?”

  “No,” he said. “I never could work out a way of phrasing the question: ‘Hey, dude—how come your office is in an abandoned building?’ I did mention it to one of the senior partners, but he did everything but stick his fingers in his ears and go la-la-la. No one’s interested in hearing anything hinky about Cranfield’s affairs.”

  I felt much the same way. “So these guys have a low-rent office. Big deal.”

  “Jack—when you die, are you going to hand your estate to a lawyer working out of a cardboard box? Assuming you’ve accumulated a couple hundred million by then and when you’ve already got one of the most prestigious law firms in Chicago on retainer?”

  “Neither seems likely. And are you sure your interest amounts to more than an attempt to resist a drop in your personal stock once the old guy was dead?”

  “Fuck you, Jack.”

  “Gary, just tell me what you got me here to say.”

  He pointed across the intersection, toward the other side of the street on the next block north.

  I turned and saw a run of battered buildings. A tattered banner hanging from a lamppost said we were in the Belltown area. On the corner was a café, two people who looked like exhausted muggers sitting outside. Next to that was something purporting to be a secondhand bookstore, but which looked more like somewhere you’d head for porn and/or a tip on where to buy drugs.

  And then a boarded-up window in a dilapidated dirty-brown building. It was wider than its neighbors, could once have held a small department store. Above the window on ground level was a peeling hand-painted sign, white on black, saying THE HUMAN BEAN. To the left of the long window was an anonymous door in gunmetal gray. I pulled out Fisher’s envelope, took out the first photograph. I didn’t need to hold it up to know that’s where Amy had been standing when it was taken.

  For a moment it was as if I could even see her standing there, head slightly turned as if she were gazing back at me, though she did not look like any person I knew.

  chapter

  TWENTY

  I walked across the street, barely noticing a truck that whistled past behind me. When I got to the far sidewalk, I turned, looked south toward downtown. I checked it against the second photograph and saw enough congruence to know that this was the view it showed.

  “Yes,” Fisher said as he stepped up the curb to stand next to me. “I was standing up at the next corner.”

  I walked up to the storefront. Tried to look through the window, but whoever nailed it over had done a good job. Went to the doorway and pushed my hand against it. No movement. It was a big, heavy door, decorated by rivets on all sides, and fitted tightly. Layer after layer of gray paint made it appear impregnable. I stooped to look at the handle and saw that the slot for the key showed flecks of bright metal. It had been unlocked recently.

  I stepped back a few paces and looked up and down the street again. The entrance to the building was exposed, visible to anyone in a fifty yard radius. It had the brutally monumental quality favored by turn-of-the-century boosters, a promise to stand profitably forever. It still stood, but it was not making anyone any money anymore. There were three big windows on each story. On the second and third floors, several panes of glass were broken, and the holes had been boarded up. On the next floor up, the glass looked complete, but the cloud reflections suggested that there was no light on behind. Clumps of grass and a very small tree were growing out of broken guttering right at the very top.

  When I pulled my gaze back down, I noticed that the two guys hanging outside the corner café were taking an interest. I walked over to them, and Fisher followed.

  Both men wore drab hoodies and stained blue jeans and Nikes that could barely have been five minutes out of the box. Apart from minor details of facial organization, they presented as functionally identical. There was nothing on the battered metal table between them. One smiled lazily at the other as I approached.

  “I smell something,” he said. “You smell something?”

  The other nodded. “Makes me think of barbecue.”

  “That one’s pretty old,” I said. “I mean, like, fucking medieval. And you’re probably just smelling each other. I can, from here. Next time it rains, you might want to stay outdoors.”

  The first one stopped smiling. “What you want?”

  “That building I was standing at. You know anything about it? Seen anyone going in or out?”

  They shook their heads slowly, as if being operated by the same lazy string.

  “Right,” I said. “You know shit about this corner. Probably new to the area. Just flew in from Paris on a student exchange program. Strolled down for a croissant and a café crème between classes. Am I getting warm?”

  Both were staring sullenly at me now. I smiled in a flat, communicative way and broke eye contact first. I took a scrap of paper out of my pocket and wrote my cell-phone number on it.

  “Call me. There’s money on it.”

  I nodded at two pairs of pink, dull eyes and walked back up the street to the building. I wondered if there was any way in around the back.

  “You find that works?” Fisher asked when he caught up with me. He sounded relieved to have moved away from the café. “The openly confrontational approach?”

  “Yes,” I said, panning my eyes around the street level of the building. “And you’re next, if you don’t just go ahead and tell me what—”

  I stopped talking and walked over to the doorway again. The entry system was a stained and rusted metal oblong with a grille at the top and a series of wide buttons. I pressed them one at a time and received no sense that anything was happening anywhere, that any connection remained to be made.

  Then I looked at the remaining button but didn’t press it. The rust wasn’t as thick, and the patina was different. It appeared, as Fisher had said, as though it might have been used from time to time. It was the second from the top. I wondered if I’d discovered the meaning of the last of the text messages Amy had sent.

  The one that said “Bell 9.”

  Around the rear of the building was a parking lot. The back of the structure was peeling and missing large patches of plaster. The street door was heavily locked. The windows on the floors above were boarded, and the fire escape was falling apart. I looked at this for a while, then walked away. A few streets back toward downtown, we walked past a bar. I stopped, turned, and went in.

  The interior was dark, the counter running along one side. The lighting was dim. The walls were wood-paneled in a way that was not a recent design decision but an indication that the paneling had been in place since such decor was still in fashion. Many of the patrons probably remembered the way it was even before that.

  The barman was skinny as a nail and looked like he knew how to get hold of things. He shot me just a brief glance and started to apologize for matters I had no knowledge of and cared about even less.

  “Look, I’m not a fucking cop,” I said. “We just want a beer. That going to be possible?”

  I walked to the corner table and sat down. Fisher got a couple of drinks and brought them over. I sat in silence for a few minutes, smoking.

  “Okay,” I said. “So now tell me
the rest. And really make it quick.”

  “After I got back to Chicago, this thing started eating at me,” Fisher said. “I knew Joe pretty well by the end. It wasn’t like he didn’t get along with his kids. Clan Cranfield was tight—vacations together at the compounds, a photo of the bloodline on the Christmas cards. If you work in my field, you know a lot of families like that. Once in a while, it gets complicated when the old goat leaves the farm to a stripper no one knew about, but the patriarch never razes everything to the ground.”

  “But evidently this is what he wanted.”

  “It still doesn’t make sense. I’m boring my wife senseless about it, barely spending any time with the kids. And so I went to visit Cranfield’s widow. I’d met Norma often over the years, had dinner at the house a few times. This is not some trophy wife. They’d been together fifty years. So I went up to the house a few weeks ago and sat with her in a big room that’s halfway through being packed up. I listened to how she was going to move into a small apartment in town, and every now and then I thought I could sense a confusion behind her eyes, as if she wondered when she was going to wake up. In the end I had to ask. Did she understand what was going on?”

  “What did she say?”

  “Nothing for a moment. Then she got up and went to a bureau in the corner. Opened a drawer, got something out. A card, old black-and-white photograph of an old pier stuck to the front, by hand. I asked her what the picture showed, and she said it was Monterey, the place she and Cranfield first met. Inside there’s a message, in Joe’s handwriting. It said, ‘Don’t hate me.’”

  “That’s it?”

  “Those three words. I looked at her, and she shrugged and said, ‘That’s all I know.’ She hadn’t told anyone else about the note. Not even her kids. I drove straight back to the office, sat down with the documentation, and I went over it for the hundredth time. Not to break the thing, but to try to understand. I looked into the nine organizations that got the big money, but there’s nothing strange there. Even the sea otters now made sense, up to a point. Norma told me they had a long weekend in Monterey ten years back, and Joe had been taken with the aquarium, loved watching the otters swim around. So I started looking at the minor beneficiaries. There’s about thirty of them, people like the restaurant-shack woman, small figures from Joe’s distant past. I can make sense of all of them, relate them to some old part of Cranfield’s business, apart from one. A guy who seems to bear no relation to anything Joe’s been into. And so I did a Google search, and that’s when I find out this person lives in Seattle and also that his family has recently become dead.”