Temper

by Alex C. Hughes

  “Do you have any actual evidence of wrongdoing?” I asked. Maybe he would. Maybe he’d have records of whatever materials Collins had shorted, or safety equipment he’d cut out, or whatever else the man was up to. That might actually make things easier—if it were in the public record already, there’d be no need to pay the blackmailer, right?

  “Nothing concrete,” Tyler said with regret.

  I finished the last bite of the pasta, stood up, grabbed his half-eaten bowl from him along with mine, and went to clean up.

  “Isa…” Tyler said.

  I turned around, halfway to the kitchen. “What?”

  “I just—I know how much of an idealist you are. I’d hate for you to end up dealing with somebody like this, bending your rules and who you are just to pay some bills. This isn’t a situation where your temper is going to get you anywhere. It’s just…he’s not a good person. I’d hate to see you get burned.”

  I met his eyes and let him see my desperation. “The bills won’t wait, Tyler. And I don’t have the luxury of turning anybody away, not right now.”

  “You really willing to lie down with the pigs?” he asked.

  I took a breath. That hurt, and it hurt worse that it was Tyler saying it. Adam wouldn’t push me like this, but maybe that was why I was here, now, having this conversation. “I know what you’re saying, Tyler. I do. But I know what I’m doing.”

  He got up and took the dishes from me. “I really hope you do, Isa. I really hope you do.” He paused. “If it helps, I don’t know what Collins is being blackmailed for—I don’t. But if this were my case, I think I’d assume it’s not whatever he’s telling me it is. You said yourself the union doesn’t care about the materials.”

  “And you said the safety equipment—they said the safety equipment—wasn’t an issue either,” I said, thoughtfully. “Maybe I’m not missing a crusader here. Maybe he’s just lying.”

  “If he is,” Tyler said, “and this is none of my business, but if he is, it makes me wonder what’s worse than safety violations. It would make me dig.”

  I got up the next morning, frustrated and feeling like I was missing something. I went for a run in my neighborhood, watching the parents load their kids into cars for the morning routine, trying to soak in the fact that nothing had changed in their lives even though it had in mine. I got more than a few nods and waves; I’d been running at this time or a bit earlier for years, though I tried to vary my course. They were all perfectly nice, and some of the neighbors had brought me food after Peter died, but they…they weren’t cops. They tried, but they weren’t, and I had always been a little out of step. I bought candy for Halloween, I put out luminaries at Christmas, I showed up at at least half of the neighborhood meetings. I did what I could. But it was always out of step, always at a distance.

  Peter had loved it here, I thought, in the final sprint down the long street before reaching my driveway again. It was early, my breath fogging in the air, and my nose and ears cold despite my cold-weather running gear. I shivered a bit as I ran, the motion not quite blocking out the chill of the winter morning.

  Even with their branches mostly bare of leaves, the old trees on both sides of the street were lovely, comforting. This neighborhood was out of the way of work, quiet, a place where Peter had said we’d raise a family some day. That hurt, that thought. It would probably always hurt, and make me angry. We’d been trying to get pregnant when he died, and I still missed him, I still got angry at what those punks had done. But I was angry more that I’d missed my chance. That it was over, and the family, the husband, all of it, was over forever for me. I didn’t even have my job now…

  I slowed down at the driveway, my lungs taking deep, angry breaths of frigid air, and pushed all those thoughts aside. I let myself into the house, dropped my keys and bear-rated pepper spray on the entryway table next to the bills labeled SECOND NOTICE, and stretched out my now-cramping legs. I’d pushed too hard, probably, being angry at the end. My sensei said the anger did no one any good, and he was probably right. I was still pissed.

  I couldn’t lose the house. If I had to walk over glass to keep it, if I had to roll around in the mud with private investigator clients or whatever the hell else I had to do, I wouldn’t lose this house that Peter had loved. I had too much to prove, anyway, I told myself. Too much.

  And sooner or later, I would prove it, I vowed to myself. I’d prove I was innocent and that I deserved to have my job back, or work somewhere better. I’d prove it so well they’d come crawling back to me, saying they were sorry for getting it so damn wrong. I’d just have to figure out where to start.

  I took a breath, another, then stripped off my clothes on the way to the shower. I’d pick them up later, and maybe think about getting a dog. A dog might make me feel better, and it’d go running with me. A dog might help.

  I called Petrov at the Atlanta Journal before I left the house, hoping against hope that he’d play true to his workaholic tendencies and be at the office this early.

  Low and behold, he picked up on the third ring. “Good morning,” he said in a tone that may as well have been a string of curse words. Not a morning person, apparently.

  “Hi, it’s Isabella again,” I said. “You said you’d see if anyone was looking into Collins Steel and its owner?”

  He sighed, and I heard the shuffling of papers. “Yeah. We have a reporter here by the name of Brook Thompson, who was looking into the guy a few months ago after there was a fire at his house. She suspected mob involvement, but that didn’t pan out, and the editor moved her on to a different story.”

  “Mob involvement?” I asked.

  “The last few years have seen The Darkness crime organization push into a lot of new territories, and the paper tries to keep at least a couple of guys on that. They were pushing into the Manufacturing District pretty hard last year, or at least we thought they were. Collins would have been in the crossfire. He must have gotten lucky, though—rumor has it that the new boss in town made his play for the metro area right about then, so your average rank-and-file had other things on his mind than a guy like Collins.”

  “Why’d they take Thompson off the case?” I asked.

  “She came across a story about a guy who’d stolen mob money and left the country, and the editor wanted her on that. She never could find enough evidence to make it stick, though.”

  “Stolen money from the mob?” I said and whistled. I’d worked on the task force against Garrett Fiske for years, the devil himself who had taken over most of the state’s organized crime and was working on the Southeast as a whole. I couldn’t imagine him letting a guy get away clean, even a year ago when he’d been dealing with a rival. “Are we sure this guy got away? What was his name?”

  “Went by the moniker The Rabbit, of all things. And yeah, supposedly, according to Thompson. The mob was pissed for months. She only got one story out of it, though—this Rabbit must have been Houdini, as well as he disappeared. Lucky for Collins. He was supposed to be getting a visit from the guy before too much longer.”

  “That’s pretty lucky,” I said, smelling something off.

  “Yeah, well, sometimes you’re in the right place at the right time, you jump on it, things happen. Collins was dealing with a strike, anyway. Forty-seven days. That one almost took down the factory, Thompson said, and the union wasn’t backing down. She said if he hadn’t given the guys their concessions, it would all be over by now. Not lucky at all.”

  I waited, but that was all he said. “Anything else you can tell me?” I prompted.

  “Other than the price of tea in China? Nah. I can connect you to Thompson if you want, she’ll have more of the details. But like I said, Collins hasn’t been in the news—or close to it—in a long time now. Not sure how much anybody on my side will be able to help past what I’ve already said.”

  I nodded, to myself. “Well, thank you, Petrov. You’ve managed to dig up more in twenty-four hours than I could have done in weeks. And lay it out
neatly, too. Whatever your editor is paying you is not enough, and that’s the truth.”

  “Why thank you, Isabella. You ever decide to go public over the charges, positive or negative, I’ll give you a fair shake. I might even help you dig up some details if what you’re saying is true.”

  I paused. Petrov could actually be a good resource once I did some of the legwork to prove my innocence. He might be able to help take it from small-scale to really provable. To something that might get me my job back. But only if I’d done the prep first.

  “Think about it,” he said.

  “I will. I promise,” I said, actually meaning it. I realized that for all the swearing I’d done that I’d prove myself innocent, I hadn’t done much digging. I wasn’t ready, maybe, not really—it was too raw. But it wouldn’t be forever. There would be a day when I’d need Petrov. That day wouldn’t be too far away at all. “Thanks for taking the call, Petrov.”

  “No problem. I owe you a few more anyway. Just keep me in mind the next time something blows up. I’ll be here.”

  “Will do,” I said and hung up the phone.

  I got my keys and left the house, feeling better than I had in a while. I wasn’t isolated, at least not as much as I’d thought I was.

  And now I had a case to look into.

  The front of the lawyer’s office said KING & SAWYER, ATTORNEYS AT LAW. It was a small place, an office condo in the middle of a group of other office condos, low to the ground and decked out with the overlapping tile roofs and striped siding popular with high-end builders ten years ago. At nine-fifteen in the morning, two different landscapers worked out in front of the set of buildings, one with a leaf blower, one with fancy laser hedge trimmers that made me nervous just to look at. That thing would be a weapon, easy, and not one I personally would like to mess with. A laser like that might chop my gun in half and laugh when it came after my arm. I gave it—and the man holding it—a wide berth and a careful eye.

  I tried the door of the office and found it open. The reception desk was empty, a small bell set out on top of it with a sign: RECEPTIONIST OUT SICK, PLEASE RING BELL FOR SERVICE.

  Not being one to announce my intentions, I ignored the bell and moved back to the left. The sound of someone coughing led the way.

  Arnold P. King, lawyer of record for Collins Steel & Manufactory—and my client Collins as a person—coughed into a handkerchief in his dark-wood-paneled office, surrounded by old-fashioned paper printed law books. A rotund Black man with a shiny pate and a mid-range complexion, King had on a poorly-fitting suit in an unflattering shade of puce. He finished his coughing—something that sounded serious and full of phlegm—and spotted me at the door shortly thereafter.

  “Who are you?” he asked, eyes large behind bookish glasses. Given his profession, the glasses were likely an affectation, but it was possible that he couldn’t—or couldn’t afford to—get the eye surgery to correct his vision permanently.

  “I’m Isabella Cherabino. James Collins has hired me as a private investigator to look into the person blackmailing him. He said you’d have the original letters.”

  “He told me no such thing,” King said. He frowned, and I got an overwhelming impression that this guy, despite his appearance, was by no means a pushover.

  “I’d like a look at those letters. They’re important if I’m going to do my job.”

  “Ms. Cherabino, if indeed that is your name, I’ve had no notification of your hiring, if indeed you’ve been hired by Mr. Collins. I have no way of knowing who you really are or why you want access to what you say are documents belonging to my client. You’ll understand if I’m hesitant to discuss anything with you, especially as you’ve shown up in my office unannounced, demanding things like a common bully.”

  “A bully?” Really? A damn bully? I found myself closing the distance between us. I wanted to grab the collar of that horrible suit, but I held myself back. “I can be a bully if you insist. Give me the letters.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Privilege says—”

  “I don’t give a damn about your privilege. I need to know what’s really going on here to do my job properly, and I don’t appreciate you standing in my way.”

  He swallowed. “How do I know you’re not the blackmailer—”

  “Do I look like the blackmailer? Really?”

  “What does a blackmailer look like?” he said, nervousness in his tone.

  I cut him off with a snarl. “Look, I’ve had a hell of a few days. Show me the letters, I’ll take a couple of them for testing, and I’ll take it up with Collins if there’s an issue.”

  He looked at me for a long moment then said, “The hollow book on the third shelf behind you. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.”

  I grabbed the book in question, opened it up, and saw a pile of letters in plastic bags—square, newspaper letters cut out and pasted on, just like Collins had said. “Fine,” I said and took a breath, the heat of my anger fading. “Can I have the book?”

  “Take it,” he said, too quickly.

  “These all from Collins’ blackmailer?” I asked him.

  “Who the fuck else would they be from?” He had put the desk between us, in what was obviously a defensive move.

  I felt bad about the intimidation all of the sudden, even though I hadn’t even really yelled at him. But there wasn’t anything I could do to un-play that card once it had been played. “The blackmailer’s been sending them how often? For how long?”

  He shook his head and cursed under his breath. I saw his hand go for the phone—

  “Don’t,” I said, almost spitting out the word.

  His hand stopped, and he pulled it back in, too fast, like I was a crazy person to be catered to.

  Shame and embarrassment hit me again.

  “You’re not a very nice woman,” he said finally.

  “I can be nicer if it would help you to talk.”

  He just looked at me while I looked back. “You want to know how long the blackmailer’s been sending the letters?”

  “The real answer, not the cookie-coated version Collins is telling people,” I said.

  “The real answer.” He nodded, and his mouth set in a line of disgust. “The real answer, huh? The real answer is that he’s been getting at least one a month for over a year. Sometimes two or three, if the blackmailer gets antsy. What’s worse, is he’s started to send them to my office. Frankly, I don’t like being implicated on a personal level in Collins’ business. I handle what I handle, I go to court when needed, and that’s it.”

  I realized then why I’d gotten so harsh with him. King reminded me of every scummy defense lawyer I’d ever gone up against in court. Every slimy man—or sometimes woman—who’d pinned me to the corner and questioned my testimony and my actions as a cop, who’d called me names and implied that I was an idiot, and sometimes, made the jury believe them. King had that smell; that smell like his client was going to walk no matter what I did, and I’d look like the idiot for going after justice. I was furious at those lawyers and had been for years. None of whom were King, and none of which justified intimidating the guy. I was really, truly ashamed at this point.

  King must have mistaken my silence for a statement because he said hurriedly, “I told him from the beginning that a payment wasn’t going to make the problem go away, not when we’re discussing an act this serious.”

  “An act? Singular?” I asked. Using substandard materials sure as hell wasn’t a single act. But, crap, I shouldn’t have said that out loud, not this quickly. Adam would have gotten the truth without tipping his hand.

  King frowned. “What did Collins tell you exactly? Actually, how do I know…” he trailed off then glanced up. “You should know, Ms. Cherabino, that I have at least two concealed cameras in this room, one of which will have seen your hands-on approach to stealing documents from my client.”

  “Cameras?” I was shocked. The Privacy Act from several decades ago had made private recordings by citizens largely illegal, as
a reaction to the fallout of the Tech Wars and the discovery that key videos could be—and were—routinely faked by the government. Even banks barely had cameras anymore. “You have illegal cameras in here?” I looked up, trying to spot them.

  “Yes,” he said, steel hitting his voice finally. “I have cameras in here, and in the lobby, and outside of the building. Furthermore, I have special exception permits for all of them, to make the recordings admissible in court, and a first-rate security company, who will turn in those recordings if anything were to happen to me. They will also likely go after you personally. Now, I don’t know who you are, or what you want with those blackmail letters, but I’ve played nice and assumed you worked for Mr. Collins like you said. I’ve even given you what you wanted. But be assured that we have copies of everything you’re holding in your hand, we have a perfectly good recording of your actions, and you’re not going to get away with anything. This is your last chance to put down the papers and walk away if you’re not who you say you are.”

  “What—”

  “I didn’t get to be a lawyer without dealing with scum a hell of a lot worse than you.”

  I took a step back, stung like he’d hit me. Worse, even. A hit I could return. A hit I could see coming. This… “I do work for Collins, and I’m keeping the letters,” I said, realizing that I’d lost this one. I’d lost it badly, and the anger rising up in me was just making it worse. I tamped it down, but it turned bitter and nasty in my mouth.

  “Do what you want, but there will be consequences if you take those letters out of here,” he said, somehow dangerous despite his physical weakness and quiet tone.

  “Asshole,” I spat and turned on my heel. The trouble was, he hadn’t been the asshole here—I had. And he’d neatly outmaneuvered me.

  I peeled out of the parking lot like the dogs of hell were after me, the landscapers looking up as I left, but the laser never once pointed away from the bushes, damn it. I’d have loved an excuse.