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“About goddamned time!” He barked it but his face radiated relief.
“Two conditions.”
“Oh, fuck.” He closed the laptop and opened his arms: hit me.
“First, I want a decent chair, like you have.”
He nodded. “What else?”
“Restore the sign out front, neon and all.”
“Do you know how much that would cost?”
I stood there with folded arms.
He mashed his lips together. Then: “Mapstone, you’re a real bastard. All right, we’ll do the goddamned sign. Now I’m in the historic fucking preservation business, and all to provide a welfare-to-work program for a washed-out professor who’s a not-bad lawman…”
I let him keep talking as I settled behind the other desk.
Somewhere I heard Robin laughing.
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Preview
Read on for the first chapter of
For Susan
And for David Strang, 1938–2012
1
The dead talk to me in my dreams. When I wake up, I can’t remember what they said.
2
It felt wrong from the start.
The man who sat across from us wore a sleek charcoal suit and a starched white shirt with French cuffs. I made the suit for a Dsquared2 right out of the New York Times Men’s Fashion supplement, retail price $1,475. Its perfectly draped cuffs broke over tasseled black loafers that might have cost more than the suit itself. You didn’t see that kind of suit in our part of town, much less when it was 108 degrees outside and this was only the first week of May. Yet he didn’t sweat.
Still, somehow, $1,475 didn’t buy elegance for the wearer, or peace of mind for me.
The suit lacked a tie, which irritated me. I like suits. I am a clotheshorse and they are also handy for concealing my firearm. Today, the rebels wear suits, which are the zenith of great clothing design. Show me a man with stubble and dressed like an adolescent and I’ll show you today’s version of 1950s conformity. Unfortunately, Phoenix weather only allows me to wear suits six months of the year. I looked at his open collar and thought: here was a suit quietly longing for a smart tie to complete it. The man appeared the same way: incomplete.
He introduced himself as Felix Smith, sat before Peralta’s desk, and said he needed our help. We already knew that part. Smith had called the day before, dropped the name of a criminal lawyer who was a friend of Peralta’s, and set up this afternoon’s meeting. I pulled over the second client’s chair and faced him.
“I want you to investigate a suspicious death.”
“Let’s start with the name of the deceased.” Peralta had produced a yellow legal pad and pen.
