back to the desk. She looked down at her little notepad and interpreted her own squiggles. Appointment in thirty minutes with Lynus Litton, her favorite private investigator. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Phil Ross; she did like him. As a person. What she didn’t like was inheriting other people’s staff, and, anyway, Phil had retired and done the report on Hollister’s wife as a final favor to Barney. She preferred to work with people she was comfortable with and had trained to her liking. Lynus Litton was such a person.
She’d met Lynus in college, and they had become fast friends because she didn’t object to what Lynus called his “gayness.” Lynus came from a blue-blooded Ivy League family who couldn’t accept his gayness and paid him huge sums of money to stay out of their lives, which he did happily, with his partner of many years, Lewis Lippman.
After college and law school, Lynus further angered his blue-blooded Ivy League family by opening a private security firm. He gave quality service at cheap rates, further annoying his upper-crust family; and then he added insult to injury by having Lewis Lippman, the top pastry chef at a five-star hotel, provide pastries for his clients, which arrived fresh three times a day. Lewis Lippman also came from a blue-blooded Ivy League political family that could not accept his gayness, either. His family, however, chose not to pay him to stay away; they insisted on it and disowned him. Jill adored Lewis as much as she adored Lynus. Lewis had even signed a note saying he would make her wedding cake if she ever decided to get married. “Don’t go there,” she’d said of the offer, “because that isn’t going to happen,” to which Lewis had responded, “Never say never.”
Lynus had a swanky suite of offices in New Town, where he knew everyone and everyone knew him. He never lacked for clients. When Jill called, he immediately put her and whatever she needed at the top of his list and made sure she had his best investigators, which wasn’t hard because everyone he worked with was the best.
Jill gathered up her jacket, her backpack, and her Wellington boots and left the office. She needed the yellow Wellingtons to get across the parking lot—unless she was willing to go barefoot, which she did not want to do. If she showed up either barefoot or wearing the Wellingtons, Lynus’s sense of fashion would be offended.
Jill was surprised to see how warm it was. Just three hours ago, when she’d practically canoed into the parking lot, certain the engine of her truck would stall out, it had been around forty-five degrees. Now it felt like it was approaching seventy. The sun was exceptionally bright after the monster storm. She loved days like this, when everything looked like someone had scrubbed the world with a brush and soap and water. The day smelled as wonderful as it looked.
Jill made it out of the parking lot and onto the main road that would take her to New Town and Lynus’s swanky offices. The trip, which under normal circumstances could have been made in fifteen minutes, took forty-five minutes, what with the flooded roads, downed trees, and drivers unsure where the detours would take them. When she finally arrived at Lynus’s building, she was glad she had worn the yellow Wellingtons. She slogged across the parking lot to the front door, where Lynus was waiting for her.
Jill smiled. Lynus could have posed for GQ or Town & Country in his elegant attire, and the truth was, he had been on the cover of each of these magazines twice, to the absolute mortification of his family. Today, he was wearing a charcoal gray Armani suit with a pristine white shirt and red-striped power tie. Lynus never wore anything but Armani because he said the suits draped his slender body to perfection, something Armani himself attested to. Lynus had even modeled for his buddy Giorgio Armani on more than one occasion.
They hugged. “You smell good,” Jill giggled.
“It wouldn’t hurt you to spritz yourself with something. Don’t you get tired of smelling like grass and fresh air? Those boots have to go!” They bantered back and forth as they walked arm in arm back to Lynus’s suite of offices, which had, of course, been professionally decorated, no expense spared.
It was a black-and-white experience. Stark white, pitch-black, yet soft and comfortable at the same time. She didn’t know how that could be, with