that valuable metal you work with?”
“I have me.” She flexed an arm, displaying impressive -ceps, both bi- and tri-. “Does he have a name?”
“Bear. But he doesn’t bark or bite and so far he hasn’t eaten. You’d hardly know he was there.”
“Especially after he died from hunger.” Tessa scratched Bear behind the ears but moved briskly to her studio before either of us got the idea she liked him.
I went into my own space. I put out food and water for Bear and folded a blanket for him next to my desk. He made a slow tour of the room and finally lay down on the blanket with a mournful grunt.
I was going through emails when my office phone rang.
“Bolton,” the voice on the other end pronounced.
“Hello, Bolton,” I said. Norm Bolton, head of Global Entertainment’s media division.
“Where are we, Warshawski?”
“We are still regretfully declining the chance to entertain Global’s global viewers,” I said.
“You’re making a mistake.” The sentence came out more as threat than comment.
“What is it about the Zamir story that is so important to Global, Mr. Bolton?”
“Not the Zamir story specifically,” he said. “This is a reality show about how investigators work.”
“These days it’s ninety-five percent desk work, in front of a computer. How about for ten thousand dollars I send you all the URLs I consult and your viewers can create their own investigations?”
“I hope your work doesn’t depend on financial negotiations,” he said. “That’s a ludicrous offer. Trust me: you will be happier in the long run if you sign that contract. After all, we can follow you without paying you.”
He hung up.
I called Murray. “Your boy Bolton just phoned; he’s not happy that I’m turning down the chance to run around town with a camera attached to my head. He may well have a tap in place on my phone, although my encryption is pretty good—I’m telling you in case you were tempted to call him a repellent worm who crawled out of the dung to run your media division.”
There was a long silence at Murray’s end before he said, “It’s probably the smart decision, but I still wish you’d rethink it. It would mean, well, a lot to me.”
What was ‘a lot’? His career? His self-esteem? His life? I didn’t want to dig in that ground.
As a diversion, I told him about Coop arriving with Bear. Murray liked that—dog stories always draw an audience. I feigned reluctance but finally agreed to let him send a camera crew to film Bear and me, in the hopes that someone somewhere would view the footage and recognize Coop’s dog and let us know where Coop was.
While I waited for Murray, I got caught up on emails and did some digging for the truckload of Ligurian wine I’d agreed to find.
Murray arrived with a cameraman who knew something about filming dogs: he brought a carton of meatballs, which coaxed Bear to his feet. Despite the food, his face looked old and mournful, as though Coop’s disappearance was merely the latest in a string of human barbarisms he’d witnessed.
TV crews work fast. Twenty minutes after arriving, they were ready to go south with Murray to look for the place where the police had found the gavel. I’d told him about the gavel the day before, but this was his first chance to film the hole where I’d found it.
Murray tried to talk me into going with him and his crew. That made me wonder if he wanted my company, or if Bolton had told him to try to pull me into a joint investigation without calling it that.
To stop his pleading, I told him about Curtis, the SLICK gaveller. “I don’t know that he had anything against Prinz, but he does own a gavel. I don’t know if the cops are checking on it. I also don’t know if they’re checking on an argument Prinz had with Simon Lensky, SLICK’s documents maestro, but in another development, which doesn’t interest the cops, Lensky has disappeared.”
That brought a gleam to his reporter’s eye, and we parted more or less as pals. He had a couple of good nuggets to put on-air, and I had someone who might confirm that the gavel in Lydia’s hideout had come from SLICK.
Back at my desk, I tried to organize my thoughts. Arthur Morton, mass slaughterer, I wrote on one of my big sketch pads. Hector Palurdo, immigrant rights activist and murder victim. Devlin & Wickham, law firm who magically popped up to defend Morton.