wiping at the corner of an eye that I’d been watching and that I swear held no tears. “I’m sorry. It’s not you I’m mad at. Ed never should have hired you in the first place.”
Then, almost as quickly as she’d appeared, she turned and left the office. Jendrek and I stared at each other. Ellen poked her head in the doorway and marveled. “What was that all about?” she asked.
Neither of us had an answer.
XI
Ten minutes later we were calling Ed Vargas to tell him we’d be giving most of his retainer back. “It’s just as well,” Jendrek said, morosely, as he dialed the phone. “This whole thing was starting to look like a train wreck.”
The phone rang. Ed answered. Jendrek told him the bulk of it in a few cryptic sentences. There was a groan on the other end of the line followed by a brief silence. When Ed spoke again, his voice resonated with desperate irritation.
“Look, I need you guys to help me with something else. Jesus,” he muttered, his voice trailing away from the phone. “She’s on her way to the fucking lawyer right now. Look, I have to stop her. Stanton told me she’s going to inherit everything. All of it. There’s got to be a way to stop it.”
Jendrek stared at the phone like it was some kind of beast, about to attack him. “This is a community property state,” he said, as if invocation of the law would somehow ward it off. “She was his wife.”
There was more silence, and then Ed spoke again, quietly this time. “But what if the marriage was a fraud? What if she was just a scam artist looking to rip him off? Couldn’t that be used to challenge it?”
Jendrek shrugged at me. I shrugged back. We weren’t divorce lawyers. What the hell did we know? “It’s possible,” Jendrek said.
“Look,” Ed said, “when I talked to Stanton, when he recommended you guys, he told me Oliver was a wiz of an investigator.” Then he spoke directly to me. “Stanton told me you were the guy who cracked that Steele case wide open a few years back.”
He seemed to be waiting for confirmation, so I said, “Yeah, that was me.” But I was really thinking how the case had nearly cracked me wide open, how the whole damned thing was blind luck.
“I need someone like you to dig around, check into Tiffany’s past. I’ve always been suspicious of her. Now, the thought of her pulling the business out from under me is, fuck, it’s totally fucking nuts. It’s unbelievable.”
Jendrek cut in. “What exactly do you want us to do?”
“Like I said, just do some digging. Then we’ll sue the shit out of her.”
“What is it you think we’ll find?”
“I don’t know. But if you dig hard enough, I’m sure you’ll find something. Like I said, I’ve never trusted the woman.”
Jendrek said, “We know some very good PIs.”
“I want you guys. I’ve already paid you. You already know the case. I want this thing to move fast. I don’t want to fuck around with someone new. Besides, Stanton told me you were good.”
Jendrek started to say something else, but Ed cut him off. “Look, I’m up at the house now. She’s downtown at Stanton’s office, but she won’t be gone forever. Why don’t you come up here, Ollie, and I’ll give you what little paperwork I have on her and tell you what little I know. Hurry, before she gets back.”
The conversation ended and Jendrek looked at me across his desk, smirking and shaking his head as if the whole world had gone mad. “Looks like you’ve got yourself a client.”
I took a cab up to the house on Mulholland. Ed came out the front door and met me at the top of the wide stairs. “Why the taxi?”
“I left my car parked down the street last night.” I smiled as we shook hands. “I had a little too much fun.”
He grinned and slapped me on the shoulder as he turned to go back inside. As I followed him through the entryway into the main room, he said, “Brianna was sure hanging all over you last night. I had half a dozen people ask me who the hell you were.” He winked at me. “I told them you were Brianna’s flavor of the week.”
I laughed, but secretly wondered if he was right. I said, “Speaking of whom, is she here?” I looked around the room. It was littered with the