Booker Brothers Detective Agency Box Set Page 6

  Luckily for me, I had jotted down filing notes while Tippy had given me the whirlwind tour earlier that morning. The blue folders were to be arranged alphabetically. They went in the tall black cabinets across the room. The dark gray folders were inactive cases to be filed by year, not to be confused with the light gray files. Those were active, also filed by year, in different cabinets. I got to work.

  Lucky walked over to Harrison’s desk and dropped the doggy bag from Doyle’s—which was actually a Styrofoam clamshell container—in front of Harrison.

  Harrison opened the container without comment, took out the second half of Lucky’s sandwich, and frowned. “There’s a bite taken out of this BLT.”

  Lucky took a seat on the corner of his brother’s desk. “Don’t worry, Harry. It was just me, not one of Doyle’s kitchen rats.”

  Harrison groaned, but he took a bite anyway. And another. He chewed quickly and took a third bite.

  Through a mouthful of leftover BLT, Harrison asked how things went at Portia Fitz’s.

  “Dead end,” Lucky said gravely. “Leo was right to be suspicious of the ol’ gal. She’s a piece of work. But she didn’t take the painting.”

  Harrison made a disappointed sound.

  I didn’t mean to be listening in, but the office was open plan, and there wasn’t even any music playing to cover their conversation. The brothers didn’t seem concerned about me overhearing them and continued talking.

  Lucky explained how he and I had worked “as a team” to find the purse. Then, to our colossal disappointment, we’d found out about the foam glued inside.

  “Oh, well,” Harrison said. “If they all wrapped up in half a day, we’d be out of jobs.” He finished chewing the sandwich and licked his fingers. “That was the best BLT I’ve ever had.”

  “From Doyle’s hands to your mouth.”

  Harrison grimaced. “Don’t ruin it.” He opened his desk drawer, pulled out a pre-moistened wipe, and cleaned off his hands. “Now what?” He crumpled the wipe and prepared to toss it several feet into a waste basket. It was a tricky shot, but he made it. He whisper-yelled the sound of a crowd cheering.

  “We should look at the artist,” Lucky said. “Hannah Otto.”

  “Why would she steal her own painting when she could easily paint another one?”

  “What if the point was to destroy it? She was overheard at the party talking about using a chainsaw on her artwork.”

  Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose. “Artists,” he said.

  “You could go interview her if you want. Why should I have all the fun?”

  Harrison snorted. “She’s all yours.”

  “Give me an address, and I’ll head over there right now.” Lucky clapped his hands together and slid off of Harrison’s desk. His movement knocked a stack of papers to the floor. Lucky grabbed the papers haphazardly and dumped them on the desk.

  Harrison plucked a handful off the top and waved them. “Lucky, do you know what these are?”

  “Letters of praise from our many satisfied customers?”

  “Parking tickets. Seventeen of them.”

  “That many, huh?”

  “And I can tell by the addresses that you didn’t even get them while on company business.”

  Lucky frowned and reached for the papers. “Are you sure about that? You spend too much time indoors in bad light, Harry. You probably need reading glasses.”

  Harrison yanked the papers out of his brother’s reach. “I don’t need reading glasses.” He stood and leaned forward with his hands on the desk. “And why is the company paying the lease on such an expensive car, anyway? It’s wasteful. Dad wouldn’t approve of it.”

  Lucky put his hands on the other side of the desk and leaned toward his brother in a mirrored gesture. “There’s not much Dad would approve of, so what’s your point?”

  “We don’t need the car. And we certainly don’t need the parking tickets.”

  “It’s the cost of doing business, Harry. You have to drive a successful-looking car and park wherever you need to. You wouldn’t want me to be late meeting a client.”

  “If you want to be on time for a meeting, leave early. You don’t have to speed.” Harrison did a double take. “Have you been getting speeding tickets, too?”

  “What’s the big deal? We can write them off against our taxes?”

  “A business needs to have a profit first before there are even any taxes to write expenses against!”

  Lucky, whose forehead had nearly been touching his brother’s, abruptly leaned and back and straightened up. “Is the business in bad shape?”

  Harrison was silent, looking down instead of meeting his brother’s gaze.

  Lucky pressed on. “How bad is it?”

  Harrison loosened his tie and undid another button on his shirt, still looking down.

  “You need to talk to me,” Lucky said. “We’re partners.”

  “I know, I know.” Harrison tidied some papers into a neat stack. “Tell you what. You stick to being the charming and clever one and leave the accounting to me. I’ve got some ideas.” He swiped the stack of mail off the desk and dropped them in the drawer.

  The brothers stared at each other for a long moment. The file drawer I’d been opening let out a dramatic squeak. I put the files away and closed it with another dramatic squeak that went on forever.

  “Focus on the case for now,” Harrison said. “Go see Hannah Otto.” He cracked the smallest of smiles. “If she pulls out a chainsaw, run for the door.”

  “You don’t want to come with me?”

  “Take the new girl. I’ll be busy here.”

  “Busy breaking another calculator? You should be getting billable hours. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of the pit.”

  “I’ve got billable work. I’ve, uh, got to talk to Leo about getting the security camera footage from the house. If Hannah Otto doesn’t pan out, we can see who else might have smuggled out the painting.”

  “I’ll need an address.”

  Harrison plopped down in his chair with a weary sigh and started tapping on his keyboard. After a few minutes, he reported, “According to Hannah Otto’s social media accounts, she’s at her studio working on a piece right now.” Harrison wrote down the address and handed it to Lucky.

  Lucky turned to me, the sticky note stuck to his finger. He looked at my clean desk and asked, “Where’d all the files go?”

  “In the filing cabinets, where they belong.”

  “Nicely done.” He offered me a high five.

  I had to stand on my tiptoes to meet his high five. Our palms made a pleasant smack.

  “We’re off,” Lucky called over his shoulder.

  “One more thing,” Harrison said, not looking up from his computer screen. With an exasperated tone, he said, “When you get back, don’t park the car in the customer parking spot. There are ten other spaces you can use.”

  CHAPTER 8

  According to Harrison’s directions, Hannah’s painting studio was somewhere among the rows and rows of warehouses in an old shipping yard. We drove until we reached a barrier. There was a metal bar that extended across the road and acted as a security gate, for vehicles at least, which meant that Lucky and I were on foot for the remainder of our search. I had to keep reminding myself that we were looking for a painting, not a body, as Lucky and I wandered through at least a mile of towering warehouses. We were in an area of the city I’d never been to, and I did not feel like I had been missing anything. Asphalt, roughly the width of a single lane road, divided corrugated metal walls that rose out of the ground for several stories. The buildings blocked the sun from reaching the ground, which left us in pools of eerie shadows.

  We passed a rusty garage-style door chained shut with what must have been six feet of chain. “Interesting location choice for an art studio,” Lucky remarked. Attached to a sign post that warned there was no parking overnight, there was an old frame of a bike that was now missing both wheels and th
e handlebars. Despite the spooky creaks and distant slams of old metal, Lucky meandered down the small street like he owned the place. Generally, I considered myself to be a glass half-full, assume the best, kind of person, but I wasn’t stupid. You didn’t live on your own in a city like LA, not to mention in your early twenties as a woman, and not jump to high alert in a place like this. Lucky showed no fear. Was he naive, or did he have the self-defense skills to back up that swagger?

  I was looking at Lucky in his two-toned, Hawaiian T-shirt that was cuffed at the sleeves, imagining how he might do in a fight, when he darted down an even narrower stretch of asphalt. He walked a few yards between a shipping container and another looming warehouse building to where there was a thick silver door. Add some magnets and it almost looked like a beat-up old fridge. I counted five stories, although it was difficult to tell if each small window marked its own floor or not. On the ground, there were faded white block letters next to the building.

  “Lot B-43,” I read aloud. “Is that the one?”

  “It should be…” Lucky scratched his head and scanned the empty alley on either side of us. He was about to knock when the giant fridge door clicked and swung open with a low groan.

  Standing in the doorway, with a very pleasant and calm expression, was a small, red-headed woman around the age of fifty. She wore a washed-out green tank top and loose black pants that gathered at the ankle. Over top of her clothes, and slightly askew, was an apron covered in every imaginable color of paint. If I had to guess, I’d say the original fabric would have been yellow, but she didn’t ask me to guess.

  “Come in,” was all she said. And before Lucky had time to open his mouth and ask if she was indeed the Hannah Otto we were looking for, she disappeared into the dim space beyond the door.

  Lucky smirked at me, and a bright flicker of intrigue appeared in his eyes. He shrugged and stepped through the doorway. I quickly closed the remaining gap between us and stepped in after him.

  I hadn’t thought it was all that bright outside, but it was enough of a transition that for a few moments I stumbled blindly down a small hallway.

  “Oomph,” Lucky said.

  My eyes took a moment to adjust and I had accidentally bumped into his wide back. He’d stopped and was about to climb up a ladder. “Wait your turn, will you, Chance?” he said playfully. I watched him ascend. It wasn’t exactly a ladder. It was relatively steep, and the steps were narrow, but the angle wasn’t too harsh. All of a sudden, light poured down from the gap in the ceiling above. Lucky must have reached the top. I held onto the cool railings and climbed.

  When I popped my head up into the light and saw the shiny brown leather of Lucky’s shoes, I had to blink the light back into my eyes. The ladder kept going past the floor like a fireman’s pole, and I lifted myself up the rest of the way. Once I stepped to the side onto the firm floor, Lucky replaced his outstretched hand at his side. His mouth turned down a little at the corners and he nodded, in the way people do when they are surprised and impressed. I lifted my left foot off the ground and tapped my flat sole with one hand and tapped my temple with the other. I knew my shoe choice would pay off, I just didn’t realize it would be on my very first day. I’d almost forgotten that this wasn’t all brand-new to me. That afternoon it somehow already felt like I’d been on the case for weeks.

  I’d momentarily forgotten to locate our suspect, if we could call her that. The room was bright and wide open, and, at first, it proved a little difficult to find her small frame in the sea of easels, tables covered in paint, and wooden boards of all shapes and sizes. The space was incredibly large. We stood on one level of a loft. Below, there were even more painting supplies and finished pieces, some of which were displayed, and others were stacked and leaned precariously at odd angles. Lucky and I must have walked past a dozen or more of those warehouses, but I hadn’t grasped their actual volume from the outside. Light streamed in through three windows that were the size of walls. I wasn’t sure what I had expected in the way of hospitality—I had never been around an artist of the painting variety—but I was surprised to see that about twenty feet away, the red-headed, elfin woman was back at work. Lucky and I approached her, carefully passing other pieces and stacks of boxes as we went. She was engrossed in a painting of...I really had no idea. It could have been the way that some hair was catching the light, or the movement of water, or the root system of a plant. I wanted to ask but there were more pressing questions to be answered.

  “Hannah Otto?” Lucky said her name like a question.

  “Just Hannah is fine,” she said. Her eyes stayed focused on her paintbrush.

  “My colleague and I, Kacey—”

  “How do you do,” Hannah interrupted, pausing from her work briefly to give me a nod. She had a very subtle accent. French, I thought.

  Lucky continued. “My name is Lucky Booker, I’m acting on behalf of Leo Fitz as a Private Investigator. Hannah, we’re here to get the painting back. We know about your intentions to saw it in half.” Lucky’s voice was charming but firm.

  At this, Hannah smiled, and her paintbrush stilled. She placed it down on the edge of the paint-splattered easel and faced us in a way that allowed me to see her properly for the first time.

  Hannah Otto was a petite, vibrant woman. She had a strong chin, and high cheekbones that were generously rouged. Besides her wide lips and deep-set green eyes, everything about her was dainty and slight. She had the grace of a ballerina in the way she moved languidly about her studio. Most of her light, ginger hair fell just above her shoulders, with a messy little knot on top held in place with a paint brush.

  “I did hear about the theft of my painting,” Hannah said, eyeing us. She squinted slightly, not quite hiding an inner twinkle of mischief. “But I’m afraid what I said at the party was misinterpreted.”

  “How do you misinterpret chainsawing a painting in half?” Lucky chuckled to himself.

  Hannah raised her eyebrows at him.

  “Like this,” Hannah began, and mimicked Lucky’s cavalier tone. I had to physically bite down on my tongue to keep from laughing myself. “Many years ago, I did a series for another lover. After we broke up, in a fit of passionate rage, I used a chainsaw to cut the paintings in half.” Hannah may have been in the throes of a passionate rage then, but now she was very nonchalant about the subject as she spoke. “It turns out, the value increased by a hundredfold from what I would have been able to sell them for intact.” She paused for a moment and gave a wide smile. “I’m still very fond of Leo, and I wish I could have done the same for him and make the value increase. But, alas, I couldn’t do it now. I don’t have any hatred in my heart for dear Leo, it wouldn’t be...authentic.” Hannah said the last word in French and made a little flourish with her hand. Then she picked up a palette beside her and began mixing an inky shade of blue.

  “You don’t feel resentful at all?” I asked her. It was strange that Portia clearly still felt very strongly about her history with Leo, and Hannah appeared so mellow.

  “No, my dear. I know how to let things go, unlike some people.”

  “Do you mean anyone in particular? Portia, perhaps?” Lucky asked. At this Hannah threw her small head back and laughed.

  “No, no. Portia is incredibly well balanced, if a little on the dramatic side at times. All of the girls are. We have each other.” Hannah added some of the midnight blue color to the painting and then changed her mind and wiped it off.

  “Hannah, what do you mean by the girls?” Lucky asked. Hannah acted surprised that we didn’t know what she had meant.

  “There are about a dozen of us, or maybe one or two more. All exes of Leo. We have an email chain, if you can believe it. We’ve become dear, dear friends over the past couple of decades. It’s all thanks to Leo.”

  I grappled with the idea of becoming friends in such a way; it was just like a movie, so Hollywood.

  “That’s how I knew about the painting. Portia filled us all in this morning. Despite wishi
ng Leo no ill-will, I have to say it has been quite comical imagining what has become of the painting. Perhaps once it’s found—if it’s found—it will be worth more after all,” Hannah added.

  Lucky tilted his head to the side. He kept pursing and then opening his lips as if to speak, but no words came out. He reminded me of a big, handsome goldfish, finally realizing he was swimming in circles.

  I was at a loss as well. I had anticipated this case would be an easy one to solve, and it appeared Lucky did too. It felt like every new lead led somewhere else, further and further from the source. Lucky and I thanked Hannah for her time. When Lucky said we’d leave her to it and get out of her hair, Hannah was put out.

  “Take your time to look around if you like,” she said. “Not many get to be in the inner sanctum.”

  Lucky shifted on his feet, suddenly taking up more space with his broad shoulders than he’d had before.

  “I would think not, if you have to go through a tunnel to get in here.” Lucky laughed loudly.

  He had evidently emerged from the state he’d been in, but he’d forgotten than Hannah was more than capable of putting him in his place.

  “Oh, no, dear. You came in the back entrance,” Hannah said simply. She motioned to the far wall with the windows and to the open space below. “There are several doors there, Detective,” Hannah said.

  She smirked, but not unkindly. I enjoyed seeing Lucky and his cheeky personality get a run for its money. Apparently, so did he. Lucky dropped the more arrogant tone and chuckled through his grin. He took in the garage-style sliding door across the room and two more regular ones beside it. He bowed his head in concession.

  We assured Hannah we would love to look around, which made her smile and place a hand over her chest.

  “Remember, many of them are works in progress,” she said. She’d already turned back toward her current piece and went to work at mixing an ugly shade of yellow. Wanting to please her for the help she’d given us, Lucky and I began walking through the loft, slowly doing our best to take in each of the strange and staggering collection of pieces. Now that I was looking at a selection of her pieces, I wasn’t sure they were meant to be hair or water or any of the ideas I had come up with before. The strong colors she used created a visually resounding effect. It appeared quite abstract to me, but for fear of offending her, I didn’t voice my thoughts aloud.