Though, if I had my druthers, I’d still nuke City Hall.
Just before we would have entered the heart of the financial district, the man turned left, cutting across the nexus of State, Congress, and Court streets, stepping on the stones that commemorate the site of the Boston Massacre, and walked another twenty yards and turned into the Exchange Place Building.
I broke into a trot because Exchange Place is huge with at least sixteen elevator banks. When I walked onto the marble floors under ceilings that stretched four stories above me, I didn’t see him. I took a right into the express elevator corridor and saw two doors sliding to a close.
“Hold, please!” I jogged to the doors and just managed to get my good shoulder in between them. They receded but not before giving my shoulder a hard squeeze. Tough week for shoulders.
The man leaned against the wall, watching me as I came in, an annoyed look on his face, as if I’d interrupted his private time.
“Thanks for holding the door,” I said.
He stared straight ahead. “There are plenty of other elevators at this time of morning.”
“Ah,” I said, “a Christian.”
As the doors closed, I noticed he’d pressed floor 38, and I nodded at the button, and leaned back.
He looked at my bruised and pocked face, the sling around my arm, the clothes I’d wrinkled almost beyond recognition by sitting in a car for eleven hours.
“You have business on thirty-eight?” he said.
“I do.”
I closed my eyes, leaned against the wall.
“What sort of business?” he said.
“What sort do you think?” I said.
“Well, I don’t know.”
“Then maybe you’re going to the wrong floor,” I said.
“I work there.”
“And you don’t know what sort of business they do? Jeez. First day?”
He sighed as the elevator raced past floors 1 through 20 so fast I thought my cheeks would slide off my chin.
“Young man,” he said, “I think you’ve made a mistake.”
“Young man?” I said, but when I got a closer look at him I realized my original estimate of his age had been off by at least a decade. His tan, tight skin and rich dark hair had thrown me off, as had the energy in his step, but he was at least a young-looking sixty.
“Yes, I really think you have the wrong place.”
“Why?”
“Because I know all the firm’s clients, and I don’t know you.”
“I’m new,” I said.
“I doubt it,” he said.
“No, really,” I said.
“No way in hell,” he said and gave me a paternal grin of perfectly capped white teeth.
He’d said “firm,” and I took a guess that it wasn’t an accounting firm.
“I was injured,” I said, indicating my arm. “I’m a drummer for Guns N’ Roses, the rock band. You heard of them?”
He nodded.
“So we had a show last night at the Fleet and somebody set off some pyrotechnics in the wrong place, and now I need a lawyer.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“The drummer for Guns N’ Roses is named Matt Sorum, and you don’t look anything like him.”
A sixty-year-old Guns N’ Roses fan? How could this be? And why was it happening to me?
“Was Matt Sorum,” I said. “Was. He and Axl had a falling-out, and I was called in.”
“To play at the Fleet Center?” he said as the elevator reached 38.
“Yeah, buddy.”
The doors opened and he blocked them into the return panel by placing his hand against it. “Last night at the Fleet Center, the Celtics played the Bulls. I know. I’m a season ticket holder.” He gave me that great smile again. “Whoever you are, pray this elevator gets back down to the lobby before security does.”
He stepped out and stared at me as the doors began to close. Behind him, I saw the words GRIFFIN, MYLES, KENNEALLY AND BERGMAN in gold leaf.
I smiled. “Desiree,” I whispered.
He reached forward and slapped his hand between the doors and they jumped back.
“What did you just say?”
“You heard me, Mr. Griffin. Or should I call you Danny?”
36
His office had everything the prosperous man needs, save a jet hangar. And he could have fit one if he chose.
The outside offices were empty except for a single male secretary filling coffee filters at intervals of every fourth cubicle and inside each office. Somewhere, far on the other end, someone ran a vacuum cleaner.
Daniel Griffin hung his topcoat and suit jacket in his closet and walked around a desk so big I was sure it was measured in yard lines. He took a seat and motioned for me to sit across from him.
I stood.
“Who are you?” he said.
“Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private investigator. Call Cheswick Hartman if you want my life story.”
“You know Cheswick?”
I nodded.
“You’re not the one who extricated his sister from that…situation in Connecticut several years back?”
I lifted a heavy bronze statuette off the corner of his desk, looked at it. It was a representation of some Eastern god or mythological figure, a woman wearing a crown on her head, but her face marred by the trunk of an elephant in place of a nose. She sat cross-legged as fish jumped from the sea toward her feet, her four hands holding a battle ax, a diamond, an ointment bottle, and a coiled serpent respectively.
“Sri Lankan?” I said.
He raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Ceylon back then, of course.”
“Duh,” I said.
“What do you want from me?” he said.
I glanced at a photo of a smiling beautiful wife, then at another of several grown children and a multitude of perfect grandchildren.
“Vote Republican?” I said.
“What?”
“Family values,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“What did Desiree want?” I said.
“I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”
He was recovering from the shock out by the elevator, his voice deepening, and his eyes growing righteous again. It wouldn’t be long before he was threatening to call security again, so I had to cut him off at the knees.
I came around the desk and moved a small reading lamp, sat on the desktop, my leg an inch from his. “Danny,” I said, “if you were just having a tryst with her, you never would have let me out of the elevator. You have something huge to hide. Something unethical and illegal and capable of sending you to jail for the rest of your life. Now I don’t know what that is yet, but I know how Desiree works, and she wouldn’t waste five minutes on your flaccid genitalia if you weren’t giving her something big in exchange.” I leaned forward and loosened the knot on his tie, unbuttoned his collar. “So, tell me what it is.”