Sudden Mischief

"Okay," I said and swung my chair back around and got up and walked over to the narrow table that ran along the left-hand wall of my office. There was a computer on it. I turned it on.

"Gimme the disks," I said.

chapter twenty-four

I AM INEXPERT with a computer and hope to remain so. I had bought one initially because Susan had one and took to it easily and had become almost immediately convinced that no office should be without one. When I did use the computer, which was rarely, and I ran into a problem, which was whenever I used the computer, I called Susan and she straightened me out. Today I ran into a problem at once. When I started up the computer and slipped in a copy of Sterling's hard disk, I couldn't get any of the folders open. I tried the other disks from the disk file we'd taken from Sterling's office. Everything was locked. Hawk was sitting in my chair with his feet up on my desk watching me.

"Need a code," he said.

"Thank you, Bill Gates," I said.

"Trying to be helpful," he said.

"Consultants!" I said in a loud mutter.

Susan did not seem the appropriate resource in this case, so I got up and went to my desk and called Sean Reilly.

"I've got some disks," I said, "that I can't get open."

"Locked?"

"I assume so."

"I'll come over."

I said thank you, but he had already hung up.

"Help is on the way," I said.

"He going to bring donuts," Hawk said.

"I don't think Sean ever ate a donut," I said.

"Then how much help he going to be?"

Reilly arrived in about ten minutes, which was the time he took to carry his black plastic briefcase down Boylston Street from the Little Building where he had an office. He walked in, gave me a brief nod, and sat down at the computer table. I introduced Hawk. Sean gave him a brief nod as he opened the briefcase and took out some software.

"You related to Pat Riley?" Hawk said, his face blank.

"No."

Sean was a medium-sized, mostly bald guy, with a patchy ineffective beard. The thin fringe of long hair that remained around the perimeter of his head was not much more effective than the beard. He wore a red plaid fla

"Unlock everything?" Sean said.

"Yep."

He ejected the first disk and slipped in another one, his gaze still locked onto the screen. He nodded as if to affirm a truth.

"Take about half an hour," he said.

"Fine."

He paused. We waited. He stared at the screen without moving.

Finally he said, "I don't like people watching me."

"Ahh," I said.

Hawk and I got up and went out and leaned on the wall in the corridor.

"People normally kick you out your own office?" Hawk said.

"Just artists," I said.

Hawk said, "Sean on his way to a costume party, you think?"

"I told you, he's a computer geek," I said. "To him that's dress-for-success."

We loitered in the hall another twenty minutes, while Sean Reilly practiced his black arts. Hawk took the opportunity to brush up on his surveillance skills by watching the receptionist in the design office across the hall.

"Are you objectifying that young woman?" I said.

"Absolutely not," Hawk said. "I thinking about her with her clothes off."

"Oh," I said. "No problem there."

My office door opened, Reilly came out, carrying his ugly briefcase.

"Files are open. Bill's on your desk," he said and walked off down the corridor.

"Nice talking to you," Hawk murmured.

We went back into the office and I sat down at my computer. I put in the hard disk copy I had made and clicked open a folder marked "Addresses." It blossomed before me as if kissed by a summer rain. Susan's address was there, and mine, and Carla Quagliozzi and someone named Lisa Coolidge, who may or may not have been worried about being another notch on Brad's gun, and a number of people whose names meant nothing to me. And Richard Gavin.

"I go see Carla Quagliozzi," I said to Hawk, who was still leaning back in my chair with his feet up and his eyes closed. Hawk could sit motionless, as far as I knew, for days.

"She's the president of Civil Streets. And Richard Gavin shows up and leans on me. I get a list of directors of Civil Streets from the AG's office and Richard is on it. We open up Sterling's address book and there's Richard."

"Say what he does?" Hawk said.

"Apparently he's a lawyer."

"Oh good," Hawk said.

"Yeah, not many of them around," I said.

I went back to the computer. Jeanette Ronan was there and all the other women who were alleging sexual harassment. There was a woman named Buffy, no last name, there were a number of women. I took some notes.

When I finished with the addresses, I closed them and opened a folder titled "Finance." Some of it was simple. There was a list of names under the heading: Monthly Nut. The name Buffy was listed and beside it $5,000/mo.

Cask and Carafe, $600/mo.

Matorian Realty, $1,100/mo.

Import Credit, $575/mo.

DePaul Federal, $4,000/mo.

Foxwood School, $22,000/year.

Then there was a notation, "Galapalooza-see blue disk."

"So why would he bother to lock this information," I said.

"What's a blue disk?" Hawk said.

"No idea," I said.

"Maybe stuff on blue disk was on this disk once," Hawk said. "And he coded it. Then later on he change it onto the blue disk and didn't take the code off."

"Be nice if we had the blue disk," I said.

"Be nice if we had lunch," Hawk said.

"Well, hell," I said. "There's something we can find."

And we did.

chapter twenty-five

SUSAN AND I went up to Essex and had some fried clams at a place called Farnham's. We got the clams, and some onion rings to go, and ate them in the car looking out over the tidal marshes toward Ipswich Bay. It was still raining. And it was cold enough to leave the car ru

"You don't leave much to chance, do you?" she said.

"Proper provisioning is the mark of a good eater," I said.

I had a large order of clams. Susan had chosen the small. We shared an order of rings. Sharing with Susan was always good because she consumed slowly and not too much. We ate for a time in silence. The evening had darkened and the windshield wipers were off so that we couldn't see much of the scenery and what we could see was blurred. But the lights from the clam shack made dark crystal patterns out of the rain that sluiced on the windshield, and the steady sound of the rain made the dark interior of the car seem like the perfect refuge.