Tropical Depression (Billy Knight Thrillers 1)

He had played it cautious, leaving me alive. He didn’t know who else might know what I knew. But he could make damn sure I didn’t learn anything else.

I made it all the way back to my hotel room this time. I called Ed at home and told him what was going on.

“Figured something like that might happen,” he said. “What you gonna do about it?”

“I only have one move. I don’t like it much, but it’s all there is. Tomorrow morning I’m going to see a high-powered lawyer and lay out the whole thing for him.”

Smoke hissed out into the telephone. “What’s chances Doyle can get to this lawyer?”

“Pretty good, I’d say. You got a better idea?”

“Nope.”

“Well then, wish me luck and watch my back.”

“I’ll do that, Billy.”

Century City sticks up from a surrounding area of low, expensive homes. You can see it from ten miles away on a good day. But there are damned few good days in L.A., especially in August.

I took Olympic Boulevard west. It’s usually faster. For twenty minutes I watched the dim fingers of the high-rises growing gradually cleaner in outline. I also watched my rearview mirror, but there were no cops following me this morning.

I pulled into the underground parking lot of one of the buildings just about ten. The sign told me that if I wasn’t making about two and a half times minimum wage, I’d be losing money to park here while I worked. L.A. is the only place I know where you can have a job that you can’t afford to go to.

Eli Woodstock had an office near the top of the building. It was behind a very plain door that said FINKLE WOODSTOCK & KLEIN. That was it; I guess anyone passing by would know that they had to be lawyers with a name like that. Or maybe anybody who didn’t already know wasn’t welcome.

I waited about twenty minutes in a small waiting room. For what they had spent decorating it, you could buy a three-bedroom waterfront house in Key West.

Eventually the receptionist, with a cool British accent, informed me that Mr. Woodstock might see me now. She said it like it surprised her—a man like Mr. Woodstock actually seeing something like me. She watched me go inside like she was afraid I would stop and pee in the corner.

A woman I knew at one of the big record companies once told me a secret. If you know the system, a person’s office tells you exactly, down to the small change, how much they make and how important they are.

The way it works is this: score so many points for a corner office, so many more for each window. A couch with a coffee table gets more points than a chair with an end table. A picture on the wall scores, if it’s big and not too modern, and a potted plant counts according to its size.

Eli Woodstock’s office was the grand prize jackpot. It was a corner room. Two entire walls were glass. On the other two walls hung four paintings. If they weren’t fakes, I had to assume that museum directors would be very polite to this man.

There was a kid leather sofa with a marble coffee table that matched it, and three citrus trees bearing fruit in huge pots.

A short person would get lost in his carpet. Eli Woodstock was tall, even behind his massive slate desk. He still looked like an Episcopalian bishop.

The last time I had seen him, he had been smiling gently, gravely, trying to get my signature on a release for the city. He was not smiling today.

“Mr. Knight,” he said, and there was a lot of disapproval in his voice. “Sit down, please.”

It was not a request. It was closer to the tone a bailiff uses on a prisoner in court.

I sat in a chair that cost more than my car. He looked at me without blinking for three minutes, his hands steepled in front of him. Then he shook his head.

“Well,” he said. “What can I do for you?” He said it in a dry, distant voice, a voice that doubted there was anything I might want him to do that his morals would let him do.

I took a deep breath and told him. I knew it was going to be an uphill battle and that didn’t matter. I was used to that.

I laid it all out for him: from Roscoe calling on me in Key West, all the way through my visit to Doyle and my stay in the drunk tank, the visits to the Hollywood bureau. I told it carefully, objectively, without getting emotional or speculating too much. I made one hell of a case.

He let me finish. He made sure I’d told it all to him. He even waited another three minutes when I was done, looking at me over his bridged hands, just in case something else occurred to me.

Then he let me have it.

He shook his head at me for a good half-minute, slowly, elegantly, the gesture filled with upper-class contempt. “Mr. Knight,” he said at last, “what is it you expect of me?”