“I wonder if mob informants look this good.”

“Why, you wanna make a desk out of one?” Ellen said.

She had stopped just outside the door to Hornsby’s office. I could see a few black-and-white photographs hung on the wall. I stepped up next to her and looked. They were archival type photos of early loggers on Lake St. Clair. They showed burly-looking guys in dark wool pants and plaid shirts walking on top of logs with big black boots.

I left Ellen there and went into Hornsby’s office. The place had been thoroughly gone over by a forensics team. His desk was old and ready to fall apart. The chair was old with a smoothly polished seat, made so by years and years of butt cheeks sliding on and off. I sat down and looked around. There was no computer or anything. Just a phone and piles of folders, invoices and coffee cups, soda cans and beer bottles.

It was weird to be sitting in a dead guy’s chair, not that Hornsby was the kind of guy who spent a lot of time here. I pictured him on the boat or in the shop.

I used my handkerchief to pull open the drawers. As I suspected, they were chock full of paperwork. I spied a date on one. 1993. If Jessie Barre loved Hornsby, it probably wasn’t because of his filing ability.

Ellen had walked into the office and was looking out the small window, which gave a view of the lake. Next to the phone was a pile of yellow Post-it notes, which was interesting because I knew Post-it notes were invented sometime in the 1980s and it surprised me that Hornsby had purchased office supplies that recently. In any event, there were a few Post-its, and I gently pulled them toward me. I peeled off the first one, which was nearly indecipherable. The second was a string of dimensions. The third had a scrawled name and a phone number.

The name was Randy.

I slipped the note into my pocket just as Ellen turned toward me.

“Anything interesting?” she said.

My heart was beating a little quicker than usual. Like I said, I didn’t like deceiving my big sister, but sometimes I had to.

“Not to me. Maybe to the Society of Mold and Fungus Collectors.”

I wanted to follow up the Randy lead by myself because I figured that it was probably nothing. And even if it were something, I didn’t want to put Ellen in harm’s way because of some half-cocked idea of mine. Even though she was probably better equipped to handle it. I remembered that one time I had spilled a bunch of milk at the dinner table, and she waited outside for me afterward and kicked my ass. And that was Thanksgiving. Last year.

Ellen took my spot in the desk chair while I looked out the window. The lake was cold and gray, like it so often is at this time of year. I wondered if Nevada Hornsby had ever stood here and contemplated the water. Probably not. He didn’t seem like the philosophical type.

I wandered back out into the main room and looked at the different pieces of wood. They were truly spectacular. I’d heard Bill Gates had used this stuff to make the kitchen cabinets in his forty-million-dollar house. I knew that only a guy like Gates could afford the wood.

“All done?” Ellen said when she emerged from Hornsby’s office. “Satiated your insufferable curiosity?”

“I guess,” I said.

We left, and Ellen locked the door behind us.

“What are you up to now?” she asked. “Going to try to sweet talk a few more waitresses?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Why do I get the feeling that you know more than you’re telling me?” she said.

“Why do I get the same feeling about you?” I said. “In fact, it seems terribly coincidental that you would just happen to drop by at the same time as me. Are you sure you weren’t following me?”

By now we were at her cruiser, and I could see my Taurus across the street.

She climbed behind the wheel and rolled down the window.

“Maybe the next time you thoroughly charm a waitress, you should make sure she doesn’t see you cross the street and snoop around a place where a guy worked that you were asking questions about. She might call the cops.”

Ellen smiled at me, rolled up the window, and drove off.

I couldn’t believe it. Michelle hadn’t believed my story. She hadn’t trusted me.

I was slipping.

Big time.

Chapter Twenty

To a resourceful private investigator—and after a few cups of strong coffee, I had no problem putting myself into that category—there were many ways to take a phone number and match an address to it. If you had a computer handy, there was the Department of Motor Vehicle database, the Nexus database, and even the good old phone directory database. Now, if you were not at a computer, there were still ways to do it. For instance, you could call the operator and say, I’m looking for Randy Can’t-Remember-His-Last-Name, but I’ve only got his phone number and I know he used to live on Whatever Street. Most operators will call up the number and say, Randy Jones? And you would say, yep, that’s him. And she would say, oh, he’s not on Whatever Street now, the address listed to that number is 334 Bourbon Street. You say, great, thanks, and hang up.

The problem was it didn’t work every time. Some operators were more cynical than others. In fact, they seemed to be getting more and more leery. So when I was in a pinch and I had a phone number but no real name or address, I went to the quickest, most dependable resource I had.

“Nate, I need an address.” I could hear the usual hubbub of the Grosse Pointe News office in the background. People talking. A copier banging out sheets of stories on the school board, and my overweight friend’s heavy breathing.

“How soon and what’s it worth?” he said.

“Let me put it this way, I’ll wait for it.”

He snickered, the sound of a fisherman who’s just sunk his treble hook into the lips of a trophy. “It’s worth that much?”

I paused. He knew he had me.

“Dinner at the Rattlesnake Club,” he said. “With drinks, appetizers, and dessert.”

“Oh, come on, that’ll cost more than I’ll make on this whole case,” I protested.

“Okay,” he said, putting on his best bartering voice. “I’ll limit dessert strictly to sherbet.”

“Nuh-uh. Instead of dinner, how about lunch at the Rattlesnake Club? One drink. No appetizers. No dessert.”

“Dinner,” he said. “One bottle of medium-priced wine, one appetizer, one entrée, and no dessert.”

“Lunch,” I said. “One glass of wine, one appetizer we split, one entrée each, and no dessert.”

I heard him sigh, then he said, “Fine. Shoot.”

I gave him the number. He accessed a mysterious software program he had on his computer then came back on the line.

“1114 Sheffield. In the village of Grosse Pointe.”

“What’s the name?” I said, scratching the address down on the back of a receipt from La Shish restaurant. I think that had been with Nate too. I believed he’d devoured an entire plate of hummus and pita bread before our waitress had returned with our drinks.

“It’s registered to a Melissa Stark,” he said.

The name meant nothing to me.

“Anything interesting going on, John?” he said. Despite all the shenanigans, Nate was still a reporter, and he actually did work from time to time.

“I’ll let you know.”

•

The address 1114 Sheffield turned out to be a small apartment building two blocks from the village of Grosse Pointe. It was one of the few low-income areas of Grosse Pointe. Most people here were renters. A “transitional neighborhood” is how realtors and city councilmen would most likely describe it. There weren’t many apartment buildings in the village as it tended to conflict with the image Grosse Pointers try to project. Quaint houses are more the order of the day. But a few apartments managed to infiltrate the market and the mysterious Randy had apparently set up shop at one.