Lisa typed away at her computer, composing and answering emails on one screen while a playlist of music played through her earbuds on the other. She was alerted to a knock on her desk from a gnarled old hand at the end of a brown long coat. Without the badge, Don’s usual apparel looked somehow less intimidating and more demure. “Hey, young lady,” he greeted. “My son in? I saw his car down below.”
“Hi, Mr. Thatcher,” she said. “Yeah, he might be in a meeting right now. Let me check for you.” “Thanks.”
Jimmy’s meeting was over, but he did not move. He stayed in the conference room where he had the vantage over his competition. The rivaling law group worked out of the building just up the street. Even by city standards, being up the street, made it seem like he was below them. Years of pushing and plowing his way through legal adversity kept him only just behind the bigger fish. He tightened his hand into a fist, then put it in his pocket to cool off. The door opened. He glanced in the reflection to see Lisa poke her head, and then her whole body, inside. “Jimmy, your dad’s here.”
Jimmy was surprised. He pulled his hand out prematurely to check his watch. “The hell is he doing here this early? I have work to do.”
Lisa was gently nudged aside as Don opened the door the rest of the way to move past her. “Excuse me, sweetheart.” He sauntered right in and gave his son a nod.
“Hey, dad.”
“Jimmy-boy,” Don began. “I gotta ask for an appointment to see my son now?”
“No, no I didn’t mean it like that Dad,” he said.
Lisa tittered in the doorway. “You guys are so cute.”
“Lisa, get the fuck out,” Jimmy demanded.
“HEY,” Don said, his voice filling the room in an instant. He pointed a stiff finger Jimmy’s way. “I raised you better than that.”
Lisa was stunned for a moment by the sudden one-two of pressure. Once she could move, she shut the door and went back to her desk. The two Thatchers sat across the long table from one another. The distance was no issue for Don to hear or be heard.
“You miss me or something?” Jimmy asked. “You’re here kind of early.”
“A little bit… You know ever since you were born that little smile of yours always made my day when it’s going rough.” “Your day’s going rough? It’s still morning.” Jimmy said.
“Yeah. I figured I’d pour my guts out to you before I hit the bars.” Jimmy rolled his eyes. “Jimmy-boy, your father’s retired now. It’s not how I wanted to go out but —.”
“Retired?”
“Yep, I’ve hung it up son. I gave 40 years of my life to making the world a safer place. I think I can get into heaven now.”
Jimmy wasn’t sure what to say or how to say it. Don’s words hung around in the air. That weight carried itself over to him. He felt like anything he said would ring hollow in his father’s ears, like he wasn’t expecting anything at all. Just spreading the news while it was hot, not expecting kindness or frustration over abandoning his sole identity. “Well congratulations. We need to celebrate later. Does mom know yet?”
“Not yet.”
“That’s perfect. I’ll reserve a table at Mastro’s, you can tell her over dinner.”
Don nodded. “That’s nice of —.”
BANG! The loud sound of a gunshot rang through the office.
Jimmy shook in his seat. “What the hell was that!?”
Don knew the answer, though it confused him. A gunshot, indoors, in a high-rise office — a legal one at that. He wasn’t positive that he heard anything at all until he heard the obvious follow up. A woman’s scream. Don threw himself out of his seat and ran from the table. Jimmy followed after as the detective headed for the cry of distress. The whole office was on alert. People stood at their desks with heads turned. Not one was hiding, ducking, or even running. They were frozen. The streamlined office halls made it easy to speed through them, though Don was far enough from his prime to be running. He spotted the threshold of the incident, a woman collapsed in the hall right in front of the break room with a few curious staff members consoling her. Her eyes aimed toward the source of distress.
Don entered and took in the room. A body was on the floor, face down. The black suit was deepened with a spreading blood stain. Just killed. Veronica was in deep shock, unable to avert her eyes yet tortured by what she saw. Don moved between her and the body as he went to investigate. The body was warm, but immobile. No pulse in the man’s neck.
He hadn’t noticed at the moment. In his line of work he’d seen all kinds of men dead in often stranger ways. It didn’t occur to him that the dead man was the only black man on the entire floor.
Jimmy arrived and stood in the doorway in disbelief.
“He’s gone,” Don said. “Looks like a gunshot wound to the back.” Don scanned the immediate crime scene once more. There was a bullet casing nearby. The shot was point-blank. He used a pair of pens from his pocket to take the casing from the ground, something he’d mastered through many years of practice. “.40 caliber casing.” He turned to his son. “Call 911, Jimmy-boy. You got an office murder on your hands.” He replaced the casing as best he could and stood up to keep the scene uncontaminated. Jimmy did not move. “JIMMY-BOY SNAP OUT OF IT. You got a dead employee, hurry up and call 911.”
“No,” Jimmy stammered. “No no no no no no no no. We can’t. We can’t do that. We can’t do that.” His voice was wispy and erratic. Don crossed the room and got in close. “What the hell do you mean you can’t? What is he just going to lay there dead?” “We can’t do that,” Jimmy reiterated. His eyes darted, unable to meet his old man’s steely gaze. “You better speak up. You’re starting to scare me.”
“Dad, this can’t leave this office. I’m already losing deals left to right. This is the last thing I need.” “Seriously? You have a killer in your office and you’re worried about deals. Sometimes your hunger for money disgusts me.” Don took out his own phone. Jimmy grabbed it before he could make a dial. “You got a lot of nerve snatching that phone out of your daddy’s hands like that.”
“I’m sorry but Dad listen, listen. If any of my business partners get wind that I’m having a murder investigated at my office. I’m out of business. You gotta understand. How about you solve the murder right now? You’re a detective”. “What?”
“Yeah, you find whoever created this mess. Arrest them on the spot. This can’t get out.”
“I just retired, you didn’t hear me in that office.”
“Well, welcome back.”
Don took a moment to ponder. If Jimmy said not to call, then no one would call under threat of their careers. The floor was as good as locked down, as far as information was concerned. It was an unofficial internal affair. He’d done work like that in the past, put his skills to use without any official police reporting. He did it better than most cops could. And it was for his son.
“Can I smoke in here?” Don asked.
“Yeah, I don’t care,” Jimmy shrugged. Don was quicker with lighting a cigarette than he was with his phone. He took a couple puffs toward the ceiling vent, then began. He knelt down in front of Anthony’s body and looked at the room from where he fell.
“This was an ambush. He didn’t see his killer. Whoever it is, they’re scared of this young man.” “How’d you figure that?” Jimmy asked.
“Usually when victims get shot in the back they’re in the act of running. There’s no room to run in here. And look how close he is to the door. When he walked in, the shooter was waiting for him back there.” He pointed to the corner behind where the door opened up, in a blind corner.
“I ran in here,” Veronica said, “right after I heard the gun sound. I didn’t see anybody.”
“It was a planned sneak attack, he was out of this room before the body hit the ground. What’s his name?” Jimmy took a timid step forward to confirm it. He didn’t need to see the face, just the back of his head and the color of his skin. “Anthony. Anthony Little, he’s been here just about a year now. One of our closers.” Don circled the body and took puffs from his cigarette, each lungful fuel for the grinding gears in his brain. He knelt down once more to empty Anthony’s pockets. Car keys and chewing gum. Nothing important was present nor expected was missing. Don placed all the items in his pocket. He saw a cellphone was clutched in Anthony’s hand. He slowly retrieved it, the fingers tightened from the shock but still warm enough to move around. There was a message from Beth still on the screen: Meet me in the janitor’s office “wink emoji”.
Don quickly stood up. “Gather every living soul in the office in that conference room. I need every employees’ resume and log sheets for the morning. I want to know who’s been in and out of this office this whole month. The murder weapon is also missing. We find that, we find the killer.”
Jimmy turned to Veronica. “You heard the man. Get to work.”
“Yes, sir,” she said. She edged herself along the wall, still reeling from the shock in her own way, and stumbled into the hall. Don gave the room another pass and noticed a surveillance camera on the ceiling. “Where’s the footage to those cameras?” he asked.
“Don’t have any,” Jimmy said. “Cameras led to settlements.”
“What?”
“Cameras led to settlements. My IT guy made a great point when we were moving in here. The more cameras you have in an office the more you are liable to get sued by employees.”
“Just an office full of dumbasses. Now you have a murder on your hands that could have been solved in seconds. Where’s this kid’s desk?”
“On the floor.”
Veronica worked fast and migrated everyone into the conference room. Jimmy led Don to Anthony’s personal desk in the middle of the cubicle rows.
“Here it is.”
Don moved the papers around. Anything that looked like work was dismissed. His keen eye could spot something as subtle as a misplaced pen on the desk. He began to open all the drawers. They were all full of work files piled up to the top. Don finally got to the last drawer. He pulled but immediately felt resistance. It was locked. He quickly took Anthony’s keys out of his pocket. He tried the first key. It didn’t work. He tried the second but had the same luck. They’re was only one key left. At this point he had made up his mind he would break the desk in half in order to see what was in that drawer. He inserted the third key, and it opened. He opens the drawer to find a .38 revolver on top of letters in red ink.
“Is that the murder weapon?” Jimmy asked.
Don scoffed. “Sometimes I regret sheltering you so much. That’s a .38 revolver. He got killed with a .40.” “What’s up with the papers in red ink?”
Don picked the revolver up with a dainty grip. Minimal contact, to keep the maximum presence of the previous user’s prints across it. His belt felt too light without a gun, so he concealed it with his waistband. He skimmed through the letters to find a business card in between the letters reading “939 BROADWAY LOFTS” with an address 939 S Broadway, Los Angeles, CA 90015. On the back of the card in red pen ink says, “DEINDE TE”.
“Threat letters. Do me a favor and look this up… Looks like. D.e.i.n.d.e. T.e.”
Jimmy typed the word along into his phone.
“Then you,” he said.
“Then you?”
“Yep, says it’s Latin.”
“Hmm,” Don nodded. He folded the letters and placed them in his back pocket. He wasn’t working by force standards anymore. Things would get dirty, rough and the rules he was accustomed to weren’t there to back him up. No backup and no handing things off to the cleaner brigades of Sergeant Miller’s good boys. It was just one detective and a mid-morning murder.
