“Ms. Ullman is looking for you, sir,” the copper-colored guard said.
“Oh?”
“Said to ask you to come by her office.”
“She just said to ask me?”
Warren shrugged and I smiled.
MY OFFICE SUITE in the Tesla Building was the apex of my professional life.
The old real estate manager, Terry Swain, had been siphoning money out of the maintenance fund for years. He never took much at any one time but it added up to quite a sum over twenty-six years. When my lease in the Empire State Building was about to lapse, I asked around and found out that Swain was being investigated by the Tesla’s new owners for having stolen one hundred seventy-one thousand dollars. So I did a little research and went to his office on the eighty-first floor.
Terry was tall and thin, sandy-haired even at the age of sixty-one. At fifty-three I’m already three-quarters bald and half the way gray.
“Hello, Mr. Swain, I hear you got some problems,” were my first words to him.
“Not me,” he said with an unconvincing smile.
“No? That’s too bad, because I’m the guy to go to when the hammer is comin’ down and you need to get out of the way.”
My words brought moisture to the man’s eyes, if not hope.
“Who are you?” he managed to ask.
“Peter Cooly used to work in here with you, right?” I replied, gesturing to an empty desk in the corner.
“Peter’s dead.”
“Yep. Died just this last March. His second heart attack in two months.