My mother mailed that poem twenty-three years ago, and I still had it. The dark blue ink was faded, and the paper was dry and ratty at the edges, but it was still legible. I’d kept it all these years in an army surplus footlocker at the back of my walk-in closet, on the highest shelf, behind my boot boxes. It floated in other bits of wreckage from my disordered childhood: a tarnished anklet made of bells, the antique glass doorknob I stole from Hervé’s house, three strings of Mardi Gras beads.
Now it was inside my briefcase. I’d dug it out right before I left to pick up Birdwine. I planned to drop by Kinkos and scan the pages. I wanted a digital copy for myself because I’d decided I should offer the original to Julian. It was rightfully his—a love poem by his mother, maybe to his father, written while he was in the womb.
“How’d your chat with the kid go?” Birdwine asked. It was the first thing he’d said since a grunty “Can we stop for coffee?” when I picked him up. I’d pointed to the cup I’d gotten him at Starbucks on the way, and he’d put his face in it.
“I don’t know. Weird. Stilted. I invited him over this weekend,” I told Birdwine, talking over the GPS as it ordered us into a small parking lot. I parked in front of a strip of stores that couldn’t live up to the word mall: Chinese take-out, a tattoo joint, a quickie mart with milk and Lotto. “He’s coming to the loft, but maybe I should take him out for tapas or to a steak place? Neutral territory.”
“Play it by ear,” Birdwine said.
As we got out, I realized I should have let Birdwine drive, after all. Gentrification had tried and failed here, and this was his car’s kind of neighborhood. Across the street, Cape Cod bungalows in various stages of abandoned rehab sat in the shadows of huge Victorians that had been sliced into awkward apartments.
Birdwine pointed to a door near the end, between a nail parlor and a tiny used-book store. It was covered in signs. The top one said OFFICE SPACE FOR RENT. Under that was a sign for Krauss & Spaulding, a ground-zero firm a bare half step up from a do-it-yourself divorce kit. The Worthy Investigations sign was next, the top edge covered by a hand-lettered piece of poster board that said MASSAGE! WAXING! TAROT! WALK-INS WELCOME! That one had an enthusiastic red arrow drawn on, pointing up.
“Hooker?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Birdwine said.
Birdwine’s default setting was quiet, and he’d never been a morning guy, but this was overkill. It was as if he’d decided in cold blood to have this friendship, and now he was doggedly enduring it. If I didn’t know better, I’d guess he was hungover. I did know better, though. If Birdwine had started drinking yesterday, he’d be very busy still drinking right now.
“I’m about to check you for a pulse,” I said.
He rallied a little bit and said, “To be fair, I bet if you asked her to wax something, she would do that, too.”
“One-stop shopping,” I said, to keep it going. Up the stairs we went.
At the top was another door with multiple locks and a buzzer system. Someone—likely the hooker—had propped it open with a crumpled soda can. The narrow hallway behind it smelled like burnt Indian food.
“How did Julian end up hiring Worth? This pit should have scared him right back to the suburbs,” I said.
Even before Birdwine went digging in his financials, Julian’s cheap khakis had told me he couldn’t afford the day rates of some high-tech midtown outfit. But I could think of a half dozen small, ethical PI firms that smelled better, both literally and metaphorically.
“I doubt he ever saw it,” Birdwine said. “Worth has a slick website.”
I paused to look at him approvingly. “Hey, you got a synapse firing. Are you ready to wake up and work this guy with me?”
Birdwine pulled a huge breath in through his nostrils, very loud, and shook his shoulders, like a bear rousing himself after winter.
“I got your back,” he said.
A directory at the top told us Worthy Investigations had the office at the far end. We passed an unrented space on the way, the door hanging wide open. It was a single large room with some flimsy partitions set up to make cubicles. No furniture except an unwieldy wooden desk. The floor was covered in deplorable blue carpet, stained and frayed.
“This whole building feels like a murder zone,” I said.
“It’s very Sam Spade. Philip Marlowe. Julian probably thinks this is what a gumshoe’s office should look like.”
“Who says gumshoe?” I said, but my soft-faced surprise brother, with his Yoda slogans and his inspirational nature pictures, might.
I continued down the hall, and Birdwine followed, narrating softly in a decent attempt at Bogart. “When she strode in on her long, spectacular stems, I knew that dame was trouble.”
“Damn straight,” I said back, grinning.
With Birdwine roused and ready now behind me, I felt like being trouble. It was a good feeling. More than good; it was downright delicious. Ye gods, but I had missed this. I hadn’t felt this alive since—well, since the Skopes depo. That was the day my check came back with Kai’s note.