John Connolly - The Unquiet

I wasn’t optimistic about Eldritch and Associates as I parked in Tulley’s lot. In my experience, lawyers didn’t tend to open up much for private investigators, and the previous day’s conversation with Stark hadn’t done much to change my opinion. In fact, now that I thought about it, my encounters with lawyers had been almost uniformly negative. Maybe I just wasn’t meeting enough of them. Then again, maybe I was just meeting too many.

The street-level door of Eldritch’s building was unlocked, and a narrow flight of battered steps led to the upper floors. The yellow wall to the right of the stairs had an extended greasy smear at the level of my upper arm where countless coat sleeves had brushed against it over the years. There was a musty smell that grew stronger the farther up I went. It was the odor of old paper slowly decaying, of dust piled upon dust, of rotting carpet and law cases that had dragged on for decades. It was the stuff of Dickens. Had the problems of Jarndyce and Jarndyce found their way across the Atlantic, they would have enjoyed familiar surroundings in the company of Eldritch and Associates.

I reached a door marked BATHROOM on the first landing. Ahead of me, on the second floor, was a frosted-glass door with the firm’s name etched upon it. I climbed on, careful not to place too much faith in the carpet beneath my feet, which was fatally undermined by an absence of enough nails to hold it in position. To my right, a further flight of steps led up into the dimness of the top floor. The carpet there was less worn, but it wasn’t much of a claim.

Out of politeness, I knocked on the glass door before entering. It seemed like the Olde Worlde thing to do. Nobody answered, so I opened the door and entered. There was a low wooden counter to my left. Behind it was a large desk, and behind the large desk was a large woman with a pile of big black hair balanced precariously on her head like dirty ice cream on a cone. She was wearing a bright green blouse with frills at the neck, and a necklace of yellowing imitation pearls. Like everything else there, she looked old, but age had not dimmed her affection for cosmetics or hair dye, even if it had deprived her of some of the skills required to apply both without making the final effect look less like an act of vanity than an act of vandalism. She was smoking a cigarette. Given the amount of paper surrounding her it seemed an almost suicidal act of bravado, as well as indicating an admirable disregard for the law, even for someone who worked for a lawyer.

“Help you?” she said. She had a voice like puppies being strangled, high and gasping.

“I’d like to see Mr. Eldritch,” I said.

“Senior or Junior?”

“Either.”

“Senior’s dead.”

“Junior it is, then.”

“He’s busy. He’s not taking on any new clients. We’re run off our feet already.”

I tried to imagine her even getting to her feet, let alone being run off them, and couldn’t. There was a picture on the wall behind her, but the sunlight had faded it so much that only a hint of a tree was visible in one corner. The walls were yellow, just like those on the stairway, but decades of nicotine accumulation had given them a disturbing brown tint. The ceiling might once have been white, but only a fool would have placed a bet on it. And everywhere there was paper: on the carpet, on the woman’s desk, on a second, unoccupied desk nearby, on the counter, on a pair of old straight-backed chairs that might once have been offered to clients but was now assigned to more-pressing storage duties, and on the full-length shelves that stood against the walls. Hell, if they could have found a way to store paper on the ceiling, they probably would have covered that as well. None of the documents looked like they’d been moved much since quills went out of fashion.

“It’s about someone who may be a current client,” I replied. “His name is Merrick.”

She squinted at me through a plume of cigarette smoke.

“ Merrick? Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He’s driving a car registered to this firm.”

“How’d you know it’s one of ours?”

“Well, it was hard to tell at first because it wasn’t filled with paper, but it checked out in the end.”

Her squint grew narrower. I gave her the tag number.

“ Merrick,” I said again. I pointed at her phone. “You may want to call someone who isn’t dead.”

“Take a seat,” she said.

I looked around.

“There isn’t one.”

She almost smiled, then thought better about cracking the makeup on her face.

“Guess you’ll have to stand, then.”

I sighed. Here was more proof, if proof were needed, that not all fat people were jolly. Santa Claus had a lot to answer for.

She lifted the receiver and pressed some buttons on her beige phone.

“Name?”

“Parker. Charlie Parker.”

“Like the singer?”

“Saxophonist.”

“Whatever. You got some ID?”

I showed her my license. She looked at it distastefully, like I’d just taken my weenie out and made it do tricks.

“Picture’s old,” she said.

“ Lot of stuff ’s old,” I replied. “Can’t stay young and beautiful forever.”

She tapped her fingers upon her desk while she waited for an answer at the other end of the line. Her nails were painted pink. The color made my teeth hurt. “You sure he didn’t sing?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Huh. So who was the one who sang? He fell out of a window.”

“Chet Baker.”

“Huh.”

She continued drumming her nails.

“You like Chet Baker?” I asked. We were forming a relationship.

“No.”

Or maybe not. Mercifully, somewhere above us a phone was answered.

“Mr. Eldritch, there’s a-” She paused dramatically. “- gentleman here to see you. He’s asking about a Mr. Merrick.”

She listened to the answer, nodding. When she hung up she looked even unhappier than before. I think she had been hoping for an order to release the hounds on me.

“You can go up. Second door at the top of the stairs.”

“It’s been a blast,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You hurry back now.”

I left her, like an overweight Joan of Arc waiting for the pyre to ignite, and went up to the top floor. The second door was already open and a small old man, seventy or more, stood waiting for me. He still had most of his hair, or most of someone’s hair. He wore gray pin-striped trousers and a black jacket over a white shirt and a gray pin-striped vest. His tie was black silk. He looked slightly unhappy, like an undertaker who had just mislaid a corpse. A faint patina of dust seemed to have settled upon him, a combination of dandruff and paper fragments, paper mostly. Wrinkled and faded as he was, he might almost have been made of paper himself, slowly crumbling away along with the accumulated detritus of a lifetime in the service of the law.

He stretched out a hand in greeting, and conjured up a smile. Compared to his secretary, it was like being greeted with the keys of the city.

“I’m Thomas Eldritch,” he said. “Please come in.”

His office was tiny. There was paper here, too, but less of it. Some of it even looked like it had been moved recently, and box files were stored alphabetically on the shelves, each carefully marked with a set of dates. They went back a very long time. He closed the door behind me and waited for me to sit before he took his own seat at his desk.

“Now,” he said, steepling his hands before him. “What’s this about Mr. Merrick?”

“You know him?”

“I am aware of him. We provided him with a car at the request of one of our clients.”

“Can I ask the name of the client?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Is Mr. Merrick in some kind of trouble?”