Cyan is now ready for pre-order. Look at todays post on the AWL side of the blog.

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“Surely it can’t be that hard to find bank accounts.”

“Harvey never put anything in his own name. He always used dummy corporations to hide his earnings from the IRS.”

I said, “Hire an investigator.” But not me.

“Bill Bristol was going to help me, but never came through. I asked him for help the day he went through Harvey’s files.”

Now there was a bit of news. I asked, “When was this?”

“About a week after the day Harvey disappeared and the fire broke out in his office.”

“You mean those happened the same day?”

“Sure. Didn’t you know that? At first, we all thought they were going to find Harvey burned up in his office. And then they found him floating in the bay three days later.”

She shrugged and made a comic grimace. And she looked at me with slow, smiling eyes. Like she was a furnace, and she thought I was a sack of coal.

“So you asked Bristol to come over and help you sort things out?”

“No! I told you, those were old, dead files. He came by on his own. Said he had new information on something he and Harvey had been working on a couple of years ago. I took him down to the basement and he went through Harvey’s old files, but he didn’t find anything.” She shook her head in amusement. “Not anything he was looking for, anyway. Harvey’s files are always interesting.”

I said, “Would you take me down to the basement?” And I kept a straight face when I said it.

She said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

She was wearing a long Tee shirt and short shorts. Her legs were long and brown as she swivel hipped down the stairway. I was thinking that ten years older wasn’t that much older. There was something distasteful and much that was cliché about the situation, but hormones are hormones.

Harvey Jacks’ files consisted of a single cardboard box jammed with manilla file folders. Each one was labeled with a name or series of names. I pulled out Debra Tomlyn/Richard Deberg and flipped it open. It held a half dozen grainy black and white blowups of a chubby young blonde woman and a bald, middle aged man having sex. In the first shot, he was in the saddle. In the second, she was on top, head back, eyes closed, nipples erect, while he held her waist and drove his hips up to meet her. The other three shots were close variations on the same theme. The angle of the shots never changed, and the participants were not well centered. Obviously a hidden camera; probably near the ceiling.

I tried another file. Same story, new actors. A skinny black man and a pale Asian woman. Then two models of suburban ordinariness. Two young men. Two paunchy men in their forties and a girl-child who was probably fifteen but looked twelve.

I said, “Did your husband own a motel?” My voice came out hoarse.

Jacks’ wife was squatting beside me with her arm around my waist. She said, “Probably. I never knew, but most of these were shot in the same two or three rooms. Harvey was a whiz at his game. That one,” she pointed at the girl-child, “is one of my cousins. Several of the ones you see over and over in these shots were on salary to Harvey. He was a real businessman.”

Good old Harvey! more tomorrow