Dead Broke: A Private Detective Crime Novel Read online

  “No,” I said. Dane had not deemed to tell me who the mysterious man was with whom he had set me up. He had referred to him like he was a client, someone he moved money for. This obviously meant he was rich.

  “Donald Grassman,” said the man. He didn’t attempt to produce a business card, which immediately put him in another bracket of wealth. Some people don’t need to carry around their contacts on tiny pieces of paper. Their names are all they need to open doors for them.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. “You have me at a disadvantage, sir. Our mutual acquaintance told me very little about you, or what your business is.” For some reason I was talking like an old southern gent out of Gone with the Wind.

  This seemed to amuse the old man, and he burst into laughter.

  “That’s how I like it. My business is money, and money nowadays is closely tied to our most precious resource – information. I like to have information on others, and I like to keep my own information private.”

  “Information is power,” I said. I offered him a drink and thankfully he declined. I only had my bottle of lucozade and the god-awful coffee to offer him. “Is that what you want from me? To get information on somebody?”

  That tickled Grassman again.

  “No, Mr Cole. I have other people to do that. I have made a great deal of money from finding out secrets, details and gossip about others, and now I outsource that sort of work to a company in Lower Manhattan. You’ve heard of Brooks and Boyle?”

  I had. They were the whales of the Private Investigation world, compared to minnows like me. They had dozens of detectives working from an office building in the Big Apple. They were part of corporate America. The worst part.

  “They’re the best.”

  “True. It was from them I learned about you.”

  “Me?” I said. I tore open the wrapper of the pasty. The hangover wasn’t going to cure itself. “There’s not a lot to know about me.”

  “Oh, come now, Mr Cole! You have quite the story for one so young,” he smiled. He wanted to show off, so I let him.

  “Go ahead, Mr Grassman. What did Brooks and Boyle dig up on me?” I said. I was truly curious. I had nothing to hide; if you wanted to know anything about me you just had to ask, but I didn’t exactly broadcast my life to the world, like the fashion was nowadays. I had no social media profile. The business had a one-page website and an email address and that’s all it ever needed. I got business on word of mouth, mostly, at least that’s when I was getting any business at all. My past was private, and thankfully it stayed in the past.

  “You’re 36? Half American, on your mother’s side. Your father was a jazz musician from Bristol. They met when he was touring the US. How am I doing?”

  “So far, so good,” I smirked. It was nothing he couldn’t have looked up in the local library.

  “Your mom’s side of the family intrigues me. Joan Bannerman, right? Of the Bannerman newspaper empire? Your great-grandaddy built it up from scratch to be one of the biggest companies in America. Must’ve been a hell of a scandal when she ran off with a limey saxophonist,” said Grassman, his eyebrow raised. He was enjoying himself, revelling in the gossip. “Little Joan married Kenny Cole and you were born.”

  I stopped him.

  “Not necessarily in that order,” I said.

  “Really? Well!” he laughed. “They stayed in New York but then your daddy ran off when you were six. You were then sent to boarding school in England when you were seven. Must’ve been tough.”

  I shrugged.

  “Nothing a few years of bed-wetting wouldn’t solve,” I said. “Please, continue. I want to know what happens next.”

  “Your mom spent some time with her friend Jack Daniels. You completed school and went back to the states to UCLA, all funded by the Bannerman empire. Correct?”

  “God bless the free press.”

  “Then Brooks and Boyle say you went dark. Dropped off the grid. That true?”

  I tried not to punch the air. Brooks and Boyle, with all their man hours and expertise, had pieced together a history of my life using only the things they could find online. My school and college records were on the internet and I was doubtlessly on an alumni database somewhere, but as soon as I graduated (History, plus a minor in getting stoned) they assumed I dropped off the map. In truth, I just hopped from job to job, and from bar to bar. I call it my ‘wilderness’ years, attempting to find myself in the bottom of a beer glass. I left no digital trace of course and the hacks at B&B were lazy enough to assume I was doing so on purpose.

  “Something like that. Your sources will now tell you that my grandfather got sick of me not contributing to the family business, so he cut me off. That’s when I started investigating.”

  “Yes. Although the gossip monger in me wants to know more,” Grassman probed. He reached in the pocket and pulled out the most beautiful hip flask I had ever seen. I’m not one for labels, but it must have been made by Louis Vuitton, Ralph Lauren or someone equally expensive. “Hair of the dog, Jefferson?”

  I nodded and he poured a little whisky into my bottle of lucozade. I drank, my head clearing instantly. Damn, that was good booze.

  “Just Cole. Never Jefferson. Definitely not Jeff,” I said, and leant back in my chair, preparing to spill the beans. I had the feeling that all this was part of the interview, part of me getting whatever job was on offer. So I told him what he wanted to hear, how Mom had let herself be controlled by my grandfather and the board of Bannerman Media in return for a healthy allowance and unlimited booze. Old man Bannerman, AKA Grandaddy, had never liked me. I think it was his idea to send me away to school in England, and it was certainly his idea to cut off any funds to me when I wouldn’t come back to New York. I ended up in London. I was visiting a friend from school when the credit cards started to be declined and I learned that the Bannermans had turned their back on me forever. I got a job with the aforementioned Patterson (AKA Skidmarks – a nickname best left to the imagination) and the rest was history.

  “Quite a story,” said Grassman, sipping at his own flask. “You missed out the part about Rebecca Fisher.”

  I paused, my mouth full of pasty. How the hell had Brooks and Boyle found that out?

  “Not much to tell. The fact that you know her name means you probably know the whole story,” I said.

  “Not really. I heard from a friend of a friend that you were in a relationship. Engaged maybe? She worked for the UK government, was that right?” I didn’t answer. He knew damn well she had. “Then she just… disappeared.”

  I was silent on the matter.

  “Ran away. Or was taken away. My source was fuzzy on that part. I imagine the police had words with you about that?”

  “You know as well as anyone else Mr Grassman that the first person that the police interview in a missing persons case is the spouse. Or spouse-to-be.”

  “And they never found her?”

  “You can’t find someone who doesn’t want to be found,” I said.

  I didn’t like to talk about Becky. It was a sore point. So I changed the subject.

  “And what’s your story?”

  Grassman shrugged.

  “I’m a businessman,” he said. “I trade knowledge. I use that knowledge to good use. Your friend Dane invests money for me, which makes me rich.”

  “Which you then spend on fancy investigators, who find you more information, which you then make into more money. It’s a beautiful circle of vice,” I said. “Question is, what do you want with a half-limey bum like me if you can afford Manhattan's finest gumshoes?”

  Grassman rose, his old knees creaking and his hip popping. He looked around the room and browsed my bookshelf. A collection of various detective novels, from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to Dashiell Hammett, right up to Ian Rankin and JD Kirk. It was my Raymond Chandler collection that stood out though.

  “I didn’t grow up rich, Cole,” he said. “I clawed my way up, hustling and grifting. I like being rich though and
I like the things that come with it. I recently found that I particularly hate it when somebody tells me I can’t have something.”

  Now I got it. He wanted a lackey.

  “Mr Grassman, I appreciate you coming all this way, but I got to tell you: I don’t break the law. I don't steal, I don’t threaten people and I don’t break legs. I’m for hire, but not for that.”

  Grassman looked at me like I’d suggested we go run over a nun.

  “God, no! Nothing like that. There are just a few things I want that I preferred people didn’t know about. Nothing illegal, just… potentially damaging to a man in my position.”

  I put my feet on the desk.

  “So get your guys in New York to do it?”

  “No. Brooks and Boyle are a company. They’re squeaky clean and they keep records of everything. I want a man who will do the job right, be discrete, and leave no trace. You seem like the man. You have zero ties, Dane speaks highly of you, and you don’t leave a digital shadow.”

  Which was true. I carried an old-fashioned moleskine notebook and that was the extent of my records. I never really caught on to the whole ‘information superhighway’ thing. My phone was a Nokia 3310 from the turn of the century. It didn’t have the internet on it, it was increasingly hard to buy credit for but, damn, that battery lasted forever.

  “And what makes you think I’ll actually do all your dirty work for you?” I asked. Grassman smiled.

  “There, Brooks and Boyle came up trumps. They found the key piece of information about Jefferson Cole that I would be able to use as leverage.”

  My own smile fell.

  “Which is what?”

  “You’re broke.”

  Chapter Four

  I don’t deal well with uncomfortable truths, which must have shown on my face when Grassman slammed down his wad of cash on the desk. He had suavely left a number on a piece of paper and asked me to think it over.

  What was there to think about? I needed money, he had it. Every fibre of my body was telling me to jump at the chance, but somewhere inside my brain a voice was screaming at me.

  Never lose your independence, Cole. Never.

  Which was easy to say, but when the red bills were piling up on the doorstep and you had to beg Mrs Croker for a cup of milk for your coffee, your integrity starts to wear thin.

  I needed to think, so I donned my trusty fedora and set off into the grey London day. I walked through the streets and found myself along the canal towpath, pacing along and dodging cyclists. I often walked when I needed to think and London was as good a place as any to contemplate the world. Great thinkers and writers got their inspiration from nature, but the city was my muse and certainly a lot more convenient. I surfaced in Camden and headed into a coffee shop, one of about twenty along the short stretch of high street. It was a chain, with the same décor as every other branch in the country. I could have been in London or Edinburgh, Cardiff or Belfast. I fumbled for change but for the amount I had in my pocket I would be lucky to buy a coffee bean, let alone a whole cup.

  “What can I get you?”

  I looked up and saw a familiar face.

  “Dylan?”

  The red head behind the counter looked up from the cash register and smiled.

  “You!” she said. She pulled her face into a mock-angry scowl. “Go on, do one. We don’t want your sort in here!”

  “Charming,” I joked. “You treat all your valued customers like this?”

  “Just the yanks. Sit down. I’ll bring you a bagel.”

  Dylan was my assistant. Well, my ex-assistant. I had hired her to field the phones a couple of years ago, do the administration around the office, generally be the face of the agency while I was out on assignments. She was perfect; young, smiley, good with clients. The only trouble was that she, not unreasonably, needed to be paid. As she did the book-keeping, she was the first to notice that I wasn’t bringing in enough to keep her on. It was her that broke the news to me that she had to get another job, and so we underwent a conscious uncoupling. We still texted and she even popped around occasionally and mothered me, reminding me to pay the bills and telling me how to work the office laptop.

  I sat at a bench that looked out the front window and a minute or so later Dylan sat down beside me with two americanos and a toasted cinnamon bagel.

  “So this is what you left me for? Selling out to the man?”

  “If by selling out you mean, getting paid, then, yeah,” she said. She had a loud cockney accent that sounded like she should be selling fruit on a market stall, or flowers in a Dickens novel. “It’s not too bad. They pay me. In money.”

  “Oh, la-de-dah,” I smiled. I was happy she had got a job, although being a barista wasn’t really using all her skills. She was smart, and great with people.

  “What’s new?” she said, fixing me with her green eyes. I shrugged.

  “Things are going well. On the up.”

  Dylan smacked me around the back of the head.

  “Don’t lie to me Cole!” she said. “I can smell a porky like a fart in a car.”

  “Porky?” I said, rubbing my head.

  “Pork pie – lie,” she said. “How have you lived here so long and not picked up the lingo?”

  I sighed. It was pointless keeping the truth from Dylan. She was raised by strong East-End women and she would rip you apart if she thought you weren’t being truthful. I laid it out; the finances (which she already knew, better than me), my meeting with Dane, and Grassman’s proposition. While anyone else would instantly say to take the money, Dylan chewed it over. She knew how much my business and my independence meant to me and how much we’d struggled to set the agency up in the first place.

  “Going exclusive to this Grassman fella would undo all that work,” she said, chewing on a piece of my bagel. “But if you’re proper brassic, then...” She rolled her eyes at my look of confusion. “If you’re broke, then maybe it’s time to swallow the old pride. What’s the old man want you to do anyway?”

  So I laid it out for her. Everything I knew about the job, which as I retold it, I realised wasn’t nearly enough information to go on.

  “Grassman is this self-made millionaire, maybe even billionaire, I don’t know,” I began. Dylan interrupted.

  “Then find out,” she said. “That’ll tell you how much to charge.”

  “He’s proud of being humble and working class, but he has a few decadent hobbies. The first of which is collecting Chinese antiquities. Old jade dragons, vases, urns. That sort of thing.”

  “Boring,” said Dylan. “If I was a billionaire I’d have way more freaky hobbies.”

  “Maybe he does, but this is the only one he told me about.”

  I chewed on the bagel and began to see why it was free. It was at least three days old and tough as leather.

  “And he wanted to buy this old piece of junk from an auction house. You know Barnaby’s on the Strand?”

  “Oh sure,” said Dylan, rolling her eyes. “I’m always down there, picking up a Queen Anne chair for my mansion.”

  “Less of the snark, Missy,” I grinned. “He had his heart set on it, but last week-”

  I pulled out a newspaper clipping and laid it in front of Dylan. The headline read ‘Auction House Robbed’.

  “Wow,” said Dylan.

  “I know. The nerve of some people.”

  “No, I meant, ‘Wow, you’re the only person I know who still buys print newspapers’.”

  I continued despite the baiting.

  “Grassman wanted tiger skull. Not just any skull; it was jewelled and from the Eighteenth Century, but the auction house was robbed and it was stolen before he could even place the first bid.”

  “Poor little billionaire,” said Dylan. “So what’s it got to do with him? The police will investigate and if they recover it, it will come around for auction again.”

  “He doesn’t trust the police. He wants me to take a look and find out who took it. He wants to be the first to reco
ver it and buy it back from the owners, without the hassle of going up against the other bidders in the auction.”

  The queue at the counter was building up, but Dylan was unconcerned.

  “Makes sense,” she said. She popped the last piece of bagel into her mouth. “What kind of freak wants a tiger skull anyway?”

  “I don’t know. It’s sacred or something.”

  “DYLAN!”

  The yell came from the counter, where Dylan’s long suffering co-worker was struggling to juggle the espresso machine and the cash register. The long line of customers looked over and glared at Dylan. She didn’t care. The good thing about Dylan is that she paid no heed to what anyone thought of her.

  “Jefferson Cole, the fact that you are eating a four-day old bagel and free coffee tells you exactly what you need to know. Take the job. Even if it’s a one-off, it could change everything for you.”

  She stood and returned to her McJob, leaving me stewing in my own thoughts, and chewing on a stale bagel.

  *

  I finished the coffee and walked back along the high street, taking the long way back to the office. Seeing Dylan had cleared my head a little. Watching her suck it up and take a job that she clearly didn’t want to do made me appreciate that we couldn’t all be titans of integrity.

  As I approached the office I heard raised voices.

  “He won’t like it! You’ve no right!”

  Mrs Croker was standing in the hallway, her hair in curlers, shouting at my open door. Had I left the door open? I’d say it wasn’t like me, but recent events made me question it.

  “Is there a problem here, Mrs Croker?” I asked.

  “Not for me, sunshine. Looks like you’ve got one though.”

  I ran up the stairs and through my open front door. There was an old Greek-looking guy standing on a chair, a tape measure stretched out in front of him.

  “Mateo?” I said. He was the landlord of the building, wearing a football shirt which his stomach was escaping from. “Did you call ahead? Because if not, that’s a violation of our contract. I could-”

  “Can it with your lawyer crap,” he barked. It took me by surprise; Mateo had always been a perfect gentleman, and never got hot under the collar. Our relationship had never been anything other than smooth. “You’re in breach of contract for three months already. You like the law? Then stick to your side and pay me some rent.”