Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
Present Day
Burbank, California
Mission Day One
“Another thing to consider,” Jules said, “is that Johnson might be Emily’s maiden name.
You may know her as Emily something-else.
” He looked expectantly across the big conference table, from the scruffy client to the unctuous lawyer, as if he still hoped this would be easy—that one or both of them would cheerfully pull out a list of Emilys they’d once known.
Sam sat back in his chair and watched as both Milt the Junior and Ernest Harper—the attorney representing dead-daddy’s estate—began warming up to deliver another chorus of the same tired songs they’d been singing from the moment he and Jules had walked in.
Milt was a thirty-something man-child—a type that was regretfully common among the offspring of the uber-wealthy.
He’d dressed for this business meeting like a fourteen-year-old, and okay, fair enough, Sam could relate to wanting to be comfortable.
But his own jeans, with a button-down shirt open at the neck with the sleeves rolled up, made him look exactly like what he was—a former Navy SEAL—which frankly was good for business.
And the jacket he had on hand for meetings like this one always had a tie in the pocket for the rare emergencies in which he might need to be more formal.
In contrast, Still-Alive-Milt’s jeans were torn and not just food-stained but food encrusted in at least a few hideous places.
They really put the ass in nasty. Combined with that T-shirt?
Faded, worn threadbare in spots, it was too big to boot.
And even though it advertised The Sultans of Ping, a band that was internationally cool—Sam had danced with Alyssa to Where’s Me Jumper in a club in Ireland not that long ago—the overall effect, combined with the grimy, dull-green crocs on the manchild’s feet, was just woke up after a three-day binge.
Living-Milt was also wearing his sunglasses inside—alcoholic much?
But his hair.
Holy, holy shit.
Surrounding a face that could’ve been handsome but was a wince-worthy, puffy mix of blotchy and pale, his shoulder-length hair was matted and tangled and stringy and limp all at the same time, parted severely in the middle.
Jesus Christ.
They’d been here for damn near an hour and Sam still couldn’t decide. Was it a wig? It couldn’t be. Could it? He kept going back and forth. Had to be. But no fucking way. Although...
Sweet lord above.
He was dying to get Jules’s opinion, especially considering the ridiculously large sum of money that Milt Junior had already paid them to take this case... That wig—or hairstyle if it wasn’t a wig—was a choice.
Sam flipped back again to an absolute: That shit couldn’t possibly be this man’s real hair—except who would intentionally put on a hairpiece that looked like that before leaving their house?
Some man-boy who couldn’t deal with going bald, yet couldn’t completely see his reflection in the mirror out of eyes that were still swollen from—back to Sam’s best theory—a punishing three-day binge.
Undead-Milt, however, was unaware of the battle raging within Sam as he responded to Jules’s comment with, “I really don’t know anyone named Emily, let alone someone my father knew, too,” following it with his constant refrain: “I haven’t been in contact with him for more than ten years.
” He shrugged expansively, but not enough so that his wig—if it was a wig—fell off, in an unvoiced What are you gonna do when Dad’s a total douche?
before looking over at Harper to get his take on any Emilys with a non-Johnson last name.
The lawyer chimed in with “I’m afraid I can’t help either. No Emilys that I know of in Mr. Devonshire’s immediate circle.” To which he repeated his standard, “Not to my knowledge,” followed by the second half of the persistent CYA battle-cry of fuckwads everywhere, “That I can recall.”
Ernest Harper was a whole nother piece of work.
He was in his seventies, wearing an expensive suit with a maroon tie.
He looked like a lawyer. Average height, thinning dull gray hair, watery blue eyes behind wire-framed glasses.
Gold watch on his wrist, leather folder on the table in front of him, fancy pen that he tapped on the table, revealing his obvious impatience and ire.
What Sam hadn’t quite figured out yet was if he were merely a man who found everything annoying, or if it was this situation in particular that pissed him off so thoroughly.
His disgust with Milt the Junior was obvious, but he clearly wasn’t happy with Jules or Sam, either.
When he wasn’t intoning “to the best of my knowledge,” or “I’m afraid I can’t recall,” he was sighing heavily.
He was, interestingly, sweating a little bit—like the outcome of this meeting mattered more to him than he was letting on.
“No problem,” Jules smoothly lied now in response to both of their nos, somehow managing to maintain that pleasant, soothing charm that made him so damn good at this.
“Just... ticking off all of the obvious-question boxes while I’ve got you both here.
” He turned his focus back to the legal document and its attached note which lay on the conference table in front of them.
“Someone connected to this document knows who Emily Johnson is, and eventually we’ll find them—and then her. ”
His words were optimistic, and yes, Sam agreed that they would find her, but probably not through anyone connected to this will.
It appeared that there was no one left alive to ask about the document, or about the handwritten note that Milton Devonshire had written and included in an unsealed envelope clipped to it.
Thanks for the new experience, Emily.
Oh, except this document I’ve just signed makes it the same old-same old, doesn’t it? Money. It’s always about more money.
So I win. Too bad for you.
Enjoy the freaking work of art—or burn it to the ground. I’ll be dead and will care even less than I currently do.
He’d signed it, The asshole who just left you a fortune.
Her address wasn’t on the envelope—just her name, penned in that same spidery handwriting that matched the signature on the will.
The note was clearly meant to be private, but the envelope wasn’t sealed and Harper had opened it in hopes it would provide info on who Emily was and how to locate her.
Instead they got more shards of this mystery, although the cryptic wording did strongly suggest that Emily had been a sexual companion of some sort.
New experience, same old-same old, always about money...
Jules had asked for a copy of the note, and Sam knew that later they’d be breaking it down, word by word.
But right now, they were focused again on the will itself, dated five years ago.
When they’d first come in, Harper had gone into a big song and dance about how he’d been in the hospital when Dead Milt had rewritten his will. Harper’s condition had been critical—apparently his heart attack had been a bad one—and he’d been out of the loop for quite some time.
No one—not even Dead Milt himself—had informed him of the updates made to the document, and it had been a genuine surprise, upon the old man’s death, to find the dramatic change—or so Harper claimed.
There was a lot of whiny-ass not my fault subtext to his words as he made it clear that if he’d known, he would’ve made sure to find out from Dead Milt exactly who this Emily Johnson was. Sniff.
They’d already determined that the underling from Harper’s office who’d revised this last and final version of the will had predeceased Dead Milt by a solid eighteen months.
And the two witnesses who’d signed the will were believed to be even longer-dead, although Sam knew for sure that he and Jules were going to verify that—and even check in with surviving family members.
Because if Dead Milt had called his equally-elderly golfing friends, Skipper and Bunny, to ask them to witness the new will he was drawing up that gave the bulk of his fortune to someone other than his son, they might’ve made a comment or two about that at the dinner table.
According to Harper, the notary who’d... done whatever notaries do for things like wills was dead, too. Sam used his phone to quickly google the guy’s name and his obit came up first.
He took a few seconds then to google “milton devonshire emily johnson,” just in case, because he hadn’t done any googling of anyone yet, but nothing came up and he put his phone down and focused back on the topic of the will.
Everyone connected to the making of this document appeared to be conveniently dead. Which made sense. Old people knew other old people, and old people died as old people do.
Jules, meanwhile, had turned to the last page, where down at the very bottom there were a series of initials. The first three letters were those of the unalive underling lawyer, but a slash was followed by three more letters: DMP. He pointed to it now. “Does DMP still work for your firm?”
Harper looked startled—it was possible he never realized that the letters at the end of his written correspondences identified the hapless assistant or secretary who’d typed up the document for him.
It was possible he never really thought about the fact that his assistants and secretaries had names. And, you know, actual lives.
“I’ll... have to check,” he said. “But it’s unlikely a secretary would be privy to the details of a legal document. It seems a long shot.”
Was that the third or fourth time he’d said that—long shot—his voice heavy with doom and gloom? Like he was secretly hoping this investigation would be a complete dead end; that they’d never find Emily.