Sam had on a button-down shirt with his jeans. Sleeves rolled up and what looked like a sports jacket casually draped over one shoulder. And yeah, in an airport where movie stars constantly came and went, hestillmanaged to stand out.
“Hey, so I guess we’re doing this. It’s gonna be fun.” He smiled now at Jules as he tossed his luggage and his jacket into the back and climbed into Jules’s little rental car. Robin had already pushed the passenger seat all the way back to accommodate his long legs, but Sam—eternally hopeful—reached down to the control handle beneath the seat, to see if he could squeeze out another inch or two. Nope. Undaunted, he reclined the back of the seat a bit instead.
“Fun,” Jules repeated as he maneuvered his way back into the slow and steady stream of traffic headed away from arrivals and toward the airport exit.
“You okay?” Sam asked. “Because we really don’t have to do this today.”
Jules glanced at his friend. “You just jammed yourself into coach on a last minute flight to get up here for this, and now you want to blow it off? Aside from the incredible inconvenience for you, we’ll lose the job.”
“Fuck ’em. Because if you’re not ready...” He shrugged. “We can have lunch, then look at some office space. Or house hunt. Robin said you were gonna look for something close to Janey and Cosmo.” Robin’s sister and her family lived in this same part of LA, relatively close to the studios. “It’s not like there’s nothing to do.”
Jules nodded as he followed his GPS’s directions to thelaw office where they were scheduled to meet the client. “You want to help me house hunt.”
“Hey,” Sam said. “I’mexcited about you moving out here—even if you’re not quite there yet. And like I said, if you’re not ready?—”
“Fuck ’em. Check. But... I don’t know if I’ll ever bereadyready. So...”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I been there. In that case, we might as well dive on in.” He clapped his hands together which made quite the noise in the little car. “All righty then, there’s shit I need to know. And before you get disgruntled, yes I do read my email regularly, you know I do, but alas, I did not read your email from yesterday in my scramble to do everything that needed to be done before I left this morning. And when I got on the extremely ancient commuter plane—nary a charging outlet in sight—my phone battery was down to two percent, which I saved to text you that I’d landed.”
“Not a problem.” Jules had worked with many a boss who’d preferred verbal overviews to written reports. He was good at making exposition both clear and concise. “There’s not a lot to tell. The client’s name is Milt Devonshire Junior. Thirty-two years old,” he reported even as he held up the phone charger cord that was already plugged into the car’s USB port and Sam plugged in his phone. “Only known child of Milton Devonshire Senior. I know very little about either of them—I’ve had absolutely no time to do any digging on my own. I requested a thorough background search from the Troubleshooters San Diego office, got a thumbs-up-hold-tight response but crickets are still chirping. How long does it normally take to get that kind of report?”
“Hmm, yeah, it can take a while,” Sam said. “Lys is looking to hire more support. Currently, this particular case is kinda low priority...”
“So... not hours, then. A day or two...?”
Sam made amaybeface.
“More thantwo days? Jesus, really? How the hell are we supposed to...” Jules stopped himself and took a deep breath. “Sorry. I’m just used to being handed a file and...” He exhaled hard. Those days were over.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Pain in the ass, but you’ll get used to the time delay—which will be shorter when we have an actual LA office with dedicated support. We’ll get the info we need, just not before this meeting. I’m sure it’ll all be straightforward.” He gently got Jules back on track. “So we’re meeting Junior... at his lawyer’s office?”
“Ithinkit’s his lawyer. Guy named Ernest Harper, has a practice right here in Burbank. Although it’s possible Harper’s the executor of the client’s father’s estate, we’ll find out for sure when we get there. Anyway the father—Milton Devonshire Senior—was a bigtime movie and TV producer from the 80s and 90s. He recently died and from what I could tell from my phone call with Milt the Junior, he left most of his twenty million dollars or so to a woman that neither the still-living Milt nor the lawyer knows.”
“And Still-Living Milt is paying us to find her.” Sam sat with that.
They were getting close to the lawyer’s office building—it wasn’t that far from the airport. Jules slowed down a bit to read the street numbers. “The distribution of the estate is obviously on hold until she’s found,” he said. “He wanted to get us started looking for her ASAP.”
“Does she have a name?” Sam asked.
“Emily Johnson.”
Sam laughed. “Damn.”
Jules smiled. “Yeah. A challenge, but... not impossible,” he said. “Milt the Junior already got his father’s accountant tosend us payroll files and tax info—that came in this morning. Everything’s digital, so I did a quick global search through the payroll files forJohnson, but came up blank. I didn’t have time to take more than a quick look—but I did get the names of Devonshire’s staff over the past few years. Mostly housekeepers—there were four different women, one long-term starting way back who must’ve retired, and then three in the past few years. Kind of a revolving door, but they’re all first on mytalk-tolist.”
Sam shook his head. “I’m still a little stuck on Milt the Junior proactively working to give away his inheritance. Unless he knows there’s nothing in those files that’ll help us find her.” He laughed his disbelief. “Emily fucking Johnson. Does she at least have a middle name?”
“Not that I’m aware of,” Jules said. “But I’d guess it’s notthat.” Despite Sam’s pessimism, he was still hopeful that solving this case could be as simple as talking to one of the housekeepers—who probably knew every single person who’d ever crossed the threshold of Devonshire’s front door.
Another piece of useful info would be the producer’s social calendars and address books going back in time as far as possible. There should be a wealth of information—decades of it in hard copies, considering the man’s age, in file cabinets and desk drawers—in the old’s man home office. “Another priority is to get a key to Devonshire Place.”
“Yeesh. He really named his house after himself?”
“Welcome to Hollywood,” Jules said. “You still having fun?”
Sam laughed. “You know it.”
Thiswas, in many ways, a pretty fun case. Find this woman, verify her connection to recently deceased film producer Milton Devonshire, and then tell her,Guess what? You just inherited a ginormous amount of money!
