“Good to know.” Sam input the info into the calendar on his phone.
“Fun fact: ShehatesHarper—with the power of a thousand fiery suns, although she didn’t say that in so many words. She also confirmed that there’s never been any files of any kind in the house—not during her time there, which was only around nine months.” Jules had his phone out now, too. “I’m making a note to call the other housekeepers back and ask them about that.” He glanced at Robin. “I spoke to them before we got the keys to the estate. The place is huge, and we even went up in the attic, but there were no personal files, no filing cabinets, no paperwork of any kind. Not anywhere. That we saw, at least.”
“The door to the library was locked,” Sam told Robin. “We were thinking maybe it’s all in there. Devonshire’s old calendars and files and address books with Emily’s info neatly printed on the page for the Js. Is Rene gonna bring that key?”
“Yeah,” Jules informed Sam. “She said she’s got a copy; she’ll leave it with us. But she also says there’re no files in the library. At least not that she ever found. When she wasthere—and probably before that, too, I’ll check—Devonshire was using that room as his bedroom. I think when he reached a certain age, he couldn’t make it up the stairs. Is that weird?” He was asking Robin, and he clarified, “A producer, with no piles of scripts lying around? No files in the house at all...?”
“That is pretty weird.” Robin had to agree.
“It felt sanitized,” Sam said. “You know, intentionally cleaned out.” He was back to flipping through the massive list of Emilys. “We’ve got phone numbers here but no email addresses.”
“Yeah, we don’t want to use email for contact anyway,” Jules said. “Hello, Emily Johnson. You may have just inherited twenty million dollars.Too Nigerian Prince.”
Sam winced as he laughed. “Let’s not do that. Can we call them?”
“Only if you don’t want to talk to any of the Emilys who are younger than sixty-five,” Robin said. “They won’t answer their phones. You know, maybe it’s not so weird. The lack of files and scripts. Maybe the placewascleaned out intentionally. I mean, think about the sheer number of scripts that a producer would have. My office is wall to wall paper, even though I get more than half my scripts digitally these days. Twenty-five years ago, God, a producer at his level probably had stacks of scripts covering his office floor—to the point of it being a health hazard.” He could tell from the looks on both Jules’s and Sam’s faces that they didn’t understand, so he added, “Someone probably moved it all out of the estate back during the worst of the threats from the wildfires.”
“Ooh, good point,” Jules said. “All that paper would go up fast.”
“But I’m not sure why he’d throw away his personal files,” Robin said. “That part’s still weird.”
“Rene said that any mail that came to the house was immediately couriered to the lawyer’s office,” Jules reported.
“Well,that’snotweird,” Robin said. “I mean, we’re still looking for a new personal assistant ourselves, so that, you know,wedon’t have to openourmail.”
Their longtime and beloved PA Dolphina Patel had moved to Europe with her husband Will Schroeder, a former journalist writing a book on the war in Ukraine. She was on the verge of having her second child—and Jules and Robin both missed her badly. Every time they held interviews to try to replace her, all of the candidates came up ridiculously short, and they went with none instead of less-than.
“I bet you’ll have better luck finding someone here in Los Angeles,” Sam said as he tossed Dave’s massive list of Emilys onto the coffee table.
“Let’s find Emily Johnson first.” Jules told Robin, “Our last, big, it’s-gonna-be-easy hope rests with Gavin LaCrosse. He’s an old friend and/or business associate of Devonshire. He’s a producer or a director—I’m not sure which, but he’s been on Devonshire’s payroll for years, which seemed a little odd. We think we found him in a nursing home, but I’m still waiting to hear back.”
“LaCrosse is not our dead last hope,” Sam pointed out.
“He kinda is until we get that background info from Dave,” Jules said. “He’s swamped, Dave is, but he thinks—maybe—he’ll get to it tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow’s good,” Sam said.
“But he’s only gonnagetto it tomorrow,” Jules said a tad testily. “Which means if we’re lucky,we’llget his report tomorrow night. We really need access to the TS computers, and to whatever database they—shit,we—search for this kind of info.”
“That’ll happen eventually, too,” Sam said evenly, insteadof pointing out that less than a week ago they were all spooning in Jules’s and Robin’s bed, and the idea of a TS branch in LA had been just that—an idea. A very good idea, but this case had popped up fast, and now they were scrambling to keep up. Which was also good.
Scrambling to keep up was so much better than wallowing in despair. The light in Jules’s eyes was proof of that.
“I want to know more about Harper, too,” Jules said. “There’s just something about him...”
“You mean other than the fact that he’s a liar?” Sam, as always, brought it down to the stripped of all bullshit bottom line.
“Harper’s the lawyer,” Robin clarified.
“For the estate,” Jules said. “But not the client. The client’s the son of the deceased?—”
“Casually referred to as Not-Dead Milt, or Milt the Junior,” Sam said. “Or, my personal favorite: Wig-Milt.”
Robin laughed. “Wig-Milt! I think I love him already.”
Jules was laughing, too, and God, that was so good to hear, Robin almost teared up again.
“Come on, Starrett. His hair was... interesting and awful and definitely needed a washing, but a wig? Nah. Sam got sucked into a what-the-fuck wormhole,” Jules told Robin.
