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sincere giver of advice, even
patently obvious advice, and it was hard to take offense. Charlene
explained further, “Your detective might make it seem like small
talk when he’s actually trying to get information about our
firm.”
    “ What information could he possibly
want? He’s already talked to Bill.”
    “ If he’s a detective then he knows
lawyers, and if he knows lawyers then he knows they don’t ever tell
the entire truth. Maybe he’s looking for the truth from
you.”
    She had lost me. I grinned at her
over-protectiveness, though it was probably for the firm’s sake
rather than my own. I whispered, “The truth about what?”
    “ Well, that’s just it,” Charlene said.
“The truth he’s looking for. We don’t know what that
is.”
    “ Now Suzanne’s rubbing off on you. I
really think it’s just an ordinary date that he was pressured into
by an ordinary secretary.”
    Charlene looked no happier about my blithe
attitude. “You know it’s not the first time that he’s had a client
commit suicide.”
    “ Who, Bill?”
    She did some mental arithmetic. “Oh, yes. But
it was before your time.”
    “ Some other client killed
himself?”
    “ Another woman, I think. I distinctly
remember Bill’s secretary saying something about a
suicide.”
    This I could believe. Charlene had an
excellent memory for what she was told. She and Lucille were my
one-two punch of information. Lucille knew what was happening with
everyone right at the moment, and Charlene remembered everything
that had happened before. Charlene said, “Usually, attorneys make
their secretaries want to commit suicide, but I guess he hasn’t
driven you to that yet.”
    “ I thought attorneys made secretaries
want to commit homicide, not suicide.”
    Charlene grimaced; this was her version of
laughter. “Maybe you should talk to your detective about it; if he
thinks Bill is driving secretaries and clients insane with boredom,
maybe Bill will be arrested for manslaughter and you can take a
vacation.”
    If Bill drove others insane, it wasn’t due to
boredom, I thought laconically. Regardless, though, this gave me an
idea. And I had a long Friday afternoon to get through.

*****
    Later that afternoon, I put in a new file
request to Lloyd. I cornered him between two rows of red-ropes.
Red-ropes are standard, legal-length accordion folders that law
firms typically use to hold their files, called red-ropes because
they are sometimes held closed with a red string. Lloyd saw me
coming with a with a pink request slip for yet another file to be
excavated from the basement storage, and started complaining before
I had a chance to speak.
    “ You couldn’t have asked for this at
the same time as the other one?” he asked, peering at it with
contempt.
    This file request was for the long-buried
records of Bonita Voigt, a former client of Bill’s who had
committed suicide. Charlene had set me on this path of discovery,
but at the time I wasn’t digging in the files because I thought it
odd that two of Bill’s clients had killed themselves, but because I
thought it might be something interesting to discuss with Gus
Haglund, should conversation lag. The field of law is full of
interesting stories, but the field of estate law is not. And my
backup work at present consisted of the screw deposition. I was not
averse to discussing screwing with the detective, but not screws.
And not estate planning. I thought it might be amusing to say, “I
was looking at another file similar to Adrienne’s, and I noticed…”
Well, I didn’t know how to end that sentence yet. I was hoping that
in reviewing the file, I would notice something. Something perhaps
interesting to a detective who was investigating a suicide.
Something that I hadn’t just seen on a television show.
    I used a roundabout way to search Bill’s
archived files on the firm’s computer database, looking for the
name that Charlene couldn’t recall, and that way produced results
more quickly