Read Online Old Poison by Joan Francis - Free Book Online Page B

bicycle? Is this how you
usually meet prospective clients?”
    “No, Evelyn was in Los Angeles to speak at
an environmental conference and was booked solid. Meeting her
during her morning bike ride was the only way to see her.”
    He stopped chewing the gum and stared at me,
open mouthed. I couldn’t decide whether he thought I was lying or
was just incredibly stupid. Holding me in a long appraising gaze,
he resumed chomping on his gum. Finally, he pulled out a small
notebook and pen.
    “What’s her address and phone number in
Costa Rica?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “How did she contact you?”
    Now there was a tricky question to answer.
“She had some associate contact me and arrange the meeting.” That
might not be strictly true, but there was no way I was going to
tell this sneering, arrogant man anything about Martians and Red
19. Even if I had been dealing with a more reasonable investigator,
that story could be career suicide.
    “What was the associate’s name and
address?”
    I knew the questions would eventually come
down to this, but I dreaded having to answer. “His name was Borson.
I don’t have an address for him.”
    He looked up from his pad. “Where did you
meet him, the Disneyland Autopia?”
    I blushed as I confessed, “No, a city park
in Bluff Beach.”
    “A city park? Let me guess. You’re one of
those hand-to-mouth PIs with an office that’s a typewriter and
filing cabinet in the bedroom. Did we maybe think to get this
Borson’s phone number?”
    I shook my head. “Just an email address, and
it’s no longer a valid address.”
    “Jesus! Let’s recap here. You meet your
clients on bicycle trails, city parks, and chat rooms, and you get
no addresses and no phones. Hunter, if you’re bullshitting me, I’ll
have you up on obstruction charges so fast it will make your
friggin’ head swim. So what great PI job did you do for these
unidentifiable clients?”
    “None. I met with Evelyn; we agreed I didn’t
know enough about the environmental movement to help with her book,
and I left.”
    “You got any notes of this meeting, any
letter rejecting the work? Oh, I’m forgetting. You’d have to mail
it to the bike trail. Do you know how flimsy that sounds? I could
have a subpoena this afternoon to turn your ‘office’ and any other
private property that got in the way of our search, so don’t hold
out on me, Hunter.”
    In my most contrite and humble tone I
answered, “I do realize how unprofessional it must look to have no
more information on these people than I do, and I am thoroughly
embarrassed by it, but you must understand, I never took them
seriously. As you surmised, researching novels is not exactly my
stock-in-trade.”
    I reached into my purse and pulled out a
page from the Times documenting my message to Borson. “You
see, Borson had someone deliver a cash retainer, and I don’t even
know how to get it back to him. But I am being perfectly legal. I
even opened a separate client trust account to keep his money
separate from my other client funds.”
    Camas read it and handed it back. “He ever
get in touch?”
    “He hasn’t sent me any address for the
return of his retainer, but I promise you, when he does, I will
call you with the address immediately.”
    If Agent Camas figured out the difference
between the question he asked and the carefully worded answer I
gave, I’d be dead meat. To distract him from that fine detail, I
kept talking.
    “Look, all the guy asked me to do was some
research that I didn’t think I would do anyway. I only obliged him
in meeting with Evelyn because he said if it didn’t work out, he
would go away and leave me alone. It was a way of getting rid of an
unwanted client. It didn’t seem like a real case, so I didn’t take
him seriously or check references. How was I to know this would
happen?”
    He studied me and he studied his notebook.
He needed a little redirection.
    “If you want more information on Evelyn, why
don’t you check the