Chapter 4

The next day it was back to work. Work is Carpenter Investigations, our private detective agency. I say "our" agency, but in fact I'm the sole owner and proprietor, and have been since I first set up as a PI back in Red Hawk, on August 15, 1988. I'd had occasion recently to refresh my mind on the date – I'd been the chief of the Red Hawk Police Department for a year, and when, after a month's vacation, we got back from Oklahoma in April we'd reopened the agency, which we'd put on hiatus while we were back east.

When we'd arrived back in town we'd looked over the new office space, given the contractor his final check with a bonus for excellent work, ordered new cards and stationary, changed the ad in the phone book, and set up a Web site. The last was Cecelia's idea, her thinking being that though I've always worked only as much as I feel like, if I'm going to train her so that she can get her own license, we'll need to always have something going. Since she's right, we hired a Web page designer, let him know that while he was the expert we didn't want anything real fancy and it had to be easy to navigate, and turned him loose.

I like the site that he came up with. It reflects my casual country boy attitude, yet has room for Cecelia's formality as well. It's got biographies for both of us, our business e-mail addresses, our separate phone numbers as well as the main office number, and – with their permission – contact information for half a dozen satisfied former clients who'll provide a testimonial upon request. I toyed briefly with asking Cecelia to write up her own testimonial for the site, since we met when she hired me to track down a guy who'd stolen some of her money, but upon reflection that seemed just a little too incestuous.

The former house that our office occupies is right next door to where we live, so we walked through the gate in the fence that separates our back yard from that of the office, unlocked the back door, and went on in. The plan of the building had essentially been the same as our house, but now the dining room was the reception area, to our right as we came in but to the left if you came through the front door. The kitchen was through a door behind the secretary's desk – she wasn't due in for another 15 minutes or so – so that clients or prospects wouldn't wander in and make off with our tea, coffee, and Coke. Walling the kitchen off was one of the two major changes the contractor had made. The wall around what had once been the living room was the other. That was now a conference room, with a nice wooden table, chairs that were comfortable enough for a meeting that might run a while, and a flat screen TV on the wall that connected to a VCR and a DVD player – though the VCR was probably not going to get much use, since "video" is now merely a term of habit, like saying you "dial" a phone number when there are millions of people in this country who've never seen a phone with a dial on it.

We could also use the TV to run PowerPoint presentations, though I don't anticipate doing that. I've never liked such things when I've been present for 'em, and I don't plan to go that route. I'd rather use a markerboard – which, I suppose, makes me obsolete in today's technological atmosphere, but then I've always thought better in hard copy, even if I do use a computer on a regular basis and enjoy it.

The hall to the former bedrooms also has a door to it, and down that hall those former bedrooms have become offices for me and Cecelia, with the third room going to storage space. When we moved out of my old office Cecelia and I went through the case files and tossed out about 85 pounds of paper – I found a few files from my days in Red Hawk, files that I'd been carting around for nearly 20 years without realizing it. Even so the remainder – now in plastic totes rather than crushed and falling-apart cardboard boxes – took up a bit of space, as did the stack of spare totes that we'd bought for future use. There were filing cabinets for, we estimated, three years of inactive files, which we could move from the cabinets behind the secretary's desk each December or January. The oldest of the inactive files would, at that time, go into totes, and after another while we could destroy them, since it really isn't likely that I'll need to dig up a file from 1987 or whenever. It was nice and organized – but a lot of it was Cecelia's idea of organization. I've never buried my desk in six inches of paperwork, like one PI I knew in Dallas, but I have had a habit of letting stuff I don't need pile up in drawers and behind doors, while the stuff I do need goes in its proper place. Organizing the old irrelevant stuff has never been much my speed.

But still, standing now in front of the secretary's desk, I was happy. We'd been in the new office for a few months now, and if I had to lose my view, this was a great place to move into, and I could go home for lunch every day if I wanted to. Darlia could visit whenever she wanted, or we could go across the yards and see her. She could even play in Inez Park across the street, and someone could watch her through the window, or sit out on the stoop, without losing business.

I looked at the sign on the secretary's desk - Cristina Cortez it said. My last secretary had been Cecelia, but she wasn't doing that job any longer. If she was going to learn to be an investigator, she needed to be out among 'em, not filing contracts and reports. So I'd hired someone else, and she actually might stay for a while. She was the first full-time secretary I'd ever had – they'd all been part-time, working when it was convenient for them, since I've always, during my PI career, had enough money to work that way myself. Shoot, is was getting money that allowed me to set up as a PI in the first place. I loved my aunt and uncle, Anna and Tony, and still miss 'em some, but the fact is that my leisurely lifestyle wouldn't be possible if they hadn't left me a healthy chunk in their wills.