LITMIR.BIZ

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      By half past eleven I was cold and getting pissed off. The ten bucks I’d left with the Malo’s doorman had worn off and he’d gotten uptight about the car’s continued presence outside the hotel. The Zimmermans’ second-best SUV did not make a great advertisement for the establishment. For any establishment, actually. Retired professors apparently don’t care a great deal about mud and dents, and the faded anti-war stickers in the back window were large and strident. Finally the guy in the hat crossed the street to come give me grief and I agreed to move along.

      I drove around the block until I found an underground lot. When I re-emerged I spent a couple of minutes with a downtown map I’d scored from the Malo reception. It was optimized toward shopping and eating opportunities and it took me a while to locate the agency’s street. It wasn’t where I expected, either. I’d assumed the agency would be located a zillion floors up in one of the corporate behemoths that surrounded me. Instead it seemed to be in a narrow street near the Marketplace.

      I walked down a couple of vertiginous blocks until I found the big Public Market Center sign, then asked directions from a guy running a news stand. He directed me down a narrow road that went under the main market and swerved sharply and steeply left. A sign confirmed this was Post Alley. It looked more like a locale for loading and unloading fish and/or selling drugs. After a hundred yards, however, it suddenly segued into a section remade in 1990s post-modernist, with hanging baskets, a sushi restaurant and a little deli with a row of people sitting in the window eating identical salads. Soon after I saw a restrained sign hanging from a picturesque wooden beam and knew I was in the right place.

      I walked in, deciding how to play this. Our working lives had always been very separate. I’d gotten to know Amy’s assistant in LA a little from crisis phone calls and occasional flying visits to the house, but she’d left to have a baby a couple of months before Amy re-aligned her working conditions. I’d heard colleagues’ names mentioned, some enough to vaguely remember. I was pretty sure a Todd was among them. Could be this one, could be some other. There was probably a Todd working in every advertising agency in the country, on a quota basis. The whole deal would have been easier to handle on the phone – I could pretend I was still back out in the sticks and trying to casually get in touch with her – but I was tired of waiting for a return call.

      Reception was an existential statement and they’d spent a lot of money on it, mainly in an attempt to make it look like they hadn’t, which is presumably the kind of thing that impresses the hell out of other advertising folk. Each chair cost far more than the woman behind the desk earned in a month, but she didn’t seem put out by this. She was all in black and willowy and big-eyed – yet also possessed of a fierce intelligence, you could just tell – and came across like a girl who inhabited the best of all possible worlds and was keen to spread the joy around.

      I asked for Todd and was asked if I was expected.

      ‘Oh no,’ I said, shrugging in what I hoped was a charming way. I didn’t have much practice. ‘Just here on the off-chance.’

      She beamed, as if this was simply the best possible way of stopping by, and got on the phone. She nodded vigorously at the end of her conversation, so I assumed that either I was good to go or she had mildly lost her mind.

      Five minutes later someone eerily identical appeared from behind a frosted glass door at the end of the room. She beckoned and I got up and followed her into the offices beyond. This woman evidently inhabited only the third or fourth best of all worlds, and was not disposed to mirth or unnecessary chatter, though I did learn she was called Bianca. We took an elevator up two floors and then marched along a corridor with glass walls, past funky little rooms in which pairs of short-haired people were working so hard and creatively it made me want to set off a fire alarm, preferably by starting an actual fire.

      At the end she opened a door and ushered me through.

      ‘Todd Crane,’ she announced.

      Ah, I thought: only at that moment realizing I was about to talk to a third of the people who made up the company name.

      I found myself in an austere space with big windows on two sides, giving a wide view of Elliott Bay and the piers. The remaining walls were covered with framed certificates and awards and huge and celebratory product shots, including a few campaigns I knew Amy had been involved with. In the middle of the room there was a desk big enough to play basketball on. A trim man in his early fifties was coming out from behind it. Chinos, well-pressed lilac shirt. Hair once black now streaked with flecks of grey, bone structure so blandly handsome he could have been cast in a television spot for just about anything good and wholesome and reasonably expensive.

      ‘Hey,’ he said, extending his hand. ‘I’m Todd Crane.’

      I’ll just bet you are, I thought, as I shook it. And I don’t like you.

      He was smooth, though. I guess half his job was making strangers feel at home. There was a framed photograph on one corner of his desk, a studio portrait showing Crane with his arm around a glossy woman, flanked by three daughters of widely spaced ages. Curiously, it was angled not towards his chair, but out into the room; as if it were another credential, like the certificates on the walls. There was a retro radio on the floor in the corner of the room too, 1970s era, presumably another character statement.

      ‘So, Jack,’ he said, leaning back. ‘Great to finally put a face to the name after all this time. I’m amazed it never happened before.’

      ‘Didn’t get out of LA often,’ I said. ‘Until we moved.’

      ‘So what brings you to the city today? You’re in books now, right?’

      ‘I have a meeting. Plus Amy managed to leave her cell phone in a cab yesterday. So I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone, get the phone to her right away. She must be in withdrawal by now.’

      Todd laughed. Ha, ha, ha. The beats were separate, as if the sequence had been composed, practised and perfected in private many, many years before.

      Then he paused, as if waiting for me to say something else. I thought that was weird. I had been expecting him to be the one to start volunteering information.

      ‘So,’ I said, eventually. ‘What’s the best way of me doing that?’

      ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Crane said. He looked confused.

      ‘I assumed someone here would have her diary.’

      ‘Well, not really,’ he said, folding his arms and pursing his lips. ‘Amy’s our roving trouble-shooter now. As you know, of course. Finger in a lot of pies. A global view. Strategic. But fundamentally she still reports to the LA office. They’d be the people who’d—’

      He stopped, as if he’d just put things together in his head. Looked at me carefully.

      ‘Uh, Amy’s not in Seattle this week, Jack,’ he said. ‘At least, not with us.’

      I was as fast as I could be, but my mouth must still have been hanging open for a second. Maybe two.

      ‘I know that,’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘She’s visiting friends. I just wondered whether she was expected to touch base at any point. As she’s here anyway.’

      Todd shook his head slowly. ‘Not that I know of. But maybe, you know? Have you tried her hotel? We always book people in the Malo. Or is she staying with her … friends?’

      ‘I left a message for her there already. Just wanted to get this phone back to her as quick as I can.’

      ‘Understand that,’ Todd nodded, all smiles again. ‘Lost without them these days, right? Wish I could help you more, Jack. She stops by, I’ll tell her you’re on the hunt. You want to give me your number?’

      ‘I left it already,’ I said.

      ‘That’s right, sorry. Hell of a morning. Clients. Can’t live with them, not recommended business practice to shoot them in the head. Or so they say.’

      He clapped me on the shoulder

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