“Listen you,” she snapped. “You can’t come in here pushing me around like this!”
“Alvy, the sooner we get this done with, the sooner we can get out of here. Let’s stop jerking each other around, okay?”
“I hate you,” she said. But she turned anyway and started up the flight of stairs behind her.
I followed her up the stairs, through a doorway into the second-floor hallway, then down to Mac Ford’s office. Alvy’s computer was on and there was a stack of papers on her desk. She pulled a key ring out of the center drawer, fumbled with the keys a moment, then selected one and opened the door. I followed her into Mac Ford’s office as she switched on the overhead.
The only other time I’d seen it, it had been as cold as January and filled with the purplish glow of black lights. Now, without air-conditioning and lit by the harsh glow of a rack of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, it looked dusty, cluttered, and full of junk that gave the place lots of class; all of it low.
“Ford’s filing cabinets are in the closet, right?”
“Just one. He has one filing cabinet where he keeps his private correspondence and files. But I don’t have a key to it. I don’t even have a key to the door.”
I reached into my pocket. “If we’re lucky, we won’t need one.”
Alvy looked over my shoulder as I unzipped the case and unfolded the side pockets. Each pick had its own little slot in the leather case. I took out a small black metal raker pick, a thin blade with a series of bends in the end that looked like a sine wave from the side. From the other side of the case, I took a tension wrench, an even thinner L-shaped blade that was flat at the end.
Down on one knee, I carefully put the tension wrench into the keyway like Lonnie’d shown me, then with my left index finger, I put just enough pressure on the cylinder to force the pins into contact with the cylinder body at the shear line. Then I gently stuck the raker pick in until I felt it hit the back of the lock. Lifting the pick just a hair, I pulled it smoothly out, feeling the raker hit the pins and push them up and down.
Nothing.
I tried it again. Sometimes it takes a few tries. Sometimes you have to pull the tension wrench out and start all over again. Sometimes it never works at all, at least when you’re a beginner like me.
This time, I pulled a little harder and a little faster. I felt the cylinder slip just a bit, mainly by the change in pressure on the tension wrench. I tried it a third time, figuring maybe it was going to take a different pick. The only question was how much time we had.
I jerked the pick out; the tension wrench gave way, spinning the cylinder around and unlocking the door.
“Hot damn,” I whispered.
“Wow,” she said. “That was cool.”
I looked up at her. “Alvy, you’ve been watching too much MTV.”
I opened the door, half-afraid of what I’d find inside. The tiny closet was mostly empty, though, except for a couple of cases of Dos Equis and diet Coke in the corner, a small bookcase jammed with CDs, and a filing cabinet. There was a bare bulb in the ceiling with a piece of string hanging down. I yanked it, filling the closet with an unforgiving light.
The cabinet was a standard-issue, five-drawer filing cabinet, almond-colored, with the smiling skull of a Grateful Dead decal on the front of the top drawer. The tiny lock in the top right-hand corner was pushed in, locking all five drawers down.
“Okay, same scene, take two,” I said. I handed Alvy the pick case. “Here, hold this for me.”
I’d never picked a filing-cabinet lock, but it looked like a smaller version of a standard cylinder lock. I used the same tension wrench, with a smaller diamond pick this time. After five minutes of fuming and cursing under my breath, I gave up on that and dug out an even smaller ball pick, which was a thin blade of metal with a round piece cut in the end.
That didn’t work either, and I was just about to go outside and see if I couldn’t find a big damn rock, when Alvy said: “Here, use this one. It looks like the one that worked on the closet door.”
I took the pick from her. “It may be too big, but I’ll try.”
It took some boogering to get it all the way into the cylinder, but I managed to maneuver it past the tension wrench. It was hot as hell inside the closet, with a particular type of musty, earthy smell that made me speculate that somebody’d been burning something illegal.
“Damn it,” I muttered as the pick stuck. I pushed harder, and felt it bend a bit, then snap past the last pin.
I took a deep breath, then let it out slowly as I raked the pick through the cylinder. Just the way the Boy Scouts taught me to pull the trigger on a .22 rifle.
The tension wrench slipped and the lock popped.
“Awright!” Alvy yelled.
“Shhh!” I whispered.
“The building’s empty,” she said. “Chill out.”
“Chill out, nothing,” I said, pulling the first drawer open. There were stacks of files jammed in tightly, in no apparent order. Chicken-scratch handwriting on the file-folder tabs was the only indication of each folder’s contents.
“There must be hundreds of them,” I said, frustrated. I looked at my watch. It had taken nearly twenty minutes to get this far and the afternoon was slipping away fast.
“I don’t know Mac’s filing system,” she said. “That is, if there is one.”
“Oh, I’m sure he’s got one. It’s just not from this planet.”
I pulled the top drawer all the way open. It was jammed with files, front to back. Then I checked the other four drawers. Same deal. It looked to me like Mac Ford never threw anything away.
“Okay, this is the only way this is going to work,” I said. “You’re going to have to help me. I’ll pull the top drawer out and set it on the floor. Then you start at the bottom. You find anything with Rebecca Gibson’s name on it, call out.”
She scowled at me. “How did I get so involved in this?” she demanded.
“Alvy, every second we’re in here, we run the risk of getting caught. The more you help, the faster you can get out of here.”
She ran her lip out again, but sat down cross-legged on the floor and pulled out the bottom drawer. I carefully pulled the top drawer off its track and took it out of the closet, then sat down on the thick Oriental rug in Mac’s office right next to a large burned spot.
There wasn’t time to examine the contents of each folder, but I flipped through the first few pieces of paper in each one. I wished I had more time; there were confidential contracts and pay schedules, notes of cash transactions that would probably have been received with great interest at the IRS, and stacks of paper that Mac Ford obviously didn’t want anyone to see.
I heard Alvy sliding the bottom drawer shut just as I was halfway through the top drawer. I hoped she was being thorough, but decided not to piss her off any further by saying so.
Nothing in the first drawer. I groaned as I lifted the heavy drawer back onto its track and slid it in. My lower back twinged, and once again I had the privilege of experiencing the first few steps of middle age.
Alvy was into the fourth drawer as I painfully eased out the second and took it back into the office. This time, I thought I might have hit pay dirt. The first file had the name Dominic Wright penciled in on the tab. Dominic Wright had had his first hit song about two years earlier, a real tearjerker of a tune about a Kenwood driver losing the love of his life at the Zodiac Lounge when a Peterbilt driver steals her away.
That wasn’t important, though. What was important was that I’d found the drawer with the artists’ files. I thumbed through the stack, one after the other, reading off a list of the famous, near-famous, and never-gonna-be famous singers that Mac Ford had dealt with. Some of them surprised me; Mac had been in on the early careers of some of the hottest people in the business.
Been in, then been out, that is. I marveled at the levels of frustration, what it must have been like to build an artist up from nowhere, only to have them dump you when the money started to get good.
No wonder he was a rageaholic.
I flipped quickly through the folders and never found Rebecca Gibson’s. I started at the front and went all the way to the back of the drawer again.
Nothing.
Maybe there were more in the next file drawer, I thought. I stood up, bent over, picked up the file drawer, then yelled as it slipped out of my right hand and fell like a hammer on my big toe.