The outside offices were empty except for a single male secretary filling coffee filters at intervals of every fourth cubicle and inside each office. Somewhere, far on the other end, someone ran a vacuum cleaner.

Daniel Griffin hung his topcoat and suit jacket in his closet and walked around a desk so big I was sure it was measured in yard lines. He took a seat and motioned for me to sit across from him.

I stood.

“Who are you?” he said.

“Patrick Kenzie. I’m a private investigator. Call Cheswick Hartman if you want my life story.”

“You know Cheswick?”

I nodded.

“You’re not the one who extricated his sister from that…situation in Connecticut several years back?”

I lifted a heavy bronze statuette off the corner of his desk, looked at it. It was a representation of some Eastern god or mythological figure, a woman wearing a crown on her head, but her face marred by the trunk of an elephant in place of a nose. She sat cross-legged as fish jumped from the sea toward her feet, her four hands holding a battle ax, a diamond, an ointment bottle, and a coiled serpent respectively.

“Sri Lankan?” I said.

He raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Ceylon back then, of course.”

“Duh,” I said.

“What do you want from me?” he said.

I glanced at a photo of a smiling beautiful wife, then at another of several grown children and a multitude of perfect grandchildren.

“Vote Republican?” I said.

“What?”

“Family values,” I said.

“I don’t understand.”

“What did Desiree want?” I said.

“I’m not sure that’s any of your business.”

He was recovering from the shock out by the elevator, his voice deepening, and his eyes growing righteous again. It wouldn’t be long before he was threatening to call security again, so I had to cut him off at the knees.

I came around the desk and moved a small reading lamp, sat on the desktop, my leg an inch from his. “Danny,” I said, “if you were just having a tryst with her, you never would have let me out of the elevator. You have something huge to hide. Something unethical and illegal and capable of sending you to jail for the rest of your life. Now I don’t know what that is yet, but I know how Desiree works, and she wouldn’t waste five minutes on your flaccid genitalia if you weren’t giving her something big in exchange.” I leaned forward and loosened the knot on his tie, unbuttoned his collar. “So, tell me what it is.”

His upper lip was speckled with sweat and his tight jowls had begun to sag. He said, “You’re trespassing.”

I raised an eyebrow. “That’s the best you can come up with? Okay, Danny.”