NINE

Our second mission together and again Jaisen got to drive. Not that I was really in a complaining mood as the vehicle assigned to us for our cable repair mission was a piece of junk. But, not only was he the driver, he was THE cable repairman. He was Don, the Don of Don’s Cable Repair that our nameplate on the side of the rust rimmed van announced in large blue letters. I was just his young assistant.

OK, I guess it made sense in a way. I mean he was a little older and he could easily pass for being in his early twenties with just little help from his disguise, namely a thick blonde mustache. This did make him much more believable as the cable repairman. But, hello? Isn’t that what prosthetics were for? Disguises? I had played a ninety-year-old lady before, for crying out loud.

Jaisen had better not get so into his role that he forgot who was in charge around here. Just because the name tag pinned to my shirt said Candy (an alias that I did not come up with thank you very much), Cable Repair Assistant, that did not mean that Jaisen got to boss me around.

I climbed into the cable repair van–ON THE PASSENGER SIDE and sat with my arms folded. The sticky fake leather bucket seat did not have any give at all, its padding probably having disappeared in the 70’s, so it was hard to even slump properly. Jaisen opened the driver’s side door and got in. This was certainly no high-tech spy vehicle. The only spy properties I could tell it had were the removable nameplates on the side.

The van started with a lurch. Stick shift. Maybe it was better that I wasn’t driving.

As soon as we passed from the outskirts into suburbia, Jaisen played up his role as Don, waving and smiling to anyone who looked his way. He was the clever small businessman always out to make a sale. Perfect.

Well, I could play up my role too. I happened to be quite good at playing undercover roles. Or I had been until Adonis had come along and thrown my groove off. I uncrossed my arms. I smiled. I was a perky assistant. My blonde wig, cut into a pageboy, swung around my face as I turned to grin out the window. I was the image of a cheery young female assistant–right down to the padded bra that I had been issued. Was Jacques trying to tell me something with that?

By the time we got to the apartment of Franklin Culpepper, a modern building in downtown San Martin, my face was beginning to ache from all of the smiling that I was doing. Exiting the van and entering the entryway of the building, I couldn’t wait to get into the safety of Franklin’s apartment so I could turn the smile off.

Jaisen reached forward and buzzed the 2b buzzer. We waited. He buzzed again. Still we waited. This was part of our undercover act. When there was still no answer we checked Franklin’s mailbox for a key into the building. And lo and behold the owner had left us a key to the building. Actually, there was nothing in the mailbox for us–except a bunch of mail, which did beg the question: would the president of a major international drug company really forget to get his mail held for him if he was going on vacation? I think not. I had palmed a lock pick and using my highly developed lock pick’s skills unlocked the front door with it. The building didn’t have especially difficult locks, thank god.

Up on the second floor kneeling in front of 2b I realized that I had jumped to that conclusion too quickly. The apartments themselves had much trickier locks. Jaisen kept a lookout while I fiddled with the door.

“Excuse me?” a booming voice came from just beside me. I jumped, stowing my tool up my sleeve. What was my lookout doing? I looked to see Jaisen smiling at a round woman with a booming voice. Excuse me, but wasn’t Jaisen supposed to warn me when someone was around? Wasn’t that the point of a lookout?

Apparently, Jaisen didn’t realize this.

“Are you a cable repairman?”

Jaisen responded affirmatively.

How were we going to pull this one off?

“I have a dish and I’ve been having some problems with it. I don’t suppose you work on dishes too?”

“Only cable, ma’am,” Jaisen said, in his confident Don, the Cable Repairman voice, complete with a heavy Southern Cal accent. “What’s your problem with the dish?”

What? Why was he encouraging her?

“Well, my reception has been coming in poorly and I’ve tried pushing all the buttons but nothing seems to help.”

“You might want to consider moving the dish to see if you can get better reception in a new location. If you’re still having problems, call the company that provided you with the dish.”

The woman’s large face split into a grin. “I’ll give that a try. Thank you so much. I won’t take up any more of your time.”

She waved and left. How in the world did Jaisen know about satellite dishes? I was beginning to get a sneaking suspicion that Jaisen wasn’t quite as dumb as his exterior would lead me to believe. Except for the whole failure as a lookout thing. You see someone, you say something, how hard is that?

I brought this up as soon as I got the door open and we were tucked safely inside Franklin’s apartment.

“How did that woman sneak up on us? Didn’t you see her?”

“Her apartment is right next door. By the time she opened it, she was standing right there.”

“Try to give me a little warning next time. I almost had a heart attack there.”

Jaisen smiled. “I’ll see what I can do. I wouldn’t want my partner having a heart attack on me.”

“Yeah, thanks.” I had to turn away from the brilliant blue eyes twinkling at me.

Franklin Culpepper’s luxurious downtown apartment was almost unbearably clean and neat. This weighed in on the not kidnapped side. There was no evidence of any sort of scuffle. The look of the apartment was all modern sleek edges. There weren’t a whole lot of things around. It was very spare. There wasn’t so much as a magazine rack or junk basket lying on the floor. Black leather furniture, a glass coffee table with Architectural Digest and Time magazine spread artfully across, nouveau art on the walls, a red light blinking on the answering machine on the front entry table.

The room that we were standing in appeared to be the living room with a kitchen under a second floor balcony.

“You look down here,” I said. “I’ll take the upstairs.”

I climbed the spiral staircase up to the second floor landing and found two bedrooms and a giant bathroom. The first room seemed to be a guest bedroom. I opened the closet door and found clear plastic containers holding extra blankets.

I moved down the hall to the next bedroom. The master suite. It was twice as large as the guest bedroom and there were small personal items on display giving it a lived-in feeling–photos of Franklin with friends at the base of the Eiffel Tower and at an outdoor cantina wearing large sombreros, a watch and some change on the nightstand, along with a paperback copy of The Broker, an alarm clock glowing red, a reading lamp curved over the top of the steel-framed bed. The closet held suits and shirts neatly hung on hangers. There was no sign of luggage in the closet and it was hard to tell if there were any clothes missing. I checked under the bed and found only empty space. Not even a dust bunny.

The watch made me suspicious, but based on Franklin’s closet he may have been fashionable enough to have more than one watch.

I moved on to the bathroom. There was no window to light the room. My hand slid over the wall until I found the light switch. Elegant wall sconces lit up a bathroom with one very large sunken tub. Across from the tub was a pedestal sink with a mirror above it. A mirror that appeared to front a medicine cabinet.

The medicine cabinet.

I approached the mirror. This would be the tell-all treasure trove of information right here. People just didn’t travel without their toothbrushes and things like that. Plus, I had a feeling about it. My left hand grasped the side of the mirror and pulled. Nothing happened. I pulled again. It appeared to be stuck. Using both hands I tugged and tugged and still nothing happened. I put my foot up on the pedestal of the sink to brace myself and threw my whole body weight into one huge tug. The mirror flew open, a band-aid flew into the air and I flew backwards. I tried to catch myself and ended up tripping over the lip of the sunken tub and everything after that happened in slow motion. Protective reflexes caused me to pull my head forward to avoid a crack on the far edge of the tub. At the same time my hands flew down to try to halt my fall, but this caused my elbows to shoot backwards. It was my elbows that connected with the far edge of the tub. A loud “CRACK” rang through the bathroom followed by an echo. Pain shot up my elbows and into my arms. I lay still, trying to do the deep breathing through pain exercises that they taught us at the U.E. in case of emergencies. My legs were up one side of the tub, my torso up the other and my elbows throbbed.

Jaisen’s face appeared, looking down at me. “Are you OK?”

“Do I look OK?”

“Let me help you,” he said leaning into the tub. “What are you doing in the bath tub?”

“Spying,” I said, letting him help me into a sitting position and then out of the tub. I held my elbows gingerly. I was going to have some mammoth bruises on them by tomorrow. Just when my muscles had stopped hurting from the air shaft, I got bruised elbows. “What does it look like downstairs?”

Jaisen shook his head. “I haven’t found anything.”

“I thought that there might be something in the medicine cabinet that would tip us off.”

“You mean like this?” Jaisen said, pulling out a plastic jar.

“Exactly,” I smiled. My hunch about the medicine cabinet had not been wrong. For Jaisen was holding in his hand just the type of clue that we were looking for–something that a person would never leave behind, would never go out of his house without. In the jar in Jaisen’s hand were Franklin Culpepper’s dentures.

“Isn’t he a little young to have dentures?” I asked, still holding my sore elbows.

“He must not have brushed his teeth after every meal,” Jaisen said.

“I want to look at his bedroom again.” I went back down the hall into Franklin’s bedroom. Carefully, I rechecked around his bed. I pulled his nightstand away from the wall and peered behind it. Just what I was looking for–Franklin Culpepper’s wire rimmed glasses were lying where they had fallen behind his nightstand. A man who needed glasses would never leave the house without them.

It looked like our friend Franklin had not gone on a little pleasure trip after being fired after all. He had been kidnapped. Now we just needed to find out who and why.

We left the building the way we had come in, this time without encountering any neighbors. After a quick change at the U.E. I was free to go home. Home to face my parents and break the news about tomorrow. Their daughter had a date to the Save the Whales Benefit Dinner.