Free Someone Always Knows by Marcia Muller

the Kenyon brothers with you?”
    12:31 p.m.
    Chad Kenyon was very much with me, however. He had called Julia just as she was returning to her office from her morning’s work, and in a moment of weakness she’d consented to setting up a luncheon for the three of us at Bella, his favorite Italian restaurant.
    Why the hell had she done that? I’d asked.
    Well, the Kenyons were good clients; they could put a great deal of money into the agency’s pockets.
    Why involve me? I’d asked.
    She didn’t want to eat alone with him.
    Great. I was acting as a bodyguard for one of my own employees.
    Now she sat beside me, wolfing her ravioli so she could get out of there as soon as possible. Ostensibly her reason was that the hunt for Renshaw was heating up and she needed to get back to it. In reality the hunt was stone-cold dead. Julia was in a hurry because she couldn’t bear to watch Chad eat.
    Chad loaded grated parmesan onto his linguini vongole. “Like I was saying, there’s a fortune to be made in these derelict buildings if you know what you’re doing.”
    I nibbled on a wilted lettuce leaf from the crab salad I already regretted ordering. Washed it down with a sip of pinot grigio.
    “What’s the matter?” Chad asked around a mouthful of pasta. “Something wrong with the salad? I’ll make them take it back—”
    “No, please don’t. I’m just not very hungry.”
    “You should be like Sweetheart here.” He gestured at Julia, who scowled at her plate. “She can eat and drink me under the table.”
    I smiled, nibbled on something green and curly that I always mistakenly call Caligula, then said, “I’d like to meet with both you and your brother to discuss Webster Street.”
    Chad’s face darkened. “Don’t get me started on that little weasel Dick. Soon’s we got back from Europe, he’s up to his old tricks again—sitting in the woods. Only now he’s in so deep, there’s no cell reception.”
    “He sits in the woods?”
    Chad knocked back the rest of his wine and motioned to the waiter for another bottle. “‘Getting away from things’ is how he puts it. Backpacks into some weird-ass wilderness and spends days—weeks, even—there. Says it brings him peace. What I call it is hiding.”
    I thought of Touchstone, Hy’s and my place on the Mendocino coast, and the high desert sheep ranch he’d inherited from his stepfather. I could certainly understand the impulse.
    “Hell,” Chad said, “what’s he want to hide from when there’s so much action here?”
    From you, maybe? I thought.
    “What kind of action?” I asked.
    “Where’ve you been living lately—in a cave? The city’s exploding. Techies and all their lovely money are flowing in. Rents and home prices are soaring. Land too. You remember that hole in the ground on Russian Hill where you were investigating that witchy stuff last spring? I turned it over the day I got back from Italy, and there’re already condos on it—a hundred percent occupied too. Families and poor people’re heading toward the burbs, taking their damn dogs with ’em too. It’s a goddamn renaissance!” He thrust out his arms, nearly swatting the waiter, who had returned with the wine. The server barely reacted; this was where Chad ate most of his meals, and the staff had become accustomed to him, I supposed.
    “ Dios mio ,” Julia exclaimed, “I’m going to be late for that meeting.” She started to slide out of the booth.
    “Come on, stay,” Chad told her. “Have some of those raspberry tarts you love.”
    “No,” I said. “She’s officially on the clock for the agency now. See you later, Jules.”
    She fled before Chad could say anything more. I smiled inwardly, because I suspected she’d earlier asked the maître d’ for a bag of the tarts—which she did love—to go.
    So there I was, trapped with Chad, who was in the process of wiping clam sauce from his lips with his tie.
    “I went to see that blighted building you hired me to