As I walked through the door, Sheyenne was arranging a stack of advertising flyers on the corner of her desk. I glanced down, trying to figure out what they were. “Another client?”
“A very dapper gentleman dropped these off, asking us to pass them out to our clientele. New business start-up in the Quarter. I figured we’d earn some goodwill by supporting our fellow entrepreneurs.”
I picked up one of the flyers. It was for a glassmaker’s shop that specialized in dark window tinting. Black Glass, Inc. Opacity Guaranteed. Blocks out all harmful purifying rays of the sun—UV, infrared, and visible. We also repair mirrors.
“Sure, go ahead and hand them out. I wonder if they install normal windows too.” I thought of the damage that had been done to the Hope & Salvation Mission. “I might have a customer for them.”
A few minutes later, Miranda Jekyll entered the office, cloaked in an aura of pomp and circumstance as if her very presence generated all the fanfare a person could need. She was dressed to the nines (or the tens, or however much she could afford), and she wasn’t afraid to show it. Miranda’s husband Harvey—Harvard Stanford Jekyll—paid for it all and resented every penny, especially now that he had filed for divorce, which only made her spend more extravagantly.
Her smile was as wide and dazzling as a great white shark’s; her red lipstick made blood look pallid by comparison. Her cinnamon-dyed hair was intricately coiffed and cemented into place by more hair spray and styling product than a salon used in a week. A lawn gnome could have jumped through her enormous hoop earrings.
Harvey Jekyll insisted that their prenuptial agreement was null and void because now that she had become a werewolf, Miranda was no longer the same person who had signed the document. Therefore, she was not entitled to half of Jekyll Lifestyle Products and Necroceuticals. Robin had been fighting on Miranda’s behalf for months, and I’d been working behind the scenes to gather leverage to use against Jekyll. After the vampire shampoo incident, Jekyll hadn’t been on my Favorite Persons list to begin with.
Now Miranda swished forward with lupine grace, her back straight, head erect, hands slightly outstretched as if she meant either to embrace or claw whoever came within her grasp. “Sweet-hearts!” she announced, pronouncing it “sweet-hots,” as if we were some kind of startlingly potent candy. “I’ve been dying to see you. I simply must have an update on my case.”
I extended my hand in a businesslike gesture, but when she took it in her own, it was a caress, not a shake. Her pointed nails traced little patterns on my pale skin. “Mr. Chambeaux, it’s always a pleasure to see you.”
When Sheyenne offered her a beverage, Miranda fluttered her fingers in a quick dismissive movement. “I doubt you carry anything that I’d drink. Not to worry, I can stay only a minute. Considering how long it’s taking your agency to solve my little problem, one might think I’m paying you by the hour. Oh wait, I am! But I don’t resent it a minute, because it’s my husband’s money anyway. However, I simply must impress upon you how desperate I am to get out of this marriage.”
“Come into the conference room, and we’ll go over what we have so far,” Robin said. “Is it all right if Dan sits in?” Technically, I wasn’t supposed to be in a confidential attorney-client meeting.
“I hired you both, sweethearts, and I don’t care whether this is solved in the courts or under the table … so long as it’s solved.”
I gestured Miranda into the conference room. “I’m sorry you’re dissatisfied with our progress, ma’am.”
“I didn’t say dissatisfied—just impatient. I long to be free.”
Sheyenne glided into the conference room, bringing the file; she set it in front of me, gave me a private wink, then left.
Robin sat down, serious. “If getting out of the marriage is most important, Mrs. Jekyll, your husband already wants a divorce, and you could sign the papers right now. Granted, you won’t walk away with any of his fortune, but at least you’ll have your self-esteem. You can be free to find true love, if that’s your highest priority.”
Miranda gave poor Robin a withering glare. “That would defeat the entire purpose of all those years I endured him, sweetheart. You simply must find a way to put him over a barrel in the courts. Or you, Mr. Chambeaux—catch him doing something very naughty … I’m sure he must be doing something. Aren’t we all? If I can hold a big nasty club over his head, then we’ll reach an amicable settlement.”
Considering how bitter the relationship was, I doubted any settlement short of Miranda’s slow torture and lingering death would feel “amicable” to Harvey Jekyll. Instead of pointing that out, I said, “I conducted intensive surveillance, Mrs. Jekyll, but my recent … setback created delays in several of our cases.”
“Yes, yes—your death,” Miranda said with a luxurious and dismissive brush of her clawlike hand. “I’m not an ogre, Mr. Chambeaux. Nobody expects the same sort of progress from a dead detective as from a live one, but that doesn’t make me any less miserable. We’ve got to break the prenup, somehow.”
Robin pulled out the inch-thick document and flipped through the pages. “Your husband’s reason for breaking the agreement is nonsense. It won’t stand up in court, despite his stalling tactics.”
“Harvey’s attorneys claim that the marriage itself has fundamentally changed, due to my transformation.”
And everything had changed for her. Two years earlier, Miranda Jekyll had been scratched, infected, and transformed into a werewolf. Harvey Jekyll subsequently claimed, through his coterie of lawyers, that his wife was no longer human, therefore not the person who had signed the agreement, and therefore and whereas, he was no longer bound to the terms, yadda yadda, and she was entitled to nothing.
Miranda, not surprisingly, held a different point of view.
In the newly changed world, so many legal questions had no precedents for lawyers to fall back on. The courts were clogged, and few judges wanted anything to do with the societal headaches caused by the unnaturals.
Robin scrutinized the document that she had read many times before. “Granted, the original contract you and Mr. Jekyll signed many years ago is quite thorough and ironclad—”
“It should be,” Miranda said. “Each side had seven lawyers at five hundred dollars an hour apiece, combing over every comma, period, semicolon, and exclamation point. Since when does a legal contract have an exclamation point? Well, this one has it.”
“I filed motions for outright dismissal, Mrs. Jekyll, taking the stance that you are still the same individual who signed the contract. How can anyone disagree?”
“Harvey has photos of me as a werewolf. Show those to an all-human jury, and he’ll have a ruling in an hour.”
“You are exactly the same person, except for during that time of the month.”
“Even then, I’m still me, regardless of whether I sprout hair and get more feisty—some men like that.” Miranda tossed her head, and not a single strand of her hair moved. “Throughout history, men have put up with women turning into bitches for a few days every month. Never been cause for breaking a prenup before.”
“Exactly!” Robin said with a grin. “I’m sure we can win this, if we get a sympathetic judge.”
I looked down at the files. “Robin may be confident, but I’d feel better if I could dredge up concrete evidence of something that your husband wouldn’t want displayed in open court.” I pressed my lips hard together. “We always do our best to help our clients, Mrs. Jekyll, but ever since the JLPN class-action suit, I also have my own grudge against the guy.”
She flashed her great-white-shark grin again. “Oh, that’s no surprise at all. It’s why I hired Chambeaux and Deyer in the first place! I was impressed with your work, even if it did cause severe financial losses to the company. Harvey deserved it.”
I took out a stack of my old surveillance photos. Miranda had seen them before, but I decided we could all use a fresh look. “After you engaged our services, I spent weeks following your husband after dark, but I never found any evidence of him having an affair.”
“No surprise. The man’s a sexless little worm. He never wanted to have sex with me—me!” Miranda pointed to herself, accentuating her breasts as if her sheer animal desirability was self-evident. “I can’t imagine him looking elsewhere for companionship, but who knows? In that twisted walnut-sized brain of his, maybe Harvey has needs, too, needs that I can’t meet, though I couldn’t imagine what they might be.”
Now, Miranda was our client, and the client is always innocent, always wronged, and always on the right side of justice. But I’m not naïve, and I assumed that the sultry and vivacious woman was fooling around as well. Undoubtedly, her husband had his own private investigators trying to find dirt on Miranda. I just hoped that she was good at hiding it—and that Harvey wasn’t. In the matter of the prenup, it would all come down to which person had the better mudslinging campaign.
I spread out the photos and tapped them, focusing the conversation on business before Miranda could go into detail about her own sex life. “Here’s a curious one. I followed your husband to the landfill outside the city, after dark. Some kind of off-books delivery or disposal. Shouldn’t a big corporate exec have underlings for jobs like that?”
“Harvey has underlings to do everything, sweetheart. It’s suspicious, but I don’t see how that helps us.”
“I plan to follow up and ask around.” I pulled out more photos. Twice, I had tracked Harvey Jekyll to clandestine nighttime meetings with shadowy figures, once accompanied by his chief sales rep, Brondon Morris. “I have no idea what those meetings were. I could never get close enough.”
“Could it be a sex parlor of some kind?” Robin sounded embarrassed. “Drugs? Gambling?”
“We can only hope,” Miranda said. “You’ll need proof.”
“I will step up the surveillance, Mrs. Jekyll.” As a zombie, I could put in long hours, day and night. “It’s taken me a few weeks to … get back on my feet. Don’t worry, I’m on the job now. The cases don’t solve themselves.”
“No, sweetheart, they don’t.” She reached into her handbag, which probably cost as much as a block of real estate in the Unnatural Quarter, and withdrew her checkbook. “I’m going to double your hourly fee this week in hopes that it encourages you.”
She wrote out a check from her husband’s account, blew us an air-kiss, and said her goodbyes.