Free Draw (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series Book 2) by Shelley Singer

doubted that someone who’d identified himself as a writer from
Probe
magazine would be left to wander around on his own.
    I was there, supposedly, to look over the possibilities for a story on education— the economics and feasibility of what these people called home study, as opposed to other kinds of schooling. As far as I knew, however, no one had ever been interested in said feasibility until one of the company’s vice-presidents got himself tossed down a spillway.
    Like I figured, I got the secretary. An intelligent-looking middle-aged woman who didn’t overdo my welcome. She escorted me back to the presidential suite. The outer office, which she inhabited, was small but carefully decorated with blue carpeting, a wood-grain desk, and white file cabinets. The inner office, where Bowen sat, was big enough for a typing pool. White carpeting, blue walls, lots of big windows with blue drapes, a real wood desk with two visitors’ chairs upholstered in blue and white tweed, a conversational group of more blue and white chairs and a white table with a blue ashtray. A blown-up photograph dominated one of the walls, a photograph of an old building on a city street. Screwed to the frame in brass was the legend, “First Corporate Headquarters, 1953, Chicago.”
    Bowen stood up and walked around his desk to greet me solemnly. He was a short man, thin, with white hair worn medium long. The glasses he wore, and his suit, a slightly wrinkled, brown off-the-rack business suit, looked as though he could have been wearing them since 1953. His face, like his suit, was wrinkled. He had watery, gentle blue eyes. He didn’t seem to belong in his office. A formal little man, at home in Chicago in a dead era, transplanted to 1980s California casual. Just a different kind of elegance, maybe, but awfully bright colors for a man in a brown suit.
    “Mr. Samson, please sit down. Edna?” The secretary had waited just inside the door. “Would you bring us some coffee, please?” He spoke very precisely, the way teachers used to talk back when they were trying to set a good example.
    After he’d finished shaking my hand, he invited me to sit in one of the chairs facing his desk. No conversational grouping for me. Or maybe the decorator’s idea of conversation was different from his. He reached for the book of matches lying next to a desk lighter set in a glittering gold ball and lit a cigarette, dropping the dead match in a large blue ashtray that matched the one on the table across the room. There were just a few butts in the ashtray. He offered me a cigarette. An unfiltered Chesterfield. He needed only a brown fedora to complete the time warp. I, being a modern person, declined the cigarette.
    “I’m afraid,” he said quietly, “that I’m not very clear on why you wanted to see me. Something about a magazine article?”
    I leaned forward earnestly. “I’m very interested in the home study phenomenon. Historically and currently.” I wasn’t sure he was hearing me. “Mr. Bowen?” He looked up. I took out my notebook and a pen, and gestured toward the photograph on the wall. “Is that the year of your founding? 1953?” He swung his chair around to face the photograph and spoke to it.
    “Yes. And that was our building.”
    I counted rapidly. “All five floors?”
    He kept his eyes on the photograph. “Well, no. We started with the second floor. But by 1963 we occupied all of it.”
    “Very impressive. Do you still have an office there?”
    He turned around to face me again. “We moved out here in 1975 and consolidated.” He smiled sweetly. “Things aren’t the way they used to be, you know. A business can only grow these days by paring away the fat. And of course you needed more people back then, just to operate. No computers, that sort of thing.”
    “So your business has grown?”
    “Recently, yes. But we have always kept even with the economy.” I wasn’t sure, but it seemed to me that keeping even with the economy