The Arraignment by Steve Martini Page B

office up in the capital.
    “Fortunately, Effie was here late last night so she was able to go online.” Harry still won’t use a computer, not even for word processing. In Harry’s arcane world, keyboards are for secretaries and typesetters. No self-respecting lawyer would touch one. I tell him he’s a dinosaur.
    “Her name is Marta, not Effie,” I tell him.
    “I like to think of her as Effie.” Harry has been on a kick lately, fiction noir, reaching back in time, the old mysteries of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, relishing a time when everything was black and white. He has taken to naming our secretary after Sam Spade’s girl Friday from The Maltese Falcon. One of these days I’m afraid I willcome into the office to find the names of “Spade and Archer” in black letters across our front window.
    “It’s fine with me as long as she doesn’t mind,” I tell him. “The laws of harassment being what they are.”
    “She thinks it’s cute,” he tells me.
    Marta is Latina, about five-foot-two, with a good sense of humor, an affable nature, and a work ethic that keeps her nose to the grindstone sixteen hours a day between school, work, and two kids. She is eager to learn and has taken charge of the office, even finding some available space for filing cabinets in one of the vacant cabanas two doors down from our office.
    “She went online,” says Harry. “She’s getting good.”
    “Maybe she could teach you,” I tell him.
    Harry gives me a look as if to say “in your dreams.” “We managed to run down the corporate records for Jamaile Enterprises. Like the cops said, it’s a limited partnership. The stuff was filed a little over a year ago. Shows your Mr. Metz as the general partner. Nick shows up as one of the officers. It looks like Metz had control of the day-to-day operations of the business and that maybe Nick was an investor. It’s not really clear.”
    I am wondering if maybe this was the investment that went sour, the one that Dana told me about. The reason she was broke.
    “Any other names on the filings?”
    “One. A Grace Gimble,” says Harry. He looks at the notebook in his hand and shrugs his shoulders like this doesn’t ring any bells. “She shows up on the statement of officers as the secretary.”
    “Where was the business located?”
    “It shows a P.O. box as the address of record.” He gives me this on a piece of paper.
    “You can be sure the cops have already been there with a search warrant,” I say.
    He nods. “Maybe one of the partners knows about it?”
    I continue to finger absently through my phone messages. “Anything else?”
    “Just the usual. Articles of incorporation containing a statement of purpose for the business.”
    I look up at Harry.
    “Like the cop said, import-export. That and any other lawful business they wanted to conduct. A lot of boilerplate from the form books,” says Harry.
    “That’s it?”
    “I went to the law library and had them run a Lexis-Nexis on Grace Gimble.” This is not something we have bought into on the office computer yet. “We found a couple of G. Gimbles, no Grace, and without more information we couldn’t tell if it was the right person.”
    “What are you thinking?” I ask.
    “About the woman?”
    I nod.
    “It could be a secretary, somebody with the firm. A signature of convenience they used for formation when they put the thing together.”
    “That was my thought.”
    “You want me to check it out? Call the firm?”
    “No. Let’s hold off. It wouldn’t do to be asking the same questions the cops are.”
    Harry considers this. “Why wouldn’t Nick have told you about this? Good friend that he was.” Harry looks at me, that cynical twinkle in his eye. “I mean if he was in business with Metz, what’s to hide? Unless they were importing contraband,” he says.
    “Don’t even go there,” I tell him. “A lawyer like Nick sees a lot of people in a year. It could be he talked with Metz over the