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selling him on spending a few more pennies on the dollar.
“Agreed,” I said.
“The company is Basile Papillion.”
“Ella,” I said without hesitation.
“I knew you’d remember. See? It was meant to be.”
Ella Papillion.
What did I remember?
Cute. Very cute, actually. Smart. Dead mother. The age difference was a
joke now, but at the time, she’d seemed too young to touch.
I remembered her alongside Millie, my senior year girlfriend and
director of the school theater production. Her costumer had been a
sophomore, still been young enough to be called a prodigy, pins in her
mouth, hunched over a sewing machine or sketching so quickly my
girlfriend hardly had to finish a sentence.
Cooper Santon was supposed to be investigating the rest, but I couldn’t
wait. I had Mandy arrange a meeting for the next evening. Ella insisted on
her place. I was already halfway across Beverly before Cooper called. I
pulled over to take it.
“You have five minutes,” I said when I picked up.
“You didn’t give me a lot of time.”
“Fast, cheap, and good, Coop. You get two out of three in life and I
didn’t bother with cheap. So tell me what I paid for.”
“Okay. Ella Papillion. She still works at her father’s company. Lives
on—”
“Highland Ave. I know.”
“It’s not zoned for a residential lease.”
“Anything else?”
“Like I said, I didn’t have a lot of time.”
“Yes, you said that.”
“There aren’t any liens against her.” He rattled off the relevant facts.
“No drug arrests. No mental health issues I can see. And—you said this was
important, so I made sure before I called—the internet’s clean. No bad
publicity with her name on it.”