The Mystery of the Old Lamp
“I’m officially giving you my two weeks notice,” I told Nick.
“What?” Nick dropped the file he was holding and turned to look at me. He was taking it worse than I had expected.
“I’m quitting,” I said.
“What? Why? I thought you liked working at Knight Investigations. You said it was your dream job.”
“Yes, I said that because I thought being a private investigator would be cool. I thought it would be like, like Sherlock Holmes or something. But I’ve been here three months, and all we’ve had are infidelity cases. Wife suspects husband of cheating. Husband suspects wife of cheating. Spoilers, they’re all cheating! If I have to do surveillance on another upper-class suburban neighborhood I think I’m going to go crazy.”
Nick sighed. “We have to do what we can to keep the lights on. But it’s not all infidelity cases; did I ever tell you about the case of the dead postman?”
“Yes, at least a hundred times! You’ve been working for, what, ten years? And that’s the only interesting case you’ve ever had! I don’t think I can wait that long.”
“Don’t be so impulsive, Jack. Three months is not enough time to know if you like a job or not. When I graduated from high school I worked as a bartender, and I hated it at first too.”
“And what, you grew to love the job after three months?”
“No, I realized that I really did hate it.” He saw the look on my face. “Hey, give me a chance here.” He picked up the file that he had dropped. “Now this, this is promising. Missing person. I have a good feeling about this one. Come on, Jack. Just one last case. Please?”
I was not very good at saying no.
Nick gave me the briefing in the car, a black 2018 Chrysler Pacifia. Sherlock wouldn’t have been seen dead in an SUV, but it blended in perfectly with the soccer mom cars that we often had to park between on surveillance duty. I got the sense that Nick was trying to hype up the case to more than it actually was.
“Rachel Lu, age 18,” he said. Nick had memorized everything about the case already. “Freshman at SFU. Second generation. Lower-middle class. Plays piano and tennis. Likes going out to nightclubs and raves, or at least much more than her parents approve of.” Nick opened the window and shook off the ashes from his cigarette. It was one of his only vices, the other being a fondness for cheap fast food.
“What’s stopping them from going to the police?”
“Well, that’s the thing. The girl’s not really missing. The family kicked her out because of . . . lifestyle disagreements, and they’re pretty sure she’s staying with a guy. Now they’ve gotten cold feet and want her back, but they haven’t been able to contact him. They want us to find her and convince her to come home, or if we can’t do that, report on her living situation.” Nick got animated whenever he was talking about a case, and it was hard for me to keep my eyes on the road and not look at his exaggerated arm movements. Sherlock Holmes was eccentric and Hercule Poirot was quirky but Nicholas Knight was neither. He was really just an ordinary guy who loved his job.
“Tell me about the guy,” I said. “Is he a boyfriend?”
“Jonathan Lim, aged 25. He’s what you might call a ‘rich international student’. Owns three Porsches and a Ferrari, wears Gucci and Fendi. Full-time unemployed. Hangs out at nightclubs, is often seen around Schrodinger’s girls.”
“Who’s girls?”
“Schrodinger’s girls. Girls who are both underaged and not underaged at the same time.” Nick had an . . . interesting sense of humour.
“Hence Rachel,” he continued. “Has a couple of priors, shoplifting and domestic violence towards another girl. Parents bailed him out every time.”
“If you’re that rich, why would you shoplift?”
“It’s always the rich kids that shoplift. Grew up without anyone ever telling them no.”
We pulled up in front of the fanciest and most pretentious house I had ever seen. Giant Roman columns supported an equally gigantic mansion, its walls gleaming white in the morning sun. A large fountain sat in the middle of the front yard, jets of water streaming out from the tip of his you-know-what. To the left of the mansion was a garage in a separate building, with three Porsches parked out in front. I guess he wanted to show them off.
“Here comes the Ferrari,” Nick said. I heard it coming before I saw it; Jonathan was definitely going to get tinnitus before the age of 30. It slowed as it passed us, and I sensed someone inside studying us suspiciously.
“Come on,” Nick said. “Let’s go ask playboy here some questions.”
Nick tossed his finished cigarette into the Chrysler’s ashtray and we stepped out. Nick waved at the car. The dark-tinted driver’s side window dropped slowly and I saw a young Asian man in sunglasses, sporting what my friends liked to call the ‘fuckboy fade’. His eyes shone with intelligence and caution, subverting the extremely low expectations I had set for him in my mind. There was a shrewdness in him that made me dislike him even more.
“What are you, cops?” he asked.
Nick raised an eyebrow. “Someone has a guilty conscience,” he said. “I am a private investigator and this is Jack, my assistant. We just want to ask you some questions about Rachel.”
“I don’t know anyone named Rachel,” he said. The window started to roll back up.
Nick put a hand on the window. For a second I thought that he was going to get his fingers chopped off, but then the window stopped. “I think you’re going to want to cooperate with us,” he said. “According to our information, you started seeing Rachel Lu four months ago, in March. Her birthday is in May. I think you’re smart enough to do the math here. Fortunately for you, the family is willing to let it go; we just want to know where she is.”
I could see Jonathan’s jaw moving as he ground his teeth together. Nick and I stood there, watching him, and he watched us back. Finally, the door opened and he stepped out. I wasn’t surprised to see Supreme shorts and Gucci slides.
“I’ll tell you,” he said. “But then you have to leave me alone. I don’t want my mom to see you guys loitering around my property. Deal?”
My property? “Deal,” Nick said, and held out his hand. Jonathan ignored it.
“Rachel’s been staying with me for the past couple of weeks, ever since her folks kicked her out. We were here at first -” he gestured to the impossibly-white mansion -“but my mom came to stay last week so we had to go somewhere else. I got us a room at the Fairmont, the one near the airport. Actually, that’s where I just came back from. You’ll want to hurry if you want to catch her, she’s checking out today and going to stay with another friend. I don’t know the exact address.”
Nick looked at him as if he was studying a criminology textbook. “Everything’s been going well between you and Rachel? No arguments or fights?”
“That’s none of your fucking business,” Jonathan said.
“What’s the room number?” I asked.
“What was your impression of him?” Nick asked me, as I pulled onto the highway.
I signed. “Look, Nick, I appreciate you taking me under your wing. I really do. But I got offered a job at the library, and I’ve got to give them an answer this week -”
“The library?” Nick looked at me incredulously. “What are they going to have you do, stack books all day? Would you really rather do that than work with me?”
“It’s a government job,” I said defensively. “They have good benefits.”
“Benefits? Is that what you want to be doing right now, in the prime of your life, saving up for retirement? When you could be going on adventures with me, catching criminals -”
“We’ve never been within a hundred meters of a real criminal! The spouses we follow are assholes, that Jonathan guy is a douchebag, but they’re not real criminals. Face it, P.I. work can never be interesting. All the good stuff, murders and bank robberies and whatnot, that goes to the police. Maybe I should go join them instead.”
Nick didn’t respond. I could tell that he was hurt.
“Are you hungry?” I asked. On our right, just off the highway, was a large plaza with a couple of bars, a Burger King, and a Starbucks. Nick had a huge soft spot for Burger King. And there was something else too, something kind of strange. “Roe’s 24/7 Thrift Shop,” I read. “Why would a thrift shop need to be 24/7? Who’s going thrifting in the middle of the night?”
Nick still didn’t respond. Truth be told, I felt kind of bad. But some things have to be said.
The Fairmont was exactly as I had imagined it: indoor pool, indoor spa, Michelin starred restaurant, the whole works. The architecture was sleek and modern. Nick and I walked straight across the marbled lobby to the elevators, almost bumping into a bunch of men in expensive suits trying to manage a complicated ten-way handshake. “Always look like you know where you’re going,” he once told me. “You’ll be surprised at the kind of things you can get away with.”
I pressed the button for 23, the top floor. Of course it was a penthouse unit. I wouldn’t have expected anything else from Jonathan Lim, the hopeless romantic. As we went up I could hear Nick humming something unrecognizable, the way he tended to do when he couldn’t think of anything to say. We didn’t look at each other.
The door to unit 2309 was slightly ajar. Nick knocked on the door with the flat of his palm. “Rachel? Rachel Lu? My name is Nicholas Knight and I’m a private investigator. I just want to have a quick word with you.”
There was no response, so we invited ourselves in. The penthouse was comfortable and spacious, with a breathtaking view of the city through floor-length windows. Nick looked with disdain at the gleaming kitchen counter and the spotless wooden floors. “Looks like the cleaning service beat us here,” he said.
What he left unsaid was, we’re not going to find any clues here. I wondered how Nick was going to continue on this case; probably he would go back to Jonathan and wrangle a name out of him. That wasn’t my problem anymore. I had agreed to go with Nick on one last case, and this was it. I was done.
But that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to enjoy myself. Who knew when I would get to see the inside of a penthouse again? I walked from room to room, soaking in the luxury and imagining myself living as the top 0.1%. There were three bedrooms, each with a four-poster king bed and it’s own bathroom unit. Why did Jonathan and Rachel need three bedrooms? In the master bedroom there was a Jacuzzi, right next to the window and shielded from the bedroom by a sliding glass door. I imagined Jonathan sitting there, his muscular arm draped around a young, pretty girl, drinking champagne and looking out at the lights of the city. What had Jonathan ever done to earn this?
When I walked back to the living room I saw that Nick still hadn’t moved. He was crouching over the coffee table, staring intently at . . . a lamp.
“Come here for a moment, Jack. Do you see anything strange about this lamp?”
I moved forward reluctantly. Nick was grasping at straws here. The case was a dead end and we both knew it. More than likely he’d find the girl sleeping with her dealer in some run-down college dorm. A tragedy, to be sure, but hardly exciting. “I don’t see anything,” I said. “It’s just an old lamp.”
“But that’s the thing,” Nick said, frowning. “It’s an old lamp. Tell me, do you see anything else that’s old around here?”
He had a point. Everything in the apartment looked as if it had come straight from the manufacturer. I studied the lamp closely. It had a heavy, metal base with the Fairmont Hotel & Resorts logo carved on it. A brass stem grew upwards into a fabric canopy. It seemed like the kind of thing I would expect to find in a Fairmont hotel room, even if it was a bit basic for this penthouse unit. But it was old. There were scratches on the base and the stem. The brass no longer gleamed. And the fabric was stained with grey and brown patches.
“So? What difference does it make?”
Nick didn’t respond, but this time it wasn’t because he was mad at me. I could see that he was thinking.
We went back down to the lobby, and to my surprise Nick walked right up to the reception. I stood awkwardly behind him, unsure of what role I was supposed to play.
“Hi,” Nick said. “I was wondering if I could extend my stay by another day?”
“Of course, sir.” The woman smiled. “What is your room number?”
“2309.”
The woman paused, and for a terrible instant I thought that we were going to be exposed. But then she smiled again. “I’m terribly sorry, sir, but all the penthouse rooms are booked out from today until next week. There is a major conference taking place. I would be more than happy to put you in a Deluxe Suite, if that suits you.”
“That’ll be fine, I’m afraid I will have to take my business elsewhere.” He started to leave, then turned around suddenly. “Just one more thing. Could I perhaps talk to the cleaner who worked on my room this morning? I forgot to leave a tip, and I would hate for them to think that I stiffed them. They’ve been doing a great job all week.”
The woman answered with the same smile again. I didn’t think she was capable of any other facial expressions. “Unit 2309 has not been cleaned yet, sir. We got a call last night saying that they . . . that you wanted to sleep in. We’re sending someone there in an hour.”
“Are you sure?” Nick was frowning harder than ever. “I did make the call, but is it possible . . . that there was a mistake?”
“No, sir. We don’t make mistakes here at the Fairmont.” She smiled at us condescendingly.
“It doesn’t make sense.” We were sitting at the Burger King that we had seen on our way to the hotel, waiting for our order. “Who cleaned the room? Rachel? Why would you clean a hotel room?”
“Who cares? I said. “They probably made a mistake. Nobody is infallible, not even the mighty Fairmont. Just goes to show you that your money is paying more for the name than for the service.”
I tried to bring up the topic of my employment again, but Nick stopped me. “I need to go for a smoke break,” he said. I shrugged. He was just delaying the inevitable.
I reflected on my situation. Perhaps Nick was right, and I just needed to give it more time. After all, which job isn’t monotonous? “If you do something you love, you will never have to work a day in your life,” someone once said. Of course, that was complete bullshit. A job was just a job. If it puts money in the bank and a roof over your head, any job was just as good as another. Stalking middle-aged cheaters was bad, but was a library job really any better? At least Nick was nice to me. Who knew what kind of asshole, penny-pinching manager I might get at a new job?
I was pulled away from my reveries by the figure of Nick bursting through the door. He grabbed my arm, tightly. “Let’s go, Jack,” he said. “We have to go back to the hotel.”
I pointed at the receipt. “But our order -”
“Put it on the expenses sheet,” he said, and dashed out into the parking lot. I shook my head in wonder. Nick letting a perfectly fine Whopper go to waste? That was a first.
Nick pressed the button for 23, yet again. There was no humming this time. “Can you please talk to me, Nick?” I said. “What did you realize in the parking lot? I hope you’re not pulling my leg. Putting on a bit of drama isn’t going to change my mind.”
Nick seemed calm, focused. I had never seen him like this before. “I went to the thrift shop. Roe’s 24/7 Thrift Shop, the one you pointed out on our way here the first time. In the window display, staring me right in the face, were two Fairmont lamps.”
“So what, the hotel bought them from the thrift store? Why would they do that?”
Nick shook his head. The elevator stopped with a ding and Nick rushed out into the hallway. But instead of going towards 2309, he turned and ran down the hallway to the left. I followed him, panting. We came to a stop in front of a door covered with red tape and a sign reading “Roof Access // Emergencies Only // Alarm Will Trigger If Opened”. Nick pushed it open without hesitation. I put my fingers in my ears but no alarm came. Nick looked back at me. “I guess you were right about the Fairmont quality of service.”
We ran up some metal stairs onto an open rooftop. Four water tanks towered against the grey Vancouver sky, the nearest one with its hatch open. Without waiting for me or offering any explanation, Nick flew up the ladder. He turned on his phone flashlight and stared into the tank for a very long time, his face a stony, expressionless mask.
“Well?” I asked. “What do you see?” The likelihood of this all being a prank was declining by the moment.
Nick came back down the ladder. When I pushed past him he didn’t try to stop me. The ladder was rough and bit into my fingers as I pulled myself up. When I got to the top, I looked in.
I turned my head to the side and began to heave my breakfast down onto the roof. From what seemed like very far away, I heard Nick talking to the 911 operator on the phone. I guess it was a good thing I never got to eat that Whopper.
He held out a hand to steady me as I got down. “How’s that for excitement?” he asked grimly. “Still think police get the best cases?” His phone was gone and he had a cigarette in his other hand.
I gave him my best impression of Dr. Watson. “How . . . how did you know?”
“Well,” he started. He was trying his best to be solemn, but I could tell he was enjoying this. I didn’t hold it against him; after all, the reveal is what detectives lived for. “The lamp is the key. When I told you what I saw in the thrift store, you asked if the hotel bought them from the store. Of course they don’t buy their lamps from thrift stores, they get them directly from manufacturers. That means it must be the other way around: the hotel must have sold the lamps to the thrift store. Some manager or other, presumably finding an excess of old lamps on their lands and a lack of accountability, sold them to the store for some extra cash. But this morning, we saw the lamp sitting on the coffee table in the penthouse unit, of all rooms. Surely whoever cleaned the room would notice that it was out of place and put in an order for a replacement. That leaves only one possibility: a guest bought the lamp from the thrift store and placed it in the room.”
“You mean Jonathan? Why the hell would he do that?”
“We need to put ourselves into the mind of the criminal,” he said. I had heard this a hundred times before, but for once the ‘criminal’ had done something more interesting than get it on with the babysitter in the laundry room. (Come on, why the laundry room? You have the option of literally every other room.) “You are Jonathan. You are rich and bored and you have nothing better to do than frequent clubs every night. You meet this girl while partying and you start to see her regularly. Then, four months later, her parents kick her out.”
“She got pregnant,” I said. This was, occasionally, how cheating spouses were discovered.
“Very good, Jack! The parents tried to be vague with me but their tone made it very obvious. There are only two reasons why a conservative Asian family would kick out their daughter: either she’s gay or she’s pregnant, and there’s no evidence for the former. Okay, so she gets kicked out and she comes to you. You take her under your wing. You act like you don’t care, but deep down you are afraid; your parents have given you free reign for twenty-five years of your life, but that could all change if they learned you got a girl pregnant. They might take away your cars, your allowance, might even force you to marry the girl. You can say good-bye to your current lifestyle! So you spend weeks trying to convince Rachel to get rid of the baby.”
“But she said no.”
“Exactly! It’s the one thing you have no idea how to deal with: someone telling you ‘no’. You get angry and frustrated, and finally one night when the two of you are arguing in the Fairmont living room, you lose it. You grab the heaviest object within reach, the lamp, and you strike your girlfriend down! As you sit there, in the penthouse room with the beautiful city view, you start to realize that she isn’t going to get back up. A sense of horror washes over you: you’ve messed up before, but never this badly. Your life is over. You sit there until the shock of it diminishes, and the gears in your head start turning again. You are Jonathan Lim: you are privileged and impulsive and kind of an asshole, but you are also clever. Maybe it isn’t over yet.”
“But there was a conference the next day. That’s why he couldn’t extend his stay! He had to get rid of the evidence that night.”
“Yes. And then you call the front desk and tell them to delay the cleaner. You don’t want them walking in on you before you are done.” Nick’s use of the second person could be unnerving, but I let him off the hook this time. Everybody has their gimmicks, right?
“How did he think of the water tank? And how did you know?”
Nick breathed out a stream of smoke that was quickly snatched away by a cool afternoon breeze. “The most difficult thing in a murder is the disposal of the body. You know that there is no way to hide the body indefinitely, but if it can stay concealed for a couple of days or weeks, it would give you enough time to flee, maybe back to China where your parents’ money and influence can protect you. Where can you hide a body in a hotel, where nosy maids and cleaners turn out every corner of every room? A flash of criminal inspiration comes to you: every day you’ve walked past this door with the red tape. And you remember that sensational case in the news a couple of years back, when a girl’s body was found in a water tank in L.A; she had been undiscovered for weeks. So you take Rachel’s body and all of her belongings and dump them into the tank.”
“And then he cleaned the room.”
“And then you clean the room. You are lucky that the floors are hardwood: if the suite was carpeted you would have been doomed. But after meticulously cleaning the room, you realize that there is no way to fix the lamp. The metal base crumpled upon impact with poor Rachel’s skull, and her blood stained the fabric. You have to throw the lamp into the tank, but if it’s missing it might raise some alarms for the cleaner. What do you do?” Nick closed his eyes for dramatic effect. “Suddenly, an image appears in your mind, that absurd sign off the highway that caught your eye! A 24/7 thrift shop! You are paranoid, you are antsy, and you don’t want to wait until dawn. You hop into your Ferrari and drive down to the plaza, and right there in the display window, as if placed there by Providence, are exact copies of the lamp you just broke! Without even a second thought you buy one and bring it back to the room.”
Nick looked at me in triumph, but my brows were still furrowed in thought. “There is still one thing that puzzles me,” I said. “How could he have known that the alarm wouldn’t go off? Wasn’t that an awfully risky thing to do?”
“You’ve probably already gone out onto the roof before with Rachel! What’s the worst thing that could have happened if you’d been caught, a fine? Or maybe you just have bigger balls than we gave you credit for, Jonathan.”
The rooftop door swung open and police uniforms began emerging. Nick looked at me and smiled. “Still considering a career change?” he asked.
To tell the truth, those uniforms looked kind of uncomfortable. “Let me think about it,” I said.
