And there was what looked like a financial record of some kind, a private ledger, columns of figures and corporate names that meant nothing to me.

I turned the pages slowly, trying to make sense of what I was looking at, this careful professional dossier that had been wedged behind a restaurant booth by a couple who had walked out on their bill.

None of it fit together.

Private investigators’ photographs, corporate legal documents, a ledger, all bound up together in an expensive leather binder, abandoned in the gap behind a velvet bench.

It was the kind of thing you see in a movie, not the kind of thing you find at your minimum-plus-tips restaurant job the morning after a walkout.