Montage
She didn't spend enough time in New York.
Claire took a couple of days to sort out her other obligations before heading back to Los Angeles. She finally hired a superintendent for the Brooklyn apartment building--some inoffensive college kid who'd responded to the want ad--and spent some time going over paperwork with Eileen.
As she did so, a part of her was constantly reaching for her cell phone, about a minute and a half from making a call and having a conversation she'd had once before. Let's just go away, she was thinking of saying to Leon. Let's run off somewhere and change our names and get real jobs and--
If he'd said yes, though, he wouldn't be who she loved; and if she asked, she wouldn't be the person he said he loved. So it remained a temptation.
Part of why she was tempted was what was waiting for her in Los Angeles when she got back to the job. Her teachers had told her again and again that it was the part of any investigation that any sensible human being hated, that it was the part that if you didn't hate it every time it happened, you needed to stop doing this sort of work immediately.
Claire's spent the last two weeks sitting in living rooms and funeral parlors across Los Angeles, talking to people about Joseph Martinson. His mother is still wearing black, a full month after Martinson's death; his girlfriend still has a look to her vaguely like someone who's just been knocked senseless; his brother talks about him in the present tense, like he just stepped out of the room for a second. She has to come up to everyone who knew Martinson and yank open wounds that have only just begun to heal, for the sake of an investigation where solving Martinson's murder isn't even really her first priority.
She's not chasing his killer; she's chasing the murder weapon, who in this case, happens to have been a guy who was apparently one of nature's noblemen.
After a day spent at that, Claire gets to come "home" to a hotel room and sort through the data she stole from Bromwell's computer. Most of it is completely innocent stuff that the CEO of a pharmecutical company could reasonably be expected to have on his hard drive, and somewhere in Washington, there's a researcher who's sick of having to tell Claire that over and over again. There's a folder containing a couple of pirated movies and a downloaded Norah Jones album, but that's the extent of Bromwell's illicit behavior.
That leaves her back at square one, which means she has to keep interviewing people who knew Martinson.
She'd rather be in New York.