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The door’s single lock had both a snap lock and a deadbolt, and Martin had taken the trouble to turn his key in the lock and put the deadbolt to work. It was hard to figure out why, because locking a door like that is like fencing a cornfield to keep the crows out. Any idiot could simply break the glass and reach inside, and I had adhesive tape that would enable me to break the glass without raising the dead; a few strips crisscrossed on the pane would keep the clatter and tinkle to a minimum.
A broken pane of glass is a calling card, though, especially if they find it with tape on it. Since I didn’t expect to steal anything, I had the opportunity to get in and out without anyone ever knowing I’d existed. So I took the time to pick the lock, and there was precious little time involved. I knocked off the deadbolt easily, and loiding the snap lock was more than easy. There was a good quarter-inch of air between the wooden door and its wooden jamb, and a child with a butter spreader could have let himself in.
“What’s it like, Bernie?”
Well, there was a little excitement in turning the knob and easing the door open, then slipping inside and closing the door and locking up. I had my pencil light with me but I left it in my pocket and switched on the overhead fluorescents right away. A little flashlight winking around in that office might have looked strange from outside, but this way it was just another office with the lights on and I was just another poor bastard working late.
I moved around quickly, taking the most perfunctory sort of inventory. An old wooden desk, a gray steel steno desk with typewriter, a long table, a couple of chairs. I got the feel of the layout while establishing that there were no corpses tucked in odd places, then went over to the window and looked out. I could see Riker’s but couldn’t look inside. I wondered if Ruth was at a front table and if she might be looking up at my very window. But I didn’t wonder about this for very long.
I checked my watch. Nine thirty-six.
Martin’s office was shabby and cluttered. One entire wall was covered with dark brown cork tiles, which had been inexpertly cemented to it. Thumbtacks and pushpins held glossy photographs in place. The greater portion of these photos showed women, who in turn showed the greater portion of themselves. Most of them showed their legs, many showed their breasts, and every one of them flashed a savage mechanical smile. I thought of Peter Alan Martin sitting at his cluttered desk and gazing up at all those teeth and I felt a little sorry for him.
There were a few head and shoulders shots in among the sea of tits and legs, a couple of male faces in the crowd. But I didn’t see the face I was looking for.
Next to the white touchtone phone on the desk stood a Rolodex wheel of phone numbers and addresses. I flipped through it and found Wesley Brill’s card. This didn’t really come as a surprise, but all the same I felt a little thrill when I actually located what I was looking for. I tried a couple of Martin’s Flair pens, finally found one that worked, and copied down Wesley Brill, Hotel Cumberland, 326 West 58th, 541-7255. (I don’t know why I wrote down his name. I don’t know why I wrote down anything, come to think of it, because all I had to do was remember the name of the hotel and the rest would be in the phone book. Listen, nobody’s perfect.)
I put my rubber gloves on at about this point and wiped the surfaces I remembered touching, not that any of them seemed likely to take a print and not that anyone would be looking for prints in the first place. I checked the Rolodex for Flaxford, not really expecting to find his name, and was not vastly surprised when it wasn’t there.
There were three old green metal filing cabinets on the opposite side of the window from the cork wall. I gave them a quick look-through and found Brill’s file. All it held was a sheaf of several dozen 8 by 10 glossies. If Martin had any correspondence with or about Brill he either threw it out or kept it elsewhere.
But it was the pictures that interested me. Only when I saw them did I know for certain that Wesley Brill was the man who had set me up for a murder rap. Until then there was still some room for doubt. All those long-distance phone calls had had us operating in something of a vacuum, but here was Brill in living black and white and there was no doubt about it. I flipped through the pictures and picked out a composite shot, half a dozen head-and-shoulders pics arranged to show various facial expressions and attitudes. I knew it wouldn’t be missed-mostly likely the whole file wouldn’t have been missed, and possibly the entire filing cabinet that contained it-and I folded it twice and put it in a pocket.
Martin’s desk wasn’t locked. I went through it quickly, mechanically, without finding anything to tell me much about Wesley Brill. I did come upon a mostly-full pint of blended whiskey in the bottom drawer and an unopened half-pint of Old Mr. Boston mint-flavored gin snuggled up next to it. Both of these were infinitely resistible. In the wide center drawer I found an envelope with some cash in it, eighty-five dollars in fives and tens. I took a five and two tens to cover expenses, put the rest back, closed the drawer, then changed my mind and opened it again and scooped up the rest of the money, leaving the empty envelope in the drawer. Now if I left any evidence of my presence, if the clutter I left behind struck him as different from the clutter he’d left there himself, he’d simply think it was the work of some hot-prowl artist who’d made off with his mad money.
(Then why was I disguising my presence in every other respect? Ah, you’ve spotted an inconsistency, haven’t you? All right, I’ll tell you why I took the eighty-five bucks. I’ve never believed in overlooking cash. That’s why.)
But I was careful to overlook what I found in the top left-hand drawer. It was a tiny little revolver with a two-inch barrel and pearlized grips, and tiny or not it looked very menacing. I leaned into the drawer to sniff intelligently at the barrel the way they’re always doing on television. Then they state whether or not the gun’s been fired recently. All I could state was that I smelled metal and mineral oil and what you usually smell in a musty desk drawer, a drawer which I was now very happy to close once I got my nose out of it.
Guns make me nervous, and you’d be surprised how many times a burglar will run across one. I only once had one pointed at me and that was one I’ve mentioned, the gun of good old Carter Sandoval, but I’ve found them in drawers and on night tables and, more than once, tucked beneath a pillow. People buy the hateful things to shoot burglars with, or at least that’s what they tell themselves, and then they wind up shooting themselves or each other accidentally or on purpose.
A lot of burglars steal guns automatically, either because they have a use for them or because it’s a cinch to get fifty or a hundred dollars for a nice un-traceable handgun. And I knew one fellow who specialized in suburban homes who always took guns with him so that the next burglar to hit that place wouldn’t be risking a bullet. He took every gun he encountered and always dropped them down the nearest sewer. “We have to look out for each other,” he told me.
I’ve never stolen a gun and I didn’t even contemplate stealing Martin’s. I don’t even like to touch the damned things and I closed the drawer without touching this one.
At nine fifty-seven I let myself out of the office. The corridor was empty. Faint strains of Mozart wafted my way from the Notions Unlimited office. I wasted a minute relocking the door, though I could have let him figure he’d forgotten to lock up. Anybody with Peter Alan Martin’s taste in booze probably greeted the dawn with a fairly spotty memory of the previous day.