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“So?”
“So the last person out didn’t bother locking it with the key. He just closed it on his way out.”
“What’s it matter? Maybe his partner’s got the key and he’s halfway to the elevator so he doesn’t bother. Maybe he never thinks to lock it with the key. A lot of people always leave their doors like that. They never take the trouble to use the whatchamacallit, the deadbolt.”
“I know. They make my life a lot easier.”
“So here we got somebody who it’s not his apartment in the first place and he’s go
“Right,” I said. I poked at my memory, trying to catch something small and quick that kept darting around corners. “I put the deadbolt on,” I said.
“How’s that?”
“Once I was inside. I closed the door and I turned this gizmo here, this knob. That’s how you engage the deadbolt from inside the apartment.”
“So?”
“And when you and Loren got here with the key from the doorman, you had to turn it around a full turn to undo the bolt and then another half turn to draw back the spring lock.”
“If you say so,” Ray said. He was a little impatient now. “If that’s what you say I’ll take your word for it, Bernie, because I frankly don’t make a point of noticing how many times I turn a key in a lock, especially when I don’t know what the fuck’s on the other side of the door, which I didn’t at the time. None of this makes the slightest fucking difference and I don’t know what the hell you’re rattling on about. I thought you wanted to get into this place, but if all you want is to stand outside talking about bolts like a nut-”
“You’re absolutely right,” I said. I came all the way inside and closed the door behind me. And turned the bolt.
The apartment didn’t look different from when I’d seen it last. If the wrecking crew at my apartment had been Michael Debus’s responsibility, he’d clearly assigned a gentler crowd altogether to the task of searching J. Francis Flaxford’s digs. Of course the search of my place had been unauthorized and unrecorded while the visit here had been made with official permission and was duly noted in some official log. So Flaxford’s books remained on Flaxford’s shelves and Flaxford’s clothes remained in Flaxford’s closets and drawers. No one had slashed open his furniture or taken up his rugs or cast pictures down from his walls.
All of this seemed wildly unfair. Flaxford, who had gone to whatever reward awaits fixers and blackmailers, would never wear these clothes or read these books or inhabit this apartment again, yet everything was shipshape for him. I, on the other hand, had a use for the contents of my apartment. And I had been sorely mistreated.
I tried to put this inequity out of my mind and concentrate instead on searching the place. I began in the bedroom, where chalkmarks on the oriental rug (I’ve no idea what kind) indicated the position of the body. He had been lying just to the left of the foot of his bed, his outspread feet reaching toward the doorway. There were dark brown stains on the carpet where his head had been outlined and similar stains on the unmade bed.
I said, “Blood?” Ray nodded. “You always think of blood as red,” I said.
“Brown when it dries, though.”
“Uh-huh. He must have flopped on the bed when he was hit. And slid down onto the floor.”
“Figures.”
“The paper said he was killed with an ashtray. Where is it?”
“I thought it was a lamp. You sure it was an ashtray?”
“The paper said.”
“A lot they know. Whatever it was, somebody musta tagged it and took it the hell outta here. Murder weapon, you don’t go and leave something like that behind. It gets tagged and run through the lab sixteen different ways and photographed a couple hundred times and then locked up somewhere.” He cleared his throat. “Even if something like that was here, Bernie, there’s no way I could let you do nothin’ about it. No tamperin’ with evidence.”
“I just wondered what happened to it.”
“Just so you understand.”
I brushed past him and moved around the bed to where an oil painting of a ramshackle barn hung in a heavy gilded frame. I realized that if there was a wall safe in the place fifteen people had already gone through it since the murder, but I moved the picture anyway and the only thing behind it was a wall.
I said, “Fu
“What cash? He owned property and he was in the theater, Bernie. Where does cash come into it? The only thing is the theater receipts and nobody brings those home nowadays. They go straight into the bank’s night depository. Plus the little theaters he messed around with, how much money’d be involved in the first place?”
I thought, Why bother going into it? But all the same I said, “He was mixed up with a lot of characters. I think he operated as some kind of bagman or fixer. I know he was tied into some political heavies, but whether he just free-lanced for them I can’t be sure. Plus he screwed around with blackmail and extortion.”
“I thought you didn’t know him?”
“I didn’t.”
“Then where do you get off knowing all this?”
“The Shadow knows,” I said. “The Department must know something about it, too, as far as that goes. Didn’t you hear anything about Flaxford’s secret life?”
“Not a word. But I don’t guess anybody looked to find out. Seein’ we knew who killed him and we got an airtight case, why futz around with details? What’s the percentage?”
“Airtight,” I said hollowly.
“Bernie, if you want to tell me what we’re looking for-”
“We are not looking for anything I am looking for something.”
“Yeah, but what?”
“I’ll know it when I see it.”
“Suppose I see it?”
I made my way past him again, stepping gingerly over the chalkmarks as if the body itself were still there, an ectoplasmic presence hovering just above the carpet. I walked down the hallway, stopping to check out the bathroom. It was large in proportion to the rest of the apartment, suggesting the building had been divided into smaller rental units somewhere along the line. There was a massive claw-footed tub, an antique survivor that contrasted with the modern sink and toilet. I ran water in the sink, gave the toilet a flush, turned to see Ray looking at me with his eyebrows raised.
“Just remembering,” I said. “If Loren hadn’t taken a wrong turn after he flushed the toilet we’d have all been on our way.”
“It’s a fact. Who knows when somebody’d have finally discovered the poor sonofabitch?”
“Not for days, maybe.”
“You’da been clear, Bernie. Even if we make the co
“But Loren walked right in on him.”
I stood for a moment in the bathroom doorway, turned toward the bedroom, then turned again and went back to the living room. I could check Flaxford’s closet for false backs and bottoms but that just didn’t seem like his style.
The desk.
I went over and stood next to it, started tapping it here and there. Darla Sandoval had seen him take the blue box from this desk and put it back in the desk when he was done showing its contents to her. And the desk had still been locked after Flaxford lay dead in his bedroom. I’d been through it once but those old fossils were loaded with secret compartments, drawers lurking behind drawers, pigeonholes in back of pigeonholes. The desk was where I’d been told to look in the very begi