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I got out my ring of burglar tools. “Sit down,” I told Ray. “This may take a while.”
It took close to an hour. I removed each drawer in turn, checked behind them, turned them upside down and very nearly inside out. I rolled up the rolltop and probed within and I found more secret compartments than you could advertise on the back of a cereal box. Most of them were empty, but one held a collection of raunchy Victorian pornography which had evidently been secreted there by a raunchy Victorian. I passed the half-dozen booklets to Ray, who’d complained earlier that Flaxford’s shelves contained nothing more salacious than Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic in two leather-bound volumes.
“This is better,” he reported. “But I wish to hell they could write it in plain English. By the time you figure out exactly what the guy’s doing to the broad you could lose interest.”
I went on performing exploratory surgery on the desk. Now and then I removed an interior panel knowing I’d never be able to put it back later, and I felt sorry about this, but not sorry enough to cry about it. Eventually I realized that, however more secret compartments the desk might contain, Flaxford wouldn’t have used any of them for the blue box. It would have taken him too long to put it away and get it out again.
I stepped back and looked down at the desk and wanted to wash my hands of the whole damned thing. The thought of washing my hands made me think of ru
And turned left instead of right, tracing Loren’s route into the bedroom. I went over to the closet and went through it very quickly, knowing I’d find nothing but clothes, and that was all I did find.
I was on my way out of the room when I happened to see it out of the corner of my eye, just a little scrap of something that had wedged itself between the bedpost and the wall.
I got down on one knee and examined it. I took a very careful look and I did some thinking, and it all fit with some thoughts I’d already had. I got up and left it where it was and went back to the living room.
I was sliding the final drawer back into the desk when Ray said, “What in the hell does gama-houche mean?”
I made him spell it, then took the book away from him and looked for myself. “I think it means to go down on a girl,” I said.
“That’s what I figured. Why the fuck can’t they just say that?”
“Other times, other customs.”
“Shit.”
I left him squinting at antique filth and did some pacing, then dropped into the green wing chair where I’d planted myself before tackling the desk in the first place. I swung my feet onto the hassock, took a deep breath, and again tried to put myself into the mood of the apartment. Your name is J. Francis Flaxford, I told myself, and you’re sitting here comfortably in your bathrobe, except it’s such a nice one you call it a dressing gown. You’re supposed to be at the theater but you’re hanging around with a drink at your elbow and a book in your lap and a cigar in your mouth and…
“That’s weird,” I said.
“What is?”
“They must have taken both ashtrays.”
“Huh?”
“There used to be a heavy cut-glass ashtray on this table.”
“They found it in the bedroom. The one he was killed with, I told you they’d take that along and lock it up.”
“No, there was a second ashtray,” I said. “It was on this table here. I suppose it was a mate to the murder weapon. Why would they take both ashtrays?”
“Who knows?”
“Just super-efficient.”
“Bernie, we’re ru
“I know.”
“And you didn’t find what you were lookin’ for.”
“I found something.”
“In the desk?”
“In the bedroom.”
“What?” I hesitated and he didn’t press. “Not what you’re lookin’ for, anyway. What are you lookin’ for? Maybe I seen it myself.”
“It’s not very likely.”
“You never know.”
“A blue box,” I said. “A blue leather-covered box.”
“How big?”
“Jesus,” I said. “Either you saw it or you didn’t, Ray. What’s the difference how big it is?”
“You say a box, hell, it could be the size of a pack of cigarettes or the size of a steamer trunk.”
“About so big,” I said, moving my hands in the air. “About the size of a book.” I remembered Darla’s words. “The size of a hard-cover novel. Or maybe as large as a dictionary. Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m an idiot,” I said. “Aside from that, nothing’s wrong.”
It took perhaps three minutes to find it, another five minutes to establish that all the other leather-bound volumes were what they purported to be. Flaxford’s blue leather-covered box was nothing but a dummy book, a neat wooden lockbox that had been passing itself off as Darwin ’s Origin of Species. When it was open it wouldn’t have looked like a book at all, just like a rather elaborate box which one might keep on a dresser top as a repository for tie tacks and cuff links and that sort of thing. Closed and locked and tucked away on a lower shelf, it looked no different from all of the real books which surrounded it.
The goons who went through my apartment would have found the box. When they shook each book in turn they would have found one that didn’t flip open, and that would have been that. But Flaxford’s apartment never got that kind of a search.
“Aren’t you go
I glanced pointedly at Ray. I was in the green wing chair again and he was hovering beside me, gazing down over my shoulder. “You go back to your book,” I said, “and I’ll concentrate on mine.”
“I guess that’s right,” he said, returning to his own chair and book. I kept my eyes on him and saw him peek over his porn at me, then resume the charade of reading.
“Back in a minute,” I said. “Nature calls.”
I walked right on past the bathroom and into Flaxford’s bedroom, blue box in hand. Whether they look like books or not, those little home strongboxes are about as hard to get into as a stoned nymphomaniac. This one had a combination lock concealed behind a leather flap. You lined up the three ten-digit dials and you were home free. You pried the thing open with a chisel.
I wasn’t in quite that much of a hurry and I did want the box to look as though it hadn’t been opened, so I did a little poking and probing for a few seconds until the lock yielded. I had a look at everything that was in the box, then transferred all of it to my own person. My uniform had enough room in the pockets so that none of them wound up sporting an unseemly bulge.
When the box was properly empty I took hold of the bed and tugged it an inch or two away from the wall. The small rectangle that had caught my eye earlier was where I had left it, and it was a good deal more visible now that I had moved the bed. I used Loren’s nightstick to coax it out into the open, then took it ever so carefully between thumb and forefinger, holding it by its edges and placing it into the legendary blue box.
And closed the box, and locked it.
On my way back to the living room I encouraged history to repeat itself, giving the toilet a convincing flush. Ray looked up when I returned to where I’d left him. “Nervous stomach?”
“Guess so.”
“Nervous myself,” he said. “What say we get outta here?”