similar instrument, and I didn’t have one on hand. I tried to get in without it and kept coming teasingly close, which in turn kept me trying. It finally dawned on me that I was spending far too much time in plain sight on a fire escape, whereupon I used the glass cutter on my tool ring and cut out one of the window’s little panes. I reached in, turned the latch, and let myself in.
I was in there for hours. It was stuffy at first, but I opened a window in the front room, and the pane I’d removed in the rear provided good cross-ventilation. It didn’t take me long to find the spot where Cappy Hoberman had lain bleeding. They hadn’t outlined the body in tape or chalk. They don’t do that anymore, preferring to have the crime scene photographer expose a few rolls of film before they move the body. But they hadn’t done anything about the blood, either, and a lot of it had soaked into the carpet.
I stood there and looked at it. He’d died on the Aubusson, and his blood hadn’t done a lot for the rug’s appearance. Even if you assumed that Candlemas had bought the rug from someone other than its rightful owner, he must have paid a good sum for it. It looked terrible now, but somebody someday would be able to get the stains out. They’ve got all sorts of chemicals and enzymes available, and nowadays they can get blood out of anything, even a turnip.
But they couldn’t pump it back into Hoberman.
I walked around the apartment, running alternate scenarios through my mind. Hoberman gives Charlie Weeks the bone carving of the mouse, cuts his visit short, and returns to this apartment. By cab, natch, since he didn’t have me along to urge him to walk. Something he says or does moves Candlemas to kill him. Candlemas grabs something sharp—this letter opener, say, or one of these Sabatier knives from the kitchen, or some other implement even better suited to dispatching a visitor. Candlemas strikes, Hoberman crumples and falls, and Candlemas slips out and legs it over to Second Avenue, looking to buy Hefty bags and a Skilsaw.
Then what?
Earlier, Weeks and I had spun out a theory in which Candlemas got home, found the cops on the scene, muttered, “Curses, foiled again!” and stole off into the night. But his own death put a different light on things. When he left Hoberman bleeding, he evidently encountered someone. Maybe he went to the wrong person for help, or maybe someone was lying doggo, waiting for him.
Maybe it was that person who made the 911 call that sent the cops to Seventy-sixth Street. In any case, the cops came. Hoberman, the way I figured it, was still breathing when Candlemas took a powder. His wounds were mortal, and he was alive but not lively, probably inert and unconscious. Somewhere along the way he rallied and wrote six unfathomable letters on my heretofore blameless attaché case, using his own life’s blood for ink. Then, perhaps even as the Keystone Kops were sending out for a locksmith, the valiant captain breathed his last.
It was probably around that time, too, that I was downstairs myself, wondering what had happened to Candlemas and considering a little illegal entry of my own. Even loopy with Ludomir, I’d been able to spot that for a bad idea. A good thing, too, considering what I would have walked in on. I could have saved the city the price of a locksmith’s house call, but I’d have had a lot of explaining to do, and my task wouldn’t have gotten all that much easier when the attaché case turned out to be mine.
The new scenario was pretty reasonable, I decided, and a substantial improvement over the one Charlie Weeks and I had hatched the previous morning. It made the mysterious telephone call to the police a little less inexplicable, and fit the dying message into a logical time frame.
But it didn’t do a whole lot to decode it.
C-A-P-H-O-B. What the hell could it mean?
I thought about it as I ambled to and fro, opening drawers and rummaging around in them, exploring closets, looking inside and beneath and behind this and that and the other thing. I was glad to have something to ponder, because this was the worst way to search a place.
The best way is when you know what you’re looking for and where it is. You go in,