The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,112
from Internal Revenue, and I have here a court order authorizing my partner and I—”
My partner and me, I thought, you federal dimwit.
“—to search said Devonshire Close premises. Sir, I’d like you to escort us upstairs and open the safe for us.”
Mapes had weathered everything up to this point. Now it was as if the hand of fate had come at him with a scalpel and savaged all the fine work some colleague had done for him. He aged ten years just like that, and his color faded even as the perspiration poured out of him.
He was sputtering, something about an attorney, and the IRS man told him he could get one later, but in the meantime they were damn well going to have a look at that safe. Wally Hemphill scanned the piece of paper and told Mapes yes, they had the authority, and there was nothing he could do but keep his mouth shut.
“The rest of you wait down here,” the other IRS agent said.
And off they went.
Forty
They weren’t gone long, and when they came back, well, as Carolyn has been known to say, the worm was on the other foot. The IRS robots looked thoroughly disgruntled, so much so that it was hard to believe they had ever been gruntled to begin with, while Mapes had somehow reclaimed the face someone had constructed for him.
“Well, I told you,” he said. “And now you can tell the rest of these ladies and gentlemen. Was there any money in that safe?”
They glared at him.
“I’ll take that as a no,” he said. “Insurance policies, stock certificates. A few pieces of jewelry, none of them terribly costly, and all of them purchased for my wife with after-tax dollars. That’s what you found, and what I’d said you would find. But you found not a drop of this mysterious cash.”
“Don’t think you’re getting off that easy,” one of them said. “You can expect to be audited for the rest of your life.”
Mapes drew himself up to his full height and glared down at them. “That’s enough,” he said. “You’ve exercised your warrant and exhausted my patience. I want you to leave.”
And I guess they didn’t care about the missing photos, or who killed Valdi Berzins, or any of the rest of it. If the cash was gone, so were they, and that was the last we saw of them.
By walking upstairs and coming down five minutes later and a quarter of a million dollars poorer, Mapes had suddenly blossomed as a folk hero, a little man who had taken a stand against the machine. Michael Quattrone was telling him that the Feds pulled shit like that all the time, and that he could recommend a lawyer who would run rings around them. Wally Hemphill told him there was a limit to how much they could harass a person, and they might have crossed it; he told Mapes he should talk to Quattrone’s lawyer.
I wasn’t much surprised that the safe in the bedroom was empty—after all, as you’ll recall, I was the one who had emptied it. But what relieved me enormously was the extent to which Mapes was relieved. He was so happy to be off the federal hook that he hadn’t yet had a chance to wonder where his money had gone. That meant this was the first time he’d opened the safe since my visit, and that meant the rest of the plan had a chance of working.
First, though, he tried to throw us out. “I want to thank you all,” he said, “for your support just now. But I don’t need to keep you any longer. I think you should go.”
“Oh, I dunno about that,” Ray said. “Seems like we’re just gettin’ warmed up.”
“I’ll admit I’m growing interested myself,” Michael Quattrone said. “I think our friend here should continue.”
I was glad to hear I was his friend, and by implication everybody else’s. I’d taken a seat, but I got up now and faced them. “Getting back to you,” I said to Colby Riddle, who looked as though he’d hoped I would have forgotten him in all the excitement. “Mapes called you. He mentioned money, whether there’s any in the safe right now or not. And he mentioned me, because he’d read the same newspaper stories as everybody else. You were a scholar, a book person. I owned a bookstore not far from where you taughtology, and—”