The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,77

of money and they’d be getting it in cash. But suppose they kept the McGuffin somewhere else?”

“Then the perps got it. They tortured Lyle an’ Schnittke until they handed it over, an’—”

“Did you find evidence of torture?”

“No, just a couple of bullets in their heads.”

“That may have hurt,” I said, “but it wouldn’t have made them talk.”

“Then they talked without bein’ tortured, or the perps found the stuff on their own, and you know how I know that? Because if it was there an’ they missed it, then we would have found it.”

“I know they didn’t find it, Ray. Otherwise they wouldn’t have looked for it in my apartment.”

He sighed. “It was us tossed your place, Bernie. We had a court order, it was all opened up aboveboard.”

I told him about the second search, and when he protested that I hadn’t reported it, I told him about Edgar the Doorman and the INS.

He looked hurt. “We wouldn’t rat a guy out to those assholes,” he said. “Half the guys on the force are Irish, an’ half of them got a relative with a fishy Green Card or none at all. All the same, I can see why he’d be worried. But I have to say you’re right. Same MO with the doorman means the same bunch of mopes, and if they found it they’d quit lookin’. So you know what I think? I think it wasn’t there in the first place.”

“Because the murder scene was searched by trained police investigators.”

“Right.”

“What were you looking for, Ray? And where did you look for it?”

“I can answer the second part. We looked high and low, searched the place top to bottom. What were we lookin’ for? We’da known if we found it.”

“I’m a trained burglar,” I said, “and I know more places to hide things than you do, and more places to look for them. And I even have a sort of an idea what I’m looking for.”

“An’ you want me to sneak you in there. Against all rules, in a case that ain’t my case anymore.”

“Right.”

“Get me two more of those crullers,” he said. “With the chocolate on ’em, an’ the jimmies.” I went and fetched them, and he ate them without a word. Then he drank down the rest of his coffee and got to his feet.

“Well, what the hell,” he said.

There were things I wanted to look at before I started hunting the McGuffin. First was the lock on the door to the Lyles’ apartment. You can pick a lock without leaving traces, if you’re careful not to scratch the face of the cylinder. But the cruder forms of entry all tend to involve gouges of some sort or other, and I couldn’t see any, or any scratches, either. It looked to me as though the Lyles had let their killers in.

Ray had badged his way past the doorman, picking up a set of keys in the process, and the two of us had pulled down all the yellow CRIME SCENE tape from the door, and I balled it up and pocketed it for disposal later, far from the scene of the crime. After I’d studied the lock, he opened it with the key, and in we went.

The forensics team had long since come and gone, but it was still hard to resist an impulse to mince around on tiptoe. I did pull on a pair of Pliofilm gloves, which got a raised eyebrow from Ray, but I couldn’t see any reason to leave a print behind, and several reasons not to.

“The Lyles let them in,” I’d told Ray before we entered, and after a close examination I said as much for the safe. “Either Lyle opened it for them, or he told them the combination and let them do it themselves. But nobody blew it or peeled it, and I don’t think there are fifteen people in America who could open it without force and violence.”

“Fifteen, huh? You an’ fourteen others?”

“It wouldn’t be easy. The thing is, if they were good enough to get through this safe, they wouldn’t have kicked my door in. I had a good lock on there, but it would have been child’s play compared to this baby.”

It wasn’t locked, so I didn’t have to show off. I opened the thing, and it was as empty as he’d said it was.

“If it was like this when Lyle opened it for ’em,” he said, “an’ if they looked all over an’ still didn’t find it, why