The Burglar on the Prowl - By Lawrence Block Page 0,78
the head shots? I can see doin’ one of ’em, to show the other one you’re serious, but why cap ’em both?”
“Head shots,” I said.
“That can’t be news to you, Bernie. I told you, an’ even if I didn’t you’da got it from TV or the papers. They were both shot in the head, and with the same gun. And no, before you ask, it wasn’t the same gun as killed Berzins. That was a Lindbauer TDK on full auto. Lyle and the lady were shot with a .22 caliber pistol.”
“Your crew searched the place.”
“I told you that.”
“But neatly,” I said, looking around. “You put things back where you found them.”
“It’s a crime scene, Bernie. You don’t touch it until the forensics guys are done, an’ then you do what you have to do an’ put everything back where you found it.”
“That’s what you did at my place,” I said. “But it’s not what they did.”
“They made a mess? Yeah, you said they did.”
“But they didn’t make a mess here. Aside from a pair of dead bodies in the living room, I’d say they left the place pretty much as they found it. Which means they didn’t search it, and what does that tell you?”
“That they got the damn thing outta the safe, just like I told you right from the beginning.”
“But I already explained why they couldn’t have. So that leaves another possibility, and it’s the only one I can think of.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“They got something,” I said, “and they thought it was the McGuffin, and at that stage they had no reason to leave the Lyles breathing.”
“Bang bang.”
“And away they went, and it wasn’t until hours later that they found out they didn’t have what they wanted. Because it’s still here.”
He took his time thinking it over. “Okay,” he said at length. “I can’t find the holes in that, so all you gotta do is prove the pudding. If it’s here, show it to me.”
Twenty minutes later, we stood looking down at four photos which I’d laid out on the dining room table. They were color prints, four inches by five inches, and looked to have been taken by the same camera. All four were framed with Scotch tape that held them to pages recently torn from a book. If you looked closely, you could see another thickness of tape, half as wide, which suggested that they’d been mounted somewhere else, then cut loose and mounted anew. The book from which they’d been most recently removed was QB VII, by Leon Uris. I’d read the book years ago and remembered it fondly, and it had bothered me to rip out the pages, especially with the author having died not long ago. But it was a book club edition and its dust jacket was missing, so it could have been worse. I’d put it on the table next to the photos, where it sat looking deceptively intact.
The photographs showed two faces, full-face and profile. Both faces, stern and expressionless, were those of middle-aged white men, and they filled the photos; if anything of either man existed below the chin, you couldn’t have told from these pictures. Madame Defarge might have just plucked them from the basket at the base of the guillotine.
“There,” I said, triumphantly. “Head shots.”
Twenty-Eight
I give up, Bern. Who the hell are these guys?”
“That’s what Ray wanted to know,” I said. “He also wanted to hang on to the photos, but I pointed out they might be evidence someday, so he couldn’t just come up with them. He had to find them somewhere, in the right time and the right place, when finding them was something he was legally authorized to do. This way, I said, he had plausible deniability. I think he liked the sound of it.”
“I don’t blame him. I like the sound of it myself. You got any idea who these bozos are? Because I wouldn’t know where to start guessing. You look at them and at first glance they look like brothers, or maybe cousins, and then you look again and see how different they are. The noses are different, the mouths are completely different, this one’s jowly, this one’s got a higher forehead, the other’s got a scar, they’re different around the eyes—you know, when you add it all up, they’re barely members of the same species, but there’s a similarity about them, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Same pose, for one thing. Same expression, or lack of expression.”