out of here. And Loren was unhappy about missing out on all this, so let’s give him a chance to see what’s in the box. I already have a pretty good idea what we’ll find.”
“And you think it’ll get you off the hook?”
“It’ll get me off,” I said, “and it’ll get somebody else on.”
We gave the place a lightning once-over to make sure we’d left everything more or less as we’d found it. The internal damage I’d done to the beautiful old desk didn’t show, and the bookshelves looked quite undisturbed. Outside, Kirschmann affixed a seal to the door, noted date and time and added his signature. Then he gave me a deliberate smile and used the key to turn the deadbolt.
And, as the lock turned, the last piece fitted into place for me.
Chapter
Sixteen
By the time we got back to Darla Sandoval’s little love nest, Loren Kramer was a nervous wreck. I let us in with my key and when we came through the door Loren was behind it. Since we hadn’t thought he might have chosen that spot for himself, we inadvertently hit him with the door. When he groaned Ray yanked the door forward and stared unhappily at his partner. “I don’t believe this,” he said. “I thought I told you to stay on the couch.”
“I didn’t know it was you, Ray.”
“Hiding behind doors. Jesus.”
“I got nervous, that’s all. You were gone a long time and I started worrying about it.”
“Well, Bernie here had to look for a box that wasn’t there. It was sort of fun to watch him. He took a desk apart and everything. Then the box he was looking for turned up on a bookshelf. That’s it right there. It was pretendin’ to be a book.”
“The Purloined Letter,” Loren said.
“Huh?”
“Edgar Allan Poe,” I said. “A short story. But that’s not exactly right, Loren. Now if you were to hide a book on a bookshelf, that would be like the story. Except this was a box that was disguised as a book.”
“It sounds like pretty much the same thing to me,” Loren said. He sounded sulky about it.
While we puzzled over all of this, Ray went to the kitchen and made himself a drink. He came back, took a large swallow of it, and suggested that it was time to open the box.
“And time I had my gun back,” Loren said. “And my stick and my badge and my cuffs and my cap, the whole works. Nothing against you, Bernie, but it bothers me seeing them on someone who’s not really a cop.”
“That’s understandable, Loren.”
“Plus I don’t feel dressed without them. The gun, we even have to carry them off-duty, you know. When you think of all the holdups foiled by off-duty patrolmen you understand the reason behind the regulation.”
What I mostly thought of was all the off-duty cops who tended to shoot one another in the course of serious discussions of the relative merits of the Knicks and the Nets, but I decided not to raise this point. I didn’t think it would go over too well.
“The box,” Ray said.
“Couldn’t I get my stuff back and then he opens the box?”
“Jesus,” Ray said.
I hefted the box in my hands. “Surprisingly enough,” I said, “this box isn’t all that important.”
Ray stared at me. “It was worth ten thousand dollars to you, Bernie. That sounds pretty important. And it’s supposed to get you off a murder charge, though I’ll be damned if I see how it’s gonna do that. For the sake of argument I’ll buy that you didn’t kill Flaxford. But I don’t see you comin’ up with a dime’s worth of proof in that direction, let alone ten grand’s worth.”
“It must look that way,” I admitted.
“Unless the proof’s in the box.”
“The box was a personal matter,” I said. “Call it a favor for a friend. The important thing was for me to get into the apartment, Ray. I didn’t even realize it at the time, in fact I actually thought that the box was the important thing, but just being in the apartment told me what I wanted to know.”
“I don’t get it,” Loren said. He looked as though he expected a trick, as though when I opened the blue box I’d be likely to extract a white rabbit. “What did you find in the apartment, Bernie?”
“For openers, the door wasn’t locked completely. The deadbolt wasn’t on.”
“Oh, Jesus,” Ray said. “I told you some cop just shut the door and didn’t bother locking it.