“Divide it up into cubes.”
“Cubes?”
“Sure. It would be squares, except squares are only two dimensions, and rooms are three dimensions. Then you search a square at a time. Search the whole square. Don’t look for the object; search the cube. If the object is there, you’ll find it. If not, move on to the next cube.”
“That makes sense.”
“How about that? Now find the earring while I finish my beer and look for investment opportunities,” Graham said. He returned to his stool and perused the point spreads.
Neal found it in the fifth cube, beneath the radiator.
He held the earring up in triumph.
Graham nodded. “The cube system is good, of course, when you are looking for some specific object, but it’s even better when you are just searching for something.”
“What do you mean?”
Graham sighed in mock exasperation. “Sometimes, Neal, you’re sent into an apartment, or an office, or a house just to see if there’s anything peculiar, out of the ordinary; with the cube system, you’re unlikely to miss anything, like maybe a twelve-inch mahogany dildo carved like Mount Rushmore or something.”
“Because you’re just looking, not looking for something, and therefore you’re not narrowing your vision with preconceptions.”
“If you say so, son. We’ll pick this up next week. Now get out so I can watch Ohio State massacre Wisconsin in peace.”
“We’re done?” Neal asked, visions of Carol Metzger dancing in his head.
“For today.”
Neal scrambled for the door.
“Neal!”
Neal stopped in the doorway. He knew it was too good to be true. Graham was probably going to send him out to look for something, like a gum wrapper he had initialed and left in Times Square.
“Yeah?”
“You got money for the movie?”
How did he know? “Yeah…”
Graham extended a ten-dollar bill. “You’ll want to take her somewhere decent afterward, get a bite to eat.”
Neal shook his head. “Thanks, Graham, but I don’t want-”
“Take it. You’re a working man; you deserve a little walking-around money. Take her someplace they have napkins.”
Neal took the money. “Thanks, Graham.”
“Get out; I wanna see the pregame show.”
Neal split. Graham went back to his paper, but his mind was more on Eileen O’Malley, who had been sixteen when he was sixteen, and who had blue eyes that could stop your heart.
10
“You give good search, Neal,” Joe Graham said one Saturday morning during one of their weekly training sessions.
“Thanks.”
“You read a room really very well.” This was true. Neal had just finished searching Graham’s apartment for an M amp;M, a brown one, the regular kind, not the peanut. He had found it in less than ten minutes, taped in the water tank of the toilet.
“But,” Graham said as Neal winced, “Helen Keller could come in here, know the place was tossed.”
“Isn’t she dead?”
“Doesn’t matter. She could still tell.” This week, Neal actually had a Saturday-night date, a real date, with Carol Metzger, so he was in a particular hurry. Nevertheless, he was annoyed that Graham was never happy. What did he want?
“Go search my top drawer.”
That’s what he wanted.
Neal went to the drawer and visually divided it into cubes. He lifted up the plastic tray full of change, saw nothing very interesting, and was about to set it down when Graham told him to freeze.
“Look at the way you picked it up,” Graham said. He waited for an answer.
Neal didn’t have one. He had just picked the damn thing up, that’s all. He shrugged.
Graham continued, “You picked it up diagonally, at an angle.”
“I should be shot.” What the hell difference did it make?
“You have to lift this straight up. Straight. Why?”
“Oh yeah, so you can set it down in exactly the same place.”
“You’re not as stupid as you look. Of course, that would be impossible. Now practice.”
“Practice?”
“It’s not as easy as it seems, lifting things straight up, setting them down. I’m going to practice on a cold bottle of Knickerbocker.”
So Neal spent an hour and a half lifting things up and setting them down, and it wasn’t as easy as it seemed. He found the best technique was to stand at a little less than arm’s reach, with his elbow slightly bent and wrist cocked downward.
“What about fingerprints?” he asked Graham. Have you ever thought of that, wise guy?
“Yeah, well, if you’re tossing an FBI agent, you might want to bring gloves along, but if you do it right, your average homeowner isn’t gonna know you’ve been there, never mind think about fingerprints.”
The next thing they worked on were window treatments. “That’s what interior decorators call curtains and Venetian blinds and that stuff,” Graham said.
“What do you know about interior decorators?”
“There’s one lives in this building whose interior I’d like to decorate.”
“God.”
“So look behind the curtain there.”
“I looked already.”
“Yeah, you looked bad, now I want you to look good.”
Neal reached for the curtain.
“Stop.”
“I haven’t even touched it!”
“You were about to pull it back. Don’t pull it back, pull it out, and no smart remarks.”
Neal pulled the curtain out.
“Now let go of it.”
Neal did.
“And?” Graham asked.
“And it fell back in the same place.”
“Doesn’t matter so much if it’s a guy’s place, but women notice these things. Woman comes home and there’s a corpse lying on the floor; she calls the cops and says, There’s a body lying in a pool of blood over by the curtain, which is out of place.’ Now raise the blinds.”
“You’re going to stop me before I touch the cord, aren’t you?”
“Yes. First lick your finger.”
“Then do I spin around three times and say, There’s no place like home’?”
Graham made a lewd gesture. “Spin on this,” he said. “But first lick your finger, then-”
“Which-”
“Any finger. Just do it. Now… using the spittle-”
“Spittle?”
“Mark the windowsill and match it up with the bottom edge of one of the thingies on the blinds.”
Neal did, raised the blinds, and then lowered them to the exact spot.
“And you thought your Uncle Joey was crazy.”
“Same thing with windows up and down, right?”
“Bright boy.”
Neal went to the fridge and grabbed a Coke. “So probably the next thing you’re going to show me is how to do closet doors, medicine cabinets, that sort of thing?”
“I’m looking at you with new respect, Neal. Now usually this is the stuff that only professionals, women, and advanced paranoids notice, but there’s no harm in being careful, right?”
“I like careful.”
So they went to work on the closet door in Graham’s bedroom. First came a lecture from Graham, which Neal didn’t mind, as it gave him a chance to sit down and finish his Coke. Graham told him that if the closet was shut, it was no issue. But sometimes suspicious people will leave a closet door ajar deliberately, and then you had to be careful to leave it exactly the same way. There were two good ways to accomplish this.
“You can mark the opening along the side of your shoe, or you can do what the subject probably did, which is to line the edge of the door up with something else in the room, usually something on the wall, and usually something very obvious.
“Hinged doors like this one are trickier than sliding doors. Why?”
“Because you have to check both the inside and outside edges of the door against possible marks on the wall, and also because it’s harder to match the exact perspective that the subject used to make the mark.”
“You’re sharp today. This is why I prefer to make measurement from the doorsill to the door, because there’s no perspective to worry about. If it’s two inches, it’s two inches, as you know from bitter personal experience.”