“Like what?”
“It had to be something I bought because he came here looking for it. And I didn’t buy much, so...” I broke off, thinking.
“What is it?”
“That box of glass slides. The stereopticon negatives? Did you look at them?”
“Just a glance. The tints are reversed so I couldn’t tell much.”
“Do you have a stereopticon viewer?”
“A couple of them, why?”
“I want you to go through that box of negatives carefully, to see exactly what they are. But don’t do it in your shop. Take them to a public place, let’s say the Hampton Mall cafeteria.”
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“I have to check something first. I’ll meet you there in an hour. But don’t dally at your shop. Get in and get out. Whoever searched it didn’t find what he was after. He might try again.”
After Karla left, I took the two stereopticon slides I’d put aside in my desk and held them up to the light.
There was nothing remarkable about them. They were duplicates of the same shot. A boy, ten or eleven, leaning over, lacing his shoes. And I realized what had bothered me about the picture earlier.
There was a radio on a coffee table in the background. A Deltrola, chrome front, naugahyde body. Very stylish, quite collectable.
But it didn’t belong there.
Stereopticons were popular in the late nineteenth century, for parlors, public slide shows. By World War I they were gone, replaced by the movies. Collectors prize the slides because they offer a clear view of the past, a window into the Victorian era.
But the radio in this shot dated from around nineteen fifty. So what was it doing in a stereopticon negative?
Obviously Jerome Potter had taken these photographs using an antique camera. But why?
And why make two negatives of the same shot... but they weren’t exactly the same. The angle was slightly different. And that was the answer. 3-D. The pictures were three dimensional.
I made a call to Mamie Szmanski to ask about the View-Master reels I sent her. And got a major chewing out. She used language I’ve never heard outside a locker room.
Afterward I sat at my desk, thinking, as the afternoon faded into dusk. I didn’t turn on the lights.
They came a little after seven. Didn’t bother to knock. I was half dozing when I heard a key in the lock. The door eased open and they slipped inside. Shadow figures in the dark. Flashlight beams flicked around the room. One flicked across my face. Then whipped back, locking onto me.
“Come on in. Why don’t you switch on the lights?”
The fluorescent lights flickered on overhead, bathing the shop in an icy glare.
There were two of them. Chief Tom Liske in civvies, blue windbreaker, faded jeans, carrying a weighted flashlight. And my father-in-law, Phil Barrett.
“Put your hands on the desk, Kenyon,” Chief Liske ordered, pulling a snub-nosed automatic from under his windbreaker. “Don’t even blink.” Crossing the room, he patted me down for weapons. Didn’t find any. Then backed away, the gun leveled at my midsection.
“My God, Tom, what are you doing?” Phil objected. “There’s no need for that.”
“You’ve stood up for this guy from the first and I’ve gone along,” Liske growled. “Not anymore. There’s too much at stake. We’re gonna have a conversation, Kenyon. And if I don’t like the way it goes, you’ll be in more trouble than you ever dreamed of. Clear?”
I nodded.
“Where’s the stuff you got from the Potter house?”
“Why do you want it?”
“Don’t play dumb, Kenyon. You know Trane was cooking meth in the garage. He may have concealed it in something you bought—”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No chance.”
“What do you mean, no!”
“You aren’t looking for methedrine, Chief. If you were, you’d have a dog with you. Any half-trained pooch can sniff that crap from across the street and we both know it. You’re after something else.”
“Like what?”
“Pictures. Pornography. Secret shots of little kids undressing. Pretty tame by today’s standards, but there’s a monster market for kiddie porn on the Internet. Especially if it’s three dimensional, like stereopticons or View-Masters. How did you spot it? On the Web?”
Liske was a pro, his face showed nothing. But the pain in Phil’s eyes told me more than I wanted to know.
“God,” he said softly. “I’m almost glad—”
“Shut your mouth, Phil,” Liske snapped. “He isn’t one of us.”
“No, I’m not,” I conceded. “I’m an outsider who blundered into this. And now two people are dead. I need to understand what’s happening.”
“Give you enough to bury us?” Liske snorted. “Not likely.”
“I don’t want to bury anybody, Chief. I’m having trouble enough just making it day to day. But I’m involved in this now. And so are you. I think I know part of it. Suppose I tell you what I think? You can fill in the blanks. Or not. Your choice.”
“I’m listening,” Liske said.
“All right. Jerome Potter was a pornographer and a pedophile. He was old money and social position meant a lot in those days so business was good. Parents were proud to have their kids’ pictures taken by a society photographer. But he was also sneaking pictures of the kids changing clothes. I’m guessing he got caught at some point. What happened?”
Warning Phil to silence with a look, Liske eyed me a moment, then shrugged. “Apparently taking pictures wasn’t enough for Jerome. He started groping boys. When their parents found out, they had a real problem. They couldn’t try Potter without putting a lot of children through hell, maybe marking them for life.”
“So they ran him off instead?”
“Exactly,” Phil said bitterly. “Jerome closed his studio and moved to Florida. Some years later he came back home to that old house and committed suicide. And good riddance!”
“The house stood empty for years,” Liske continued. “Then a few months ago, some photos showed up in my department’s Internet porn watch. I recognized some of the kids from years ago. Trane was squatting in the old Potter place. We figured he found a cache of Jerome’s old photographs and peddled them.”
“When he wasn’t cooking meth,” I added.
“Yeah, I knew about that,” Liske admitted. “Trane wasn’t too bright. You could smell his lab a block away. But I couldn’t bust him. If he had more pictures they’d be found and entered as evidence. It would dredge up the whole dirty business again, cause a lot of pain and embarrassment to innocent people.”
“So we decided to squeeze him out,” Phil said, the story coming out in a rush now. “The Downtown Development Authority bought the house, served him with eviction papers, and ordered an execution sale. We didn’t want trouble, we just wanted him to move on.”
“I thought we had things under control,” Liske continued. “We planned to buy up everything at the sale, force Trane out, then demolish the place once and for all.”
“But you found out Trane tried to beat the execution sale by unloading everything first. Then what? You torched the house?”
Phil and Liske exchanged a glance.
“We didn’t,” Liske conceded, “but there are others involved. Good men, family men, who have a lot to lose if those pictures become public. It’s possible someone panicked and started that fire. There’s no way to prove it now. Meth labs are high risk operations, you said so yourself. They blow up every damn day.”
“And the dead girl?”
“Was living on top of her brain-dead boyfriend’s meth operation. What happened was awful but it was an accident. No one meant her harm. She should have chosen her playmates better.”
I glanced at Phil but he avoided my eyes.
“And now?” I asked.
“Now? Now it’s over,” Liske said simply. “If you’ll let it be. We’ll buy any pictures that surface and I’ll bust the perverts who sell ’em. The DDA will build low income apartments on the Potter house site and in a few years nobody will remember it was ever there. We all move on. Any problem with that?”