Plastic Flexcuffs were another option. Use a gun to intimidate, make him get on his knees, restrain him, put the ties around his neck, start asking questions.
Strawberry Death probably had better tricks than that.
My tricks were limited by time, by who might be expecting Pennington’s office to be open. I quickly went through his desk drawers, the most interesting item being a nine-millimeter pistol in the top right-hand drawer, for all the good it did him. Or, if he really wished to kill himself, why not use that?
I did a quick study of his desk. The top was cleared of everything but a blotter and a telephone. Not even a laptop. In fact, there was no computer in the office, although there was a charging cord and a T1 cable. Strawberry Death took his laptop.
If it was her. Historians are warned against something called confirmation bias, where every piece of information backs up your existing hypothesis. It’s a big no-no. Pennington might have made many enemies. But she was the killer at-large whom I knew.
There was something else: besides the faint but growing odor of death from Pennington’s corpse, I detected traces of Chanel Number Five.
Coco Chanel had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II. She had hired a former perfumer to the Tsar to create the scent that would bear her name. Five was her lucky number. “Your mind is an amazing thing,” as Peralta told me.
That meant Pennington was connected to diamonds. Perhaps a fence.
The closet showed me a tantalizing file cabinet with combination locks on each of the four drawers. No time. I needed to be out of this office.
Still, I lingered.
“Well, I found him, what next?” I whispered.
Hearing nothing in the ether from Peralta, I played the best hunches I had in a dim room with a dead man. I studied the edges of the filing cabinets. It appeared as if they had been built into the closet itself. Only an inch of the heavy metal was sticking out of a black wooden frame.
I tapped on the drawers. They sounded empty. But diamonds weren’t likely to take up much space inside.
I spun the dials, pulled on the drawers, and nothing happened.
Four drawers.
I tried setting each dial to coincide with the last digits of Pennington’s birthday. Not one drawer opened. On each one, I ran his birthday as a four-segment combination. They stayed locked.
Being there was growing from foolhardy to insane to linger this long. But only the quiet kept me company.
Then I remembered the class ring and started setting the four combinations from the top town: one, nine, nine, five. I don’t know why I tried it, but when I slid the last dial over to five, the wall clicked and the file cabinets popped ever so slightly toward me.
Reaching around again, I pulled on the left side. It gave way and I was staring at the door to a safe. The safe had a digital keypad and an inset handle that looked as if you turned it, the result would be a missile launch. “Valberg,” a modern black-and-orange label said. The file cabinets were a false door.
Another ten minutes went by as I tried putting in different combinations. Each time, a small light went red and who knew what might have happened if I kept at it.
I closed the false door and it sealed with a soft but definitive sound. I spun the combination knobs around to random numbers.
When the phone rang it was a low, muted tone. But you might as well have attached jumper cables to my spinal cord, connected to a fully charged battery. I stared at the desk phone. The digital read-out glowed lagoon green. It said, UNKNOWN.
I approached it warily. Two rings. Three.
My hand touched the receiver.
Then I picked up.
“Pennington,” I said.
A long pause followed and I was instantly sorry I had answered.
Then a man’s voice said, “What’s wrong, Mister Pennington? You’re late. ”
“I was tied up.”
“Is everything in order?”
The voice was a medium timbre, speaking standard American English, no movie villain German, no cartel Spanish.
He didn’t know Pennington’s voice.
So far, so good.
Now the real gambling began.
“A woman tried to kill me.”
A long pause. Maybe I had made a bad move. I expected the line to go dead.
But he came back on. “Her name is Amy Morris. That’s what she goes by, anyway. She’s after the diamonds, too.”
“You should have warned me.”
A pause. Then, “We thought you were safe, out of the loop.”
“I don’t like being out of the loop,” I said. “What about Peralta?”
“Peralta is a different problem, and it’s better for you not to know. He’s our problem. Did you kill the girl?”
“No,” I said. “She got away. She’s a fighter.”
“She’s well trained. They say she was a Mountie, you know.”
“Hell! She’s a cop?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “It may not even be true. There are many stories about her. If they sent her for you, we need to meet quickly. At the place you designated.”
“No. That’s not safe now. I don’t like this.” The agitation in my voice was easy to manufacture. “Not if this Morris woman knows about me. Makes me wonder who else knows. We need a new meet point. And what about the FBI?”
Another pause, longer this time, and I worried that I had finally stepped out of bounds.
But the voice came back yet again, a taut tone. “Mann’s window is closing.”
Mann. I thought about Peralta’s recorded warning.
I said, “How much time? This has all gone to hell. I don’t feel right about this.”
“Calm down, Mister Pennington. Let’s meet. It would be good to finally see you.”
I tamped down the flood of adrenaline in my system.
When I didn’t answer, the voice turned angry. “You’re acting pretty foolish if you’re going to let your fear of that girl keep you from the million dollars you stand to make on this deal. You came highly recommended, but we can go somewhere else if we have to.”
A million dollars? Off a million-dollar diamond robbery? How did that work out?
I said, “This is business. I want it done right.”
“That’s better.” His tone returned to normal. “So when do we meet, and where?”
“Soon. I’ll call you.” I paused. With the blocked number, I didn’t know how to reach him. I said, “Give me a new number. I don’t trust the old one.”
“You’re being paranoid. But if it will help…” and he read out ten digits.
“Thanks. I’ll call.”
Before he could protest, I hung up.
A few seconds later, the phone rang again. UNKNOWN. I didn’t pick up.
I wiped down any surface that I might have touched before putting on the gloves. Then I checked the peephole into the hallway. The corridor was empty. I unlocked the door again, stepped out, and softly closed it. I put on my sunglasses.
One benefit from the building being on hard times was that the security desk downstairs was empty.
Later, I would find one of the few remaining pay phones in the city and call the fire department: I noticed a strange odor on the eighteenth floor. Coming from the office at 1806. You might want to check it out. Maybe it’s a gas leak.
I was glad to be out in the January air.
Chapter Twenty
When I returned to the hospital, a woman in a gray pantsuit with short red hair intercepted me at the elevators. Her face was full of freckles and smiles. So this was not the social worker who would tell me that Lindsey had died while I was gone.
I let loose the breath I had been holding.
Then I noticed the gold shield and gun on her belt.
We shook hands and she introduced herself as Megan Long, a Chandler Police detective. She had an engagement ring with a large clear diamond in the main setting and smaller ones on the band. I had come to notice such things.