“What are you doing out of bed?” she asked.
“I’ll get back in, if you’ll join me,” Brown said, grinning lecherously, and the nurse fled down the corridor, calling for the intern. By the time the intern got to the room, the detectives were in the main lobby downstairs, setting up plans for contacting each other later in the day. They nodded to each other briefly, and went out into the June sunshine to pursue their separate pleasures.
Carella’s pleasure was the Church of the Holy Spirit on Inhurst Boulevard in Calm’s Point. He had first stopped at Lucia Feroglio’s garden apartment where he was told by her neighbors that the old lady went to 9:00 Mass every Sunday morning. He had then driven over to the church, where Mass was in progress, and asked the sexton if he knew Lucia Feroglio, and if he would mind pointing her out when Mass broke. The sexton seemed not to understand any English until Carella put five dollars in the box in the narthex. The sexton then admitted that he knew Lucia Feroglio very well, and would be happy to identify her when she came out of the church.
Lucia must have been a beauty in her youth; Carella could not understand how or why she had remained a spinster. A woman in her seventies now, she still walked with a tall, erect pride, her hair snowy white, her features recalling those of ancient Roman royalty, the aquiline nose, the full sensuous mouth, the high brow and almond-shaped eyes. The sexton nodded toward her as she came down the broad sunwashed steps. Carella moved to her side immediately and said, “Scusi, Signorina Feroglio?”
The woman turned with a faint half-smile on her mouth, her eyebrows lifting in mild curiosity. “Sì, che cosa?” she asked.
“Mi chiamo Steve Carella,” he answered. “Sono un agente investigativo, dal distretto ottanta-sette.” He opened his wallet and showed her his detective’s shield.
“Sì, che vuole?” Lucia asked. “What do you want?”
“Possiamo parlare?” Carella asked. “Can we talk?”
“Certo,” she said, and they began to walk away from the church together.
Lucia seemed to have no aversion to holding a conversation with a cop. She was warm, open, and cooperative, speaking in a Sicilian dialect Carella understood only incompletely, promising him she would tell him everything she knew about the photographic segment she had inherited from her sister. As it turned out, though, she knew nothing at all about it.
“I do not understand,” Carella said in Italian. “Did you not tell the insurance investigator that the full picture reveals where the treasure is?”
“Ma che tesoro?” Lucia asked. “What treasure?”
“The treasure,” Carella repeated. “Did you not tell Mr. Krutch about a treasure? When you gave him the list and the photograph?”
“I know nothing of a treasure,” Lucia said. “And what list? I gave him only the little piece of picture.”
“You did not give him a list with names on it?”
“No. Nor has Mr. Krutch given me the thousand dollars he promised. Do you know this man?”
“Yes, I know him.”
“Would you ask him, please, to send me my money? I gave him the picture, and now it is only fair to expect payment. I am not a wealthy woman.”
“Let me understand this, Miss Feroglio,” Carella said. “Are you telling me that you did not give Mr. Krutch a list of names?”
“Never. Mai. Never.”
“And you did not tell Mr. Krutch about a treasure?”
“If I did not know it, how could I have told him?” She turned to him suddenly, and smiled warmly and quite seductively for a woman in her seventies. “Is there a treasure, signore?” she asked.
“God only knows, signorina,” Carella answered, and returned the smile.
The best burglars in the world are cops.
There are three types of alarm systems in general use, and the one on the back door of the Ferguson Gallery was a closed-circuit system, which meant that it could not be put out of commission merely by cutting the wires, as could be done with the cheapest kind. A weak current ran constantly through the wires of the closed-circuit system; if you cut them, breaking the current, the alarm would sound. So Brown cross-contacted the wires, and then opened the door with a celluloid strip. It was as simple as that, and it took him no longer than ten minutes. In broad daylight.
The gallery was empty and still.
Sunshine slanted silently through the wide plate-glass windows fronting Jefferson Avenue. The white walls were pristine and mute. The only screaming in the place came from the colorful paintings on the walls. Brown went immediately to the blue door on the far wall, opened it, and stepped into Bramley Kahn’s office.
He started with Kahn’s desk. He found letters to and from artists, letters to patrons, a rough mock-up of a brochure announcing the gallery’s one-man show to come in August, memos from Kahn to himself, a letter from a museum in Philadelphia, another from the Guggenheim in New York, a hardbound copy of Story of O (the first few pages of which Brown scanned, almost getting hooked, almost forgetting why he had come here), a trayful of red pencils and blue pencils, and in the bottom drawer a locked metal cash box — and a .32-caliber Smith & Wesson. Brown tented his handkerchief over the revolver, picked it up by the butt, and sniffed the barrel. Despite the fact that Albert Weinberg, his late partner, had been slain with a .32-caliber weapon, this gun did not seem to have been fired lately. Brown rolled out the cylinder. There were six cartridges in the pistol, one in each chamber. He closed the gun, put it back into the drawer, and was reaching for the cash box when the telephone rang. He almost leaped out of Steve Carella’s borrowed trousers. The phone rang once, twice, again, again, again. It stopped suddenly.
Brown kept watching the instrument.
It began ringing again. It rang eight times. Then it stopped
Brown waited.
The phone did not ring again.
He lifted the gray metal cash box from the bottom drawer. The lock on it was a simple one; he opened the cash box in thirty seconds. It contained anything but cash. He found a partnership agreement between Kahn and Geraldine Ferguson, a certificate for 200 shares of IBM stock, Kahn’s last will and testament, three United States Savings Bonds in fifty-dollar denominations, and a small, white, unmarked, unsealed envelope.
Brown opened the envelope. There was a slip of white paper in it:
However lousy a bank robber Carmine Bonamico may have been, he was sure good at cutting out paper dolls. If this wasn’t the second half of the list Krutch had brought to the squadroom, Brown would eat the list, the photograph, the first chapter of Story of O, and maybe O herself. He quickly copied the names in his notebook, replaced the fragment in its envelope, put the envelope and everything else back into the cash box, locked the box, and replaced it in the bottom drawer of the desk. His attention was captured by the painting of the nude on the opposite wall. He went to it, lifted one edge, and peeked behind it. Reaching up with both hands, he took the heavy painting off the wall. There was a small black safe behind it. Brown knew that people who used safes or combination locks with any frequency would often leave the dial just a notch or two to the right or left of the last number. This facilitated constant opening, since all you then had to do was give the dial a single twist each time, rather than going through the whole boring rigmarole. He was moving the dial a notch to the left of the number showing when he heard the back door of the gallery being opened. Swiftly, he moved behind the door of Kahn’s office, and threw back his jacket.