“You mean swimming.”
“Or falling off a bicycle,” I said. “Same thing.” I donned my plastic gloves, double-locked the door, fastened the chain lock, and put on the light. Doll pointed at my gloves and mimed putting on a pair of her own.
“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. I only brought the one pair. Anyway, you couldn’t have worn gloves all the other times you were here, so the place must be full of your fingerprints. A few more won’t matter.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“Besides, you don’t think Luke’s going to dust the place for prints, do you?”
“No, but—”
“So let’s just find what we’re looking for and get out of here.”
That was easier said than done. She went first to the closet, and she did a pretty commendable job of ransacking it, yanking garments off hangers and tumbling boxes down from the top shelf. I guess that’s the way to search a place if you’re in a hurry, but it’s never been my style. I tend to walk lightly upon the earth, especially in other people’s houses.
“These are mine,” she said, holding a couple of sweaters and a pair of jeans. “But who cares?” She tossed them onto a wooden chair and spun around to glare at the open closet, her hands on her hips. “Come on, Bernie! I thought you were going to check the dresser.”
“I did.”
“How come you didn’t just pull out all the drawers and empty them in the middle of the floor? Isn’t that what burglars do?”
“Some do, I guess. This one doesn’t.”
“Well, you’re the expert,” she said, “but it seems to me—”
“Slow down,” I said. “Take a breath.”
“I know they’re here,” she said. “I guess I had this picture in my mind. You would open the door and we’d walk in and there they’d be, right out in plain sight. I expected to see Marty’s rosewood humidor sitting on Luke’s coffee table. But of course he left the humidor, didn’t he?”
“How would he have taken the cards? He didn’t just stuff them in his pockets.”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’d pack them in a shopping bag.”
“And walk out of Marty’s building that way?”
“Why not? He could just—Bernie, the attaché case! That’s what he would have used.”
“I hope the cards don’t wind up smelling like meat.”
“Meat? Oh, right, I told you how he used it for shoplifting. But I’ll bet that’s what he did. He put on his one decent suit, he shaved his larcenous little rat face, he packed up his attaché case, and—”
“What’s the matter?”
She ran to the closet. “Where’s his suit? Shit. Son of a bitch.”
“What’s the matter?”
“His suit’s gone. You don’t see a suit, do you? The son of a bitch took it with him.”
“You said he probably got an acting job out of town. Maybe they told him to bring a suit because the part called for it.”
She shook her head. “Bad casting. If the part called for a suit, you’d get a different actor. Did he take the attaché case? That’s the real question, isn’t it?”
“Where did he keep it, Doll?”
“In the closet,” she said. “Isn’t that where you’d keep it?”
“I might. What other luggage did he have?”
“I don’t know. We never went anywhere together. All he really wanted to do was go to bed. The bed!”
“What about it?”
“Under it,” she said, diving to the floor. I stood by as she fished things out—an olive-drab duffel bag, a maroon backpack, a carryall of light blue parachute nylon. There were other things, too—a couple of athletic shoes, a tennis racket, a sock. No attaché case.
“Shit,” she said. “I give up. They’re not here. If he had the cards in the first place.”
“You think he didn’t?”
“I don’t know what to think. I was positive, but now I don’t know. And if he did have them, they’re not here now.”
“We don’t know that.”
“We don’t? This is a tiny little one-bedroom apartment, Bernie. And we searched it from top to bottom. Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll show you how to search a place.”
The thing is, you can’t just dash around. You have to proceed methodically, taking it a room at a time, going through each room in a deliberate fashion. You don’t necessarily spend more time that way but you spend it wisely, and when you quit a place you know you haven’t missed anything.
Within reason, that is. If you put a little thought and effort into it, you can hide stuff so that it won’t be found other than by a crew of professionals with time on their hands. Of course, the right dog will sniff out drugs or explosives in nothing flat, but otherwise you’re safe.
I was willing to assume, though, that Luke had not enlisted a carpenter to build in some really good hiding places, in a baseboard, say, or as a false back to a cupboard or closet. The fact that he had three large bottles of pills in his freezer and a plastic bag full of some dried herb underneath the sugar in his sugar canister suggested to me that he probably stuck to the tried and true. Most people do.
I spent half an hour at it, and when I was done I’d have been prepared to swear that there was neither an attaché case nor a quantity of baseball cards in that apartment. I didn’t say a word during the entire half hour, and, after a few conversational ventures that I ignored, neither did Doll. When I gave up at last and let my shoulders sag in defeat, I realized that she was staring at me with something akin to awe. I asked her what was the matter.
“You’ve done this before,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m impressed, you’re obviously a pro at this. What did you think I meant?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought,” I said. “It’s frustrating. The best sort of burglary is when you know exactly what you’re looking for and just where it is, and you go in and it’s there and you take it and you’re gone.”
“That’s how I thought this was going to be.”
“I know. So did I. The second-best burglary is when you go in without any expectations whatsoever, and there’s the thrill of discovery whenever you find something. But this is the worst kind, because…well, no, that’s not true, is it? The worst kind is when you get caught.”
“Don’t even say that, Bernie!”
“The next-to-worst kind,” I said, “is when there’s something you’re looking for and it’s not there, and even if you do find something else you don’t really give a damn because it’s not what you wanted. Here.”
“What’s this?”
“It’s a hundred and twenty dollars,” I said. “It’s exactly half of what he had stashed in an empty jelly jar in the fridge. There was some change, too, but I left it. Go ahead, take it. We’re partners, remember?”
“It seems strange to take it.”
“It would seem stupid to leave it. I think we should get the hell out of here. You checked the duffel and the carryall, didn’t you? And the little red backpack?”
“I reached inside them. Why?”
“Check ’em good,” I said. “One reason I’ve been going through things so thoroughly is I don’t know exactly what we’re looking for.” I picked up the duffel bag, opened the long zipper, ran my hands around the inside. “Maybe he stuffed the attaché case, cards and all, into a locker somewhere. Maybe he gave it to a checkroom attendant and walked away with a claim check.”
“Wouldn’t it be in his wallet?”
“Probably,” I said. I tossed the duffel bag aside and grabbed the carryall. “Check the backpack,” I told her. “It’s got a whole batch of compartments, same as this stupid thing. We might as well be thorough.”