“Let's take a wild stab at nothing,” I said. “You know any young man, say, about twenty-six, with brown hair and eyes and a V-shaped scar on his right wrist?” I thought a moment. “He'd be a fairly recent acquaintance, if you do know him.”
“No one with a scar, no,” he said. “In all truth, I know hardly any younger men at all. I'm — one might almost say a recluse. Except for my work, and picture-taking strolls here and there, I lead a very withdrawn existence.” He closed the drawers and straightened up. “What was the nature of the evidence, Mr. Selby?”
“What?”
“Didn't the telegram tell you what to look for?”
“No.”
“In that case, it might be just anything at all, mightn't it?”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose it could.”
“Then I suggest we continue with the desk, and then proceed in any way you like.”
“Why not?” I said. “One starting place is as good as another.”
“It's just that I have all my cameras and things in here,” he said. “I'd much rather handle them myself, Mr. Selby. You know how it is, I'm sure.”
I nodded. “Let's get started.”
“At least we'll have the exercise,” he said as he turned to pull out another drawer. “Perhaps it will help us enjoy a much sounder sleep.”
It takes a lot longer to search a one-room apartment when you don't know what you're looking for than it does when you do. When you have no idea at all, it's largely a matter of lifting and shifting and pawing and shuffling, and wishing you had taken the examinations for the Fire Department.
But there are tricks in every trade, and I used every one of them. I worked hard and rapidly, and, to my surprise, so did Albert Miller. It was he who did most of the lifting and shifting, and I who did most of the pawing and shuffling. For a man of his age, his energy was almost as amazing as his strength.
Even so, my search of Miller's apartment, including the removal of the back of the television set for a look inside the cabinet, took almost an hour. And when I'd finished, I knew no more about Miller than if I'd searched my own.
Chapter Fifteen
I HAD just gone out to the bathroom to wash my hands when the phone rang. As I started to run some water in the basin I heard Miller answer it and then ask someone to hold on.
“It's for you, Mr. Selby,” he called. “You want to take the call now, or would you rather call back?”
“I'll take it now,” I said as I turned off the water and walked back into the living room. “It's probably my precinct partner. I left your number on his desk.”
Miller nodded absently, glanced at the palms of his hands, and started for the bathroom. “I think I could profit from a little soap and water myself,” he said. “Feel free to use the phone as much as you like, Mr. Selby.”
The phone was on a nightstand at one end of the sofa bed. “Selby,” I said.
“Stan, Pete. How's the roving detective?”
“Bushed,” I said. “Nothing like a toss to wear you down.”
“Any luck?”
“Not a bit.”
“Tough. What kind of a guy is this Miller, anyway?”
“Big,” I said. “How'd you know about him?”
“Sid Kaplan called. He said he just wanted to know how you'd made out on that telegram.”
“He wanted to bet me I wouldn't make out at all,” I said. “I'm glad now I didn't take him up.”
“Dead end?”
“Looks that way. All I got was a good workout.”
“You had another call. From BCI. They said to tell you they don't have anything on Miller at all. Not ever a traffic ticket.”
“Good for him,' I said. “What'd you find out from the Joyner Translation Bureau?”
“Very cooperative outfit, Pete. The boss came down right away.” He paused. “Boy, what a head on that one! The guy speaks seventeen languages. Can you imagine?”
“No,” I said. “What'd you find out?”
“Well, it seems this bill Nadine had in her strongbox was for translating an item from a French newspaper.”
“New York paper?”
“No, this was published in France, in Bordeaux. I can't pronounce the name of it, but it was published almost eight years ago.”
“What's it about?”
“Pretty interesting, Pete. Just what good it is to us, I don't know. But those French cops are on the ball.”
“Stan…”
“All right, keep your hair on. It's about this joker that knocked off his wife and planted her in the flower garden behind his house. Guy's name was Maurice Thibault. He was a linguist with some kind of import-export outfit in Bordeaux. That's a seaport city, Pete.”
“So they say,” I said. “What's the rest of it?”
“Well, the guy was a pillar of the community, and all that, and all at once he turns up missing. So does his wife. After a while the neighbors call the police, and the police toss the guy's house and yard and ask around a bit; and then one of the cops happens to notice that all but one of Thibault's flower beds aren't doing so well. But this one flower bed looks like it could nose out the champ flower bed in the whole country. The plants are all up and blooming like crazy. But it's the only one. The flower beds all around it have just about had it. And so do you know what the payoff was?”
“I've got a pretty good idea,” I said. “And even if I didn't, I know I can depend on you to tell me. Not necessarily tonight, of course, but—”
“Knock off, will you? It was terrific police work.”
“All right; so the cops found Thibault's wife beneath the champion flower bed. Terrific police work. And then?”
“Well, then they find out Thibault's pulled a disappearing act. They put a lot of men on it, and they stayed with it a long time, but they never came up with a single lead on him. Nothing. It was like he'd just jumped straight up in the air and kept right on going.”
“Is that all there is to the item?”
“No. It goes on to say that they dug up so much evidence that he'd knocked off his wife that they were able to go ahead and try him for it, anyway. In absentia, it says here.”
“How'd the trial come out?”
“Guilty. If they ever do find the guy, he'll get the guillotine.”
“And you say all this happened eight years ago?”
“Just about.”
“Damn few people ever just disappear into thin air, Stan. Funny they wouldn't have come up with at least a nibble or two in all this time.”
“It says they figure he could pass as just about anything. Speaking all those languages, and all, he could blend right in, anywhere he went. This export-import outfit he worked for in Bordeaux had sent him all over. He even spent two or three years in Canada — in Quebec, it says — and five or six years, off and on, here in New York.”
I listened to the water running in the bathroom, wishing I'd had time to wash my own hands, and wishing even more that I'd gotten something to eat before I came up here. I'd put off eating for so long that I was getting a little nauseated.
“I've got the clipping right here,” Stan went on. “It was stapled to the carbon copy of the translation. The boss at the Joyner outfit said they'd asked Nadine if they could hold on to it. Everybody around there was pretty interested in this Thibault, seeing as how he was a fellow linguist.”
I cocked my head to hold the phone against my shoulder and tried to clean some of the grime off my hands with my handkerchief. “You think our girl may have been pulling a little blackmail?” I said.
“She sure didn't have that thing translated just for the hell of it. If it wasn't blackmail, what was it?”
“With what little we know about her so far, it could have been anything.”
“Look at it this way, Pete. Say you had to bet your life on it, one way or the other. Either it was blackmail, or it wasn't. Which way would you bet?”