Nothing clicked as I pressed the card between the door and the jamb. I didn’t even turn the knob. The door simply swung open.
FORTY-TWO
I bent to look at the jamb. Orange chewing gum had been pressed into the recess to prevent the bolt from sliding shut. Someone wanted easy access for a return visit.
Small’s desk was old scratched oak, littered with papers, a Starbucks cup, and a tipped over Dunkin’ Donuts box. The green vinyl on the desk chair was cracked; the red vinyl visitor’s chair held an old blue IBM Selectric typewriter. A half-dozen cardboard file boxes lay in a ragged row on the floor near the wall.
I sat at the desk. The green desk chair had been dished by a substantial man, and groaned as I reached to move away the Starbucks cup that still stank of the cream, dried now, that Small must have used to keep his weight and cholesterol up. One doughnut remained in the tipped Dunkin’ twelve-pack. It was sprinkled with coconut and somewhat intact, missing one human-sized bite and a few hundred smaller rodent nicks. Probably a few mice or rats were anticipating coming back to finish it, as had Eugene Small, I supposed.
The papers scattered next to the black phone were copies of invoices sent to furniture stores and used-car dealerships. Someone had pawed through them.
I re-sorted them into numerical order, reading as I went. Eugene Small had been a small-time repo man, grabbing back patio furniture and reclining chairs when he couldn’t get work repossessing cars. The invoices charged flat rates, three hundred for a car, fifty for a sofa, and twenty-five for a patio set.
One invoice was missing from the sequence. Judging by the dates of the invoices preceding and succeeding, it had been dated around the first of March, a few days before Small was killed. It seemed likely that the man who’d jammed gum into the office door lock thought that particular invoice was worth taking.
There was nothing in the desk drawers except a stapler, a full box of red-capped ballpoint pens boosted from an Econo-lodge, and a small pad of note paper with a trucking company logo on it.
I scooted the chair to the ragged row of file cartons. Most of the folders had been used several times, their tabs erased and re-lettered in pencil. That they’d been jammed roughly into the cardboard boxes might have meant simply that Small was a slob, except they were not in alphabetical order. Likely they’d been hurriedly searched and jammed back by someone who knew Small was never again going to return to his office.
There was no file for the Confessors’ Club, no file for Arthur Lamm or any of the dead men. Most especially, there was no file for Wendell Phelps. I felt no relief at that. I was certain Small was the detective Wendell had hired. Whoever had searched Small’s office knew that now, too.
I stood up, went to the closet. Four wire hangers dangled empty on a rod. An enormous pilled polyester cardigan sweater hung on a fifth. It smelled of gin and sweat and, like the worn, reused files in the cardboard boxes and the empty desk, was another marker of a guy who’d haunted the poorer alleys of town, grabbing back unpaid-for used cars and discount furniture.
A guy who might have stepped out of his league and into the path of someone killing in the heavy cream.
I’d seen enough of nothing to be sure I’d seen enough. The office had been looted.
I paused at the desk on the way to the door. I don’t like creatures that scurry, and saw no point in making their dinner easy. I dropped the foul smelling Starbucks cup and the remains of the coconut doughnut into the trash basket and was about to toss in the stained, crumb-littered paper desk-top calendar when I noticed its corners. The top sheet, January’s, was blank – nothing had been written on it. But the pad’s corners were creased from being turned up. I shook the candy sprinkles into the wastebasket and flipped to February’s page.
For a big man, Eugene Small wrote tiny; the little numbers and initials scribbled inside the squares beneath the coffee rings were almost indecipherable. Only the dollar sign at the top of the sheet was big. He’d retraced it so many times that the tip of his black ballpoint had cut through the paper. I flipped to the next page.
He’d filled the first days of March with tiny numbers and initials, too. They stopped on March 8. Small had been killed the next day.
Many of the initials matched the Bohemian’s list of those in the heavy cream. One pair of initials – A.L. – appeared most of all. Arthur Lamm.
Something rustled inside the closet. It was feeding time at the rat ranch. I grabbed the desk calendar and left.
I called Delray when I got outside but again got his voice mail. ‘Eugene Small’s office was tossed,’ I said. There was more to say, but I’d say it when he called me back.
Small’s intruder, likely his killer, had missed something important.
FORTY-THREE
I studied the calendar for an hour back at the turret, and then I called Leo.
‘I’ve broken and entered twice more since we last spoke,’ I said.
He groaned. ‘As skillfully as you did at Arthur Lamm’s agency?’
‘Even stealthier.’ I told him about Arthur Lamm, and the recording equipment Delray and I had found at the Confessors’ Club. And then I told him about Eugene Small.
‘You think Small got killed because he was working for Wendell?’ he asked.
‘Everything else the man did was small-time repo, not worth being killed over. I need you to look at something of significance.’
He said he was headed downtown to Endora’s, but always liked being delayed for significance. He told me to come right over.
Light showed from the window of his basement office. I tapped the glass six times with the toe of my shoe – three taps, a pause, then three more, our code since seventh grade – and went to sit on the front steps. He came to open the door a minute later, wearing a huge blaze-orange T-shirt with a black deer head on it, the sort a 300-pound hunter would wear on a warm autumn day. Pressing his index finger to his lips to let me know Ma was still asleep – Saturday night was late-night dirty-movie night on her favorite cable channel, and she often didn’t stagger to bed until almost dawn – he led me through the front room to the kitchen.
Leo poured coffee into Walgreen’s mugs and we sat at the kitchen table. I placed Eugene Small’s calendar between us and flipped past the blank January sheet to February, littered with small markings and the enormous dollar sign, traced and retraced, at the top. I pointed to a small, almost microscopic ‘W.P.,’ with an equally small huge dollar amount written next to it: ‘$5,900.’ I told Leo of the one invoice copy that was missing from the small pile on Small’s desk.
He laid his finger on the tiny markings. ‘These are Eugene Small’s billable hours?’
‘And surveillance record.’
‘You think the missing invoice was Small’s copy of one he sent to Wendell for fifty-nine hundred?’
‘It’s a good guess.’
‘Why would someone want to take the invoice?’
I pointed again to the most obvious mark on February’s page, the enormous dollar sign inked over and again, so obsessively that the pen had almost torn through the page. ‘I’m worried someone else besides Small sees big bucks in going after Wendell.’
‘Blackmail, over what Small learned about the Confessors’ Club?’
I could only nod.
Leo picked up the calendar. ‘Let’s put this under better light before we draw too many stupid conclusions.’
We tiptoed down the basement stairs, not speaking as we passed the cartons of Leo’s old school books, the spindly little plastic tree they stuck on the television at Christmas, and the model train tracks we’d screwed on green-painted plywood when we were kids.