"Use it?"
"Uh-huh."
"Score?"
"Uh-huh. Indirectly; clipped him with a splinter I think."
Joe groaned softly and pinched the bridge of his nose, his eyes shut.
"You guys give me a pain in the ass," he said. He reached over and tapped me under the arm. "You packing iron too?"
"Of course not, dummy. I don't even own a shoulder holster
"Well I just never know with you, Doc. You're a strange one, with your fancy watches and-"
"Pooooor baaaaaaby!" cooed Mary as she patted the dog's head. "Baaaaaby got a headache, hmmmmm?" She wrenched open his mouth and popped in three Excedrin, closed his mouth, held it shut, and massaged his throat until his big pink tongue popped out, which meant the pills had been swallowed. Sam watched, amazed.
"Let's split," said Joe, getting up. "The state lab team will meet us at the factory. They're probably already there."
The manager was glad to see us go. On the way I stopped at a hardware store and bought a small crowbar, a pony sledge-hammer, and a broad mason's chisel. I knew there were tools left at the scene, but in all likelihood the lab boys would want them.
Within thirty minutes eight of us wound our way up the dismal stairs and onto the landing where we'd first spotted our man. e The room was halfway down the hall on the right. Right in the center of the big building. We went in. There was a very faint aroma in there I didn't like. A burnt smell. Popeye went over to the wall on the left and jumped up, sniffing. He whined and wagged his tail, then dropped to all fours and turned in a tight circle. Whined louder. Cried. Wailed. To the dog's left, near the door we had entered, the wall was torn. The plaster and lath had been hacked away from the studding and lay on the floor in a heap. This had been the falling noise, the patter of debris like heavy rain, we'd heard from the floor below before our mysterious friend had knocked off work and fled, shooting at us.
"He picked the wrong place to look," I said. "That's why he didn't find it."
"Find what?" asked Joe.
"Johnny's pouch. It's in there. In the wall. Didn't you notice the dog's reaction? That's why we brought him in the first place. He just also happens to be good at bulldozing old doors. I'm going into that wall to get the pouch because I bet my anterior bridge is inside. Now you see why our errand doesn't look so dumb?"
"I just wish you'd told me is all," he said. "And you're not doing any banging and digging until the lab boys case this place."
And they did. While we watched from the doorway, they took photographs of everything, and one guy made a sketch showing measurements, the window and door, and the location of the old desk that was in there. The team dusted the place for prints, collected fibers and dust from the floor, placed some cigarette butts in vials, and carefully collected the tools (a hammer and cold chisel) left by our mysterious friend. Then they left. Joe, Mary, Sam, and I stared at the wall. Then Joe examined the floor closely and drew our attention to large scrape marks on the floor. They led to the heavy old desk. His eyes went back to the wall, which was ruined along its upper edge where it joined the ceiling. There was about a two-foot line along the top where the plaster and lath had been removed from the timbers a long time ago, perhaps in the expectation of installing plumbing pipes or heating ducts. But it had never happened. That meant there were deep troughs between the studs that ran all the way down the wall toward the floor. The big gash in the wall was as high up as a basketball net."
"What they did was," said Joe, "they dragged that desk from the middle of the room over to the wall here, then dragged it back. Yeah, they dropped something down behind the facing all right."
I watched the dog jump up again, forelegs on the wall, nose pointed straight up, whining. I took hammer and chisel and poked through the wall just above the floor, right below him. Nothing but space. I tried farther up and ran into horizontal cross bracing between studs. So I tried right above the bracing, and before half a minute was up I was seeing glimpses, through the plaster dust and crumpled, splintered lathboard, of gray canvas. When the hole was big enough I pulled at the cloth and then was holding the pouch in my hand. On it, in dark-blue letters, were the words LOWELL SUN.
"Well, gotdamn!" said Sam.
The dog took it in his steam-shovel mouth and sank to his belly, holding it between his paws with his chin resting on it. He whined and thumped his tail on the old dirty floor. Popeye seemed to know Johnny wouldn't be back.
I returned to the hole and kept pecking away, hacking and tearing off slabs of plaster the way a pileated woodpecker works on an old dead tree. My mouthpiece was in there. I just knew it. And I'd save Tom and me a week's work if I could get it out. In fact, I was in such a sweat to retrieve my dental work that I didn't notice Joe. I heard him mumbling something but I couldn't-"
"Why?" he shouted. I turned to face him. Joe had Sam get the paperboy's pouch for him, since he didn't want to lose an arm. He turned it inside out. Examined the seams, the carrying strap. "Why?" he repeated. "They got the pouch, took the packet inside, then ditched the pouch behind the wall just the way they ditched the gas masks.. . and for the same reason. But what happens? They come back for it. Why?"
"Because they failed to get what they were after," I said. "They got the packet of documents from the public library all right."
"What makes you so sure?" said Mary.
"Because here's the envelope," I answered, gingerly pulling out as crumpled manila bundle that was slightly torn. Clearly visible on it was not only the Santuccios' address but the receiving stamp of the Boston Public Library.
"Well done, Doc. Well done. You shoulda been a cop."
I continued to punch, pry, smash, and chip at the wall. My reasons, and reasoning, were simple: there were two things in Johnny's pouch when he was murdered, the Sacco-Vanzetti documents in the packet and my anterior bridge in a small cardboard box. One they wanted, one they didn't. They'd taken the pouch to this location to examine it. Therefore, they'd disposed of the dental work the same way they'd hidden the pouch. In the old wall.
Only it wasn't working out that way. When I'd demolished the rest of the wall, with Joe's help and encouragement, it yielded nothing except what we'd already found. I'd helped Joe a bit but struck out on my personal quest. I led them back down and outside, trudging across the old buckled asphalt and cinder. The tools clanked and clinked under my arm. I was down. Joe was up; his star would rise at headquarters. I would have to spend a lot of time and trouble redoing the piece. Damn it all.
We asked Sam to dinner. He thanked us but declined, saying he had a lot of extra work to do at home. As we dropped him off I got out and walked with him over to the door, where he switched off the electronic alarm.
"I want to thank you, Sam, for all you've done."
"Hmmmph! Should be me who's thankin' you, Doc. We almost got that guy today. Next time, I promise you: I won't miss."
"Call it a hunch, Sam, but if I were you I'd take that cash out of your safe for a week or so."
"Huh? Why?"
I shrugged my shoulders and repeated that it was just a hunch.
Sam went in and reappeared with a shopping bag full of bills. He asked us to drive him to Somerville. We did. Following his directions, we soon found ourselves winding our way through tiny labyrinthine alleyways that were lined with small businesses dealing with the automotive aftermarket. Muffler shops, radiator repair, engine rebuilding, front ends, rear ends, bumpers, windshields, tires, shocks- the Cambridge-Somerville line was to cars what Boston's South End was to leather and shoes. We passed a radiator joint and I smelled noxious fumes of zinc galvanizing and acid baths. We stopped at Nissenbaum's Auto Parts on Columbia, right down the street from the Nike running-shoe factory.