“They’re coming,” Pippa said, turning from the window, and Max registered shouts and noises from the street. She wanted to ask what had happened to Thomas—where he had gone—but her brain felt like it was encased in sludge. She wanted to turn away from the body but she couldn’t.
There was the pounding of footsteps on the staircase. Thomas once again burst into the room, followed by two grim-faced detectives and a beat cop Thomas must have found patrolling the street. The detectives wore identical belted trench coats and fedoras pulled low over their eyes. The only difference between them, as far as Max could tell, was in their chins: one man was clean-shaven, with a chin so pointy it looked like it could cut vegetables; the other had a chin as blunt as a shovel and covered in stubble. They even smelled the same: like cheap aftershave; tobacco; and, faintly, just faintly, like sour milk.
“Here,” Thomas said, panting a little. “I mean, there.” He pointed to the body of Mr. Anderson.
Max stepped aside to let the police detectives pass. The beat cop hung back, looking vaguely nauseous, tugging at his uniform. “Well,” he said, with a nervous cough. “Seems like it’s pretty cut-and-dry. I’ll leave you to it. Too many cooks in the kitchen, and all that. No point in muddling the soup, as it were.” He turned around and practically bolted out of the room. The detectives didn’t even seem to notice. They were both circling the body in a way that reminded Max unpleasantly of sharks.
“He’s—he’s really dead, then?” Pippa said, as though she’d been hoping all along that Mr. Anderson might suddenly sit up.
The detective with the stubble straightened up from where he’d gone into a crouch. “He’ll never be deader,” he said, and spit matter-of-factly into a large vase on Mr. Anderson’s desk.
The other cop flipped open his leather badge case and closed it so rapidly Max saw only the glint of metal. Underneath the brim of his hat, small black eyes glittered. “Name’s Hardaway,” he said. “Assistant Chief Inspector Hardaway.” He jerked his head toward the other man. “This here’s Lieutenant Webb.”
Lieutenant Webb grunted.
“Let’s take things nice and slow,” Hardaway said, pulling out a notebook from the pocket of his trench coat. “First up: you want to explain to me how four kids ended up with one dead body on a nowhere street in Brooklyn?”
There was a moment of silence. Max could hear the ticking of a grandfather clock and it was as loud as an accusation. The back of her neck was sweating. She looked around the room, trying to seize on something—anything—that might serve as an excuse.
“Well, you see . . . ,” Thomas said, scratching his neck.
“It’s very complicated . . . ,” Pippa said, as Sam said, “It’s very simple.”
“Locket!” Max burst out. Her eyes had just landed on a tarnished silver locket coiled on the blotting paper on top of Mr. Anderson’s desk. Everyone turned to look at her in surprise. “My, um . . . locket,” she said, forcing herself not to fidget. She could lie to a cop. She could lie to a nun, if she had to. “Mr. Anderson said he could sell it for me. He—he told me it was worth twenty dollars.” She was getting into the story and wishing she really had given Mr. Anderson a locket to sell for twenty dollars. “But then I had a kind of, um, change of heart! Because it was my granny’s. Poor granny.” She sniffled experimentally. The policemen looked sympathetic, and she sniffled again. Pippa was scowling, but Max ignored her. “She got run over by a streetcar. Just flattened like a pancake, and all her brains splattered like a bunch of jelly on the—”
Lieutenant Webb spit once again into the vase on Mr. Anderson’s desk.
“He gets the idea, Max,” Pippa said, through gritted teeth.
“Oh, right. Yeah.” Max was annoyed that Pippa had cut her off in the middle of her dramatic monologue, right when she was getting to the good part about her fake grandmother’s eyeballs rolling into the gutter. “So anyway, like I said, we came out to talk to Mr. Anderson about letting me have it back. The locket, I mean.”
Hardaway stared at her and she forced herself to stand still. Then his eyes ticked slowly around the rest of the group. “Who turned the front door to a pile of splinters?”
“That was me, sir.” Sam spoke up quietly. “We were worried when he didn’t answer the door. The light was on, and he was expecting us. We thought something might have happened. So I may have, um, knocked down the door.”
“With what? A battering ram?” Hardaway said. Fortunately, before Sam was required to answer, Lieutenant Webb—who had begun circling the small room, sifting through the wastepaper basket, and sniffing the cigar ends in the ashtray—now spoke up.
“Chief,” he grunted, extracting a folded white sheet of stationery from underneath the corner of the blotter. “I got something. Looks like a note from Anderson.”