“Just showing you that we all know what we’re all up to here in Palfry. You want fries with that or slaw?”
I chose slaw, not from an obsession with health but because I could imagine the weight of all that starch in my stomach when I went back to work. Susie was right about her BLT: I’d never tasted better. I had a cup of her thin coffee before pushing myself off the stool. Susie gave me directions to Herb’s Hardware, where I bought more tarps and a fine-toothed rake.
Back at the meth house, I used the rake to cull the bottom of the tank. I brought up a mass of rotted leaves. When I raked through it, I uncovered syringes, cigarette butts, the remains of a dozen or so KFC buckets and pizza cartons and a large collection of condoms, but no documents, at least none in any condition I could recognize.
And no human bones. All afternoon long, as I’d shifted through the muck, I’d been terrified that I’d find some trace of Martin.
I took off the gloves and finished my second gallon of water. My arms and legs were wobbly from exertion and salt loss. Pulling off the waders, I climbed into the pickup, where I tilted the passenger seat as far back as it would go. As I slumped there, my feet up on the dashboard, I figured at least I could head to Chicago knowing that I’d left no condom unturned.
A blast from a car horn jerked me awake. I remembered where I was and reached reflexively for my gun. Frank and Roberta had pulled my Mustang up the track outside the Schlafly fence. I hastily slid the gun back to the truck floor.
“You look like the sorriest piece of leftover detective I’ve ever seen,” Frank said. “We came over to see how you were doing. Also, Warren, our boy, is playing football tonight. We need the truck to go watch him, unless you want us to take your car.”
I swung my legs over the side of the truck and lowered myself gingerly to the ground. My legs still wobbled, but at least they didn’t give way on me. “I’ve raked through that whole sludge heap and I didn’t see anything that looked like the papers Martin fought over with his mother.”
Frank inspected the three tarps I’d covered. “I’d say you got just about everything that could be got.”
“They threw this in?” Roberta had walked over to the dresser. “This was Agnes’s piece. She was Ricky and Janice’s grandmother, the lady who left the house to Ricky. This was an heirloom. Her great-grandmother brought this with her when they moved to Illinois in the 1840s, and she always said that it was the grandmother’s great-grandmother who brought it to Pennsylvania from Germany back in 1750 or so. This is terrible. Those beautiful inlays all damaged, and the drawer pulls—they were gold. I suppose Ricky tore them off and sold them and then dumped this in the pit because it wasn’t any use to him anymore.”
Frank walked over and put an arm around her. “We can take it back with us, see if we can do anything to restore it.”
He found a blanket behind the driver’s seat of the pickup and placed it on the truck bed. When he lifted the dresser up, the drawers fell out. I lumbered over to help Roberta pick them up. And found paper sticking to the undersides of two of them. I laid the drawers, bottom sides up, out on the baked clay of the backyard and squatted on my sore haunches to inspect them.
Time with drain cleaner had taken a toll on the paper, but we could see that it was several layers deep. The top layer included fragments of unpaid bills, shreds of an ad for Pizza Hut, bleached-out photos that looked as though they were torn from a porn magazine. Roberta stuck out a hand to pull off the top layer, but I jerked the drawer out of reach.
“We need something like forceps; otherwise we’ll destroy what’s underneath.”
Her sandy eyebrows lifted in surprise, but she said, “I’ll drive over to my workshop. Got plenty of little tools there.”
She climbed into the truck, saw my gun on the floor. “Were you planning on shooting your way through the trash in that pit?”
I took the gun from her, smiling feebly. “I found Ricky Schlafly’s body, and that poor dog over there. I didn’t want to die in a meth pit.”
23
TRUNK SHOW
ROBERTA’S EXPERIENCE in making miniatures had given her a sure touch with delicate material. Within an hour we had lifted most of the paper from the two drawers and laid it on a clean sheet of plastic that she’d brought from her workshop.
There were only two items that might have been what Martin and his mother had argued over. One had bonded so tightly to the drawer bottom that we didn’t risk peeling it off, but it looked like the remains of an old savings passbook.
I held my magnifying glass over it. “The address is something on Lincoln, I think.”
Roberta looked over my shoulder. “Lincolnwood?”