I parked in the shopping center lot behind the Thayer apartment and reentered the building. The chicken bones had disappeared, but the smell of urine remained. No one came out to question my right to be in the building, and I had no trouble finding a key to open the third-floor apartment.
I should have been prepared for the shambles, but it took me by surprise. When I’d been here before, there had just been the typical disorder of a student apartment. Now, the same hand or hands that had been to my place had done a similar job here. I shook my head to clear it. Of course. They were missing something, and they had been here first. It was only after they hadn’t found it that they had come to me. I whistled a bit between my teeth—the opening bars to the third act of Simon Boccanegra—and tried to decide what to do. I wondered what was missing and thought it most likely to be a piece of paper of some kind. It might be evidence of fraud or a picture, but I didn’t think it would be an actual object.
It didn’t seem too likely that it was still in the apartment. Young Thayer might have given it to Anita. If she had it, she was in worse danger than she seemed to be already. I scratched my head. It looked as though Smeissen’s boys had covered all the possibilities—sofa cushions ripped, papers and books dumped on the floor. I decided to believe that they had gone through everything page by page—only if my search didn’t turn up anything would I take that job on. In a student apartment with several hundred books it would take a sizable chunk of time to examine each one in detail. The only things that were still intact were appliances and floors. I made a methodical search of all the rooms for loose boards or tiles. I found a few and pried them up, using a hammer I found under the kitchen sink, but didn’t turn up anything more interesting than some old termite damage. Then I went through the bathroom fixture by fixture, taking down the shower rod and looking into it, and the toilet and sink pipes. That was quite a job; I had to go to my car for tools and break into the basement to turn off the water. It took me more than an hour to get the rusted fittings loose enough to open them. I wasn’t surprised to find nothing but water in them—if anyone had been into them, they would have opened more easily.
It was 6:30 and the sun was going down when I returned to the kitchen. The chair where Peter Thayer had been sitting had had its back to the stove. It was possible, of course, that the missing thing had not been hidden deliberately, but had dropped. A piece of paper might float unnoticed under the stove. I lay on my stomach and shone a flashlight under it. I couldn’t see anything, and the opening was pretty small. How thorough did I want to be? My muscles were aching and I had left my phenylbutazone at Lotty’s. But I went to the living room and got some bricks from a brick-and-board bookcase. Using the jack from my trunk as a lever and the bricks as a wedge, I slowly pried the stove off the floor. It was an impossible task; the jack would catch and raise the thing, and just as I was kicking a brick under the side, down it would slip again. Finally, by dint of pulling the table over and wedging the jack underneath it, I was able to get one brick under the right side. After that the left came up more easily. I checked the gas line to make sure it wasn’t straining, and carefully raised the stove by another brick. I then got down on my stomach again and looked underneath. There it was, a piece of paper stuck by grease to the bottom of the stove. I peeled it slowly off in order not to tear it, and took it over to the window to examine.
It was a carbon copy about eight inches square. The top left corner had the Ajax logo on it. In the center it read, “Draft only: not negotiable,” and it was made out to Joseph Gielczowski, of 13227 South Ingleside in Matteson, Illinois. He could take this to a bank and have it certified, at which point Ajax would pay the sum of $250 to the bank as a Workers Compensation indemnity payment. The name meant nothing to me and the transaction sounded perfectly straightforward. What was so important about it? Ralph would know, but I didn’t want to call him from here—better get the stove down and leave while the leaving was good.
I levered up the stove, using the table again as a wedge, and pulled the bricks out. The stove made a dull thud as it dropped—I hoped the downstairs neighbors weren’t home or were too self-engrossed to call the police. I gathered up my tools, folded the claim draft and put it in my shirt pocket, and left. A second-floor apartment door opened a crack as I went by. “Plumber,” I called. “There won’t be any water on the third floor tonight.” The door closed again and I left the building quickly.
When I got back to my car, the game was long over and I had to wait for the eight o’clock news to come on to get the score. The Cubs had pulled it out in the eighth inning. Good old Jerry Martin had hit a double; Ontiveros had singled, and wonderful Dave Kingman had gotten all three of them home with his thirty-second homer of the season. And all this with two out. I knew how the Cubs were feeling tonight, and sang a little Figaro on the way home to show it.
10
Beautiful People