“Yesterday afternoon.”
“How do you know it was him? Dumb question. Skip that. How’d he get in?”
“He still had her keys. He waited until I went off to work and let himself in. I might not have known about it except that I hired a company to come in and clean blood off the carpeting late in the day. When I unlocked the door to let the crew in, I could see he’d torn the place apart.”
“The locks hadn’t been changed?”
“I notified the property management company and asked them to send a locksmith, but the guy didn’t arrive until this morning and by then, the damage was done.”
“Why would Ned come back? That’s a big risk.”
“He went through the moving cartons he hadn’t hit before.”
“All of them?”
“Looks that way. He was systematic and took his sweet time this round.”
“Shit,” I said.
“You haven’t told me what he was looking for.”
“He believes his ex-wife has the box of souvenirs he collected from each of his murder victims. What he needs is his ex-wife’s alias and her current location. Phyllis mentioned jotting the information on a slip of paper she’d tossed in a moving carton.”
“How did Ned get wind of that?”
I went back through events, explaining how I discovered not only where the fugitive had been holing up, but how he’d managed to tap my phone. “He actually installed an extension so all he had to do was lounge in the dirt down there, listening to every word I said.” I filled him in on Ned’s threat to burn me out and how I’d blasted him through the vent opening.
“Well, that explains the mess he left. He stayed long enough to change the dressing on what must be a nasty wound. He went through a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, gauze pads, and adhesive tape, and then he stole her Valium and prescription pain pills and left the empty bottles in the trash. Apparently, he can’t resist showing how clever he is . . .”
“Could you bring Detective Altman up to speed on this?”
“That’s the next call on my list.”
30
When I reached the McCabes’ condominium, Hollis was home. He’d gone over to the police station, where he filed the missing person’s report on his son, and then called his secretary to tell her he wouldn’t be in. The three of us sat down in the living room. Just in case the forthcoming conversation wasn’t going to be difficult enough, Lauren hadn’t told Hollis she’d fired me. When I repeated the terms I’d laid out for my continued employment, he had no idea what I was talking about. We spent ten minutes sorting out the details, which seemed to make Hollis cranky. What a surprise.
Lauren was busy smoothing things over. “You’ll want to see his room,” she said. “Maybe you can figure out where he went.”
Given that I’d never stepped a foot in Fritz’s room, I couldn’t see the point, but we were all now on our best behavior and I was pretending to be agreeable.
Lauren showed me in, saying, “I’ll leave you to look around.”
She left, closing the door behind her. My guess was that she and Hollis would engage in a low-level argument, probably a continuation of the one sparked by the discovery that Fritz had forged his mother’s signature and walked away with twenty-five thousand in cash. Their murmured conversation in the living room had a rising and falling tone to it that reminded me why I’m so happy to be single.
Fritz’s room was not what I expected. I’d tagged him as spoiled and overindulged, so I’d assumed he’d have the best of everything and lots of it: his own phone and answering machine, a television set, stereo components, cameras, tennis rackets, skis, a surfboard, skateboards, guitars, and whatever else a young lad like him might consider essential. I was right about the phone and answering machine and wrong about everything else. His room was as plain as a jail cell, which made a certain amount of sense. Lauren was right about his closet being crammed, but only because she and Hollis had moved every article he owned before he went off to prison. The hangers were packed together so tightly, it was hard to determine what was there, let alone what he might have removed. Most of the garments had all the sophistication of a fifteen-year-old’s taste, roughly his age when the legal bombshells started going off in his face. His life had come to an abrupt halt for eight years and now that he was home, all the items of clothing he owned were outdated, out of style, and probably too small.
No books, no school texts, no magazines, no photographs, no artwork, no records, no cassettes, no Sony Walkman, no personal correspondence. No trash in the trash can. There was nothing out of place because he had so little in the way of possessions. In the bathroom, I saw his safety razor, his deodorant, his toothbrush and toothpaste arranged on the glass shelf above his sink. In the shower, his Mickey Mouse soap-on-a-rope dangled from the shower fixture. In the medicine cabinet, a bottle of aspirin and an unopened box of assorted Band-Aids. To me, it didn’t look like he’d left with any of the usual toiletries. As for changes of clothing, I had no way to guess.
I circled his room again and studied the phone and his answering machine. No indication he had messages, but I pressed Play nonetheless. A mechanical fellow wholly without enthusiasm assured me Fritz had no messages. I opened and closed his desk drawers but found nothing of interest. To demonstrate how thoroughly an investigator of my caliber proceeds in such matters, I got down on my hands and knees and peeked under the bed. I also inspected the underside of drawers in his chest of drawers, the interior and the back of the toilet tank, and the space between his mattress and his box spring. For the first time, I felt sorry for him. Not that he needed my pity or my dismay, but I knew now how small his life had become.
? ? ?
When I emerged from Fritz’s room, Hollis was standing at the wet bar, fixing himself a drink. It was two in the afternoon, which for all I knew was the usual cocktail hour for him. “So, Sherlock, did you find any clues?” Hollis asked. “Any secret messages written in invisible ink?” The jocular tone barely disguised his belligerence.
“I don’t need secret messages. Either he was delivering the twenty-five thousand to the extortionist or he was taking it for himself,” I said.
“Of course he was taking it for himself,” Hollis snapped. “Are you just now figuring that out? Lauren can’t accept the fact, but it seems obvious to me.”
“All he had to do was ask,” she said. “We’d have given him the money if we knew it meant so much to him.”
“We wouldn’t have given him a cent! Kid gets out of prison and thinks he’s entitled to a lump sum? For doing what?”
I closed my eyes briefly, wishing I could click my heels and be somewhere else. This was exactly the reason I didn’t want to work for these people.
Hollis turned to me. “It would have been nice if you’d come up with the insight before the kid ripped us off.”