Эд Макбейн - Jigsaw

The doorman was not pleased to see them.

He had been hired to check on any and all strangers entering the building, his job being to prevent tenants from getting strangled in the elevator, and incidentally to call taxis for them on rainy nights. It didn’t matter that these two strangers identified themselves as detectives from the 87th Squad. The doorman liked detectives as much as he liked stranglers or burglars. He had no way of knowing, naturally, that Eugene Edward Ehrbach had been a burglar, and undoubtedly a highly successful one. He told the detectives that he would have to check with the manager of the building, and even though they told him they were investigating a murder, he insisted on making his telephone call. When he got off the phone, he said, “It’s okay, but don’t go making a mess up there,” which was exactly what they intended to make up there.

Ehrbach had lived on the tenth floor of the building, in an apartment at the end of the corridor. There were three other apartments on the floor. Ehrbach’s was the choice apartment since it overlooked the River Harb. There were two rivers flanking Isola, the Harb on the north and the Dix on the south. Apartments overlooking either of these waterways were considered very desirable, even though the view of the next state across the Harb featured a big housing development and the roller coaster of an amusement park, and the view of the Dix revealed a grimy gray hospital on an island, mid-river, a collection of spiny bridges leading to Calm’s Point and Sands Spit, and a house of detention on another island out beyond Devil’s Causeway. From Ehrbach’s living room window (in addition to the roller coaster, the housing development, and an insistently blinking SPRY sign), you could also see all the way uptown to the Hamilton Bridge.

Carella and Brown entered the apartment with a passkey provided by the doorman, and found themselves in a carpeted foyer. Their reflected images looked back at them from a gilt-framed mirror hanging on the wall facing the door. A long narrow table was against that wall, just below the mirror. The apartment ran off to the right and left of the foyer. They made a perfunctory check of the place, discovering that there were four rooms in all: living room, kitchen, den, and bedroom. A small bathroom was off the entrance foyer, and another bathroom adjoined the bedroom. That was it, and very nice indeed. They divided the apartment in half, Carella taking the foyer, the small bathroom, the kitchen, and the den; Brown taking the bedroom, the living room, and the second bathroom. With all the expertise and sang-froid of a demolition crew, they started searching for the scrap of photo Irving Krutch was certain Ehrbach had possessed. They began the job at noon. At midnight, they were still looking.

They had made two trips downstairs for sandwiches and coffee, Carella going out at 2:00 P.M. and Brown going out at 7:00. Aside from slashing up the mattresses and upholstered furniture, a license not granted to them, they had done a thorough and painstaking job, but had found nothing. They sat now in the living room, exhausted, Brown in an easy chair near a standing floor lamp, Carella straddling the piano bench. The lamp was on, it cast a warm and cozy glow over the moss-green wall-to-wall carpeting.

“Maybe we ought to take it up,” Brown said.

“Take what up?” Carella asked.

“The carpet.”

“That’s a big job.”

“The way they lay this stuff,” Brown said, “is they’ve got these strips of wood with tacks sticking up out of it. They nail that to the floor all around the room, and then hook the carpet onto it. You ever see these guys work?”

“Yeah,” Carella said.

“You got wall-to-wall carpeting in your house?” Brown asked.

“No.”

“Me, neither. A hood like Ehrbach has wall-to-wall carpeting, and all I’ve got is a ten-by-twelve in the living room. How do you figure it?”

“Guess we’re in the wrong racket,” Carella said. “Did you check out all these books?”

“Every page.”

“How about the switch plates? Did you unscrew them?”

“Yep.”

“Nothing scotch-taped to the backs, huh?”

“Nothing.”

Carella glanced at the floor lamp. “Did you take off that shade?”

“Yeah, zero. It’d show, anyway, with the light on.”

“That’s right, yeah.”

“How about the ball in the toilet tank?” Brown asked. “They’re hollow, you know. He might have... ”

“I pried it open,” Carella said. “Nothing.”

“Maybe we ought to take up this damn carpet,” Brown said.

“Be here all night,” Carella said. “If we have to do that, we’d better get a crew in tomorrow. Did you look in the piano?”

“Yeah, and the piano bench.”

“How about the clock radio in the bedroom?”

“Unscrewed the back. Nothing. The television in the den?”

“Same thing.” Carella smiled. “Maybe we ought to do what my son does when he loses one of his toys.”

“What does he do?”

“Well, he starts by saying ‘Where would you be if you were a fire truck?’ ”

“Okay, where would you be if you were a photograph?”

“In an album,” Carella said.

“You find any picture albums around?”

“Nope.”

“So where else would you be?”

“We’re looking for something maybe this big,” Carella said, curling his thumb and forefinger into a C some two inches wide. “Maybe even smaller. He could have hidden it anywhere.”

“Um-huh,” Brown said, and nodded. “Where?”

“Did you look in those cereal boxes in the kitchen?”

“All of them. He sure liked cornflakes.”

“Maybe it is under the carpet,” Carella said.

“Would you put it under the carpet?”

“No. Too much trouble checking on it.”

“That’s what I figure. Have to move the furniture around and pull up the whole damn rug every time you wanted to make sure the picture was still there.”

“So where would you be?” Carella said.

“Home asleep,” Brown answered.

“Okay, where wouldn’t you be?”

“I wouldn’t be in plain sight of two cops coming to look for me.”

“It sure as hell ain’t in plain sight,” Carella said.

“Probably right under our noses, though, and we haven’t yet spotted it,” Brown said. “Maybe we need a little more light on the subject.” He rose from the easy chair, sighed heavily, and walked to the piano. A lamp with a brass base rested on the burled walnut top. Brown switched it on. “There,” he said, “how’s that?”

“The better to see you with, my dear,” Carella said.

“You want to look around a little more, or shall we come back in the morning and rip up the carpet?”

“Let’s give it another whirl,” Carella said. He got off the piano bench, walked to the middle of the room, looked around, and said, “So where the hell is it?”

“You don’t think he could have rolled it up and stuck it inside a cigarette or something?” Brown asked.

“Why not? Did you check out that cigarette box?”

“I looked inside it, but I didn’t slit any of the cigarettes.”

“Try it,” Carella said. “We may get lucky.” He walked to the standing floor lamp and started to unscrew the shade.

“I’ve already done that,” Brown said.

“Right, I’m getting punchy,” Carella said. He looked down into the lamp, said, “One of the bulbs is out,” and then walked across the room to where Brown was slitting cigarettes open with his thumbnail.

“Just ‘cause the man’s a burglar,” Brown said, “that don’t mean he’s got to be a bulb-snatcher, too.”