First impressions were not encouraging; the top drawer was empty, a discovery I thought symbolic of the entire house.

  The underlying question was, why? Was it that Jardine’s moderate wealth had come so suddenly that he’d leapt from having nothing to a house full of furnishings without passing through those years in which the rest of us accumulate tons of junk? That didn’t explain the parents Beaumont had mentioned. Jardine must have bent over backwards to eradicate all signs of their presence here, making an erstwhile family home into what looked like a weekend condo.

  I hesitated before checking the other desk drawers, still lost in thought. There were other possibilities—a man without identification traced to a house without individuality. There was an almost ominous blandness to it all, the way aspects of real life are sometimes portrayed artificially on stage. I put that thought into a mental cubbyhole and began going through the rest of the drawers.

  There I found the first signs of life—bank statements, insurance papers, credit-card receipts, utility and oil bills, tax returns. I would immerse myself in all those later, fabricating a life from them as an archaeologist does from debris found in the dust. But at first glance, it all seemed utterly normal. Jardine had an income that averaged out to some forty-five thousand dollars a year. There were no gigantic debts, no large, unexplained deposits.

  There was a desk calendar, one of those two-ringed plastic easels you can flip through, day by day. Again, it was mostly blank, barring the occasional cryptic note, like “R 2” or “G 730.” Flipping through, I found concentrations of R’s, G’s, T’s, S’s, and more, with some extending throughout the year and others ending at the tail end of a clump. For the most part, whether bunched or spread out, they usually fell on Fridays or Saturdays. With Beaumont’s appraisal of Jardine as a ladies’ man, I was content to think for the moment that the initials stood for women’s first names, some of whom were regulars, while others had apparently been brief and passionate affairs.

  I leafed through the calendar a little more carefully a second time, focusing on a single discrepancy. Without exception, R had a single low digit next to it, usually a 2 or a 3, while all the others rated anywhere from 6 to 11, with the occasional 630, 730, and 830 thrown in for good measure. If these numbers stood for rendezvous times, then R had a fetish for either mid-afternoons or the dead of night.

  The phone rang suddenly, causing me to drop the calendar in surprise. It stopped after the first ring, there was a click and a soft whirring sound, and then a gentle, modulated male voice filled the room: “Hi, this is Charlie’s machine. Talk to it like you’d talk to me, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

  There was a beep, a pause, then an irritated woman’s voice muttered, “shit,” and the line went dead.

  I stared at the answering machine under the phone. A single beady red light was blinking on its front. I leaned forward and read the various labels imprinted in the black plastic. I couldn’t remember if that light had been on when I’d sat down or not. I found a button marked “messages” and pushed it. Again the machine whirred, and I could hear the tape rewinding. There was another beep, and a woman’s voice asked, “Charlie, I can’t find one of my white blouses. Do you still have it? Call me before Thursday.”

  I pursed my lips. Why was it friends never identified themselves on the phone? Gail never did either. I was used to it now, of course, but at first it had thrown me for a loop, forcing my brain to scramble through its entire voice catalog in a desperate search for the right one, all while I tried to converse with utter self-confidence.

  The machine spoke again—another female voice, hesitant, soft, almost fearful. “Charlie? I was wondering… I’d like to… Call me, okay?”

  A beep again and I heard the muted “shit” that had caught my attention to begin with. I thought for a moment, still looking at the machine, and then reached for the telephone book nearby. I picked up the phone and dialed.

  “ABC Investments.”

  “Hi. Is Mr. Jardine there?”

  “The office is closed, sir. This is an answering service. May I take a message?”

  “Oh, sure. Actually, it would be for his partner.” I paused.

  “Mr. Clyde.”

  I quickly flipped to the front of the phone book, talking while I did so. “Yeah, that’s it—he’s the one I really want to chat with.” I found the listing. “Mr. Arthur Clyde.”

  The voice on the other end took on a slight edge. “That’s what I said, sir, Mr. Clyde. What’s the message?”

  “I changed my mind—it’s a little delicate. I think I’ll wait until I see—” But the line had gone dead.

  I smiled to myself and dialed again. A man answered—I could tell I’d woken him up. I altered my voice. “Is this Arthur Clyde, of ABC Investments?”

  “Yes.” His tone became slightly wary.

  “You around tomorrow? I was wondering if I could come by to discuss some investments I’d like to make.”

  The wariness yielded to controlled irritation. “I’m around, but I’d prefer that you called my secretary tomorrow at the office. She’ll set up an appointment. Good night.”

  I hung up. Not knowing anything about Clyde or ABC, or even much about Jardine, I didn’t want things to move too quickly. I wanted to learn what I could from Jardine’s records before telling Clyde of his partner’s death, and I knew that task might take me a good part of the night. The phone call had told me I had the right man, and that he’d be available in the morning. I turned to the sound of Ron Klesczewski coming into the office.

  “Finding much?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “I’d say the guy was a monk if it weren’t for all the women on his answering machine. I’ve seen two-year-olds with more material possessions.”

  Klesczewski gave an uncharacteristic smirk. “He was no two-year-old, and I think his interests were way outside religion.”

  He crooked a finger at me and led the way upstairs. Given the layout of the house on the ground floor, I expected a conventional equivalent above. I was dead wrong. The entire second floor consisted of two enormous rooms—a bedroom and a bathroom, both of which had cathedral ceilings going right up to the apex of the roof.

  The contrast didn’t stop there. The rooms were not only disproportionately large, they were also as gaudily furnished as the downstairs was staid. The bed was circular, huge, and covered with a fake-fur coverlet and black satin sheets. It was a four-poster, but instead of supporting the traditional fabric canopy, the posts carried a round mirror reflecting back down on the bed.

  There was also a fireplace—gas-fired for intimacy at the twist of a wrist and flanked by mirrored panels—and before it was an eight-foot-square fur rug with pillows. One wall had an elaborate stereo and TV system, controlled by a couple of remote units I saw parked on the half-round headboard of the bed, next to copies of The Joy of Sex and The Sensual Massage. The lighting was dim and indirect, as if designed for some Hollywood seduction scene. The walls were painted a dark, sensuous red.

  The bathroom was similarly excessive, with thick rugs, a Jacuzzi, and a separate glass-walled shower stall so big it had several nozzles and a redwood bench inside. Again, mirrors predominated throughout.

  “Jesus Christ,” I muttered at last. “Looks like a whorehouse.”

  “Does seem he had a one-track mind. There’s a ton of massage oils and weird creams in there, plus a couple of vibrators.” He gestured to a cabinet over one of the two sinks.

  “What else did you find?” I could tell from his expression that Klesczewski was feeling terribly proud of himself, especially knowing of my own slim pickings downstairs.

  He smiled and led me back into the bedroom. Along another wall, next to the closet door, was a long, low set of drawers. Klesczewski pulled one all the way out and laid it on the floor. “Look at the back.”

  I did and found taped there a Ziploc freezer bag filled with white powder.

  “I didn’t touch it, but I don’t guess it’s sugar.” He paused and frowned. “I always thought coke was supposed to kill your sex drive.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t the one using it.”

  Klesczewski looked slightly abashed. “Oh—right.”

  “Holy fuck.”

  We both turned to see Al Santos standing at the top of the stairs, looking around as if he’d just been exposed to the Sistine Chapel.

  Ron laughed. “Yeah. Literally.”

  I placed a call to J.P. Tyler to let him know what we’d found, and asked him to come over and collect the cocaine. He could check the house more carefully tomorrow, but for now I wanted at least that one piece of evidence under lock and key in the Municipal Building.

  Santos and Mayhew took us on a tour of other parts of the house.

  It became apparent that a good deal of what I’d been missing in my search had merely been relegated to less traveled areas. Both the basement and the garage appeared more normal than the first floor. They were cluttered with skis and winter clothing and empty suitcases and automobile parts and boxes of conventional books. Somehow, that discovery set my mind at ease. I was no closer to finding out why or by whom Charlie Jardine had been killed, but at least now I felt he’d been a real—if slightly exotic—human being.

  I had Mayhew relieve Santos in babysitting the house. The graveyard shift would take over in a quarter hour in any case, since it was now almost midnight. The dread of the publicity and the bureaucratic hassles that had crept into me when we’d uncovered Jardine’s body had by now been replaced by the familiar adrenaline of the hunt. Driving back to the police department with a boxful of evidence in my car trunk made me regret that in order to be halfway functional tomorrow, I would have to call it quits soon and go home to bed.

  I parked near the department’s private outside door, right beside where John Woll, now in uniform, was getting out of the passenger seat of his own car. His wife, Rose, leaned out the window as he circled around and kissed him good-night.

  I’d seen her before at department get-togethers, a pretty, slightly plump, dark-haired woman with an overly and permanently anxious face. I waved to her before I opened my trunk to retrieve the box.

  She waved back and then called out to Woll, who was halfway up the steps to the entrance. “John, you forgot your lunch box.”

  He returned and took it from her, muttering a greeting to me. I stood at the back of my car, watching her drive away and hearing the door slam shut behind him, my heart hammering and my previous good mood destroyed.

  The sense of dread I’d experienced earlier, of being in the way of some threat as implacable as fate, caught hold of me again. Only this time, recognition had made it abruptly more pressing; the urgency I felt now had less to do with solving a complex crime quickly, and more to do with the department’s self-preservation.

  The voice I had heard on Charlie Jardine’s answering machine, the hesitant one who’d left no clear message, had belonged to Rose Woll.

  6

  I DIDN’T GET TO BED THAT NIGHT. I’d packed the answering machine’s tape in the box I’d brought back from Jardine’s place, and after I sent all the detectives home, I played it over and over in total silence, trying to hear in Rose Woll’s voice things that weren’t there to hear. I also leafed through Jardine’s desk calendar, fighting the growing conviction that the R’s scribbled there stood for Rose, and that the hours opposite them were for two and three in the morning, when John Woll was on the midnight shift, as he had been for the last two years.

  After about thirty minutes of this, I decided the only cure for the depression that now hung over me worse than the heat was to look at this mess analytically. I left my office to dig out Woll’s personnel file.

  Everyone’s personnel files were kept locked inside the chief’s office across the hall, available only to the chief and his deputy. Normally, access was only granted under their supervision, but I had asked Brandt earlier if an exception could be made in this one instance. Time, after all, was a crucial element here, and we both knew my penchant toward burning the midnight oil. He’d told me to be as discreet as possible and had handed me his keys.

  The chief’s office was located in the room next to the officers’ room, in the corner of which Woll, Manierre, and I had met earlier. Now that both Brandt and Billy Manierre had gone home, however, the only other occupant on that entire side of the building was Dispatch, which was located in an open-doored corner room diagonally across from Brandt’s glass-walled cubicle.

  Using my own key, I entered the darkened officers’ room from the hallway, risking my neck by tiptoeing across that carpenters’ battlefield so I wouldn’t have to use the primary entrance, whose lock was electronically controlled by the dispatcher.

  I waited at the interconnecting threshold, around the corner from the dispatcher’s open door, until I heard him acknowledging someone on the radio, which he could only do by turning his back to me. I then quickly crossed over to the chief’s office, unseen and unheard. I was not taking Brandt’s admonition to be discreet lightly. Not much happened in the department that didn’t become common knowledge within a day. Being caught going through the personnel files in the dead of night would have been like dropping a lit match into a bucket of gasoline.

  Using the parking-lot lights filtering through the window, I located the cabinet I was after and opened the appropriate drawer. I found John Woll’s file by using a small flashlight I always carried in my pocket. It was a bizarre sensation, skulking around my own place of employment like a second-story man, all for the sake of discretion. By the nervous sweat that was beading my forehead, I might as well have been lifting someone’s silverware.

  As I eased the file drawer shut, I noticed a dilapidated oscillating fan sitting on top of the cabinet. The temptation was more than I could resist. If I was slated for an entire night in my hot coffin of an office, at least I could have the air being pushed around a bit. I tucked the fan under my arm and started to make my getaway.

  I was halfway across the officers’ room, feeling the euphoric rush of the successful thief, when the far door opened, a hand groped along the bare-stud wall, and the entire place was flooded in blinding light. I froze in double shock, not only because I’d been caught, but because I had no idea the lights had been connected.

  As it turned out, that revelation served me well, for I blurted out without thinking, “The goddamn lights work.”

  Buddy, the night janitor, stared at me in startled amazement.

  “Oh… Hi, Lieutenant. Yeah—they hooked ’em up this afternoon.”

  I chuckled and shook my head, relieved that my secretive ordeal was abruptly over. “I’ve been poking through here like a blind man, for Christ’s sake.”

  Buddy was carrying two buckets full of sponges, rags, solvents, and whatnot, destined to maintain the dispatch office’s brand-new luster. “What’re you doin’ here so late?” He suddenly looked down at the floor, as if the words had blurted out before he could stop them.

  He was almost in his thirties, a somewhat scrawny-looking man with a pile of curly hair on his head and a pathetically wispy Vandyke. He’d been the night janitor for years, telling me once that he liked the privacy and the hours because they allowed him time to read. Indeed, he always had a paperback stuck in his back pocket, although I’d never been curious enough to find out what kinds of books he preferred. He was generally quiet, sometimes painfully shy, and, I thought, apparently perfectly suited to his solitary job.

  “Actually, I was about to commit a theft.” I waggled the fan that was still tucked under my arm.

  His eyes grew round. “That thing? If you don’t mind me saying, that’s not much of a theft—too noisy.” He hesitated, while a nervous smile spread across his face. “You know, Lieutenant, if it’s a fan you want, I could get you one as quiet as a whisper.”

  “From where?” I couldn’t deny I was interested. I’d heard the chief’s fan in action and understood why he never had it on. My lifting it had been an act of pure desperation.

  He gave me a lopsided grin, relieved at my lack of outrage. “Don’t ask me no questions and I won’t tell you no lies—isn’t that what they say?”

  I hesitated. “How about a temporary loan, from someone who won’t miss it?”

  “Oh, sure. That’s just what I had in mind. Be right back.” He piled his belongings along the wall and headed out the door.

  “I’ll be in my office,” I called after him and placed Brandt’s fan on a nearby windowsill.

  I returned to my own corner of the building. Under cooler circumstances, I actually enjoyed working here in the middle of the night. It wasn’t only the silence that made it appealing, although the still phones and absence of people were definite pluses; it was also the odd satisfaction of being up when almost everyone else was asleep. I felt in the middle of the night as if I were capable of deeds unachievable in the daylight—as if I were endowed with ethereal powers.

  Buddy found me as I was sorting through the contents of Woll’s file, separating the bureaucratic confetti from the reports that might tell me something.

  “Here you go.” He wiped a large blue-and-white plastic fan clean with a rag from his pocket and placed it on my desk, fastidiously moving aside a large ashtray filled with paper clips. The fan was enormous and looked brand new. “Even goes back and forth, and it’s got three speeds.”

  He got down on his knees and plugged it into a baseboard outlet. The fan began swinging its mechanical head back and forth, as if sighing in resignation at the plainness of its surroundings. It was admittedly the fanciest thing in my office.

  “See? Quiet as a whisper.” He was grinning like a sweepstakes winner. Helping the chief of detectives in an interagency theft had obviously made his day. He slightly readjusted the fan’s position.

  “It’s great, Buddy. I owe you one. What do I do with it after tonight?”