Jigsaw

3

Lieutenant Byrnes looked at the list of names, and then turned his attention to the two pieces of the photograph:

“Don’t even look like they belong together,” he muttered.

They had filled him in on Krutch’s story, and he had listened intently, head cocked slightly to one side, blue eyes shifting from Carella’s face to Brown’s as they alternately picked up threads of the narrative. He was a thickset man, Byrnes, with heavy hands, the backs of which were sprinkled with liver spots. His hair was going white, and he had a bald patch barely beginning to show at the back of his head. But there was a sense of contained power about him, the certain knowledge that he had broken many a hood’s nose before being promoted to his present desk job. Impatiently, he looked at the photograph segments again, turning each one on his desktop, trying to fit them together, and then giving up the job.

“Guy comes in here with a story,” Byrnes said, “what does he expect us to do? Drop everything and go on a goddamn treasure hunt?”

“Well,” Carella said, “there’s the possibility he’s right.”

“A pretty slim possibility, if you ask me. Where’d you say he got this story? From an old lady who hardly speaks English, right?”

“That’s right.”

“But she told him in Italian,” Brown said. “She told him the picture shows where il tresoro is buried.”

“Il tesoro,” Carella corrected.

“Did she say that? Buried?”

“No. I don’t know. Hidden, I think she said. What’d she say, Steve?”

“Just that the picture shows where the treasure is, I think. That’s all.”

“She didn’t say buried, huh?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I just hate to put a man on this, and then...” Byrnes shook his head. “It’s not as if we’ve got nothing else to do around here, you know.”

The detectives were silent.

“Let’s say we search Ehrbach’s place,” Byrnes said. “And let’s say we do find a third piece of this picture, then what?”

“Then Krutch’s story begins to sound a little better,” Carella said.

“Yes, but where do we go from there?” Byrnes asked. “I’m willing to put you on it... okay, we don’t find anything, we’ve only wasted a day. But suppose we do find something, then what? This fellow... what’s his name?” Byrnes consulted the list again. “Weinberg. Albert Weinberg. He’s the next logical step. But Krutch says the man’s got an assault record, which means he can smell The Law six blocks away. Whoever we send after him would have to use a cover, and I’d need a second man for a contact and drop. That’s two men out of action, maybe on a wild-goose chase.” He shook his head again. “I don’t know.” He looked down at the photograph segments and then up at Carella. “What’s your caseload like, Steve?”

“I’ve got that dry-cleaning store holdup, and the muggings over on Ainsley... six in the past two weeks, same m.o. I’ve also got a lead I want to run down on the pusher who’s been working the junior high school on Seventeenth. And there’re two cases coming to trial this month. I have to be in court on Tuesday, matter of fact.”

“What about you, Artie?”

“I forgot to mention...” Carella said.

“Yeah?”

“Couple of burglaries over in Smoke Rise. We’ve been getting a lot of static on those because the sister of a municipal judge lives in the neighborhood.”

“Yeah, so let Hizzoner go find the burglar,” Byrnes said dryly. “Artie?”

“A hit-and-run, a jewelry store holdup, and a knifing. I’m supposed to be in court tomorrow on the knifing. It’ll be a quick trial — the guy stabbed his wife when he found her in bed with another man.”

“You want to take a crack at this Weinberg character? Assuming we find anything in Ehrbach’s apartment?”

“Sure,” Brown said.

“Does Weinberg live in the precinct? Would he be likely to spot you as a cop?”

“I don’t know.”

“Check him out with the IB, see if they’ve got an address for him.”

“Right.”

“You’d better find out where he’s operated, too, which cities, and pick your cover accordingly. Don’t make it anything too big, Artie, don’t say you’re a mob gun from Chicago or anything like that. Be too simple for him to check if he’s got any connections at all. Make it a numbers runner, a small-time pusher, something unimportant. You stumbled on your piece of the picture, you think Weinberg’s got another piece, and you want to team up with him. Keep it as simple as that.”

“Right.”

“Steve, you’ll have to be the outside man at the skunk works.”

“Fine.”

“Arrange a drop, and keep your contacts as few as possible. This guy Weinberg doesn’t sound like a customer to fool around with. And let’s not go overboard on this thing, okay? Let’s handle it in easy stages. If we don’t turn up anything at Ehrbach’s place, that’s it, back to the salt mines. If we hit pay dirt, we move on to Weinberg, stay with him a day or two. If it looks like he’s got a piece of the picture, we stick with him. Otherwise, we thank Krutch for his information and we drop the whole damn thing.” He looked up at the two men. “Anything else?”

“Just one thing,” Carella said. “The IB called a few minutes ago and verified everything Krutch said about the two dead men.”

“So?”

“So maybe he’s right about what we’ll find in Ehrbach’s apartment, too.”

“Maybe,” Byrnes said.

Judging from Eugene Edward Ehrbach’s apartment, the man had been a highly successful burglar. One could, of course, argue that anyone who had already taken two falls for burglary could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a successful burglar. But the fact remained that Ehrbach lived in a luxury apartment close to Silvermine Oval; neither of the detectives who shook down the place could have afforded anything even remotely similar to it on their salaries.

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.”

“Course not,” Carella said. “How we doing there?”

“I may get cancer of the thumb,” Brown said.

He looked up at Carella. Their eyes met, and instant recognition flashed onto both their faces at the same moment, leaping the distance between them like heat lightning.

“Yeah!” Carella said, and started moving back toward the floor lamp.

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Brown said, following him instantly.

“Oh, you know it,” Carella said.

There were three electric light bulbs in the lamp. Two of them were illuminated, and the third one was out. Carella reached in through the open top of the shade and unscrewed the one bulb that was not burning.

“There it is,” he said. “Unplug this damn thing before we electrocute ourselves.”

“Talk about a light bulb going on over a man’s head,” Brown said, and pulled the plug. Carella reached into the open socket with his thumb and forefinger. Neatly folded in half and then in half again, nestled into the bottom of the socket where it had been hidden by the light bulb screwed in on top of it, was the piece of the photo Krutch had promised they would find.