Spook

17

From the catwalk we located Kennett, drink in hand, wandering casually through the crowd. By the time we got to the pier floor he’d stopped by the Santa’s Village display, was standing there by himself looking at it. When he saw us, the grim look on McCone’s face, it was like watching somebody put on a mask. Blank, smiling innocence, the kind Nixon used to project in front of TV cameras.

Sharon said, “Where’s the disk?”

“What disk?”

“The one you stole from my private office.”

“Stole? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you deny you were in my office a few minutes ago?”

“I certainly do. I haven’t been anywhere near your office.”

I said, “We both know that’s a lie, Kennett.”

“Who’re you? I don’t know you.”

“You’re not leaving here with that disk,” McCone said.

“I don’t have any damn disk.” Bluster now, but with an undercurrent of fear. He gulped what was left in his plastic cup, set the cup on the floor, and then extended his arms dramatically. In a loud voice he said, “Search me if you want to. Go ahead, search me!”

People in the vicinity stopped talking, turned to stare — just what he wanted. Neither Sharon nor I moved. There was no point in searching him, we both knew that. His leather pants were skin tight; the outline of a disk would have shown clearly. Same thing with the ribbed pullover. A computer disk might fit inside one of the loafers he was wearing, but he hadn’t had time to stuff it in there; and even if he had, it would probably have changed the way he walked. He didn’t have it on him. He’d gotten rid of it somewhere, and not very long after he left McCone’s office.

“All right, Kennett. You win this round.” She jabbed him on the chest with a sharp-nailed forefinger, as hard as I would have. “But we’ll find it if it takes all night. You’ll be under watch until we do.”

“If you try to hold me against my will, I’ll sue you. You and this man and anybody else involved. Don’t think I won’t.”

More bluster. Neither of us bothered to respond.

Sharon McCone is as efficient an investigator as I’ve known in thirty-some years in the business. Doubly so in a crisis. She gathered and quickly briefed the members of her staff, individually and in pairs, telling Craig Morland to stay close to Kennett everywhere he went, assigning her nephew, Mick, and her newest operative, Julia Rafael, to watch the exits. The rest of us went upstairs to her office, Neal Osborn and Kerry included. Neal because we might need an extra hand, Kerry because she’d noticed Kennett hurrying downstairs with me in his wake.

Once we were all settled, Sharon behind her desk, the rest of us sitting or standing, she said, “We need to brainstorm this, try to get some idea of what Kennett did with the disk. Wolf and I will do most of the talking, but if anybody has anything to contribute, jump in any time.” That was another thing about McCone: She ran a fairly loose ship, delegating a good deal of authority to her people, but when she took command she did it forcefully and got complete cooperation in return. In my idealized view of the future, Tamara would turn out just like her. You couldn’t ask for a better role model.

She asked me to go over again, in detail, what had happened earlier. When I was done, she said, “So Kennett didn’t go around to the opposite catwalk before he went downstairs, and Craig said he hasn’t gone up there since. That eliminates the Chandler & Santos offices as a hiding place.”

“We can eliminate one other possibility,” I said. “The unlikely one that Kennett hid the disk somewhere in here before I walked in. The old purloined letter trick. He didn’t expect to get caught and he’d be a fool to risk sneaking in another time, or trying to retrieve it while you were here.”

She nodded. “You had him in sight the whole time after he left, except for those few seconds on your way downstairs?”

“Right.”

“How many seconds, would you say?”

“No more than fifteen. That little window must be when he got rid of the disk.”

“Unless he managed to hide it on the way. Up here among the railing decorations, for instance.”

“I doubt it, but I can’t be a hundred percent certain. He did walk close to the railing all the way to the stairs. It’s remotely possible he slipped the disk in among the decorations.”

“The main argument against it is the same as hiding it in here — he couldn’t’ve been sure of getting his hands on it later. All the decorations between here and the stairs are ours. Still... Ted, go check and make sure.”

As Ted went out, I said, “Kennett had one hand in his pocket on the catwalk, on the stairs, and when I lost sight of him. But when I spotted him again, the hand was out — he made a gesture with it when he joined the group by the trophy. It’s possible that he passed the disk to somebody in the crowd.”

“Not likely. He’d’ve had no reason to arrange for an accomplice. It feels like a one-man operation to me.”

“Which leaves a hiding place someplace on the pier floor.”

“Did he turn straight into the crowd from the stairs?”

“Yes. Hard left turn.”

“So he passed right by the Model T Ford display.”

“Right, because that was what cat off my view of him.”

Charlotte Keim, Mick’s girlfriend and fellow computer whiz, said, “Another possibility is the nonprofit’s ecological display. It’s right next to the car.”

McCone said, “Among the branches of one of the fir trees? Could be.”

“The only problem with that is, he’d’ve had to go right in among them. That’d be inviting attention.”

“Have a look anyway, Charlotte. As unobtrusively as possible.”

Ted came in just then, shaking his head. “It’s not among the garlands or galactic decorations.”

“Check the Model T next. Inside and out.”

Neal said, “I’ll help him look.”

The three of them left together. Sharon asked Kerry, “You also lost sight of Ken-nett for several seconds, you said?”

“Yes. About the same number, fifteen.”

“Where was he when you spotted him again?”

“By Santa’s Village, on his way toward the loving cup.”

“The way the village is constructed, it’d be hard to hide anything in it quickly, even an object as small as a computer disk.”

“What about the cup?” Kerry asked.“If it’s hollow, he could have dropped it inside.”

“It’s hollow, but Kennett isn’t very tall and the way the cup sits on the pedestal, he’d’ve had to stretch up on his toes. Again, too conspicuous.”

I said, “Then it has to be either the Model T or the fir trees.”

Wrong. It was neither one. First Charlotte, then Ted and Neal returned empty-handed. Neal said, “I even got down on my hands and knees and checked the undercarriage. You should’ve seen the looks I got.”

We all lapsed into a period of ruminative silence. Frustration had thickened the tension in the room, increased the sense of urgency. Sharon usually maintains a poker face in business situations, tense or otherwise, but the worry was beginning to show through. She had a lot riding on the recovery of that disk.

I broke the silence finally by saying, “We’ve been assuming that if I hadn’t come in unexpectedly and caught Kennett in the act, he would’ve hung onto the disk until the party ended. But remember how he’s dressed. If he’d kept it in his pocket, as tight as those leather pants are, he’d have to keep his hand in there too so it wouldn’t show.”

“You’re right,” McCone said. “That would really call attention to himself, the last thing he’d want. If he’d intended to hold onto the disk, he’d’ve worn looser clothing.”

“So he must’ve planned to hide it all along. Someplace picked out in advance, one he’d be sure to have access to later. Easy access, when nobody was around.”

“Yes, but what place? What’ve we overlooked?”

“Kerry, when you saw him passing Santa’s Village, was he moving straight toward the trophy?”

“... No, he wasn’t. At an angle, a sharp one.”

“From which direction?”

“The right.”

“Then he had to have veered off from the Model T display, toward the center of the floor, then veered back again.”

“That’s right.”

“Aimless wandering, maybe. And maybe not. The bar and the buffet are in the center, but farther back. What’s closer to this end?”

“Nothing, except — Oh! Of course.”

The rest of us got it at the same time.

Mick said, “Home for the Holidays.”

I said, “And the sign says ‘Be generous.’ ”

Ted said, “And this year it’s Chandler and Santos’s turn to disperse the donations.”

McCone said, “That’s it, that’s got to be where he put the disk.”

Paul Kennett’s unfunny private joke, his own personal donation to the homeless: he’d dropped it right through that little slot into the Season of Sharing Fund barrel as he passed by.

We waited until the end of the party to check the barrel and confront Kennett. The Patterson case was sensitive, and more than one of the guests had political or media connections; and there was no point in spoiling the festivities for everyone else. McCone sent Ted and Neal downstairs to brief Craig, Mick, and Julia, and to stand guard over the cash barrel. The rest of us sat in her office, nibbled food that Ted had sent up, and talked about this and that. I’m not a patient man, normally, but tonight I had no trouble with fidgeting or clock-watching. Sharon’s quiet, comfortable office was a far better place for me than down among the noisy revelers on the pier floor.

At a few minutes past eleven, Neal poked his head through the door. “The pier’s locked down and the clean-up crews are assembling.”

We all trooped down into a wasteland of party wreckage. The decorations, fresh and colorful when Kerry and I arrived, now looked as tired as the people from the pier offices who had volunteered to remain and clean up the mess. McCone pointed out the two partners in the architectural firm, Nat Chandler and Harvey Santos, who were hauling one of the barrels of clothing up the stairs to their offices. Paul Kennett was nowhere to be seen.

Mick was leaning casually on the cash barrel, talking to Ted. Sharon said to him, “You’re supposed to be watching the back entrance.”

“No need. Kennett went upstairs about ten minutes ago. Probably waiting in his office for the money barrel to be brought up. What do you bet he volunteered to stay and count the cash after everybody else goes home?”

Santos and Chandler were coming back down. McCone signaled to them, said when they came over that she wanted them to act as witnesses, and then nodded to Mick and me.

We pried the lid off the barrel. It was three-quarters full of cash, coins, checks. We tilted it at a forty-five degree angle, and I held it like that so Mick could root around inside. It wasn’t much more than a minute before he came up with a flat, round object encased in a thin plastic sleeve.

One of the architects asked Sharon, “A computer disk? What’s this about?” She didn’t answer; she was looking up at the catwalk in front of their offices.

Paul Kennett stood at the railing, staring down at us. She took the disk from Mick’s hand, held it high over her head. Kennett had nowhere to go; he didn’t try. Not even when Mick said loud enough for him to hear, “Gotcha!”

Later, most of us reassembled in McCone’s office for some Christmas cheer. The disk was safe for tonight; tomorrow she would have copies made and lock them in her safe deposit box, along with the hard-copy evidence files, until it was time for her Monday meeting with the D.A. As for Kennett, he’d avoided arrest and prosecution for theft because of the need to avoid publicity; but he’d been warned to keep his mouth shut if he didn’t want to be named in the forthcoming indictment against Patterson. What he hadn’t avoided was the loss of his job. Chandler and Santos had summarily fired him as soon as they were made aware of what he’d done.

I’d forgotten all about my Christmas present, which Sharon had slipped into a desk drawer during our earlier session. But she hadn’t forgotten. As soon as we were settled with our drinks, she produced the package and handed it to me with a little flourish.

“With thanks and love from all of us,” she said.

Embarrassed, I said, “I haven’t gotten anything for any of you yet...”

“Never mind that. Open your gift, Wolf.”

I hefted it. Not very large, not very heavy. I stripped off the paper, removed the lid from an oblong box — and inside was another, smaller box sealed with a lot of Scotch tape. Ted’s doing; I could tell from his expression. So I used my pocket knife to slice through the tape, opened the second box, rifled through a wad of tissue paper, and found—

Two plastic-bagged issues of Black Mask. And not just any two issues: rare, fine-condition copies of the September 1929 and February 1930 numbers, each containing an installment of the original six-part serial version of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

My mouth was hanging open; I snapped it shut. When I looked up they were all grinning at me. I said, “How’d you know these were the only two Falcon issues I didn’t have?” Funny, but my voice sounded a little choked.

“I told them,” Kerry said. “I checked to make sure.”

“And one of my book contacts back east found the issues,” Neal said.

“They must’ve cost a small fortune. So scarce and expensive I didn’t even put them on the want list I gave you...”

McCone waved that away. “What they cost doesn’t matter. You’ve been a friend for a long time. It’s the season of sharing with friends, too.”

I just sat there.

Kerry said, “Aren’t you going to say something?”

Sure, right. But what can you say to friends and loved ones who treat you better than you deserve, that doesn’t sound woefully inadequate?