Booking In. Jack Batten

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      “Even if we had, there wasn’t anybody in the architect’s office to wake up.”

      “Nothing else went wrong?”

      “Without a hitch, man,” Maury said, a big grin on his face.

      “A delight in every regard,” Biscuit said. He was grinning too.

      “What are you guys holding out on me?” I said. “You’re like a pair of kids with a secret the adults don’t know about.”

      Maury looked at Biscuit, who nodded back at Maury.

      “Listen,” I said, “I didn’t pay a twenty-five-buck cab fare just for an omelette. You said it was essential I get here.”

      Maury leaned partway across the table. He said, “The safe wasn’t empty.”

      “So?” I said. “Fletcher put some other client’s papers in there?”

      “You don’t get it.”

      “Which part don’t I get?”

      Maury reached down to the seat beside him and lifted his black briefcase onto the table. Before he opened the briefcase, he took a pair of white gloves out of his pocket, the kind of gloves that hospital surgeons wear as part of their scrubs in an operating room. Maury pulled the gloves on, and only then, gloved up, did he slowly and deliberately pull the briefcase open and slide out a medium-sized file in a large brown envelope. He held the envel­ope in my direction, but when I reached for it, Biscuit handed me another pair of the white scrub gloves. I put them on.

      “Why are we going super cautious with whatever surprise you guys have come up with?” I said.

      “You’ll understand the reason in a moment, Crang,” Biscuit said.

      Maury allowed me take the envelope from his hand.

      “Have at it, Crang,” he said.

      I realized what I was holding in my hands the minute I opened the papers inside the envelope. I wasn’t any kind of expert on Victorian typography, but the filigrees and drop shadows and other delicate touches on the papers told me I was looking at a forged version of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese. This was a copy of the Reading Sonnets, real or faked. I took my time, turning the sheets with thoughtfulness and respect until I had examined all forty-four of the sonnets.

      I looked up at Maury. “Whoever swiped what we assume are the forgeries of the sonnets put them back in the safe. And you guys reswiped them. Anything I’m leaving out?”

      “Yeah,” Maury said, “who done it? Apart from us, I mean? Who planted these mothers back in the safe they got stolen from in the first place?”

      Maury and Biscuit were still grinning like madmen.

      “Go ahead,” I said. “Tell me who you guys are fingering as the guilty party.”

      “You want to take a guess before we tell you our expert opinion?”

      “It’s no guess,” I said. “From all the clues, it must be Charlie Watson.”

      Maury’s face lost the grin. Biscuit kept his.

      “You’re a sneaky son of a bitch, Crang,” Maury said. “How did you figure her?”

      “The first thing Biscuit must have done at the store last night,” I said to Maury, “was examine the lock on the back door. I’m betting it showed no signs of ever being picked, just as you yourself figured out the other day.”

      “Correct, Crang,” Biscuit said. “Which leads to the rest of your conclusions practically automatically.”

      “You found the lock on the safe similarly pristine,” I said. “Ergo, as I think Sherlock Holmes probably never said, the thief who stole the forged sonnets and the Walter Hickey letters probably got into the store with a key and into the safe with the combination.”

      “And as far as we know only two people fill the bill,” Maury said. “Namely Fletcher and this dame Charlie.”

      “I pick Charlie,” I said to Maury. “If it was Fletcher who did it, he’d hardly be likely to hire you and me to hunt down the purloined papers.”

      “Being as how we’re so frigging smart at this stuff,” Maury said.

      “Done,” I said. “Charlie’s our lead suspect.”

      Maury was drinking a beer and Biscuit had a Johnny Walker Black, which he took in very small sips. I raised my Coors, and the three of us toasted the previous night’s productive break-in.

      “One problem,” I said. “Charlie’s got an alibi for the night of the original burglary.”

      “Guilty parties always say they were nowhere near the scene of the crime,” Maury said.

      “She was with her boyfriend at his place.”

      “Who’s the boyfriend?”

      “According to Charlie, she has to keep his identity confidential for a while.”

      “What that probably means is we got another suspicious party.”

      “We do. The boyfriend could be Charlie’s partner in both the original swipe job and in the replacement operation. It could be that both of them got cold feet and bailed out of the theft, at least as far as the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems are concerned.”

      “How come they’d do that?” Maury said. “Give back the poems but not the letters about the Hickey guy and Norman Mailer?”

      “Seems to be a case of selective cold feet.”

      “Or else there were two separate safecrackers,” Biscuit said. “One for the poems and the other for the letters.”

      “The way is open for several possibilities,” I said.

      “That’s the kind of bullshit lawyers always say,” Maury said. “Their answer to every question includes something about ‘several possibilities.’”

      “We got our work cut out for us,” I said.

      “That’s another lawyer’s line.”

      “What I say, Maury,” I said, “is we start following somebody around.”

      “Now you’re talking, man,” Maury said.

      “Starting with Charlie. That’s because we need to identify her boyfriend.”

      “If you need more manpower for the tail than just you two guys, count me in,” Biscuit said.

      “We already only got one vehicle,” Maury said to Biscuit. “Crang’s currently carless.”

      “I recall a very elegant Mercedes of ancient vintage,” Biscuit said to me.

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