give her a good listening to.
I ate at my desk while wading through the mail, which consisted of a medley of junk and bills. A quick tote of the accounts payable told me most of my check from the insurance company was already gone. No matter, I thought, if I could just maintain the next few days, I’d be ready to drum up biz again.
Right, like I could focus for shit on anything beyond the next five minutes. What if this was crazy? I thought. What if Mac Ford didn’t have anything to do with Rebecca Gibson’s death? Beyond the fact that I really didn’t like the guy, there wasn’t much to go on.
Finally the clock moved. I gathered up my trash and stuffed it into the wastebasket. Inside my desk drawer, a small zippered leather case held a set of lock picks that I’d bought from Lonnie. Ever since I saw him go through a couple of locked doors like they weren’t there, I’d wanted to learn more about locks. Lonnie’d been glad to teach me, and in the past few months I’d gotten to where I could pick an ordinary cylinder without too much trouble.
I slipped the case into my shirt pocket, then almost as an afterthought tucked the stun gun into my other shirt pocket after first making sure the safety was on. I left the office and drove out Charlotte Avenue, under the interstate bridge, then turned left and crossed first Church Street, then Broadway, and on up to Demonbreun. Music Row was up the hill, past the loudspeakers booming country music on a warm Saturday afternoon and the tourists with white hairy legs, plaid shorts, and novelty T-shirts wandering in and out of traffic oblivious to the Nashville drivers.
I made my way through that maze, then down Music Row and parked in the block before Mac Ford’s office. I nestled into the curb, between a Ford Ranger with a camper bed and a brand-new Saturn. I sat low in the seat, hugged the driver’s side door, and by looking around the corner of the pickup, had a perfect view of the front door of Mac Ford’s building.
There were two cars parked on the brown pea-gravel driveway, with two more on the curb directly in front. I sat there hidden for nearly twenty minutes before anyone came out the front door. A tall woman with a bundle of file folders got into one of the cars in the driveway, followed by a scruffy short guy with a briefcase in one hand and a portable phone in the other. He got into the car behind the woman, and the two backed out onto the street and pulled away. The driveway was empty now. I checked my watch. It was almost one o’clock.
I sat there another fifteen minutes. There was no guarantee that the two cars parked in front of the building were owned by Mac Ford’s employees. Alvy could be in there alone by now and there’d be no way for me to know it.
The sun was high now, and the inside of my car was turning into a greenhouse. I felt a sheet of sweat on my forehead, and suddenly wished I could strip off these clothes and dive into a swimming pool. I waited until I couldn’t stand it anymore, then got out of the car and locked it behind me.
I walked quickly down the street, past the office building, then rounded the corner and walked down the side street. The alley that ran behind Mac Ford’s building was empty. The parking slots were vacant as well. I decided to go for it.
I slipped across the grass and climbed the wooden stairs to the back door. The knob wouldn’t turn; I thought for a second, then decided to try the doorbell. I pressed the small button and heard a muffled buzzer go off from somewhere inside the building.
Flies buzzed around me from the Dumpster out by the alley. There was no traffic. Silence everywhere. I didn’t know the Row got so quiet on weekends. I was about to hit the buzzer again when I heard hard shoes on steps.
Alvy Barnes cracked the door open and glared at me.
“You’re early,” she said.
I reached into the crack and yanked the door open, then stepped inside before she had a chance to do anything besides deepen her dirty look.
“You have a keen grasp of the obvious,” I said. I was in no mood for her bullshit. I wanted to get this over with as quickly as possible, then get the hell out. If this worked out as I fantasized, my next stop would be Sergeant E. D. Fouch’s office at police headquarters.
“You can’t just-”
“Move,” I interrupted. “Let’s do it.” I took her right arm just at the tricep and gently pushed her forward.
“Listen you,” she snapped. “You can’t come in here pushing me around like this!”
“Alvy, the sooner we get this done with, the sooner we can get out of here. Let’s stop jerking each other around, okay?”
“I hate you,” she said. But she turned anyway and started up the flight of stairs behind her.
I followed her up the stairs, through a doorway into the second-floor hallway, then down to Mac Ford’s office. Alvy’s computer was on and there was a stack of papers on her desk. She pulled a key ring out of the center drawer, fumbled with the keys a moment, then selected one and opened the door. I followed her into Mac Ford’s office as she switched on the overhead.
The only other time I’d seen it, it had been as cold as January and filled with the purplish glow of black lights. Now, without air-conditioning and lit by the harsh glow of a rack of fluorescent tubes in the ceiling, it looked dusty, cluttered, and full of junk that gave the place lots of class; all of it low.
“Ford’s filing cabinets are in the closet, right?”
“Just one. He has one filing cabinet where he keeps his private correspondence and files. But I don’t have a key to it. I don’t even have a key to the door.”
I reached into my pocket. “If we’re lucky, we won’t need one.”
Alvy looked over my shoulder as I unzipped the case and unfolded the side pockets. Each pick had its own little slot in the leather case. I took out a small black metal raker pick, a thin blade with a series of bends in the end that looked like a sine wave from the side. From the other side of the case, I took a tension wrench, an even thinner L-shaped blade that was flat at the end.
Down on one knee, I carefully put the tension wrench into the keyway like Lonnie’d shown me, then with my left index finger, I put just enough pressure on the cylinder to force the pins into contact with the cylinder body at the shear line. Then I gently stuck the raker pick in until I felt it hit the back of the lock. Lifting the pick just a hair, I pulled it smoothly out, feeling the raker hit the pins and push them up and down.
Nothing.
I tried it again. Sometimes it takes a few tries. Sometimes you have to pull the tension wrench out and start all over again. Sometimes it never works at all, at least when you’re a beginner like me.
This time, I pulled a little harder and a little faster. I felt the cylinder slip just a bit, mainly by the change in pressure on the tension wrench. I tried it a third time, figuring maybe it was going to take a different pick. The only question was how much time we had.
I jerked the pick out; the tension wrench gave way, spinning the cylinder around and unlocking the door.
“Hot damn,” I whispered.
“Wow,” she said. “That was cool.”
I looked up at her. “Alvy, you’ve been watching too much MTV.”
I opened the door, half-afraid of what I’d find inside. The tiny closet was mostly empty, though, except for a couple of cases of Dos Equis and diet Coke in the corner, a small bookcase jammed with CDs, and a filing cabinet. There was a bare bulb in the ceiling with a piece of string hanging down. I yanked it, filling the closet with an unforgiving light.
The cabinet was a standard-issue, five-drawer filing cabinet, almond-colored, with the smiling skull of a Grateful Dead decal on the front of the top drawer. The tiny lock in the top right-hand corner was pushed in, locking all five drawers down.
“Okay, same scene, take two,” I said. I handed Alvy the pick case. “Here, hold this for me.”
I’d never picked a filing-cabinet lock, but it looked like a smaller version of a standard cylinder lock. I used the same tension wrench, with a smaller diamond pick this time. After five minutes of fuming and cursing under my breath, I gave up on that and dug out an even smaller ball pick, which was a thin blade of metal with a round piece cut in the end.
That didn’t work either, and I was just about to go outside and see if I couldn’t find a big damn rock, when
