He looked up and grinned.
‘What d’ya know,’ he said. ‘Clean as a new dime.’
‘So?’ The Nosh said.
‘So how many people do you know polish off the doorknob when they enter or leave their place?’
Sharky stepped close to Barret. ‘You through here?’ he asked.
‘Yep.’
‘Then why don’t you step over there out of the way and let Nosh and me take the door, just in case.’
‘Why, indeed,’ Barret said and walked ten feet down the hail. The Nosh knelt down and popped the lock with less trouble than it would have taken to open a can of soup. Sharky took out his automatic and, holding his arm close to his side and bent at the elbow, pointed the gun towards the ceiling and slipped the safety catch off. The Nosh took out a snub-nose .38 and leaned back against the wall on the opposite side of the doorway, the pistol nestled in two hands.
‘Here we go,’ Sharky whispered and The Nosh nodded. He twisted the doorknob slowly and then pushed the door open, jumped inside and fell flat against the wail in the dark room. An instant later The Nosh came through and kicked the door shut behind him. They waited for a few seconds, listening to each other breathe. ‘Scares the shit outa me, doin’ that,’ The Nosh said finally.
Sharky clicked on the light. The apartment was empty. They let Barret in. Barret slipped on surgeon’s plastic gloves and went to work. Slowly and methodically he moved through the apartment. The doorknob inside was also devoid of fingerprints. He spot vacuumed the rug, marking each bag of dirt and grit with a small diagram of the room showing the exact location of the sample. He got down on his hands and knees with a flashlight and perused the carpeting. Then he told Sharky to turn off the lights.
‘Kneel down here beside me,’ he said. The finger of light skipped across the piling of the carpet. Barret moved it slowly back and forth. ‘See anything?’ he asked.
‘You mean the marks there on the floor?’
‘Urn hmm.’
There were four deep grooves in the rug. Then Barret saw something else twinkling in the rays of the flashlight under the chair. He took tweezers and picked it up. It was a small red oblong pill.
‘Look familiar?’ Barret said.
‘Looks like a red devil to me,’ Sharky said.
‘Could be, could be. Or some kind of angina medication. Perhaps the woman who lives here dropped it.’ He plopped it in a baggie, then turned his attention back to the chair.
‘Somebody swung this chair around in front of the window,’ Barret said. ‘And see here, on the windowsill, those circles. Still damp. It looks like somebody put a glass of water down here.’ He looked at it under his magnifying glass. Along the edges of the water ring was a slight red discolouration.
‘When’s the last time anybody was in here?’ Barret asked.
‘Last Sunday,’ Sharky said.
‘Hmmm.’
Barret went over the living room in minute detail, then the kitchen and bedroom.
‘Okay,’ he said finally, ‘here’s what we got. Somebody moved the chair. Somebody dropped a pill on the floor. That could’ve happened a week ago, yesterday, or last month. But the water rings on the windowsill — that was recent. No more than a few hours. Still damp. Also there’s water in the sink in the kitchen and one of the glasses is damp. I’d say three or four hours on the outside, or both the glass and the sink’d be dry by now. That red discolouration on the sill could have come from that pill we found on the floor. I took a scraping. The lab’ll confirm that. No prints in the apartment, no recent prints in the apartment. Everything’s latent. Okay, we can expect that. There’s also a trace of oil on the carpet in front of the window. Smells like machine oil but I’ll check that out. It could have been from a gun if somebody laid one there on the floor. The phone is clean. Some old prints and smudges. My guess is somebody wearing gloves picked up the phone. It’s operating, by the way.’ Barret went to the window and parted the venetian blinds with two fingers. ‘Direct view of the other apartment from here.’
He stopped and for several moments he stared into space, saying nothing. Then he said, ‘I think he was in here. Somebody was, and within the last few hours.’ He nodded to himself, still staring.
‘I have one more idea,’ he said.
He took his brush and vial of black powder and went first to the guest bathroom and kneeling down, dusted the handle on the toilet. It was clean. He went to the other bathroom and repeated the procedure.
The loops and whorls seemed far away at first.
Then as Barret dusted them they seemed to jump out at
‘Well, I’ll be a son of a gun,’ Barret said with a grin. ‘Ding,! We got ourselves a fresh print.’ He looked up at Sharky and The Nosh and winked. ‘Keep that in mind,’ he said. ‘Nobody likes to wear gloves when they take a leak.’
Chapter Fourteen
From a table near the railing of the Tai Tak Restaurant Lowenthal watched as a beautiful young Chinese woman dressed in a red silk mandarin dress jumped lightly from the sampan and came up the walkway to the deck of the floating restaurant. She was a tiny flower of a girl, barely five feet tall with an almost perfect body and an ebony ponytail that cascaded over one shoulder.
Wan Shu, the chef of the restaurant, motioned her to the table. He was almost a parody of the stereotyped Chinese, a fat man, Buddha-like, with thin moustaches that drooped down over the corners of his mouth and a perpetual smile on his lips.
