“Under the inside lip of the one on the right as you face the door,” she said, obviously parroting something that her husband had told her many times, “toward the back.”
“Okay. I’m’a go in alone.”
“I’ll come with,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
I had the whole ride up from Culver City to think about that question. I didn’t want Gella to find out about Lily unless she absolutely had to; not that I cared that he had a girl on the side or even how Gella would feel about that, but we were in a tight situation, people were getting killed, and I didn’t need any excess passion boiling in the backseat if the cops pulled us over.
“I’m gonna leave the key in the ignition,” I said, “so that if we have to leave fast again, I can just jump in and hit it. But if I leave the keys and ain’t nobody in the car, then when we come out, there might not be a vehicle to get away with. That won’t do.”
“But there’s no one to run from here,” she argued.
“Maybe not for you alone, but if you’re with a black man, at night, in a closed office building, going through a man’s papers and such without his permission — then maybe there might be a reason to move fast.” By the time I had gotten through that mouthful I had convinced myself.
“Can I turn on the radio?” she asked in defeat.
“Knock yourself out.”
THE KEY WAS where it was supposed to be, which made me think that I was not where I should have been. Everything so far that had worked out right had ended up wrong. I went through the front door anyway.
The second floor was dark. The key that opened the office building was also designed to work on the Minor Insurance Company door. The office was one middle-size room with two desks, one ash and the other constructed from sheet steel that was painted light gray.
I knew from first glance that the wooden desk belonged to Morris; it was as sloppy as he was. It was covered with candy bar wrappers,
Morris was the executing agent on all of them. He was also the signatory agent of a dozen or more European and British insurance companies. I knew that Morris couldn’t have been the agent of such expensive policies. Therefore he had to be a patsy; a big dodo sitting on a swan’s clutch.
I went through every gritty, chocolate-stained file but came up empty. No Lily or secret apartment to be found.
I had to jimmy the file drawer on Minor’s desk. At first I was surprised that the boss would have taken the uglier piece of furniture for himself, but then I realized that it was for the enhanced security. I wouldn’t have bothered at all except that I had a notion.
Minor’s lower drawers had more policies. These also listed Morris Greenspan as the agent. Rodin, Kandinsky, Picasso were but a few of the names that I recognized from the cheap art picture paperbacks I sold in my store. Policies ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The owners were people from around the world. I sifted among the files and folders until I came upon a policy for a set of jewelers’ tools. I took Sol’s newspaper clipping from my wallet and checked it against the last entry on the documentation section — the dates coincided with the auction that caught Sol’s attention. The sale was brokered by Lawson and Widlow, the accounting firm Sol had worked for. Ten or eleven other policies had Lawson and Widlow mentioned one way or another; brokers, gallery representatives, collateral holders.
There was fraud in there somewhere, I was certain of that; not that I cared. All I wanted was the cost to set up a new bookstore. The rest they, whoever they were, could keep.
I knew that Minor had something to do with the bond; that’s why he came to see Fanny. Or maybe he knew that Fanny was dead and he intended to search the house personally. There was nothing about it in his desk. The only connection I could make to Sol and Fanny were Lawson and Widlow, the article that Sol had clipped, and the fact that Morris Greenspan coincidentally
