“What-nothing?”
“My apologies, sir, that we can’t help you.”
“Do you mean that you don’t have any information, or that you can’t give it to me?”
“I’m very sorry, sir. That’s all I can say.”
“Oh. Well, thank you very much, Mr. Prescott.”
“Yes, sir. Have a pleasant day.”
Charles set the telephone down and stared across the room at Dorothy.
“You look like someone just ran over your dog,” she said.
“Yes, poor Argos. I’d finally landed on Ithaca,” he said. “And the car that squashed him was Penelope running off with the mailman.”
“That’s terrible.”
“It is.” He frowned. “Except that it’s seven o’clock in London.”
“He must have been working late.”
“And on Friday. Odd. Oh, well-that’s what I get for hoping.”
“I’m sorry, dear,” Dorothy said.
“Not at all. Something might turn up. And besides, if someone wanted to buy Odysseus, I would have to sell him.”
“And if you did, I might have to spend the money paying these bills.”
“Pesky bills! Very well. Speaking of selling books, I need to pick a few more for the catalog. I think I’ll look at the shelves downstairs.”
Alice’s smile was a passable antidepressant and the rows of books even more. Charles browsed them for a while, slipping past literature and travel and into sports.
“Mr. Beale?”
“Yes, Morgan?”
He was sitting on the stairs in his usual pose. “Mrs. Beale said Sothe-by’s stiffed you?”
“Yes. They did. Very politely.”
“Shall I keep looking?”
“You can. Jacob mentioned Padding and Brewster as possible publishers. I know they’ve been out of business for a century, but there might be some trace still.”
“Yes, sir. Didn’t Sotheby’s have any records of the auction?”
“He wouldn’t say. He wouldn’t say anything. It must have been some kind of secret.”
The front door opened. “Hey, boss.”
“Hello, Angelo. How was today’s expedition?”
Angelo crossed the room. “I did not see that lady.”
“I didn’t find what I was looking for today either. How many places have you visited so far?”
He was already two steps up, but he stopped to pay attention. “I have seen ten places.”
“Good. Have you done the same thing in each one, where you ask about picking up a package?”
“Every one is the same.”
“Have you had any trouble in any of them?”
“No trouble.”
“Have any of them treated you nicely?”
Angelo shrugged. “I talk and they talk.”
“Do you treat them nicely?”
“I am always nice.”
“We need to be sure we have a good definition for that word,”
Charles said.
The front door opened again.
“Beale.”
Charles answered. “Mr. Jones. Good afternoon.”
Mr. Jones only said, “Downstairs.”
“Of course. This way.”
Charles led, barely keeping ahead of the long, fast legs. Alice watched with wide eyes, and Angelo with narrowed ones.
Whump, the bag of coat hangers landed in the chair. Whupp, the long legs shot out.
“Okay, Beale, talk.”
“I really just have the questions I asked on the telephone.”
The chair leaned backward as Mr. Jones became straight, heel to head, at a thirty-degree angle to the floor. His arms crossed behind his head.
“I don’t feel like answering them. Think of something else.”
“All right. Let’s try the auction. You were there, you saw how at least two people desperately wanted Derek Bastien’s desk. They bid it up to a hundred thousand dollars. You bid on it, too.”
“It’s a nice desk.”
“It is. But it’s worth twenty-five thousand dollars, not a hundred thousand. There’s some other reason those two people wanted it so badly.”
“I’ll tell you this, Beale. I don’t know anything about it that’s worth that much money.”
“But you do know something, and that brings me back to my first question about a secret drawer. Do you put hidden compartments in furniture? Have you ever?”
“Beale, you’re walking on thin ice.”
“That’s almost an answer by itself.”
Mr. Jones leaned farther back, and his stare was even more acute. “What’s your angle in this, anyway, Beale?”
“I’m trying to do the right thing.”
His answer was a bitter, “Yeah, what’s that?”
“I think you’re not obtuse, Mr. Jones,” Charles said. “This is what I’m working with. I saw a copy of a newspaper article about police finding cocaine hidden somehow in a piece of furniture.”
Galen Jones leaned forward, slowly, his gray bushy mustache traveling a very long distance to barely a foot from Charles’s nose.
“Where did you see that?”
“If you were Derek and you had that paper, where would you keep it?”
Mr. Jones showed he was not obtuse. A fierce light broke in his eyes.
“That lying-” The jaw clamped shut. “I’ll kill him.”
“He’s already dead, of course,” Charles said.
“Then he deserved it.”
“So you did do something to the desk?”
“Yeah, it’s a drawer.” He leaned back to a less hostile distance. “So wait a minute. Where did you see that about the cocaine? Do you have the desk?”
“I don’t, and I don’t know who does. I’ve already told you a lot. Why don’t you tell me what you know?”
“Okay, I’ll tell you.” He bent forward again, but this time it was to confide. “I met him first three years ago to fix some chess pieces. High-berg set me up with him.”
“What was wrong with the chess pieces?”
“His wife broke them.”
Charles paused. “Badly?”
“With a hammer. Smashed. I just made him new ones. The two queens.”
“This was the wood inlay set in his office?”
“That’s where I saw it, on his desk,” Mr. Jones said. “So, a couple months later he called back and asked me to build him a hidden drawer in the desk.”
“But you hadn’t said anything about ever doing that.”
“That’s the kind of thing I never say.”
“It got you in trouble before.”
