Dead Watch

Jake went to look. As Madison had said, it was empty. “Now, what does this teach you?” Patzo asked.

“Beats the heck out of me,” Jake said.

“It teaches you that the guy who put the security in this place knew what he was doing,” Patzo said. “He knows he won’t fool a pro, if you give the pro all day to look, but no goddamn junkie on this green earth is ever going to find this safe. Not except by accident. So, if there’s more stuff hid, it’s gonna be clever, and you’re gonna have to look for spaces where there shouldn’t be spaces.”

“That’s why I dragged your ass up here.”

Jake went back to the computer and checked the history setting. The history had been wiped, and the time period for saving documents had been set to zero.

Bowe, Jake thought, was wiping out traces of himself right up to the time he disappeared. He could get Madison to go to the banks, and find out whom Bowe had written checks to, but that usually took a few days, and it might take longer, and involve lawyers, in the case of a dead man.

But if Bowe wasn’t worried about all the personal financial records he’d left behind, why was he so worried about e-mail, about websites he’d visited, about his medical records? Why had this skunk-striped doctor denied seeing Bowe? Jake was thinking about the doctor when Patzo came back.

“Got another one.”

“Another safe?”

“Another something.”

This one was in the living room, in a built-in DVD-CD case. “You see the way it looks like this is a trim panel, on the side, but it’s not a panel?” Patzo said, tracing the wood with his hands. “There’s eighteen inches of space there, a foot high, a foot deep. It could just be a measuring mistake, except everything here is done too well. Everything is very tight, and then you have this . . .”

He kept probing at it, but finally gave up. “I don’t know how it opens. But if you went after it with a crowbar, I think you’d find something.”

“Maybe it opens remotely,” Jake said. “A button, or you think the TV remote?”

“There’d have to be an electric eye for a remote. Probably not that. Probably . . . Let’s see, they’d have to wire it, they probably wouldn’t want to run the wires all over the place, so it’d be close.”

They looked at the edges of the paneling, under the shelves, around the edges of the fireplace, groped behind the TV. Then Patzo said, “Huh,” put his foot out, and pressed a piece of base molding. A drawer slid silently out of the DVD case, and Jake said, “Holy shit,” and Patzo said, “Like one of them pyramid movies, where the tomb opens,” and they both went over to look.

A few worn pieces of paper on top. Jake lifted them out. Below them, they could see a jumble of leather, with the flash of gemstones. Peering in the drawer, Patzo said, “Your friend is a fagola. Or something. A freak.”

“My friend is the guy’s wife,” Jake said. He pointed. “What is that?”

“I used to know a fella in the adult novelty business, he had a whole caseful of this stuff,” Patzo said. “That thing is a dog collar for people, and that’s the dog chain. I don’t know what that thing is, but I ain’t gonna touch it.”

“Ah, Jesus,” Jake said.

“Other cultures,” Patzo said.

“What?”

“Other cultures. The fagola is other cultures. They do what they do.”

Jake looked at the paper he’d lifted out: three photographs, a hippie couple perhaps from the sixties, a young girl on a swing, a young boy. The photos were smooth, aged, but with a certain curve to them. They’d been in a wallet.

There was also a three-by-five card with a phrase written on it with a felt-tipped pen: All because of Lion Nerve. Nothing else.

“I never seen a dog collar with diamonds in it,” Patzo said. He was holding it up by the buckle. “But that’s what it is.”

“I doubt they’re real diamonds,” Jake said. “They’re too big.”

“In a place like this? They’re real. And that dog chain is eighteen-karat gold,” Patzo said. He looked at Jake. “Can I have them?”

“What?”

“The dog collar. The chains. And that other thing. I mean, it’s gonna be really embarrassing if your friend finds it, the wife. I couldn’t help noticing that the wife is Mrs. Lincoln Bowe and her husband is the dead senator, so if this stuff is his . . . I mean, I could get rid of it. Nobody would ever know. I couldn’t tell anybody, because they’d send me back to the joint.”

“How much is it worth?”

Patzo said, “Less than Bowe’s reputation.”

They finished combing the apartment, and Jake called Madison on her cell phone just after six o’clock.

“You okay?”

She’d been alone after the funeral. “I couldn’t stop crying. It got on top of me, Jacob.”

“But you’re okay now?”