“He could, couldn't he?” I asked.
“Could what?” Horace asked, coming in. “They're alive. Nobody wants coffee.”
“You could go home,” I said.
“Not likely,” Horace said. “Not when I'm having so much fun.”
“Could of fooled me,” Dexter said.
“That's because I'm hungry,” Horace said. “My blood sugar is low.”
“Horace won't eat,” Dexter said in his white man's voice.
“Shame it's so late.” Horace picked up his money and fanned it idly. “Nobody delivers now.”
“They do to the rich and famous,” Dexter said.
23
At 4:55 a.m. Chinatown looked like a closed department store. The streets were dark and empty; even the Christmas lights had been given a rest. Two Chinese men in paramilitary uniforms strolled Hill Street. They were laughing.
“Foot patrol,” Horace the Expert said smugly from the driver's seat. “Neighborhood association. They do the whole circuit in forty-five minutes and then start over.”
“Do they go up Granger?”
“Nah. Only the main streets and the shopping alleys. The merchants pay them.”
“Our resident fount of wisdom,” I said.
“I had lots of time to figure it out.” He loved knowing more about anything, anything at all, than anyone else did.
“Speaking of time,” I said automatically.
“Almost five. We're right on top of it.”
He pulled over at Hill and Granger and I got out. The night had grown sharply colder and the sky was low with fog and pale with city light. Two homeless men sprawled in a patch of weeds, partly covered by yesterday's news.
The metal gate opened with a faint rusty protest. There was a streetlamp directly in front of the house, something I should have noticed before but hadn't, and I followed my lengthening shadow up the walk toward the dark bungalow, hoping that Tiffle wasn't shagging some silky immigrant on his desk. He was going to need his strength before the day was over.
I punched up 11–14 on the alarm keypad to the right of the door. Tiffle's birthday, Florence Lam had said, another piece of evidence that his brain worked on alternating current. Dexter's duplicate key turned without so much as a snag, and the light from the streetlamp illuminated Florence's desk, convincingly messy and busy looking. I pushed the door as far closed as I could without the latch clicking into place and switched on my flashlight. Moving quickly but deliberately, I searched the rooms, including the basement.
The basement was entirely satisfactory. It extended beneath the entire house, it had a rough wooden floor, and there were no windows. Metal filing cases stood against two of the four walls; the others were occupied by a massive old gravity furnace and the stairs I had come down. The door at the top of the stairs opened out, as I'd hoped it would. The skeleton key worked just fine.
Tiffle's desk was a steel hymn to paranoia. Not only did the three drawers lock, but an iron rod had been passed through their handles and locked to the desk frame at top and bottom. It might as well have had a neon sign on top of it saying
Five o'clock in the button, as Tran would say.
I had my hand in the inside pocket of Tiffle's suit jacket, which was hanging behind the door, and as I pulled it out my fingers snagged on something. “I'll be damned,” I said, pulling out a little keyring with four double- serrated keys dangling from it. “Thank you, Claude.” As I slipped one of the keys into the lock at the top of the iron rod, the first car pulled away and I heard footsteps on the front porch. The second car door slammed and the front door to the cottage opened almost simultaneously.
“Surprise,” Dexter said from the front room. “Where the balloons and whistles?”
“How many you got?” I called.
“Four. Rest with Tran and two Doodys.”
“They all inside?” The first lock turned easily.
“No, you dinkus, I left them on the step.”
“You know where they go.” The lower lock resisted, and I chose another key.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Shoes scuffled across the floor and then down the steps to the basement, and I heard the door close. A moment later the front door opened to a confusion of soft voices, one of them a deep Doody rumble.
“Here your jimmy,” Dexter said, coming into the office. He was toting a crowbar.
“Don't need it. The man thoughtfully left his keys.”
“Guy got to be in serious minus territory.” He leaned forward and studied the desk. “More locks than the mint, and he leaves the keys here.” The lower lock turned, and the metal rod slipped loose and clattered to the floor. “Good thing we ain't bein sneaky.”
“Dexter, why don't you go help Tran or something?” I flipped through the remaining keys.
“You the one needs help. Try the one with the nail polish on it.”
I did, and it fit smoothly into the top drawer and turned. “See?” Dexter said. “Good thing you got friends.”
“You're breathing on my neck.” I pulled the drawer open.
“I doin it free, too. Cap'n Snow would pay good cash for a little of that. What's in the box, you think?”
“Opening it,” I said patiently, “will be my very next act.”
“Lordy,” Dexter said. It was full of money: five stacks, apparently all hundreds, each three inches thick. “A little dividend,” Dexter said. “One each.”
I hesitated and then said, “Why not?” and scooped the money out of the box and handed it to him. “A sideline, maybe, something Charlie Wah didn't know about.”
“Or insurance,” Dexter said, stuffing money into his pockets. “Getaway stash.”
I put the box on the desk and rifled though the rest of the drawer's contents. A manila envelope contained thirty or forty green cards, genuine to my unpracticed eye, and four Canadian passports. The spaces for the photos were blank.
“Hot shit,” Dexter said over my shoulder. “Hello, Uncle Sam.”
“Downstairs, them,” Tran said, coming into the room. “Talk too much.”
“Let's hope they keep it up,” I said, fishing out a cardboard stationery box that had been shoved to the back of the drawer. “Oh, well, Claude, you wicked dog.” The box was packed with Polaroids of naked Chinese girls, taken right there in the office. They were all young and all unsmiling, but other than that they ran the gamut from plain to beautiful, fat to thin. They had been posed obscenely, and breasts pushed themselves at the camera like swollen bruises, sex organs gaped like wounds.
“Cops gone love that,” Dexter said.
“Bleary,” Tran said, picking one out with thin fingers. “Here Mopey.”
“Find Weepy and Snowbell,” I said, handing him the box. “Keep them.”
“I'll keep Snowbell,” Dexter offered. “Just kidding,” he said, his free hand upraised, when I turned to look at him.
An economy-sized box of twenty-four Trojan condoms rounded out Claude's private museum. Tran passed me the box of Polaroids, keeping four, and I closed the first drawer and went to work on the second.
“They all untaped?” I asked as I worked.
“Cept they hands and they eyes,” Dexter said.
