He was running his mouth, talking trash, when Jake Grafton came by. The admiral shook hands with both of us and asked me how I was doing.
“Okay. Ready to go, but the doctors said I have to stay another day.”
“Are you dizzy?”
“No.”
“Double vision?”
“No. Honestly, I’m fine. Just had a whack on the noodle. Got some bruises and I’m mighty sore. They took eight stitches in my leg, bandaged it up and gave me some shots.” I tried to flip back the sheet to show him my bandage.
“I don’t want to see it,” Willie declared. “You keep that thing under the covers.” He said to the admiral, “He’ll be okay. His head’s pretty hard.”
I asked Grafton about ol’ Henri. He had a few dozen stitches and a broken rib, Grafton said. He and Callie had checked on Rodet and Marisa before he stopped by to see me. Marisa was conscious and talking, and the doctors said her prognosis was good.
“None of this has hit the papers yet,” Grafton said. “The French government is keeping the lid on. They want the G-8 summit to go as planned.”
“I figured,” I admitted. “The first priority is to look good. But I want to know which of these bastards iced Elizabeth Conner.”
“What would you do if you knew?” Grafton asked.
There must have been an edge in my voice, because as I was mulling an answer, Willie put his two cents in. “Don’t tell ‘im! Don’t tell ‘im. He don’t need no more shit to tote through life.”
“I just want to know, that’s all,” I insisted.
What Grafton might have said I don’t know, because just then Callie came in. Turns out she had been talking to the doctors in French. She shook her head from side to side at Jake, who obviously had something on his mind.
“Well, you’ve laid around here long enough,” he said to me. “Get dressed. Doctors or no doctors, we have work to do. You can check yourself out.”
Uh-oh. Saddle and ride. “Where are we going?”
“I need some help. You can come, too, Willie.”
“Sure. I got nothing to do until tonight,” Willie replied, a comment Grafton ignored. With Willie the Wire, you have to ignore things.
I wasn’t as enthused as Willie. Sarah was going to stop by later. I was sorta looking forward to holding her hand and soaking up some sympathy. There isn’t much sympathy in the world these days— you’ve got to get it where you can, when you can.
Willie and Grafton wandered off to the lobby. I got out of bed and put on my ripped pants and dirty shirt and stinky socks while Callie stood in the hallway having an earnest discussion with the staff. I was so damned stiff and sore that getting dressed took several minutes.
There was some difficulty about the bill; Grafton whipped out a credit card. After a while, I scribbled my name a few times and they gave me some pills to take four times a day. Then we were escorted to the street.
“If you’ve got anything important in mind, I’d like to take a bath and change clothes,” I told the admiral. He was downwind of me, so he knew how it was.
He didn’t care.
“Later,” he said, and led the way to his car.
“So what’s the gig?” Willie asked when we were rolling along with Grafton at the wheel.
“We’re going back out to Rodet’s estate on the Marne,” Grafton told us. “Yesterday afternoon Callie and Sarah Houston searched the apartment on the Place des Vosges and found a onetime pad written with invisible ink that had been sitting in plain sight on Rodet’s desk.”
“It was lying in the trash beside the desk,” Callie said. “And we found a curling iron in one of the desk drawers.”
“What’s a onetime pad?” Willie asked.
Callie told him, even passed him the one she had found. He looked it over and passed it back.
“So why are we searching today?” Willie asked.
Grafton tilted the rearview mirror so he could see my face, then asked, looking at me, “Doesn’t it strike you as strange that someone searched Rodet’s apartment from top to bottom — ransacked it — and didn’t find that pad? With the curling iron right there in the desk drawer?”
“Well…”
“If you had found that iron in an office drawer, what would you have thought, Tommy?”
“Heat. Ink. But maybe they just missed it.”
“Maybe,” Grafton agreed.
“Why not go back there and see what else we can find?”
“I’d thought we’d do the country place first. You may have to get us in.”
“Oh, man!” Willie said dramatically. “Breakin and enterin’. The last time I got out of the joint I promised my ol’ mama that I’d never do that again.”
He was lying, of course. His mother died when he was a teenager. I laid my head back against the headrest and tried to sleep as Willie entertained the Graftons.
Rancho Rodet looked properly somnolent that warm, sunny Monday morning. It should, since the old man and his thugs had killed a maid and the gardener, who doubled as the outside security guy and fed the dogs. They didn’t have any dogs left, either, which almost brought a tear to my eye, but not quite. And no cops in sight.
Grafton handed me my backpack; he had rescued it yesterday from the police after I passed out. I went to work on the back-door lock while he and Callie and Willie stood by the car looking around like tourists. Innocent tourists.
Opening it took a while. My headache had subsided to a buzz, yet I was a little shaky and, truthfully, a bit dizzy. I kept trying one pick after another. Finally I paused, wiped my head and took a deep breath, then started all over again with the pick I had first started with. Got it that time.
After Callie and Willie went in, Grafton told me to sit down for a minute. I plopped down right on the step. He sat down beside me.
“How you doing?” he asked.
“Okay. Want to tell me what you hope to find?”
“I’ve got a theory,” he said. “I want to prove it or disprove it.”
“Uh-huh.”
But he didn’t explain, merely got up and went inside. I wiped my face and levered myself erect.
Each of us took a room. We took that house apart. Looked everywhere, in everything, examined everything. One of the first things I found was an electromagnetic sweep set in an aluminum case; no doubt Rodet used it to check the house for bugs. Terrific.
We found a lot of dry pens, receipts from years ago, old photos, dust balls in places the maids obviously hadn’t visited in years. It was hard, dismal work and got us exactly nowhere. We took pictures off the wall and cut the backing off. We rolled up carpets, examined the baseboards, disassembled radios and televisions, flipped through every book on the shelves — and ol’ Henri had a lot of books. I wondered if he had read them all.
In midafternoon Callie fixed us something to eat. We only had three rooms left to do at that point, two bedrooms and a kitchen.
“Tommy, why don’t you tackle the barns?” Jake said.
He didn’t have to say it twice. I gobbled the rest of my sandwich and went outside.
The big barn smelled of horses, yet it was empty. A few flies buzzed on that warm, late autumn day, and a couple of cats slunk around.
There weren’t a lot of places to hide anything in that barn. I looked under the walkway. Cobwebs and dirt, a pathway for the cats. No human had ever crawled under there.
I went over the ground floor inch by inch. I probed the cans that held the horse feed with a shovel handle. Obviously it would have helped if Grafton had told us what he was looking for, but I sort of figured he didn’t know. My impression was that he was feeling his way along, which bothered me. I confess, I didn’t understand what
