“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.”
“A friend of a friend. I did him a favor and put a little space under a bed.”
“That isn’t wrong, is it?” Charles said.
“He made a deal with the cops when he got busted. Every name he could come up with was worth points.”
“What happened?”
“It was ugly, but I hadn’t done anything. But it won’t do me any good if that desk ever gets my name on it. I didn’t work for a year after that with all the dealers yakking about me. Do you get that, Beale?”
“I get it, Jones. That’s why you tried to buy the desk back?”
“I wanted to just get it out of circulation. But some people have way too much money. For a desk.”
“I think they wanted what was in it. Can you tell me what this drawer was like?”
“Yeah. There’s eight inches behind the regular drawers on either side. That’s just how it was made originally. It’s empty space between the drawers and the back of the desk. On the left, there was a small drawer and a larger file drawer. This is what I did. You push them both into the desk at the same time, about an inch. If you push either one by itself, it won’t go. Push them both and then pull them back out, and when you pull the bottom file drawer all the way out, there’s a six-inch box behind that comes out with it. It hangs on the far back. Push the drawer back in, and next time you pull it out, there’s no box.”
Charles nodded slowly. “It wouldn’t be easy to find.”
“Depends on how hard someone’s looking.”
“Would someone just stumble onto it? The movers? The appraiser from the auction house?”
“I don’t know. Probably not, if they kept it level. A regular appraisal, you wouldn’t find it. If you pull the bottom drawer all the way out by itself and look in where it was, the box just looks like the inside of the desk.”
“Whatever was in the drawer when Derek was killed-could it have still been there when the buyer picked it up last week?”
“For all I know, it could be.”
“And if that person knew there was a compartment,” Charles said, “they would find it.”
“Soon enough, they would. They could tear the desk apart and it would be right there.”
“Then it’s possible that person would have the original contents right now.”
“It sounds like you know a lot about what that was,” Galen Jones said.
“I’ve seen some of the papers that may have been in it. How much would this box have held?”
“Six inches. At least a few hundred sheets of paper, or whatever else he put in it. So look, Beale.” He backed off entirely, to his full straight length. “I’ve told you everything I know. From what you say, I don’t think I want to know anything else.”
“I will be glad not to tell you anything.”
“Yeah, let’s do that. Like including whatever you think you’re doing.”
“As I said, just the right thing.”
“Lots of times that doesn’t work. You might want to be careful.”