“Have a look anyway, Charlotte. As unobtrusively as possible.”
Ted came in just then, shaking his head. “It’s not among the garlands or galactic decorations.”
“Check the Model T next. Inside and out.”
Neal said, “I’ll help him look.”
The three of them left together. Sharon asked Kerry, “You also lost sight of Ken-nett for several seconds, you said?”
“Yes. About the same number, fifteen.”
“Where was he when you spotted him again?”
“By Santa’s Village, on his way toward the loving cup.”
“The way the village is constructed, it’d be hard to hide anything in it quickly, even an object as small as a computer disk.”
“What about the cup?” Kerry asked.“If it’s hollow, he could have dropped it inside.”
“It’s hollow, but Kennett isn’t very tall and the way the cup sits on the pedestal, he’d’ve had to stretch up on his toes. Again, too conspicuous.”
I said, “Then it has to be either the Model T or the fir trees.”
Wrong. It was neither one. First Charlotte, then Ted and Neal returned empty-handed. Neal said, “I even got down on my hands and knees and checked the undercarriage. You should’ve seen the looks I got.”
We all lapsed into a period of ruminative silence. Frustration had thickened the tension in the room, increased the sense of urgency. Sharon usually maintains a poker face in business situations, tense or otherwise, but the worry was beginning to show through. She had a lot riding on the recovery of that disk.
I broke the silence finally by saying, “We’ve been assuming that if I hadn’t come in unexpectedly and caught Kennett in the act, he would’ve hung onto the disk until the party ended. But remember how he’s dressed. If he’d kept it in his pocket, as tight as those leather pants are, he’d have to keep his hand in there too so it wouldn’t show.”
“You’re right,” McCone said. “That would really call attention to himself, the last thing he’d want. If he’d intended to hold onto the disk, he’d’ve worn looser clothing.”
“So he must’ve planned to hide it all along. Someplace picked out in advance, one he’d be sure to have access to later. Easy access, when nobody was around.”
“Yes, but what place? What’ve we overlooked?”
“Kerry, when you saw him passing Santa’s Village, was he moving straight toward the trophy?”
“... No, he wasn’t. At an angle, a sharp one.”
“From which direction?”
“The right.”
“Then he had to have veered off from the Model T display, toward the center of the floor, then veered back again.”
“That’s right.”
“Aimless wandering, maybe. And maybe not. The bar and the buffet are in the center, but farther back. What’s closer to this end?”
“Nothing, except — Oh! Of course.”
The rest of us got it at the same time.
Mick said, “Home for the Holidays.”
I said, “And the sign says ‘Be generous.’ ”
Ted said, “And this year it’s Chandler and Santos’s turn to disperse the donations.”
McCone said, “That’s it, that’s got to be where he put the disk.”
Paul Kennett’s unfunny private joke, his own personal donation to the homeless: he’d dropped it right through that little slot into the Season of Sharing Fund barrel as he passed by.
We waited until the end of the party to check the barrel and confront Kennett. The Patterson case was sensitive, and more than one of the guests had political or media connections; and there was no point in spoiling the festivities for everyone else. McCone sent Ted and Neal downstairs to brief Craig, Mick, and Julia, and to stand guard over the cash barrel. The rest of us sat in her office, nibbled food that Ted had sent up, and talked about this and that. I’m not a patient man, normally, but tonight I had no trouble with fidgeting or clock-watching. Sharon’s quiet, comfortable office was a far better place for me than down among the noisy revelers on the pier floor.
At a few minutes past eleven, Neal poked his head through the door. “The pier’s locked down and the clean-up crews are assembling.”
We all trooped down into a wasteland of party wreckage. The decorations, fresh and colorful when Kerry and I arrived, now looked as tired as the people from the pier offices who had volunteered to remain and clean up the mess. McCone pointed out the two partners in the architectural firm, Nat Chandler and Harvey Santos, who were hauling one of the barrels of clothing up the stairs to their offices. Paul Kennett was nowhere to be seen.
Mick was leaning casually on the cash barrel, talking to Ted. Sharon said to him, “You’re supposed to be watching the back entrance.”
“No need. Kennett went upstairs about ten minutes ago. Probably waiting in his office for the money barrel to be brought up. What do you bet he volunteered to stay and count the cash after everybody else goes home?”
Santos and Chandler were coming back down. McCone signaled to them, said when they came over that she wanted them to act as witnesses, and then nodded to Mick and me.
We pried the lid off the barrel. It was three-quarters full of cash, coins, checks. We tilted it at a forty-five degree angle, and I held it like that so Mick could root around inside. It wasn’t much more than a minute before he came up with a flat, round object encased in a thin plastic sleeve.
One of the architects asked Sharon, “A computer disk? What’s this about?” She didn’t answer; she was looking up at the catwalk in front of their offices.
Paul Kennett stood at the railing, staring down at us. She took the disk from Mick’s hand, held it high over her head. Kennett had nowhere to go; he didn’t try. Not even when Mick said loud enough for him to hear, “Gotcha!”
Later, most of us reassembled in McCone’s office for some Christmas cheer. The disk was safe for tonight; tomorrow she would have copies made and lock them in her safe deposit box, along with the hard-copy evidence files, until it was time for her Monday meeting with the D.A. As for Kennett, he’d avoided arrest and prosecution for theft because of the need to avoid publicity; but he’d been warned to keep his mouth shut if he didn’t want to be named in the forthcoming indictment against Patterson. What he hadn’t avoided was the loss of his job. Chandler and Santos had summarily fired him as soon as they were made aware of what he’d done.
I’d forgotten all about my Christmas present, which Sharon had slipped into a desk drawer during our earlier session. But she hadn’t forgotten. As soon as we were settled with our drinks, she produced the package and handed it to me with a little flourish.
“With thanks and love from all of us,” she said.
Embarrassed, I said, “I haven’t gotten anything for any of you yet...”
“Never mind that. Open your gift, Wolf.”
I hefted it. Not very large, not very heavy. I stripped off the paper, removed the lid from an oblong box — and inside was another, smaller box sealed with a lot of Scotch tape. Ted’s doing; I could tell from his expression. So I used my pocket knife to slice through the tape, opened the second box, rifled through a wad of tissue paper, and found—
Two plastic-bagged issues of Black Mask. And not just any two issues: rare, fine-condition copies of the September 1929 and February 1930 numbers, each containing an installment of the original six-part serial version of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.
My mouth was hanging open; I snapped it shut. When I looked up they were all grinning at me. I said, “How’d you know these were the only two Falcon issues I didn’t have?” Funny, but my voice sounded a little choked.