Darcey repeats, “Of course.”
Mr. Rochelle continues, “Very simply, my people mean to acquire, from you and Mr. Tang, the Bikaner volume you recently removed from Dr. Hawthorne’s residence.”
Darcey’s breath starts coming hard. He hates the idea that he and Yuk Tang have been mentioned in the same sentence. He’d bet both their lives that this has to do with that scumbag Scalley and his note in the Menard. And then he remembers the note. Word for word.
99 Usher
Up in Windsor
A doctor and his wife.
Goddamn Scalley, he thinks. And goddamn that phone-pager.
Darcey wants to leave, to be out of the van and the garage. Out of Quinsigamond. He says, “I have to discuss a few things with my partner.”
Mr. Rochelle sighs again, then says, “Very well,” and moves to the front of the van. He presses a small card into Darcey’s hand. He climbs out the side door and into the darkness of the garage.
Usher Drive is a cul-de-sac. It branches off from Cromwell and bends, like a short, twisted arm of civilization interrupting Kingstown Woods. Kingstown Woods is a well-tended preserve that borders Windsor Hills, ropes it off from everything around it, as if nature gave the Hill’s residents their own buffer zone as a gift.
Usher Drive is the most remote and isolated street in the Hills, but it’s still entirely part of Windsor. It fulfills all the requirements. For a house to be part of Windsor Hills, it has to have a certain privileged and stable look. The homes are all oversized Colonials. Solid brick, a lot of them with ivy running up the walls. Five bedrooms and up. Three-and four-car garages. Long and curving brick or flagstone walks and perfect lawns that roll into a lake of mulch.
Darcey and Yuk Tang wait in the rented Jaguar down below the Hills. Once they break over the line and drive up, that’s it — head for the job, hit it, and get out. Time, during Windsor Hills jobs, becomes even more of an important factor than it normally is. Time becomes everything.
They’ve left the MG behind, an unusual move and one that bothers Darcey. Though he doesn’t doubt the speed and performance of the Jaguar, he’s intimate with the MG. He knows how and when to push it. There’s a cushion of instinct when he has the MG. But, as Yuk Tang found out — and Darcey will admit it’s a worthy idea — Dr. Hawthorne’s out-of-town son drives an olive green Jaguar. An olive green Jaguar has parked often in the Hawthorne driveway, so it wouldn’t jar any neighbors’ eyes.
Darcey and Yuk Tang sit below the Hills, both wishing they were someplace else. They wish they were sitting on fat, foreign bank books and studying difficult languages on a beach with white sand. They’re having trouble concentrating. They’ve lost all the calmness that once came so naturally.
Yuk Tang did some checking with a few normally reliable people. He runs it down for Darcey: The guy’s a surgeon. Due for retirement. Comes from old money — his old man was a surgeon. Married forever. They’ve got one kid, a son, who’s doing a residency at Johns Hopkins. The old man’s got a houseful of awards. He’s a world traveler with a big interest in the Middle East. He’s tight about weird stuff — won’t eat in the better restaurants, wears the same clothes forever, and, bingo, the one that counts, won’t spend the money for an alarm system.
But there’s not a word about Dr. Hawthorne being any kind of collector. Even when Yuk Tang put out some dollars. Not a word about antiques, paintings, coins or stamps, wine. Nothing. So, they’re going in cold, no idea what to look for or where to start looking. That, combined with the time factor, does not make for an easy night. They know going in that they can’t be as neat and careful and professional as they’d like.
The Hawthorne house sits near the end of Usher. Because of the age of the houses in Windsor, the lots are only a half-acre. That doesn’t give them the best border protection. They’ll have to be frugal with noise and light. They’ve decided on mid-to-early evening, nine o’clock, because of the rented Jaguar/visiting-son angle.
The house is number six. Mid-sized. Brick with black shutters. A standard, moneyed Yankee estate. Darcey would’ve bet the owner was a doctor or a judge. Classy but subtle. A huge front door with a golden eagle above it. Fake “alarm protected” certificates pasted into the corners of the front windows. It’s like they put out a neon sign that they’re on vacation. Took a commuter-time ad on a popular radio station. There isn’t a light left on and the drapes are pulled tight across all the windows. The place looks like a tomb.
They pull slowly into the driveway and cut the engine. Yuk Tang moves into the entryway, takes a stack of banded mail out of the mailbox, and stands, easily and patiently shuffling through it. He wears latex gloves and tries to ignore the feeling they give him. Several letters have foreign postmarks, and on one the return address is in another language. Arabic, he thinks.
Darcey moves fast to the most hidden side of the house. He finds some good protection behind an out-of-control shrub. He cuts the screen out of the storm window frame and lays the mesh against the bush. He takes a diaper from beneath his jersey, lays it against the window. Takes a flashlight from his waist and smashes in the pane, then reaches in and up carefully and grabs the plastic alarm box that rests on the lip of the casing, He muffles the momentary honk against his body, then dumps the battery and box beneath the bush. He enters into the dining room, takes a breath, and calms himself and lets his eyes adjust to the darkness.
He finds his way to the living room and the front door, but tenses up when he discovers that it’s locked with a dead bolt. He can feel Yuk Tang’s nerves beginning to fray on the other side of the door. On instinct, Darcey lifts a cushion on a cane-back child’s chair, positioned by a coal rack to the side of the door. He finds the key, a thick Yale, turns off and removes the alarm box that’s hanging from the doorknob by a plastic strap, and lets Yuk Tang in.
They stare at each other in the dim foyer, both waiting for the other to flinch, to move back out the door and into the Jaguar. Finally, Yuk Tang looks to the floor and Darcey clears his throat. They’ve made a vague plan about splitting up once inside and taking different rooms, but now the plan seems useless.
“All right, let’s get at it,” says Darcey, and Yuk Tang moves instantly out of the room and up the stairs in the hallway. Darcey thinks Yuk Tang is being a fool. Instinct tells him that they’ll find what they’re after on the first floor of the house. He steps into the living room and snaps on a dim light on a side table by a huge leather chair. He guesses the bulb is about forty watts and laughs to himself at cheap Doc Hawthorne. He imagines the old surgeon suddenly at a desk somewhere in the house, scribbling on the backs of grocery lists his wife tried to throw out, squinting under the forty watts of illumination and figuring how many gall bladders or tonsils he has to chop out to equal the year’s electric bill.
Trying not to think about what he’s doing, Darcey eases himself into the leather chair. He sits back and lifts his legs onto the matching ottoman. It’s a comfortable chair. He could sleep or eat in it. He can hear Yuk Tang upstairs going through drawers. He knows he should be up and moving, thinking on his feet, but he tells himself this is a new approach. He’ll sit and think about the best single place to look for specialty items. He doesn’t care that his new approach is most likely brought on by panic or that he hasn’t felt panic on a job, even in the worst of situations, in five or six years.
He loves the leather chair and regrets that he can’t take it with him. He can picture the perfect spot in his apartment for it. Something made of glass falls and breaks upstairs and Darcey knows Yuk Tang is just as rattled.
Darcey takes a long look around the room. Everything appears normal. There’s a fireplace, sofa, framed portraits, floor lamps, small tables covered with bells and photographs and small crystal figurines. There’s a small upright piano across the room, pushed against a wall, and Darcey would bet that no one in the house can play it well. There are dozens of things, right here around him, in easy reach, that he could pocket and turn over in a day. But none of them are what he came for.