A sense of space and dimension began to shape the darkness. I began to be aware that I stood near one corner of a large tilted box that grew smaller as it rose toward the far end. After a time, I could make out before me the raised edge of the stage as a slight shimmer, like rays of heat coming up off a highway. This disappeared as Tom Pasmore moved in front of me and then returned when he moved quietly away up the side of the theater. I heard his footsteps dampen but not disappear as he left the cement apron extending from the first row of seats to the stage and stepped onto the carpeting. The shimmer solidified into the long swelling shape of the stage, and the seats gradually became visible as a dark, solid triangle fanning up and out from a point a few feet from where I stood. Tom's face was a faint, pale blotch up the aisle.
At the far end of the theater was another aisle, I remembered, and the wide space of a central passage, probably mandated by the fire department, divided the rows of seats in half.
I could now just about make out the curved backs of the nearest individual seats, and I had a dim sense of the width of the aisle. Beneath the pale smudge of his face, Tom was a black shape melting in and out of the darkness surrounding him. I followed him up the aisle toward the front of the theater. When we reached the last row, Tom stopped moving and turned around. A metallic glint like a slipperiness in the air marked the panel in the lobby door. Looking down, we could see a great soft darkness over the stage that must have been the curtains.
The gleam of the metal plate disappeared as he put his hand over it, and the door yielded before him in another widening column of shining gray light.
The lobby was filled with hazy illumination from the oval windows set into thick doors opposite leading out to the old ticket booth and the glass doors on Livermore Avenue.
Two chest-high pieces of wooden furniture stood in the place of the old candy counter. Even in the partial light, the lobby seemed smaller than I had remembered and cleaner than I had expected. At its far end, another set of doors with metal hand plates led into the aisle at the other side of the theater. I went up to the furniture where the candy counter had been, bent down to look at a round carving in what I thought was the back of a shelf unit, and saw ornate letters in the midst of the filigree. I took out my penlight and shone it on the letters, inri. I pointed the light at what looked like a lectern and saw the same pattern. I was standing in front of a portable altar and pulpit.
Tom said, "Some congregation must use this place as a church on Sundays."
Tom went toward a door in the wall next to the pulpit. He tried the knob, which jittered but would not otherwise move, unrolled the burglar kit, peered at the keyhole, and worked another key into the slot. When the lock clicked and the door opened, Tom packed away the kit and peered inside. He took out his light, switched it on, and with me behind him went into a stuffy, windowless room about half the size of Tom's kitchen.
"Manager's office," he said. The penlights picked out a bare desk, a small number of green plastic chairs, and a wheeled rack crowded with shiny blue choir robes. Four cardboard boxes stood lined up in front of the desk. "Do you suppose?" Tom asked, running his light along the boxes.
I went through the chairs and knelt in front of the two boxes at the center of the desk. The open flaps had been simply laid shut, and I opened those of the first box to see two stacks of thick blue books. "Hymnals," I said.
I played my own light along the other boxes while Tom started moving things around behind me. None of the boxes showed anything but ordinary wear, no rips or holes made by busy rats. All four would hold hymnals. I checked them anyhow and found—hymnals. I stood up again and turned around. The rack stuffed with choir robes angled out into the room. Tom's head protruded above the rack, and the circle of light before him shone on a plywood door almost exactly the color of his hair. "Fee always liked basements, didn't he?" Tom said. "Let's take a look."
9
I walked around the rack as Tom opened the door, and trained my penlight just ahead of his. A flight of wooden stairs with a handrail began at the door and led down to a cement floor. I followed Tom down the stairs, playing my light over the big space to our right. Two startled mice scrambled toward the far wall. We descended another three or four steps, and the mice darted into an almost invisible crevice between two cement blocks in the wall on the other side of the basement. Tom's light flashed over an old iron furnace, a yard-square column of bricks, heating pipes, electrical conduits, rusting water pipes, and drooping spiderwebs. "Cheerful place," he said.
We reached the bottom of the steps. Tom went straight ahead toward the furnace and the front of the theater, and I walked off to the side, looking for something I had glimpsed while I watched the mice scramble toward the wall. Tom's light wandered toward the center of the basement; mine skimmed over yards of dusty cement. I moved forward in a straight line. Then my beam landed squarely on a wooden carton.
I walked up to it, set down the thermos, and pushed at the edge of the flat top. It moved easily to the side and exposed a section of something square and white. I slid the top all the way off the carton and held the light on what I thought would be reams of paper arranged into neat stacks. A lunatic message gleamed back into the light. Black letters on a white ground spelled out BUYTERVIO. Above that, in another row of letters, was MNUFGJKA. Two other nonsense words filled the top two rows of the carton. "Buytervio?" I said to myself, and finally realized that the carton contained the letters once used to spell out the movie titles on the marquee.
"Come over here."
Tom's voice came from a penumbra of light behind the furnace. I picked up the thermos and followed the beam of my own light across the dirty floor to the side of the furnace and then shone it on Tom. "He was here," he said. "Take a look."
I misheard him to say He's here, and, thinking that Fee's corpse lay on the ground beside the gun with which he had killed himself, experienced an involuntary surge of rage, sorrow, grief, and pain, all mingled with something that felt like regret or disappointment. My light swept over a pair of cardboard boxes. Did I want him to live, in spite of everything he had done? Or did I simply want to be in at the end, like Tom Pasmore? Raging at both Fee and myself, I aimed my light at Tom's chest and said, "I can't find him."
"I said, he was here." Tom took my hand and aimed the beam of light on the boxes I had overlooked in my search for the corpse.
Their flaps lay open, and one box was tipped onto its side, exposing an empty interior. Ragged holes of various sizes had been chewed into two sides of the box still upright. Tom had tried to prepare me, but as much as a body, the empty boxes were the end of our quest. I said, "We lost him."
"Not yet," Tom said.
"But if he moved the notes to some other safe house, all he has to do now is kill Dick Mueller." I placed my hand on my forehead, seeing horrible things. "Oh, God. It might already be too late."
"Mueller's safe," came Tom's voice from the darkness beside me. "I called his house last night. His answering machine said that he was on vacation with his family for the next two weeks. He didn't say where."
"But what if Fee called him? He'd know…" It didn't matter, I saw.
"He still has to come back," Tom said. "He knows somebody's trying to blackmail him."
That was right. He had to come back. "But where did he put those notes?"
"Well, I have an idea about that." I remembered Tom saying something like this earlier and waited for him to explain. "It's an obvious last resort," Tom said. "In fact, it's been in front of our face all along. It was even in front of his face, but he didn't see it either, until today."