ROBERTA’S EXPERIENCE in making miniatures had given her a sure touch with delicate material. Within an hour we had lifted most of the paper from the two drawers and laid it on a clean sheet of plastic that she’d brought from her workshop.
There were only two items that might have been what Martin and his mother had argued over. One had bonded so tightly to the drawer bottom that we didn’t risk peeling it off, but it looked like the remains of an old savings passbook.
I held my magnifying glass over it. “The address is something on Lincoln, I think.”
Roberta looked over my shoulder. “Lincolnwood?”
“It could be. That puts it close to where Judy Binder grew up. Her passbook, or her mother’s.”
I thought of Kitty Binder’s outcry over the picture of Martina at the Radium Institute: Judy had stolen it along with Kitty’s pearl earrings and cash. Judy might also have stolen her mother’s savings book and drained the account.
The other interesting paper was a photocopy of a government document, partly redacted. Roberta and I both hunched over it. The header was from an “Office of Tec . . . al Serv . . . es, Of . . . Ins . . . al,” in the “United St . . . De . . . n . . . Co . . . rce.” The date was illegible.
“Technical Servers?” I said dubiously.
“Services,” Roberta suggested. “We get memos from the Department of Commerce, so I’m thinking that’s the third line.”
I thought that made sense, but neither of us could figure out “Of-Ins-al.” We studied the text together. Between the redaction and the Drano damage, we could only make out bits of it.
“city of Inns . . . he . . . a chemical engineer . . . duct underground te . . . She was a member . . . if she was to work . . . luded a major bomb . . . orking and living co . . . Nor did [redacted] ever witne . . .”
Frank coughed. “Kickoff’s in forty minutes, gals. Can you put that aside?”
Roberta and I got reluctantly to our feet. We folded plastic sheets around the papers we’d loosened, including the redacted document, and laid the packet in one of the drawers to protect it. The drawer with the passbook welded to the bottom I wrapped in a blanket. I placed both in the Mustang’s trunk.
Roberta protested. “Those were Agnes’s. I’d like to refinish them, find some new drawer pulls.”
“I’ll get them back to you,” I promised. “I want to take the papers to a forensics lab in Chicago, to see if they can bring more of the letter or the bank book back to life.”
Roberta frowned unhappily, but Frank put an arm around her. “Bobbie, that chest of drawers would have rotted away if this Chicago detective hadn’t spent a day in the pit. As for you, Detective, you look like the bad side of a dead cow. If you’re planning to drive back to Chicago tonight, you need to think that through a few more times. What you ought to do is find a motel, get a shower. In fact, you ever go to a high school football game?”
“I played basketball; my cousin played hockey,” I said.
“Tell you what: you check into the motel other side of town and come watch my boy play against Hansville.”
When I shut my eyes to think it over, the world started spinning; if I looked even close to how I felt, bad side of a dead cow was a generous description.
Roberta pulled a T-shirt advertising the Palfry Panthers from her bag. “You borrow that. You can wash it in Chicago and mail it back to me.”
I took it meekly and followed them into town. Frank honked and pointed at the high school stadium, then to the road leading to the motel. When I’d checked in and showered away the worst of the stench, I longed to lie down and pass out, but Frank and Roberta had more than extended themselves for me today: I needed to drag my weary bones to the football stadium to watch young Warren.
In the end, I was glad I’d gone. The September air cooled as the sun went down. The crowd was loud but friendly. When I made my way through it to Frank and Roberta, I found I was part of the entertainment.
In a town suffering from a disastrous harvest, a Chicago detective who had found not just Ricky Schlafly—good riddance, was the general sentiment—but a version of buried treasure was better than a TV crime show. At halftime, while Frank stood in line for pizza, fifteen or twenty friends of the Wengers came by for a firsthand account of digging through the meth pit. Roberta was happy to add the embellishments of the missing gold drawer pulls.
I stayed long enough after the game for an introduction to their son, Warren. I had dutifully cheered him during the game: he was a middle linebacker who made an interception and caused a fumble. Even though Hansville won on a late field goal, he was a cheerful junior version of his father, checking in with the family before heading out for burgers with his buddies.
Back at the motel, I stayed awake long enough to send an e-mail to the Cheviot labs, the private forensic lab I use. I wanted to drop the drawer and the fragment of letter off when I got to the city tomorrow; their Sunday skeleton crew could book them in and keep them safe.
I tuned the app on my iPad to the Midnight Special, streaming from WFMT in Chicago, which made me feel that I was at home. I fell asleep in the middle of Gordon Bok singing “The Golden Vanity.” The music played through my sleep, and my dreams were pleasant, not the nightmares that had dogged me lately.
Leg pains were what woke me, shooting across the feet and up the shins. As I massaged my calves, I heard noises in the parking lot. Four-eighteen, an odd time for people to be coming back to their rooms in a town whose bars all closed at midnight on Saturdays. I parted the curtains. Two men were taking a crowbar to the trunk of my Mustang.
I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt and was in the hall, gun in hand, without bothering to find my shoes. I sprinted down the hall to the door that overlooked the parking lot, pushed it open just enough that I could see the men.
The two froze briefly, then turned more energetically to my car. I dashed barefoot across the lot, but they had the trunk open before I got to them. They grabbed the drawers and were bolting toward their own waiting car when the papers I’d wrapped in plastic fluttered to the tarmac. I got to them first, but one of the punks ran back and tried to grab them from me. In the tug-of-war, the paper disintegrated.
I slugged the thug across the jaw with the handle of my gun. He yelled in pain, his hands clutching his face. His partner had gotten into their car and swung it around for him. I tried grabbing him by the shoulder, but he broke free and made it into the car.
I fumbled in my jeans for my car keys, but I’d left those inside along with my room key and my shoes. My trunk was open and empty. I had caught their car model, a Dodge Charger, but I’d been fighting so hard that I didn’t get the license plate. I was too angry with my own stupidity even to swear.
Several people appeared in the doorway, shouting out confused questions. I stuck the Smith & Wesson inside my waistband at the small of my back.
“Someone was breaking into my car out there,” I said. “When I called out, they dropped their crowbar and took off.”
My fellow residents streamed past me, looking for damage to their own cars. I went to the front desk, where I had some trouble rousing the night clerk. I explained what had happened, but that in my haste to drive off the intruders I’d locked myself out of my room.
The clerk wanted proof of my identity, which was also in my room, but she finally agreed to come with me to open the door. She stood in the entrance and told me to describe what was in the room.
“I left a beige jacket and a rose-colored silk shirt on a hanger in the closet. The briefcase on the desk has my iPad and my wallet in it, and I have the code to unlock the iPad.”
Now that I’d gotten her up, she was determined to be zealous: she watched me unlock the iPad, which was now playing a Haydn sonata, incongruously enough, before returning to her desk to call the sheriff.
The night deputies, two men I hadn’t encountered before, met me at my Mustang. By then I was dressed again in my silk shirt and jacket and had my gun in my tuck holster. I’d double-checked all the surfaces in the room for my belongings. I didn’t have much—iPad, phone and Roberta’s Palfry Panthers T-shirt. I packed those into my briefcase, along with odds and ends like my picklocks.
When I told the deputies what had been taken from the trunk, they didn’t roll their eyes or give the blank stares I’d expected.
“Oh, yeah. You’re the Chicago detective who found buried treasure at Schlafly’s. How valuable was it, you think?” The taller, older deputy felt compelled to lean into my face, which meant I could read his name badge in the dim light: Herb Aschenbach.
“I don’t think it was valuable at all,” I said. “It had sentimental meaning for Roberta Wenger because the dresser once belonged to Agnes Schlafly.”
“Not what we heard,” Herb said. “Talk was about gold.”
I sighed. “Ms. Wenger said the drawers used to have gold handle pulls. If someone passed that story along I suppose it could have grown into a stack of gold, but all I found were chicken bones, ether cans and tampons.”
As I’d hoped, the word “tampon” made Herb back away from me. “What were you looking for, anyway? Why did you take the drawers?”
“I’m not the one who committed a crime here,” I said. “I’m the victim. The punks drove off in a Dodge Charger, in case you have one zooming around the country connected to B-and-E’s.”
The two deputies looked at each other, startled. They knew the Dodge.
“You must have been looking for something,” the younger deputy said. “We went and took a look at that pit out back of Schlafly’s. You got it pretty well cleaned out.”
“Since you know everything I’ve been doing, Jenny Orlick must have told you I’m looking for a young man named Martin Binder. He was at the Schlafly house a few weeks ago. He might have dropped some papers in the pit which could shed some light on where he went next.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble for not much to me,” Herb said.
“Hard to argue with that, Deputy, especially since I also have a smashed trunk lock on top of not much. You can talk to Ms. Wenger in the morning, which is right now, come to think of it, and get her version.”
The night clerk came out through the back of the hotel. “Kyle, I got a whole bunch of nervous guests in there, wanting to know if their cars are going to be vandalized. Can you come talk to them?”
Kyle and Herb looked at each other, looked at the Mustang, nodded.
Kyle said, “Yeah, Tina, we’ll be right in. We can’t do anything for you here, Miss. I mean, we could dust the trunk lock for prints, but frankly that’s a waste of time, no matter what they say on those TV shows. We’ll file a report and tell the team to be on the lookout, case anyone hears anything about these drawers. I’m guessing someone who heard the talk at the game last night got carried away, thinking you’d dug up gold, and went and helped themselves to it.”
Herb added, “We’ll send Jenny Orlick over to Wenger’s in the morning, see if Roberta remembers anything else. How long you fixing to stay here?”
“Not long, Deputy.”
“You stop by the station to sign a complaint before you head back to Chicago, okay? And don’t go leaving the jurisdiction without letting us know.”
“Right you are, Deputy.”
I watched while the two men followed Tina into the motel. I picked up the crowbar by one end and laid it in the trunk. I doubted it would show any prints or DNA, but you never know. The punks had damaged the lock so badly it wouldn’t stay shut; I had to fasten it with a bungee cord to keep the lid from swinging open.
Like the deputies, I didn’t think there was any point in doing anything else, such as signing a complaint, or getting permission to leave the jurisdiction. I slipped out the back exit, my lights off, gun on the seat beside me. Only when I was clear of the motel did I consult my iPad for advice on a route to Chicago. I wanted the old state highways and county roads. I was tired, my legs still hurt, I didn’t feel up to driving eighty on the interstate in the dark. I also wanted to make sure I was alone.
Night creatures skittered away from my headlights, raccoons, foxes, rat-like creatures. Now and then a tractor would rumble across the road to get on one of the tracks alongside the fields. Sunrise was still two hours away, but lights were on in many of the farmhouses I passed.
I didn’t think my punks were looking for buried treasure; I thought they wanted the bleached-out documents Roberta and I had found. Judy Binder and her son had argued over some papers, Roberta said: she’d watched them through her binoculars, but she hadn’t heard what they said. Invaders had torn Kitty Binder’s house apart, searching for—what?
I shifted uneasily in my seat, rubbing my driving leg. Was I ruling out the obvious because I wanted the subtle? Judy and Martin could have been fighting over her drug habit. They could have been fighting because he was furious that she’d rather be with crack and meth than him. Ricky Schlafly, that death had all the earmarks of a falling-out among drug dealers. And drug dealers were a wild, unstable bunch. Roberta and Frank Wenger had said there were a number of drug houses in the county. Other meth makers would have heard about my find at the football game: they could easily have believed a tale of buried treasure.
Even if that was the correct analysis, it didn’t answer one big question. Where had Martin Binder gone?