Frances’ ploy of staging a poker game to make sure no one got into the safe was dazzling. I was out and about too early the next day to congratulate her. I took the borrowed pictures back to the coroner, along with muffins from The Canterbury to sweeten him up for future favors. I picked up the prints of the photographs I’d taken at the hotel. The morning could still pass as young when I arrived at Skip’s theatrical shop.
“That’s him. He’s the one.”
Skip tapped one of the photographs I’d spread before him on his display case. It was easier finding pictures of live people than of dead ones, so I’d given him half a dozen.
“You’re sure?” I asked.
“Absolutely. Before we started this place, I spent enough years helping actors put on makeup to know how a face looks with and without additions. Add a couple of moles and a mustache, and that’s the man who came in.”
He’d picked out the picture of Nick Perry.
“Then what I want you to do is draw those in on one of these.”
Rummaging until he found a pencil that suited him better than the one on his counter top, Skip added the details of Perry’s disguise so subtly it took several looks to recognize they weren’t part of the original. I now had two copies of the identical photo, showing the same man. In one he appeared as described by Skip and the clerk from Lagarde Jewelers; in the other as he looked at The Canterbury.
“You’re some artist,” I said in admiration.
Ship hooked thumbs under his red suspenders and tried not to show he was pleased. I put the pictures away.
“May I use your phone?”
* * *
Freeze was in some kind of meeting. It should be over in forty minutes or so, I was informed. Meantime, there was another phone call I wanted to make, one better made where I had more privacy. I thanked Skip and left, with the glorious feeling I was finally making progress.
The dead plant in my office had long ago become part and parcel of my decor. The sagging window shade was entirely different. When I opened the door, the sight of it still hanging listlessly irked me as much as it had the first time the shade refused to roll up. I turned my back on it and its perkier neighbor, divided the mail I’d brought in between desk and wastebasket, and located Sarah O’Neill’s phone number.
“This is Maggie Sullivan,” I said when she answered. “I came by asking questions about your cousin yesterday. How’s your little boy?”
“He’s... better, thanks.”
“I thought it would be less disruptive if I called instead of coming over again.” It was a nudge to encourage her to cooperate now. I didn’t give her long enough to speak. “There’s something I forgot to ask when I was there.”
“Yes?”
Talking to me didn’t appear to be the highlight of her day.
“The boy you remember Nick palled around with — the son of a chauffeur or gardener — what was his name?”
The silence lasted so long I thought she was going to hang up, but she didn’t.
“I can’t remember. Honestly. I saw it in the paper six or seven years ago — he’d been arrested for something. I recognized it then, but now....”
“Why was he arrested?”
“Not for murder or anything dreadful like that. It just caught my eye because of the name. It had something to do with a house, I think.”
“Uh...”
“Couch? No. Draper? No.”
I got what she meant now.
“Butler?” I suggested. “Cook?”
“No... but I do think it might have to do with a kitchen.”
“Baker? Lamb?” A thought stabbed into me. “Rice?”
“Yes! That’s it! Colin — no, Kevin — Rice!”
* * *
I called to see whether Freeze was out of his meeting. Boike answered and told me he was. Five minutes into my visit, Freeze held up a hand.
“You’re telling me the dead bum in that flophouse is the same guy who disappeared from the fancy hotel?”
“Yep.” I sat back in my chair.
“Based on nothing except the say-so of the butterball who owns the place and one of his waiters?”
“And one of the bellhops, who’s a sharp old bird. He picked the same man out of the photos. And he’d told me when I first asked that the man who’d vanished had callused fingers.” I clasped my hands around my knees and leaned forward. “I’ll bet he told your men too. And I’ll bet the coroner told you about the stiff from the flophouse having new underwear.”
Freeze shook out the match he’d just used. He took a draw on his cigarette.
“Lots of do-good groups collect socks and underwear. Give it out at the missions. Anyway, the guy wasn’t a homicide.”
“Philippe Lagarde was, and a clerk who came in early heard him arguing with someone — even got a look at whoever it was. Remember how she described him?”
“How did you—?” Freeze shot a suspicious look at Boike, who was jotting down notes at the desk to his right, then at another lackey who leaned on the edge of it. He started to reach for a file, then recited from memory. “Medium build, pair of moles by one eyebrow.”
“And a medium mustache.”
Freeze flipped the file open.
“Clerk never mentioned a mustache.”
“Somebody else who met him did.” Reaching into my purse, I took out the envelope with the photographs I’d taken the day before. “And if you show the clerk, she’ll tell you it’s him.”
I flipped the one Skip had doctored onto his desk. Freeze bent over it with interest. Suddenly his expression sharpened.
“Is this your idea of a joke? Someone’s drawn on this.”
“Yes. And here’s the original. This is how he looks when he doesn’t stick on his disguise. He’s a guest at The Canterbury.”
Boike and the other guy crowded closer to look.
I laid it out for them: How Nick Perry had gone into Skip’s hunting someone to copy jewelry; his local roots; his youthful safe cracking. Freeze squashed out the stub of his cigarette.
“Long way from enough to charge somebody with murder,” he said sourly. “If that cuckoo you’re working for had reported thefts from his safe, it might be different.”
“They reported a dead girl stuffed in a trash can. She scrubbed floors in the middle of the night, Freeze. Down on her knees where she wouldn’t be seen until she popped up when Perry was going in or out of the room with the safe. He didn’t want a witness, so he killed her.”
“You theorize.”
Frustration drove me out of my chair. I rounded it and gripped the back to control my anger.
“What about the Lagarde case? A witness saw Perry arguing with him the day he was murdered. Doesn’t that at least suggest a motive? A possible one, worth exploring? It gets you off the hook if I’m wrong.”
Giving him the satisfaction of hearing me raise that possibility stuck in my craw, but time was running out at The Canterbury. Lily Clarke was leaving on Sunday. Unless I could stop it, her diamonds would be gone before then, and the Tuckers would be ruined.
The phone rang. Freeze answered, listened a minute, then thanked someone. He jotted something on a notepad next to the phone and tore off the top sheet.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. He reached for the suit jacket draped on the back of his chair.
“I’m not done.”
“Miss Sullivan, we have things to do.”
“Does the name Kevin Rice ring a bell?”
Freeze was bullheaded, but waving the red flag in this direction might get his attention. The name didn’t register, so he looked at his two assistants. Boike nodded.
“Yeah. From when I worked robbery-burglary. He was a fence. Got sent away for a couple of years.”
Freeze stood up, shrugging into his jacket.
“So?” He was looking at me.
“So he and Perry were pals as teenagers. So every couple nights since Perry’s been at The Canterbury, he’s dropped things out the hotel window to Rice. Nights they don’t play that game, the two of them meet in a bar on Cass. Rice gives Perry something. Rice runs a used book store on Wayne, south of Fifth, a swell spot for dealing in stolen goods in case his stretch behind bars didn’t turn him into a choirboy.”
Freeze stared, the cigarette in his lips forgotten as the match in his fingers burned down.
“South of— what were you doing in a place like that?”
My patience snapped.
“Having tea. Contrary to what you think, Freeze, I don’t spend my time with my feet on my desk eating bonbons while men toss information into my lap. I was following Rice.”
The flame of the match reached his flesh. He swore and dropped it, batting it off the edge of his desk before it set any papers ablaze.
“There may be a thing or two there worth looking into if nothing else pans out,” he relented. “Don’t get your hopes up.”