Page 102 - Labelle Gramercy, Detective

Cat’s Paw

She had changed her outfit from the morning vamp rags into
cocktail attire, d a slinky dress with an exaggerated bolero jacket. I
ignored as much of her as I could. She was carrying one of those
800-page romantic novels in paperback you can buy at the checkout
stand in a supermarket, so she must have been resigned to a long
session. I left her in the kitchen and went to work. If I didn’t find the
book before I got to her little alcove, she would just have to move. It
took me more than half an hour to finish the hall, going at top speed.
No more looking for fictitious wills, marriage licenses and suicide
notes. It was pick it up, scan it if it fit the size, and lay it down.
Then I hit the bedroom. It had a musty smell, but I didn’t dare try
opening a window for fear of triggering a booby trap. I heard Ruth
yawn loudly, perhaps even at a theatrical level. Pick ‘em up, lay ‘em
down. Why hide the damned thing, anyway? Because it was valuable.
Why was it valuable? Not just as a do-it-yourself manual on home
security; that made no sense. Maybe it contained some trade secrets
of the FBI or the CIA. How to wire your house to pick up
conversations in passing airplanes. How to plant small land-mines in
your back yard. How to build undetectable hiding places—oops!
What if the secret in the book had been used to keep the book itself a
secret? It could be embedded in some structural member of the
house, through a barely accessible panel which would pop open only
when a coded signal was emitted by a dog whistle.
I stopped in my tracks. It was almost six-thirty. No way would I
get this done before Ruth’s patience wore out. My mind raced.
Hidden, hidden. It had to be hidden. But something that big could
always be found, even if the entire house had to be torn down. Too
bad it wasn’t on the computer: now, there was a structure I could
demolish in a few minutes! I went back to the study. Maybe I had
overlooked something. Maybe the location of the manuscript was in
one of those text files. Yeah. I needed a break, anyway.
The letters and memoranda proved devoid of interest. Then I
looked at the spreadsheets. Boring stuff, a lot of empty cells; Lesley
had been careless setting them up. I backed out of the subdirectory,
admitting defeat. Fletcher Mallard could have sent Evan Adams to do
this job. Or the janitor. I idly began typing in DOS commands, just a
habit, to see what how the machine was configured. Then I saw it.
The hard disk didn’t have enough free space, given the files it

101