The Dark Room(40)

“I’ll call up Dr. Levy.”

“Not yet,” Cain said. “Before the world starts walking through, I want to see the rest of the room.”

Kneeling over Castelli, he patted him down. He was wearing the same striped shirt and blue tie he’d been wearing ten hours ago in City Hall, when Cain confronted him. His suit jacket was missing but could be anywhere.

The shadows were too heavy. Underneath the desk was like a cave. He looked up. Track lights ran along the ceiling and pointed to the bookshelves.

“See if you can find a switch for those,” Cain said. “We need more light.”

He turned back to Castelli and patted down his trouser pockets. It was hard to feel inside the right pocket. Castelli lay curled on that side. But Cain felt the distinct shape of an antique lever lock key beneath the gabardine fabric. He didn’t move the body, and he didn’t try to take the key out. That would all come later, after the crime scene photographers were finished.

Above him, the lights came on. One bulb went out immediately. A droplet of blood must have splattered there, cracking the thin glass when it heated. He stepped over Castelli’s legs to look at the desktop.

“There’s a key in his right pocket,” Cain said.

“All right.”

“After we move him, we’ll get it out and test it. Make sure it locks that door.”

On the desk, a near-empty bottle of bourbon stood next to a crystal tumbler. Farther from the bottle, there was a red wax seal, like the one Castelli had cut from a fresh bottle at City Hall. So Castelli hadn’t poured a drop from this bottle until he sat down tonight, opened it, and got started.

Cain pointed it out to Nagata.

“We’ll tag it and bag it,” he said. “The bottle and the glass—all of this.”

He knelt again, mindful of the blood on the rug, and opened each of the drawers.

“Five dollars there’s a nickel-plated folding knife in here.”

“What?”

“Bingo.”

The knife was in the first drawer he opened. He eased out the blade and saw the red wax caught in its serrations. He put the knife down. The drawer Alexa had described was locked, but it only took Cain a moment to find the key underneath a pencil tray in the slim center drawer.

“What are you doing?” Nagata asked.

“Checking for a note.”

“A suicide note.”

“That’d be nice,” Cain said. “But maybe he didn’t put a bow on it. If he’s got the next set of photos, they might have come with a note.”

“He said this whole thing was a hoax.”

“People say a lot of things.”

Cain unlocked the drawer, then rolled it open. There were two more bottles of bourbon, their seals uncut. Castelli must have had his own delivery truck. He pictured an entire fleet of them, riding all night on the highways between San Francisco and Kentucky. Next to the bottles, there was a foot-high stack of Playboy magazines. Each was stored inside a separate plastic collector’s sleeve. Cain lifted the magazines to look beneath them, but there was nothing. A couple of loose coins, the pennies that find their way into all drawers and never come out. One of them was from 1983, the other from 1997. And, as far as the locked drawer went, that was all.

“I’m putting this all back the way I found it,” Cain said. “We’ll photograph it in place, then bag it.”

“Fine.”

“He might’ve left it in City Hall,” Cain said. “In his office there. Did you post a guard?”

“I didn’t think—”

“Call now and get some guys. We don’t want any staff going into his office. Not even the reception area.”

“All right.”

“We’ll search that after we finish here.”

Nagata left the room to make the call. It didn’t surprise him how easy it was, taking this over, telling her what to do. She’d never run a homicide investigation. She’d been looking to him for direction since they came upstairs. While she was gone, Cain checked out the bookshelves behind the desk. History, organized by geography. The top shelf was California: San Francisco on the left, and everything else on the right. The middle five shelves covered the rest of the world, by continent. General reference on the bottom shelf. It was surprising, the breadth of Castelli’s interests. Cain wouldn’t have pegged him as a serious reader of anything beyond bourbon labels and men’s club brochures. Behind him, Nagata hung up.

“What now?” she asked.

“Why don’t you check the credenza over there—see if there’s a note.”

He was still holding the stack of Playboys. He knelt again and began putting them back into the drawer, one at a time. The first issue was December 1953. On the cover, Marilyn Monroe raised her bare left arm and smiled with her eyes half closed. He knew the centerfold in that one, the famous shot of Marilyn curled up on some kind of red cushion. The pages looked well thumbed. Alexa had come in here as a girl to borrow these, to sneak them off to her room, where she could study the photographs in private. They couldn’t have been in this drawer back then. They must have been out on the shelves, because the drawer had been locked and she said she didn’t know what was in it. He did wonder how much he should be relying on anything Alexa said. And he wondered what Castelli kept in here ten years ago. The gun, maybe.