Bloody Genius (Virgil Flowers, #12)(19)

A bookshelf was stacked with academic journals, several medical books, and more academic detritus, all of it printed, none of it annotated, nothing that would help with a murder. There was another stereo, with two bookshelf speakers. Virgil noticed an LED light on a CD player, opened it, and found an unmarked disc sitting in the tray. He took it out: no markings whatever. He put it back, pressed the play button, and a minute later an unfamiliar singer pushed the uncomplicated lyrics of “Home on the Range” through his nose through the speakers.

He turned the CD player off with an involuntary shudder. He sorta lived on the range, but that didn’t mean the song didn’t suck.

The bookshelves also contained a collection of antique wooden boxes, and inside them he found important but routine papers—a checkbook, check stubs from his university paycheck, investment reports from U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo, tax records, insurance policies, titles to automobiles, a stack of last year’s Christmas cards. He spent a half hour going through the papers and journals on the desk and on two side filing cabinets, looking for anything handwritten, anything out of place. He found nothing that looked important.



* * *



—

Virgil was lying under the desk, in the kneehole, when Trane asked, unexpectedly, “What are you doing?”

Virgil, startled, jerked half upright and banged his head against the bottom of the keyboard drawer. He dropped back on his elbows and saw Trane’s shoes and cuffs of her pants. “Ouch. Jesus Christ, give me a little warning, will you?”

“Sorry. What are you doing?” She stooped and peered under the desk.

“My grandpa had a desk like this. Smaller, but old like this one, with a million drawers,” Virgil said. He was digging around in a narrow space behind the drawers. “Pull the top left drawer out, would you?”

She pulled the drawer out, and Virgil asked, “Anything interesting?”

“Not that we haven’t looked at . . .”

“Can you pull the drawer all the way out? So it comes loose?” Virgil asked.

She tried. “No. It’s not made to come out. I can feel it hit some stops.”

Virgil said, “Hmm.” And, “Get anything good at the library?”

“Everybody agrees it’s a pubic hair. Actually, three pubic hairs; you missed some. I was at the autopsy and I can tell you they’re not Quill’s. He was a real blond.”

“Three pubic hairs . . . Unless the owner was shedding, they might have used it more than once.”

Virgil crawled out of the kneehole and stood up.

“What are you looking for?” Trane asked.

“The case housing the drawer is about eight or ten inches deeper than the drawer itself. No good reason for it, but it’s entirely enclosed,” he said.

“Maybe if we pushed the desk away from the wall, we could look in from the back?”

“No. If there’s a space there, you’d want to be able to access it without taking the room apart. My grandpa’s . . .”

Virgil pushed down on the left edge of the top: nothing.

He pulled up: nothing. Looked under the edge, couldn’t see anything except a scratch.

“There’s a scratch . . .” he said, going down to his knees.

“So what?”

“Well, it’d be a hard place to scratch,” Virgil said. “There’s, ah, a hole here . . . by the scratch . . . That’ll be it.”

“For a secret door? You gotta be joking,” Trane said.

“Everybody knew about my grandpa’s hidey-hole, including me,” Virgil said. “Wasn’t a secret. A lot of these old desks had them. They weren’t safes. You might put confidential stuff in there, maybe tax stuff and so on, but not money. Like I said, the drawers weren’t all that secret at the time.”

He stood up again, opened the top right drawer. A plastic tray held pencils, ballpoint pens, paper clips, fingernail clippers, scissors . . . and a single, right-angled Allen wrench. He took it out, carried it around to the side of the desk, fit it in the hole, and pushed.

A side panel clicked loose and out, then folded down. Inside was a vertical stack of small drawers, almost like trays.

“Agatha Fuckin’ Christie,” Trane said, amazed. “Open the drawers.”

Virgil did. They were all empty. He crawled around to the other side of the desk, found an identical hole, popped the side panel, revealing another stack of drawers. He pulled open the top drawer, and they both peered inside.

Trane said, “Oh, no. Nope. Nope. Nope. Shut the drawer, I don’t want to see that.”

“Could be laundry detergent,” Virgil said. “You know, like Tide? I could snort a little to see if it is.”

“How much you think?”

“I never worked dope,” Virgil said. “But I’ve seen cocaine, and that’s cocaine. Not much, but we don’t know what he started with.”

“Our murdered boy’s got cocaine stashed in a secret cubbyhole? That’s the cherry on the cake, you know? That’s just fuckin’ perfect. I hope the television people find out about it so they can go berserk.”

“Could be Tide . . .”



* * *



—

They called the narcs and continued to probe the office, although Trane had already done that. She took each of the antique boxes down, looking for false bottoms or secret drawers. They didn’t have any. A Narcotics cop named Bill Offers showed up, said that the baggie had contained a standard eight ball, an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. “Good stuff, not been stepped on much . . . Originally, he probably paid a couple hundred bucks for it, depending on his connection.”