CHAPTER TEN
“Where did you learn to do that?” Casey watched as Desiree removed the thin metal ruler she had forced between door and jamb in order to pop the bolt on Ron Neal’s locked office door. “No, let me guess. You did something like this in a movie.”
“Close,” Desiree said. “A co-star did it. But you’d better believe I was taking notes.”
“Do your employers have any idea of what you’re really like?” Casey asked. “I’m just glad you use your powers for good and not for evil.”
“Shut up and get in here,” she said as she edged the door open and slipped into the dark office.
Casey heard the click of a switch. A small circle of light revealed the top of Neal’s desk, and the reflected glow showed Desiree with her hand still on the lamp. Casey could also see the frosted glass of the office door glowing faintly, and it didn’t take much imagination to guess how that would look to anyone in the hallway. “We’re not exactly making a secret of our presence,” he said, closing the door as quietly as he could. “Is there a security guard? And if so, how often does he come around?”
“I have no idea,” Desiree snapped. “Shall we wait and find out?” She was, he realized, nervous—possibly even a little frightened. Not that she was alone in that. I should have sent her home after we finished at Wardrobe, he thought. She isn’t really made for this sort of work.
“You’re right,” he said, moving quickly to join her. “I hope Neal isn’t one of those who locks his desk.”
“Doesn’t matter if he is,” she said after a moment. “Here we are.” Triumphantly she waved a small, cloth-bound book; it appeared and then disappeared as her gesture moved it in and out of the circle cast by the desk lamp.
“Splendid. Now, what about that Photostat machine?” He looked around the office. It wasn’t a very big place, and he saw nothing that looked like a Photostat machine—whatever one of those might prove to be.
“It’s back in the Personnel and Records office,” she said. Her breathing was deep and rapid, as though she’d been exercising. “Do you want to risk going there?”
“Not really. How fast do you write?”
“Fast enough,” she said, sitting down and pulling paper from a tray. “Why don’t you keep looking, see if you can find anything else that might be helpful?”
Fortunately, Neal was not an especially tidy man. There were plenty of notes and other papers to examine. After a few minutes of this, Casey wasn’t so sure how lucky he’d been after all. Not only was Neal not tidy, he wasn’t even organized. It had to constitute something of a miracle that the man had remembered to lock his door on leaving for the night. After a few more minutes, Casey decided that someone else had locked up. Neal’s only apparent virtue as a security chief was his bloody-mindedness. “I can’t figure out what any of this means,” he muttered.
“See if you can find—” Desiree began, then stopped.
Casey heard it too: footsteps. The sound echoed down the hall, rhythmically like some extremely slow clock. The desk lamp went out suddenly, and Casey had to suppress a whistle of appreciation; Desiree had timed it so that the noise of the switch would be drowned by one of the footsteps.
The man in the corridor began to whistle, a tearing-metal screech that Casey only with effort recognized as “My Blue Heaven.” Casey grinned as the sound echoed down the hall, loud enough that it ought to be rattling the doors in their frames: so long as the guard kept up that racket, he wouldn’t hear Casey and Desiree breathing in their hiding place.
When the whistling stopped, Casey had just long enough to notice the guard’s silhouette on the frosted glass of Neal’s door—and for Casey’s heart to seem to stop—before the shadowy figure disappeared and the piercing noise started up again. Casey didn’t get his breathing back under control until the whistling had faded with the guard’s departure to another hall or another floor of the building.
Casey was still grinning, though, when Desiree snapped the light back on. He had to suppress the urge to laugh out loud. “What the hell do you find so funny?” Desiree whispered. She was, he realized, pale and shaking.
Didn’t you find that exciting? he wanted to ask. He knew by the look on her face, though, that it would be the wrong thing to say. “Sorry,” he said instead. “I think I find being frightened to be a bit of a tonic.” It reminds you, he thought, of how it felt to be coming home after surviving a flight over the lines, the sky filled with Germans chasing you.
And it was true. Most of his life since being demobbed in 1919 had revolved around a continuing search for ways to feel that way again. At some level Casey knew that it wasn’t healthy to need to take such risks in order simply to feel alive. But that seemed to be the way it was going to be for him. Best get used to it.
“When I need a tonic,” Desiree said carefully, “I pour myself a drink. Something I think I’m in rather desperate need of, right now. Why didn’t we check to see if there was a guard inside the building at night? After all, you asked me about it.”
“It made sense at the time not to check,” Casey said. “And now the thing’s done, and when something’s done you don’t ask about changing it. That’s the rule. How are you coming with the diary?”
“For all the good it’s going to do us, I guess I’m doing pretty well.”
“She wasn’t much of a writer?”
“Oh, the early pages are just packed with detail about things that don’t seem to matter. But the longer Lily was in Hollywood the more cryptic her entries became. The last pages are just abbreviations of names and places and chores or appointments.” She picked up the pen she’d been using and drew a fresh load of ink into the barrel. “I’ve got the name of her bootlegger boyfriend, though.”
“Is it Barton Allen, Dan McGrath, or”—he squinted, trying to read the words—”Michael Buckley?”
“McGrath,” she said. “How’d you know?”
“One of the bits of paper I picked up when you took the diary. Our friend Neal has obligingly written up a list of names that I’m guessing are people he wants to talk to. Some of them have addresses. And one—Mr. Buckley—has been erased from the list. I’m going to copy him down anyway. I’d just as soon not have to go through this process twice.”
“You and me both, brother. This is a bit more excitement than I think I can handle.”
“It’s probably going to get worse, you know.”
She looked at him, cold appraisal in her eyes. “How much worse?”
“Depends on how successful we are,” he told her. “Sooner or later, if we’re any good at this, we’re going to have to deal with a person who’s already killed at least once.”
“Oh,” she said. After a moment she added, “I guess I already knew that. I just didn’t want to think about it.”
“It’s not the sort of thing one wants to think about,” Casey said.
Next Prologue Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five
Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine
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