Murder by Candlelight (14 page)

Z could now see headlights, the little
carry-all slowing as it came, Jamie no doubt trying to see an
address, probably also looking for Z's car.

To help her, Z flashed his lights; saw
the truck straighten and speed up.

Passing him, Jamie made a U-turn at
the next intersection, drifting up slowly to park behind
him.

As Jamie killed her lights and her
engine, Z opened the car door, levering himself out on the narrow,
mostly dirt and gravel street, mindful of his trick knee, though
the knee had been functioning better lately.

Jamie's dome light came on as she
opened her door, Jamie getting out, the girl trying to be quiet as
she shut her door.

Z waited, Jamie walking up.

Thankfully, she was
dressed in dark clothing, slacks, shirt -- though he
could
see the outline of
her perky face and the "moonshine" of short blond hair in the
midnight shadow of hovering trees.

Seeing her brought back memories of
the nights they'd spent together. Hot, sticky memories.

"Hi, Mister," Jamie said softly in her
deliberately sexy voice. "If I go all the way with you, will you
respect me in the morning?"

Z didn't know what to say.

"Don't worry. Your virginity's safe
with me. At least for tonight. I'm having the curse. Of course,
some men really get off on .... Now, don't look like that. Can't
you tell when I'm kidding?"

"No." Which was the simple
truth.

In spite of the quiet cool at that
time of night, Z could feel moisture collect at his hairline. For
being such a "cool customer," Jamie could make a man feel hot, in
more ways than one.

"Well, come on," she prodded. "If
we're going on a mission, let's get to it."

"OK."

Motioning Jamie to follow, Z crossed
the street and stepped over the curbing, the two of them padding
silently down the broken sidewalk, Z turning into Kunkle's cracked
drive, Kunkle's "misused" car still parked there.

Passing the car, Z led Jamie into the
deeper shadow of the stoop -- where the situation was as he'd
expected. No yellow plastic police tape.

The cops had unsealed the Kunkle
house. Case unsolved, but closed.

Using his plastic card to "key" them
inside the sad little house, Z and Jamie crept in, Z closing the
door.

Only then did Z take out his
new-battery penlight and flick it on, the narrow beam punching
holes in the blackness, the living room -- minus Kunkle -- seeming
just the same ... but stuffy.

Stuffy, because the house had been
closed up since the murder investigation.

With less of a dusty odor. .........
Because the police had vacuumed the place in the vain hope of
sucking up a small, but useful, clue.

"What are we looking for?" Jamie
whispered, keeping her voice down even though Z had assured her the
house would be unoccupied. "You weren't very clear on the
phone."

Z hadn't been "very clear" because
he'd failed to think up a story about why he needed to break into
someone's house in the dead of night. He wasn't too certain of what
to say, now.

"Drugs."

The catchall. The single word that
justified illegal law enforcement.

"We're looking for, what?
Cocaine?"

"Anything ... unusual."

"Where do you want to
begin?"

Jamie was being unusually
cooperative. Even submissive. Z wondered how long
that
would
last.

To make a start, Z "beamed" Jamie to
the add-on bathroom. Found it looking much the same, except that
someone had mercifully flushed the stool. No medicine, except that
Z did find a bottle of aspirin this time, tucked in behind some
wash cloths on the shelf.

No change in the bedroom -- no asthma
medicine on the stand by the bed, or any other medication in the
room. Ditto for the bedroom closet -- minus the neck brace Z had
used on Kunkle.

The kitchen was also no surprise, the
box of candles missing from the drawer, of course.

Back to the living room.

By this time, Jamie had
switched on her own penlight, the two of them cutting at the dark
like light sabers slashing up
Star
Wars
movies. Jamie was still following Z
around, but was also taking side trips of her own to look at
whatever caught her eye.

They were both careful to keep from
shining their small lights at windows. Above all, didn't want to
alarm a neighborhood insomniac. It wouldn't do to have cop cars
sirening down the street.

Though the police had taken down what
was left of Z's innovative candle arrangement in the center of the
living room, Z noticed a couple of wax spots on the floor where
he'd put Kunkle-and-chair; a sad reminder of a scare-off job gone
wrong.

Z still couldn't believe his candle
wax approach had killed little Howie. ...

Denial.

Z had seen enough talk
shows on TV to know that "denial" was what a psychologist would
call Z's refusal to believe he'd been the instrument of the little
man's death. Maybe Z would talk to Calder about this sometime.
Would
definitely
do that ... if only the Bateman psychologist was a
priest.

Shaking off this unprofitable line of
thought, it was time to impress little Jamie.

Z walked over to the desk.

While he'd left open the secret
drawer, someone, as he'd hoped, had closed it again; probably the
same "someone" who'd shut down the roll top.

Z tried the top.

Found it locked.

Good!

"A locked desk," Z said, pointing it
out to Jamie, the girl stopping whatever she'd been doing with a
rickety magazine rack to come over.

"Hmm," she said.

"Locked for
some
people."

With that, Z got down on the floor,
scooted himself through the knee hole, and under the desk. Reaching
up, he tripped the locking mechanism again, the drawers clicking
open as before.

"Clever," Jamie admitted as Z backed
himself out, Jamie giving him a thumbs-up.

Facing the desk, Z rolled the top up
and back, the two of them pointing their lights inside.

Nothing in the little
drawers.

Nothing in the pigeon holes at the
back.

Next, Z pulled out the large lower
drawers, in turn.

Empty.

After that, making something of show
of it, Z began to examine the secret drawer -- did the measuring
bit again to demonstrate his wily discovery of the drawer's false
bottom.

Pulling out the drawer to its full
extent, reaching under it, he tripped the latch, the spring-loaded
bottom popping up, revealing the compartment below.

Hearing Jamie's intake of breath, he
knew he'd amazed her -- a difficult thing to do to worldly-wise
Jamie Stewart.

Both of them pointing their little
lights inside the drawer, the drawer "swallowing" the light to make
the rest of the living room even darker than before, the first
thing they saw was the same greasy deck of cards, scattered
about.

The leather notebook with names and
phone numbers ... wasn't inside. The police would have taken
that.

Nor was the money anywhere to be seen,
the odds saying that the first cop to inspect the drawer had
pocketed the cash. With the owner of the desk safely dead, who was
to say what the desk contained? Anyway, policemen were underpaid.
Underappreciated. Their children undernourished ..... And a lot of
that.

Gallantly, Z stepped back to let Jamie
have "first crack" at the drawer's ... stuff.

As Z had done the first time, Jamie
began by taking out the items, examining each in turn before
putting it on the desktop.

First, she corralled the scattered
cards, making a pack out of them, stacking that old deck on the
desktop.

She took out the new unopened
decks.

She retrieved the cellophane card
wrappers that Howie seemed to have steamed off some of the
decks.

The little mirror.

The instant glue.

The sunglasses -- though they were
hardly sunglasses in the usual sense, since they had such lightly
colored lenses they could pass for regular glasses.

And finally, the small bottle of
alcohol.

Looking at each item again, Jamie
turned to look up at Z.

"What do you make of it?" Z would like
to have added, "Smarty Pants" -- but restrained himself. In
addition to her tongue, the girl's ego needed trimming as much as
anyone he knew.

"Whoever put these here is a
gambler."

Good.

That was very good.

John Dosso had told Z
that. On the other hand, from just a few decks of cards, how could
Jamie have deduced that Kunkle gambled? He could have been a bridge
player. Or played pitch, or hearts, for that matter. While
he
might
have bet
on the outcome of those games ....?

"Gambler?"

"Sure."

The famous "shoe" was now
on the notorious other "foot." Jamie was so confident she was right
-- and Z knew she was -- that she was not even bothering to offer
her evidence for pronouncing Kunkle a ...
wagerer
... "wagerer" the recent and
more respectable sounding term for those who lost their shirt by
"wagering" at rigged-against-you (but state-
approved
) casinos. The state makes
money on gambling -- good. The state doesn't make money on gambling
-- bad.

Figured.

Back to Ms. Stewart. If Z wanted to
know her reasons for pronouncing Kunkle a gambler, he'd have to ask
her -- something he didn't want to do, unless .... Ah!

"You're right, of course. And the
tipoff?" Put like that, Z would seem to have already figured out
any small thing Jamie had noticed that he hadn't.

"The glim, all by itself, is a dead
giveaway."

Glim?

What was this glim?

This was going differently than he'd
planned.

"And of course, you noticed the
glasses."

"Umm. Yes."

Jamie reached down, picked up the
glasses and put them on -- the frames too big for her, the girl
having to hold them on with one hand to her temple.

With her free hand, she picked up the
old deck.

Thumbed out several cards, looking at
each.

"Not very sophisticated," she
sniffed.

Satisfied with whatever she'd
discovered, she passed the glasses to Z, who put them
on.

Jamie's narrow light added to his own,
Z looking carefully at the same cards Jamie had inspected, he
suddenly saw what she'd been talking about. Though invisible to the
naked eye, through the glasses, he could see that tiny spots had
been inked on the cards' backs.

Marked cards! Wearing these special --
polaroid? -- glasses, a player could see spots no one else in the
game would notice. Making it a dead cinch that, because Kunkle
marked his cards, he was a gambler.

Moreover a crooked one!

Z soothed his wounded pride by telling
himself that, if he'd known about the glasses trick, he would have
seen the same thing Jamie had.

Z took off the glasses. Set them
down.

Meanwhile, Jamie had picked up the
worn deck again.

Running her fingers along the sides of
the pack -- twice -- she laughed, her husky voice in the silent
house sounding like a donkey's bray.

"He must have kept forgetting his own
marking system, or else he had bad eyesight. Otherwise, why bother
to rig a cut?" Again, she was using terminology Z had never
heard.

Apparently seeing that Z was puzzled,
Jamie cut the deck, lifting up the pack to show Z that the Ace of
Spades was on the bottom. Jamie shuffled the deck. Cut again. Ace
of spades on the bottom.

"How ....?"

"Maybe it's the way I shuffle," she
said with a wry smile. "Here, you shuffle."

Z did. Three times.

He handed the deck back to Jamie, who
made another cut before upending the deck. Ace of Spades on the
bottom.

"OK," Z said, willing at last to admit
that little Jamie had special knowledge he didn't.
"How?"

"Kunkle shaved the deck. What you do
is, you take out the card that, after the deck is cut, you want to
appear on the bottom. Putting the other cards back in the pack, you
sandpaper the edges of the deck. That makes the other cards bow in
just a little along their sides. When you put the unsanded card
back in and run your fingers up the sides of the deck, your fingers
automatically "stick" on the unshaved card, that card now a little
wider than the rest. When you cut, you cut at that card, making
that card the bottom card. Most gamblers are more sophisticated
than to make the bottom card the Ace of Spades, however. That's
rather obvious. Overdoing it. Of course, when Kunkle is the dealer,
he could deal seconds."