Wall of Glass (6 page)

“Three-bit,” I said. “Inflation.”

“I'm warning you, Croft,” he said, leaning forward and pointing a thick index finger at my face. “You do what I tell you and keep your nose out of my family's business.”

“Mr. Leighton,” I said, “that finger is going to look pretty silly buried in your ear.”

He stared at me for a moment and then abruptly stood up. “Get out of my house.” He said it through clenched teeth. Maybe he'd gone to one of those Eastern colleges himself.

I nodded. Chalk up another triumph for diplomacy. Just as I stood, Mrs. Leighton returned with a drink in each hand. She looked at her husband, looked at me, looked back at her husband. “What on earth is going on?”

“Croft was just leaving, Felice,” he said.

“Thanks for the tea,” I told her, and slipped the notebook into my jacket, the pen into the pocket of my shirt.

It might have been my imagination, but her blue eyes seemed to grow brighter. Her left eyebrow rose in an arch and a small smile appeared on her lips.

Happy families are all alike.

I turned to Leighton. “Don't bother showing me out.”

I walked across the brick floor, up the steps, through the foyer, and out the front door.

F
ROM MY HOUSE,
I called Rita and told her what'd happened. She suggested I might have been more patient with Leighton and his sensitivities. I said she was probably right. She predicted that Mrs. Leighton, sooner or later, would get in touch with me. I said she was probably wrong; hubby wouldn't let her. I told her that I'd spend the rest of the day trying to pick up some background on the Leightons, and that I'd talk with Hector tomorrow.

I called Peter Ricard, the one man I knew in town who could probably give me reliable information on the Leightons; but he was out. I called the police station, and Sergeant Nolan of the Burglary Investigation Unit was available. After I mentioned a few names—Rita's, Romero's, the Leightons'—he told me that if I made it down there right away, he might be able to spare me a few minutes. It was too gracious an offer to refuse.

His cubicle at the station was identical to Hector's, but Nolan himself looked less like a cop than a bank clerk. He was in his mid-thirties and he was short, not over five foot five. His light brown hair was cut close to the skull and parted on the left with the precision of a razor scar. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, a pale yellow shirt, and a tropical-weight light gray suit whose vest almost hid the beginnings of a small round belly. His tie was banded with red-and-yellow regimental stripes. It hadn't come from the same regiment as Romero's, but I got the feeling, after talking to him for a few minutes, that he and the insurance investigator had probably gotten along splendidly.

He offered me a dry, businesslike hand, and then he offered me a chair. He sat down, pulled a pocket watch from his vest pocket, frowned at it, slid it back, and then patted the pocket twice, as though to reassure himself that the watch hadn't slipped into a time warp and disappeared.

“Normally,” he said, pushing his glasses back with the tip of his index finger, “Sunday is off-time for me, but we've got a trial coming up and I had to finalize some reports for the A.G.'s office. I was just leaving when you called.”

“I appreciate your giving me the time.” It seemed like the thing to say.

He nodded once, in recognition of my appreciation, and said, “I spoke to Allan Romero a few minutes ago, and he's verified your bona fides. As I understand it, you'll be interfacing with Atco on a contingency basis.”

“Right,” I said. I admire a man who can use
interfacing
with a straight face. I hadn't seen a straighter face than Nolan's in some time.

He picked up a ball-point pen from his desk blotter and began to tap it lightly against the desk. “Sergeant Ramirez assures me that you're more honest than most private investigators, but I do want to caution you about one thing. Any hard data you obtain regarding the perpetrator of the Leighton burglary, or for that matter of any other burglary, is to be input to this office at once.”

There would've been more—warnings of the dire consequences to me and my license if I failed to comply. He was taking a break, about to get started, when I interrupted. “Absolutely,” I said. “Hector tells me you had Frank Biddle and Stacey Killebrew figured for the theft.”

He nodded curtly. “Sergeant Ramirez is correct.” With only the faintest emphasis on
Sergeant
to remind me that despite my friendship with Hector, I was still a civilian.

I said, “Biddle was out of town the night the necklace was stolen.”

Another curt nod. “Yes. The burglary took place on October sixteenth of last year. And Biddle had left for Amarillo, Texas, on the thirteenth.”

“Hector tells me that you think Biddle was involved with Mrs. Leighton.”

Still tapping the pen, he nodded again. “I had evidence to corroborate that belief.”

“What kind of evidence?”

He shook his head. “Privileged information.”

And I wasn't among the privileged. “All right,” I said. “Leighton fires Biddle, Biddle gets angry, organizes the theft with Killebrew, then sets himself up an alibi by going to Amarillo. That the way you see it?”

“Yes. The connection between Biddle and Killebrew is established. Neither one of them denied it—they'd known each other since high school in Amarillo. The M.O. of the burglary matches that used in others we know Killebrew committed. And certainly Killebrew is one of the few burglars in town with access to a fence professional enough to dispose of the necklace.”

“Good fences make good neighbors.”

Nolan smiled faintly. “The majority of thefts here in Santa Fe, both commercial and residential, are committed by drug users, primarily heroin addicts, who steal to support their habit.”

“Free Enterprise,” I said. “The American Way.”

He frowned. And still kept tapping away with the pen—despite the prim exterior, he had a lot of nervous energy tumbling around inside. “The point I wish to make is that Stacey Killebrew is not a part of this system. He is not a drug user who steals to support his habit. He is a professional, full-time burglar who steals only your high-ticket items, primarily artwork and jewelry. Goods that the average Break-and-Enter people could never dispose of because the items are too easy to identify, or because the receivers in this town don't have the cash to pay for them.”

“You make him sound like Raffles.”

“Don't let his appearance deceive you. He's sly and he's shrewd and he's extremely competent at what he does.”

“He can't be all that competent if he got busted.”

Nolan shook his head. “We arrested him only because of a tip from someone who lived near the apartment where the goods were cached. And the burglary counts were ultimately dropped. All we had were the recovered goods, and although they were demonstrably in Killebrew's possession, we had no way of proving his participation in their actual theft.”

“So you got him for receiving.”

He nodded. “That's correct.”

“He only did eighteen months.”

Nolan frowned, nodded.

“I remember reading in the newspaper,” I said, “about the bust. Weren't the goods valued at over thirty thousand dollars?”

Still frowning, Nolan nodded again. “Thirty-three thousand five hundred.”

“Over twenty thousand dollars makes it a second-degree felony. That's eight years' time on a conviction. He plea-bargained?”

“The D.A.'s office is overworked. A trial costs time and money.” He spoke quickly, and there was a tightness, an irritation, in his voice. At me, certainly, but also at the system he was defending. It had to be frustrating to make a solid bust and then watch the bad guy get off with only eighteen months in prison. But the frustration was cop-frustration, and rather than share it with a civilian, he was giving me the party line. “They let his lawyer plead guilty to third-degree. Three years. He did half of it.”

I said, “The stuff that was recovered was mostly artwork?”

He nodded. “And jewelry. He had burgled at least four galleries here in town, and several homes.”

“Was everything recovered?”

“No. We estimate that at least another seventy or eighty thousand is still missing.”

“What about Biddle? Did he have a record?”

“Nothing here. And in Amarillo, nothing extensive. Drunk and Disorderly. D.W.I.”

“Did Biddle and Killebrew originally come to Santa Fe together?”

“No. Biddle came here about six years ago, Killebrew a year later.”

“Did you talk to Biddle after the burglary?”

“Not immediately. We didn't have enough evidence to request extradition. I called him in Amarillo, asked for his cooperation, but it wasn't until a week later that he drove back here.” Nolan frowned again, remembering.

“When he did come back,” I said, “he denied having anything to do with the burglary?”

A small shrug. “I didn't expect him to confess.”

“What was he doing in Amarillo?”

“Looking for work, he said.” Another frown. Nolan clearly hadn't been fond of Frank Biddle. “If so, he never found it. He returned to Amarillo after I questioned him, but he stayed only another few weeks before coming back to Santa Fe.”

“And you never got the evidence you needed to tie him to the burglary.”

“No. Neither him nor Killebrew. But his coming to you as he did, trying to unload the jewelry, is hardly an indication of his innocence.”

I nodded. “Getting back to the Leightons. You said something about the M.O. of the burglary.”

“Yes. It matched that of the other burglaries. In every case the phone lines had been severed to circumvent a telephone call from the alarm system.”

“Did he cut the wires to the siren?”

“You don't merely cut alarm wires,” he informed me. “Doing that triggers the system to send an alarm over the phone lines. First you bypass the wires, set up a secondary circuit, and then you cut them.”

“Okay,” I said. “Did he bypass the alarm wires?”

“At the galleries, yes, but they're all located in town, where the sirens would've been heard. The private homes, including the Leightons', were all out of town and isolated. The phone lines were cut in each case, although only two of the houses had alarm systems.”

“Those two had sirens?”

“Yes. The wires were uncut.”

“He pulled the plug on the siren when he got inside.”

“That's correct.”

I nodded. “One thing I don't understand.”

“Yes?”

“If Killebrew had the necklace, if he still has it, then why hasn't he tried to get rid of it before now?”

He shrugged. “Waiting for it to cool off, perhaps, and get himself a better price. And possibly he wasn't the one who was trying to get rid of it right now. Possibly Biddle was acting without Killebrew's approval.”

I nodded. “You think Killebrew killed Biddle.”

“I'm convinced of it,” he said.

FIVE

I
CALLED
R
ITA
from the public library and told her what I'd learned. Then I called Peter Ricard's house. Still no answer. So I left the library, climbed into the Subaru, and went looking for him. Santa Fa is a small town, and there aren't that many places to hide.

Particularly on a Sunday. Except for the bars in the hotels, which few of the locals frequent anyway, most places shut down from Saturday night to Monday morning. One of those that didn't was Vanessie's, a big piano bar on the west side, and it was here, at seven o'clock that evening, that I found Peter.

He was standing up against the far corner of the large rectangular bar as I walked in, staring down into a brandy snifter as though it were a crystal ball. There were no other customers, and Gordon, the bartender, was using the light above the cash register to do
The New York Times
crossword puzzle in ballpoint. This is a display of arrogance I've always found irritating. Rita does it too.

I walked around the bar and said hello to Peter.

He looked up and nodded glumly. “Joshua. How goes it?” He was wearing a leather windbreaker, jeans, cowboy boots.

“Fine,” I told him.

Gordon abandoned the
Times
long enough to take my order, a Jack Daniel's on the rocks for me, another Amaretto for Peter.

“So,” I said, “you're looking a little down in the mouth this evening.”

Every year, some group here in town puts out a list of Santa Fe's most eligible bachelors. Peter Ricard has made the list every year. Not hard to understand why. He was tall, a little over six feet, with boyish good looks that were becoming more interesting as they began to blur at the edges—Dennis the Menace gone slightly to seed. I knew him because he usually swam at the municipal pool about the same time I did, and occasionally we played racquetball. He was bright, articulate, and he was also one of the richest men in Santa Fe. The third richest or the fourth, depending on whom you talked to. Unless you talked to Peter. He would tell you he was broke.