by Dan Willis
“Guess he’s nothing like his dad.”
“You wouldn’t think so, but I looked him up, too. He has a degree in organic chemistry from Yale and a patent for a new kind of fertilizer.”
“Well, that wouldn’t be the first time today I’ve been wrong,” Alex admitted. “Anything else?”
“As far as I can tell, Karen Burnham is Dr. Leonard Burnham’s youngest heir, but I suspect her father and his wife are first in line. If you think Karen is out to bump her grandfather off, you’re going to have to come up with a better motive.”
Alex sighed.
“All right.”
“Are you going to meet up with Danny?”
“I need to make a call first, but then I will.” He glanced outside at the pea-soup fog. “Assuming I can get a cab.”
“Good luck,” Leslie said and hung up.
Alex pulled out his rune book and extracted the Ice Queen’s business card from the pocket sewn under the back cover. She’d given him one of her cards when they first met, two years ago, but that one only had one number on it that turned out to be her home. This card had one number as well, but it was clearly marked, Office.
“Miss Kincaid’s office,” a smooth male voice answered when Alex’s call connected.
“I need to talk to Miss Kincaid,” he said.
“I’m sorry,” the voice responded. “Miss Kincaid is out at the moment. May I take a message?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “Tell her that Alex Lockerby knows something about her mysterious fog.” He chuckled at the reaction that message was sure to get, then hung up and headed out into the fog to find a cab.
11
What Isn’t There
Alex wondered how Danny was going to get him past Charles Grier’s super. By the time he arrived, however, the police were already upstairs and there was no sign of the combative Henry Travis.
“You’re late,” Danny said with a grin when Alex reached Grier’s door.
“Blame the fog,” he said. “Anything interesting?”
“There have been more accidents in the last week than in the previous six months,” Danny said.
Alex shot him an unamused look.
“In the apartment.”
Danny looked around at the officers who were going through Grier’s home looking for anything out of the ordinary. The hall door led into a large parlor with couches that faced each other over a coffee table. Behind them was a smallish reading area with a radiator next to a comfortable chair and a bookshelf. Doors led off each side of the room and Alex could see a kitchen through the one to the left.
“The super let us in,” Danny began, leading Alex into the parlor and toward the kitchen. “As far as we can tell, nothing is out of place.”
They passed through into the dining room where a table big enough for several people stood with a china hutch along one wall. The kitchen was connected through an open bar area. Alex could see a stove and oven next to a generous counter.
“Any dishes left out?”
“No,” Danny said. “And none in the sink either.”
Alex took a moment to look around, opening the icebox.
“It looks like he hadn’t been shopping in a while, and some of the food has started to spoil,” Danny observed. “It could mean Grier’s been gone longer than we thought.”
Alex shrugged and shut the icebox door.
“According to Dr. Kellin, Grier is a bachelor,” he said, pulling open some of the cabinets. “There aren’t any fancy pans or pots here. If Grier learned to cook beyond the basics, he’d have more equipment.”
Danny nodded. He’d eaten at the brownstone before. More to the point, he’d helped Alex wash up before. Like any true artist, Iggy had an almost inexhaustible supply of cooking gear.
“So, you’re thinking he ate out a lot?” Danny asked.
Alex gestured around at the apartment.
“Look at this place,” he said. “Grier was clearly doing well for himself.”
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” Danny said leading Alex back out into the parlor and across to the other door. Beyond it was a short hall with a bathroom and a linen closet, then another door opened into an enormous bedroom. A walk-in closet ran the length of the room, filled with more clothes than Alex could use in a lifetime.
“Apparently, Grier was quite the dandy,” Danny observed.
Alex looked down the rows of hangers to the back where a stack of shoeboxes filled the far shelf. Since there were already at least two dozen pairs of shoes on the floor in a neat row, he wondered what might be in the boxes.
The bedroom itself consisted of a double bed with a tall dresser and a dressing stand for a suit.
“There’s another bathroom through there,” Danny said pointing to a small door in the wall. “And across the hall is a study.”
“Let’s see that,” Alex said, heading for the door.
The study turned out to be a little office with a desk, a filing cabinet and a secretary cabinet that held more souvenirs of Grier’s travels.
“Anything jump out at you?” Danny asked once Alex had looked around.
“No,” he said, irritation plain in his voice. “Let me poke around with my lamp. Maybe there’s something we can’t see.”
An hour later, Alex had to admit defeat. He’d been over the house meticulously and found no signs of foul play. There wasn’t even anything suspicious. No signs of a betting habit, or suspicious money. No sign of a torrid affair, or even a tame one.
“Did the medical examiner have any luck with the body?” Alex asked as he packed up his kit.
“There’s a tattoo on the dead man’s arm,” Danny said, leaning against the desk in Grier’s study. “If he’s been arrested before, there might be a record of it. And if the file guys can find that record, we might learn who he was, but that’s about it.”
“Mind if I look through Grier’s papers?” Alex asked, pointing to the filing cabinet. “Maybe he really did go on a trip.”
“You’re welcome to look,” Danny said, “but I went through those while you were doing your sweep. If he went somewhere, he didn’t take money out of his bank account to buy tickets. And before you ask, there’s nothing in his calendar. I checked.”
Alex felt the urge to check for himself, but he knew Danny’s work. If he said he’d checked, Alex knew it had been done. He moved to the filing cabinet and began going through the files inside. Most of them related to Grier’s travels and his finances. There was a file of correspondence between Grier and other alchemists, but nothing that stuck out. Finally Alex shut the cabinet and turned to face Danny.
“Ready?” his friend said. “I sent the uniforms home half an hour ago. What do you say we get some dinner?”
“One more thing,” Alex said, remembering the shoe boxes in Grier’s enormous closet. He made his way down the wall of clothes to the boxes and began pulling them off the shelf one by one. The first contained receipts for work he’d had done on his apartment. Another held the rank insignia and decorations of an army lieutenant along with a picture of Grier during the big war. Others held bits and pieces of Grier’s life, including a collection of stamps, more souvenirs he obviously didn’t think were worthy to display in his glass cabinet, and a stack of old letters.
Alex thumbed through the letters, scanning the names. When he got to the back , he found several that were signed simply, Andrea. There were five of them, and Alex set them aside, returning the rest to their box.
“Find something?” Danny asked.
“I think these letters are from Dr. Kellin,” he said, scanning through them. The first letter dealt with a project they were working on, presumably in college. From the text, Alex gathered that Dr. Kellin had gone out of town to secure some rare ingredient and she had written to inform him of her success.
The second letter had obviously been written during the war. There weren’t any declarations of affection in it, but Alex felt like the subtext was there.
The third lett
er was the longest of the five. In it, Dr. Kellin explained that she was leaving their graduate school to go to medical school. She regretted leaving and wished Grier luck with something he was working on called Leon’s Libation. There was no mention of a relationship in this letter either, but it was clear, Andrea was leaving more than just school.
The last letters were written while Grier was overseas on his travels. They were mundane to the point of being boring.
“Do you think Dr. Kellin knows more about Grier’s disappearance than she’s letting on?” Danny asked, once Alex brought him up to speed.
“No,” Alex admitted. “This last letter was written almost ten years ago.”
“What about that potion he was developing, Leon’s something-or-other?”
“Libation,” Alex supplied. “I’ve never heard of a potion called that, but I’m no alchemist.”
“But he would have it written down somewhere, wouldn’t he?” Danny asked. “We didn’t find a book or file of his alchemy formulas. Not here or at his shop.”
Alex nodded, seeing where Danny was headed.
“You’re thinking he’s got some kind of secret safe?”
“No, actually,” Danny said. “I was thinking he’s got a deposit box at his bank.”
Alex felt a bit sheepish.
“That would make sense,” he admitted. “How long will it take to track that down?”
“Well, since there are deposit stubs in his office for Manhattan Central Bank, I’m guessing not long,” Danny said with a grin. “Getting a warrant for Grier’s box? That will take some time.”
Alex sighed.
“Let me know when you find it,” he said. “Maybe that’s what our burglars were looking for.”
“If either of them grabbed Grier, they already know where it is,” Danny said.
He was right, of course.
“So where is Grier in all of this?” he wondered. “Maybe he knows someone’s after his recipe book, so he took the book and went on the lam?”
Danny shrugged.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” he said. “Now what about dinner? It’s been a long time since we had the chance to talk about something other than work. On top of that, I’m starved, and I brought my car so we won’t need to find a cab.”
Alex hadn’t eaten since breakfast and his gut growled at him.
“I can’t,” he said. “But we can meet up at the Lunch Box tomorrow.”
“How about somewhere else?” Danny said.
Alex had forgotten about his falling out with Mary.
“Sure,” he said. “Call me when you get free. Also, would you mind dropping me over on the South Side? I’ve got to look in on a client.”
When Alex arrived, the home of Dr. Leonard Burnham was dark, with the exception of a single light on the second floor where Burnham’s room was located. Alex assumed that Karen wasn’t home from her job yet, so he avoided the house and made straight for the workshop.
He did pause to take stock of the back yard before he went in. Karen had been right; there were only two trees in Burnham’s back yard, and both of them were saplings, far too small to give any meaningful shade.
So much for that idea.
He tugged open the workshop’s carriage door and stepped inside, flicking on the light switch. It still looked like there had been a protracted fight in the workshop, but nothing appeared out of place from the last time he’d been there.
Alex moved to the workbench with the chemistry set on it and put down his kit bag. He tried using his silverlight to examine the room, but the glow in his oculus almost blinded him. Every surface was covered in chemical residue from whatever Burnham had been doing. He’d find no clues that way.
With a sigh, he put away his lamp and oculus. He would have to do this the old-fashioned way. Looking around, he decided to start with the papers that were all over the work surfaces and the floor. An hour later, he’d made three stacks on one of the workbenches he’d cleaned off. The first stack were ordinary papers he’d found on the floor, the second were papers that had been scribbled out, and the third were the more important-looking ones.
One by one, Alex read through the papers until he finally gave up. Most of them were inscribed with chemical formulas that might as well have been written in Sanskrit for all the sense they made. The rest were covered with notes in the form of unintelligible sentence fragments.
“You’d think a Nobel Prize winning chemist would keep better notes,” he said, finally. Even as he said it, Alex realized that Burnham would have had to keep better notes. The papers that littered his workshop were just convenient places to jot ideas, a literal written record of his own stream of consciousness. A man who’d worked for a big chemical company for decades and had developed a gas mask filter before that would have to keep detailed notes.
“The question is, where?”
Alex turned around, looking over the workshop with a more critical eye than before. He didn’t see any obvious hiding places, but something still bothered him about Burnham’s home lab. Something wasn’t right.
He walked back to the door and turned, looking in. Everywhere he looked, the lab was a sea of chaos...except for one place. Right inside the door was a large, open space where there just wasn’t anything. A table nearby was piled with strange metal parts and an overflowing tool box, but none of that encroached the empty space.
“Something’s missing,” he said at last.
Alex cursed himself for not seeing it sooner. Karen said her grandfather spent all his spare time out here, so what was he working on? Whatever it was should be the central focus of the workshop, but all he’d seen when he came in was the chaos.
He’d been right from the beginning. This was a robbery. Whatever Dr. Burnham had been working on, it had been stolen. Burnham had probably walked in on the thief or thieves and gotten brained for his trouble.
Alex went to his kit and pulled out his lamp and oculus again. This time he clipped the amberlight burner inside the lamp and pointed it at the empty space. The ghostly outline of a machine appeared, occupying the space where its real counterpart had been. It looked like some kind of motor on a small, wheeled trailer. A large tank of some kind sat on top of everything, but Alex couldn’t tell if it was for the engine’s fuel or some kind of pressure vessel.
Almost invisible orange lines showed where the whatever-it-was had been pulled out of the workshop. He could try following them with the lamp, but that only worked when following something back to where it had been for a long time. Since Alex was starting where the missing motor had been stored, he knew the trace lines would vanish after he’d gone a few dozen feet.
He was about to put his lamp away when another set of lines caught his eye. These surrounded one of the pictures on the workshop wall. They appeared to trace around the frame, as if it had been repeatedly moved and then replaced. Setting his lamp down, Alex lifted the frame and found a hollow space behind it. Inside was a plain folder and a few sheets of writing paper. Alex removed them, then picked up his lamp. Shining it inside revealed that the cubby used to hold several rectangular objects. No doubt these were Dr. Burnham’s missing notebooks.
Alex put away his tools and then turned his attention to the folder. It was labeled rather neatly along the protruding tab: Shade Tree. The inside of the folder was empty except for several handwritten receipts. Each of them was for a cash draft of several hundred dollars out of an account that was labeled SEI. There was a name on the stub, but it was poorly written. It looked like Adam Tennon.
“Stand your ground,” a rough voice boomed from the door and Alex whirled around.
A uniformed policeman stood in the carriage door, his .38 drawn but not raised.
“Who are you and what are you doing in here?” the policeman asked.
Alex put his hands up where the cop could see them. He was older than Alex, on the job long enough not to get spooked and shoot Alex by mistake. Provided, of course, Alex didn’t give him any reason to.
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“My name’s Lockerby,” Alex said. “I’m a private investigator hired by Karen Burnham, she lives here.”
“Why’d she hire a private dick?”
“Do you know the Burnhams?” Alex asked.
“I see the old man sometimes,” he said. “Just to speak to.”
“Well, he was assaulted on Thursday and went missing. We found him and got him home, but now Miss Burnham wants me to find out who did this and why.”
The cop seemed to mull this over.
“I have Miss Burnham’s permission to be in here,” Alex continued. “She should be home by now if you’d like to check.”
“You got a P.I. license?”
Alex nodded and opened his coat so the officer could see that he wasn’t armed. He then pulled out his rune book and handed it over.
“My license is in the back.”
“You’re a runewright,” the cop said, paging through the book toward the back. “Are you friends with Detective Pak?”
“Danny and I go way back,” Alex acknowledged.
The cop seemed to relax at this, holstering his weapon. He still checked Alex’s license before handing the rune book back, though.
“Sorry about the gun,” the cop said. “Neighbor lady saw the lights on and called us.” He looked around as if seeing the workshop for the first time. “Wow, that must have been some fight. The old man must have a few left in him. What did they want?”
Alex explained about the missing motor and the strange pay stub.
“You ever hear of something called the SEI?” he asked.
The cop shrugged.
“Sounds like the government,” he said.
That actually made sense. Government was a veritable alphabet soup of acronyms from the FBI to the OSS to the WPA.
“You ever hear of an Adam Tennon?” Alex asked, showing the cop the name on the pay stub.
“No,” he admitted. “But that doesn’t look like Adam. It’s just A D M. That’s Navy for Admiral.”
“How do you know that?” Alex asked, staring at the signature. It was very messy...but the cop might be right.
