The house was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence lined with annual flowers, which also edged the cracked concrete sidewalk between the garage and the back door of the house. Instead of going in the door, he walked around the house, looking it over. At the front door, he peered through its window, saw nothing in particular, turned the key, and stepped inside.
The door opened into a generous reception area, the dark oak floor mostly covered with a red-and-blue oriental carpet. A circular staircase wound around and up to a balcony overhead, looking down at the door. A central hallway separated a living room from a library/music room.
The living room was arranged for entertaining, with three couches around a center carpet, a sideboard for drinks and food; a mahogany grandfather clock stood in a corner, its hands stopped at four forty-four because its winder had been murdered. The library had a wall of books interspersed with a variety of keepsakes, including a collection of chipped Hummels that appeared to be very old and a shelf of aging stereo equipment, including a turntable, with speakers on shelves at opposite ends of the bookcase.
A walnut-cased Steinway baby grand sat in one corner, a stack of sheet music on it. He looked at the music for a moment. Half classical, in the full piano forms—somebody was a good pianist—and half romantic stuff from the swing era pre–World War II—Cole Porter, George Gershwin, like that. Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies” was open on the music stand.
Farther back down the hall was a formal dining room with a rectangular walnut table and ten matching bentwood chairs, and, on the other side of the hall, a breakfast room with a table and two chairs and a door leading to the kitchen. A powder room was built in near the kitchen.
The house was silent as a coffin.
* * *
—
Virgil took the stairs, found Quill’s bedroom, plus a home office with more books, three more bedrooms, and a door leading up to the attic. The bathroom was expansive and modern.
A rich guy for sure. Everything was notably tidy except the home office, which had the look of a working space, with papers and books and journals and pens and transparent highlighters spread around all the flat surfaces. Everything else in the house had the feel of professional maintenance: a maid, at least, and possibly a gardener.
Virgil worked his way slowly through the entire house with the exception of the cellar and the attic, which he checked briefly and then dismissed. Again, he couldn’t imagine how either might factor in a murder that had taken place a mile away. He was looking for words—in letters, texts, or printouts—or personal possessions that weren’t Quill’s. Something that would suggest or reveal an inimical relationship.
The bed was neatly made, king-sized and covered with a huge old shoofly quilt. He carefully peeled it back until the bottom sheet was exposed, then went over the quilt looking for more dark pubic hairs. And found none.
He saved the office for last. The centerpiece was an ancient oak desk, fully eight feet long and four feet across, the old wood polished to a high sheen, with ranks of drawers on both sides of the kneehole. The desk had been carefully updated with a keyboard where there’d once been a center drawer, with a rank of electric sockets installed along the back edge of the desktop. There was an empty spot there where a computer had been, its Canon printer still sitting to one side, its computer hookup cable curled next to it. Trane had taken the computer to research emails.
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.”