“For a secret door? You gotta be joking,” Trane said.
“Everybody knew about my grandpa’s hidey-hole, including me,” Virgil said. “Wasn’t a secret. A lot of these old desks had them. They weren’t safes. You might put confidential stuff in there, maybe tax stuff and so on, but not money. Like I said, the drawers weren’t all that secret at the time.”
He stood up again, opened the top right drawer. A plastic tray held pencils, ballpoint pens, paper clips, fingernail clippers, scissors . . . and a single, right-angled Allen wrench. He took it out, carried it around to the side of the desk, fit it in the hole, and pushed.
A side panel clicked loose and out, then folded down. Inside was a vertical stack of small drawers, almost like trays.
“Agatha Fuckin’ Christie,” Trane said, amazed. “Open the drawers.”
Virgil did. They were all empty. He crawled around to the other side of the desk, found an identical hole, popped the side panel, revealing another stack of drawers. He pulled open the top drawer, and they both peered inside.
Trane said, “Oh, no. Nope. Nope. Nope. Shut the drawer, I don’t want to see that.”
“Could be laundry detergent,” Virgil said. “You know, like Tide? I could snort a little to see if it is.”
“How much you think?”
“I never worked dope,” Virgil said. “But I’ve seen cocaine, and that’s cocaine. Not much, but we don’t know what he started with.”
“Our murdered boy’s got cocaine stashed in a secret cubbyhole? That’s the cherry on the cake, you know? That’s just fuckin’ perfect. I hope the television people find out about it so they can go berserk.”
“Could be Tide . . .”
* * *
—
They called the narcs and continued to probe the office, although Trane had already done that. She took each of the antique boxes down, looking for false bottoms or secret drawers. They didn’t have any. A Narcotics cop named Bill Offers showed up, said that the baggie had contained a standard eight ball, an eighth of an ounce of cocaine. “Good stuff, not been stepped on much . . . Originally, he probably paid a couple hundred bucks for it, depending on his connection.”
“Then he could have gotten it from anybody outside the back door of a bar,” Trane said.
“Yeah, like that. Might want to talk to his wife about it,” Offers said.
“I will,” Trane said. “Tonight.”
“I was planning to call her,” Virgil said. “Mind if I tag along?”
“Suit yourself,” Trane said.
Not exactly a heartwarming welcome from Trane, but maybe a little progress, Virgil thought. Offers had a scale in his car. They weighed the coke, with the baggie, and Virgil and Trane signed it over to Narcotics for safekeeping.
“You said you were at the Graduate Hotel?” Trane asked Virgil, as they finished the paperwork.
“Yeah. All checked in.”
“Nancy Quill doesn’t live far from there, she’s over by the Witch Hat,” Trane said. “You could follow me over.”
* * *
—
The Witch Hat referred to the Prospect Park neighborhood that had an old water tower perched on the second-highest piece of land in Minneapolis. Visible for miles, the tower was topped with what looked like a green witch’s hat. Quill didn’t live in Prospect Park itself but in an adjacent neighborhood, in a neat, yellow-brick condo. Trane called ahead, and Quill buzzed them through the door to the elevators.
On the way up, Trane asked, “Do you know anybody in the media? Here in the Cities?”
“Couple people,” Virgil said. “Why?”
“It would be nice if word leaked out that we’re actually making progress without it coming from me or anyone in Homicide. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” Trane said.
“Davenport is tight with a lot of TV people. He even has a daughter with one of them, at Channel Three. She’s an executive now, used to be a reporter. I could ask him to leak it. He’d do it. And if somebody smart tried to backtrack it, it’d come to me. And I don’t care if it does.”
“If you could make the call, it might take some of the heat off,” Trane said.
“Soon as we leave here,” Virgil said.
* * *
—
Nancy Quill was a tall, severe-looking blonde who spoke in short, precise sentences that were delivered in paragraphs.
“I never saw Barth use any drug. Not even aspirin. He didn’t care for wine, although he took a glass from time to time. That was his effort to be social. He didn’t use hard alcohol, with one exception. He did spend some money on tequila. He’d sip a glass of it at night, before bed, by himself. Cocaine seems unlikely. But, if he were to have a drug of choice, and I were asked to guess what it was, I would guess cocaine or one of the amphetamines. He would look for a drug that would intensify focus, not blur it.”
“You never saw any hint that he used cocaine?” Trane asked.
“Never. He made it clear, though, that I wasn’t welcome in his office,” Quill said. “It looks messy in there, but actually everything had its place and everything was put in its place. I had my own office, in a spare bedroom. I moved my effects here when I left him. I have no idea what the signs of cocaine abuse might be, other than having seen some actor inhale some white powder in some movie.”
Virgil asked, “Did he have any friends or associates that you saw who seemed, mmm, to strike a false note? Somebody who might have supplied him with the cocaine or might have been a connection to that world?”
“Barth didn’t have close male friends, people he would confide in. He married three times, of course, so it seemed that he should like women, although I’m not sure he did. He needed us for sexual release, to be frank about it. I’m not sure he wanted us around for anything else.”
“A misogynist, then?” Trane asked.
“Oh, I wouldn’t use that word,” Quill said. “A misogynist is someone who thinks of women as inferior. He didn’t. He quite respected a number of women in his own field, for their work. He regularly corresponded with them. You have his home and office computers. I believe if you closely examine his emails, you’ll find their names.”
Trane said to Virgil, “We’ve done that. There were female academics among the people he wrote to, but I didn’t see anything there that struck me as personal rather than professional.”
Virgil to Quill: “To get back to my original question: what about false notes?”