by Sue Grafton
“Impressive. How’d you find that?” I asked.
Bucky smiled sheepishly, clearly pleased with himself. “We’d emptied the closet and I was sweeping it out when I bumped my broom handle up against the back wall. Sounded funny to me, so I got a flashlight and started looking at it real close, you know, knocking across the wall. Seemed like there was something goofy about this one section, so I give it a push and this panel popped open.”
I hunkered down in front of the opening, peering into the cavity that had been hidden in the “found” space between the joists. The front face of the safe was imposing, but that might have been deceptive. Most home safes are not built to withstand a professional burglar with the proper tools and sufficient time to force his way in. The safe I was looking at was more likely a fire safe, in which what appears to be a solid steel wall is only a thin metal outer shell filled with insulating material. The function of such a safe is protection from a home fire of fairly short duration. Insulation in an old safe might be something as basic as natural cement. A more modern safe might rely on vermiculite mica or diatomaceous earth, particles of which can often be traced back from a burglary suspect’s tools and clothing to the specific safe manufacturer.
On closer inspection, I could see the safe wasn’t actually embedded in concrete. The concrete formed a sort of housing into which the safe had been shoved.
“We got a locksmith on his way,” Chester said. “I couldn’t stand the wait, so I called an emergency number and told ‘em to send somebody out. We could have all the answers right behind this dial.” He was probably picturing maps and ciphers, a small wireless radio, a Luger, and transmission schedules written in invisible ink.
“Have you looked for the combination? It’s possible he wrote it down and tucked it someplace close. Most people don’t trust their memories, and if he’d needed to get into it, he wouldn’t want to waste time searching.”
“We thought of that, but we looked every place we could think of. What about you? You searched pretty good yourself. You come across anything might be the combination to that?”
I shrugged. “I never came across any numbers, unless he was using his birthdate or Social Security.”
“Can they do that?” Bucky asked. “Make up a combination to suit any set of numbers you give?”
I shrugged. “As far as I know. I’m not an expert, but I always assumed you could do that.”
“What do you think, should we pull that thing out?” Chester asked.
“Couldn’t hurt. The locksmith will probably have to do it anyway once he gets here,” I said.
I rose to my feet and stepped out of the closet, allowing Bucky and Chester sufficient room to maneuver the safe from its resting place. It took a fair amount of huffing and puffing before they managed to set it down on the floor in the middle of the room. Once they’d eased the safe out of its concrete housing, we could take a better look. The three of us inspected the exterior surfaces as if this were some mysterious object that had appeared from outer space. The safe was maybe sixteen inches deep, with a two-tone beige-and-gray finish and rubber mounting feet. It didn’t look old. The dial was calibrated with numbers from one to a hundred, which meant you could generate close to a million combinations. There wasn’t any point in trying to guess the right one.
Babe had abandoned her packing and was watching the whole procedure. “Maybe it’s open,” she said to no one in particular.
We turned in unison and looked at her.
“Well, it could be,” she said.
“It’s worth a try,” I said. I reached down and pulled the handle without success. I turned the dial a few numbers in one direction and then the other, still pulling the handle, thinking the dial might have been left close to the last digit in the combination. No such luck.
“What do we do now?” Bucky asked.
“I guess we wait,” I said.
Within the hour, the safe technician arrived with a big red metal toolbox. He introduced himself as Bergan Jones from Santa Teresa Locksmiths, shaking hands first with Chester, then with Bucky and me. Babe had gone back to folding clothes, but she nodded at him shyly when he was introduced to her. Jones was tall and bony looking, sandy haired, stoop shouldered, with a high shiny forehead, sandy brows, and big glasses with tortoise-shell frames. I placed him in his middle fifties, but I could have been off five years in either direction.
“Hope you can help us out here,” Chester said, waving at the safe, which Jones had already spotted.
“No problem. I probably open thirty safes a month. I know this model. Shouldn’t take me long.”
The four of us stood and watched in fascination as Jones opened his toolbox. There was something in his manner of an old-fashioned doctor on a house call. He’d made his initial diagnosis, the condition wasn’t fatal, and we all felt relief. Now it was just a matter of the proper treatment. He took out a cone-shaped device that he attached to the dial, screwing it down tightly. Within minutes he’d popped the dial off and set it aside, then removed the two screws holding the dial ring in place, slipped off the ring and set it with the dial. Next he took out an electric drill and began to bore a hole through the metal in the area that had been covered by the dial and ring.
“You just drill right through?” Babe said. She sounded disappointed, perhaps hoping for dynamite caps or nitroglycerin.
Jones smiled. “I wouldn’t put it quite like that. This is a residential fire safe. If this were a burglary safe, we’d run into hardplate: barrier material just behind this steel plating. I got a pressure bar for that, but it’d still take me thirty minutes to drill a quarter-inch hole. Lot of them have auxiliary spring-loaded relocking devices. You hit the wrong spot and you can fire the relockers. If this happens, it gets a lot worse before it gets better again. This is easy.”
We were quiet while he drilled, the low-pitched whine of metal making conversation awkward. The hair on the backs of his hands was a fine gold, his fingers long, wrists narrow. He was smiling to himself, as if he knew something the rest of us hadn’t considered yet. Or maybe he was just a man who enjoyed his work. As soon as a hole had been drilled, he took out another device.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ophthalmoscope,” he said. “Gadget your doctor uses to peer in your eyes. This shines light on the combination wheels so I can see what we got going.” He began to peer into the newly drilled hole, moving closer while flicking an outer dial on the scope to adjust the focal length. While squinting through his ophthalmoscope, he carefully rotated the protruding spindle stub to the left. “This turns the drive wheel, which in turn picks up the third combination wheel. The third wheel moves the second wheel, which then turns the first wheel,” he said. “It takes four rotations to get the first wheel moving. That’s the one closest to the front of the safe. Here it comes. Perfect. The gate’s exactly under the fence. Now we’ll just keep reversing the direction of our rotation and lessening the number of turns. Soon as I get all three wheels lined up, the fence will be in position to drop when the lever nose hits the gate in the drive wheel. We keep turning and the lever pulls back the lock bolt and it’s all over.”
With that, he gave the handle a pull and the safe door opened. Chester, Bucky, and I gave out a simultaneous “Ooo” like we were watching fireworks.
Babe said, “Heck, it’s empty.”
“They must have got it already. Goddamn,” Chester said.
“Got what?” Babe said, but he ignored the question, shooting her a cross look.
While Bergan Jones wrote down the combination and put his tools away, Bucky peered into the safe, then got down on his back like an auto mechanic and shone a light into the interior. “Something taped up here, Dad.”
I leaned over and peered with him. An item had been secured to the top of the safe: a lumpy-looking ten-inch-by-ten-inch square of beige tape.
Chester stepped over Bucky’s legs and crouched by the safe, squinting at the patch. “What is that? Peel it off and g
ive it here. Let me take a look at that thing.”
Gingerly Bucky loosened one corner, then pulled it away like a Band-Aid from a wound. A big iron key adhered to the tape. It appeared to be an old-fashioned iron skeleton key with simple cuts in the end. He held it up. “Anybody recognize this?”
“Beats me,” I said, and then turned to Chester. “You know what it is?”
“Nope, but Pappy used to fool around with locks now I think of it. He got a kick out of it. He liked to take a lock out of a door and file a key to fit.”
“I never saw him do that,” Bucky said.
“This is when I was a kid. He worked for a locksmith during the Depression. I remember him telling me what a hoot it was. He had this collection of old locks – probably close to a hundred of them – but I haven’t seen them for years.”
I turned the key over in my hand. The design was ornate, the handle scalloped, with a hole in the other end like a skate key. Viewed straight on, the bit was shaped almost like a question mark. “The lock and keyhole would be odd looking, to say the least. You don’t remember anything like it around here?”
Chester’s mouth pulled down. “Not me. What about you guys? You know the place better than I do at this point.”
Bucky shook his head, and Babe gave a little shrug.
I held the key out to Bergan Jones. “Any ideas?”
Jones smiled slightly, snapping down the locks on his toolbox. “Looks like a gate key. One of those big old iron jobs like they have on estates.” He turned to Chester. “You want me to bill you on this?”
“I’ll write you a check. Come on down to the kitchen and we’ll take care of it. You probably gathered by now my pappy died a few months back. We’re still trying to get his affairs sorted out. The safe came as a surprise. People ought to leave instructions. What the hell this is and who’s supposed to get that. Anyways, we do appreciate your help.”
“That’s what I’m in business to do.”
The two men departed, leaving Bucky, Babe, and me to contemplate the key. Bucky said, “Now what?”
“I have a friend who knows a lot about locks,” I said. “He might have a suggestion about what kind of lock this might fit.”
“Might as well. Won’t do us any good otherwise.”
Babe took the key and inspected it, frowning. “Maybe Pappy kept it because he liked the way it looked,” she said. “It’s neat. It’s old-timey.” She handed it to Bucky, who passed it back to me.
“Yeah, but why bother to keep it in a fireproof safe? He could have stuck it in a drawer. He could have wore it on a chain around his neck,” he said.
“If you don’t object, I’ll see what my local expert has to say.”
“Fine with me,” Bucky said.
I slipped the key in my jeans pocket without mentioning the fact that my local expert was the burglar who’d also given me the set of key picks I carry in my handbag.
Walking back to my place, I found myself reviewing the entire sequence of events. I have to confess the past twenty-four hours had piqued my curiosity. It wasn’t necessarily Chester’s spy theory, which still seemed farfetched. What bothered me were the vague, unanswered questions surfacing in the old man’s life. I like order and tidiness; no clutter and no dust bunnies hidden under the bed.
As soon as I got home, I sat down at my desk, pulled out a pack of index cards, and started making notes. It was amazing how many details I could actually recall once I began committing them to paper. When I’d exhausted the subject, I pinned the cards up on the corkboard that hangs above my desk. I put my feet up on the desk and leaned back in my swivel chair with my hands locked behind my head and studied the whole collection. Something wasn’t right, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I shifted some cards around and pinned them up in a new configuration. It was something I’d read. Burma. Something about Chennault and the American Volunteer Group. For the moment the truth eluded me, but I knew it was there. I thought about nailing down the unit he’d served in. Was that really the issue here, or was there something else at stake? In scanning Johnny’s books, I’d seen several AVG fighter pilots mentioned by name. One or more of those guys had to be alive today. Couldn’t they provide a way to pinpoint Johnny’s fighter group? It’d be a pain in the ass, and I sure wasn’t going to do it, but I could at least steer Chester in the right direction. I’d have to check back through the books and see if I could find the reference, but what the hell, I wasn’t doing anything else. Besides, once I start worrying a knot, I can’t let go of it.
I put in a call to my burglar friend, whose number had been disconnected. Rats. Later in the morning I’d try the Santa Teresa Police Department. Detective Halpern in Major Crimes would probably know where he was.
Chapter 5
*
By ten a.m. I found myself back at Bucky’s. I knocked on the door, but after several minutes went by and nobody answered, I headed down the driveway toward the back. The miscellaneous collection of cardboard boxes had been shoved to one side to make the driveway passable. The garage door on the left was standing open and the Buick was missing. Maybe the three of them had gone out to breakfast. The other half of the two-car garage was piled high with junk, an impenetrable mountain of boxes, old furniture, appliances, and lawn care equipment.
The cardboard box full of World War II books was right on top. I dragged it over to the stairs and made myself comfortable while I sorted through the contents. I finally found what I was looking for at the bottom of the box in a book called Fighter! The Story of Air Combat 1936-45 by Robert Jackson.
On 4 July 1942 the American Volunteer Group officially ceased to be an independent fighting unit and became part of the newly-activated China Air Task Force, under command of the Tenth Air Force. Command of the CATF devolved on Claire Chennault, who exchanged his Chinese uniform for an American one and was given the rank of brigadier-general.
The AVG pilots, who had held the fort in Burma for so long against impossible odds, scattered far and wide. Few of them elected to remain in China. Those who did formed the nucleus of the new 23rd Fighter Group, still flying war-weary P-40s.
A few names followed: Charles Older, “Tex” Hill, Ed Rector, and Gil Bright. What interested me was the fact that the AVG pilots were recruited by the Central Aircraft Manufacturing Company between April and July 1941. All of them were serving U.S. military personnel, bound to CAMCO by a one-year contract. But Bucky had told me Chester remembered his father arriving home after two years overseas in time for his fourth birthday party, August 17, 1944. Because he was so specific, the date had stuck in my mind and I’d jotted it down on an index card. The problem was, the AVG had already been out of business for two years at that point. So where did the truth lie? Had Johnny actually served with the AVG? More important, had he served at all? Chester would see the discrepancy in dates as confirmation of his theory. I could just imagine his response. “Hell, the AVG was just a cover story. I could have told you that.” Chester probably envisioned his father parachuting behind enemy lines, perhaps even feigning capture so he could confer with the Japanese high command.
On the other hand, if he’d never been in the service, then maybe he’d only acquired the books so he could bullshit about the subject. And that might explain why he was unwilling to talk about the war. It was always going to be risky because he might well run into someone who’d been in the very unit he was claiming to have served. By creating the impression of government secrecy, he could account for his reluctance to discuss the details that might give him away.
I scanned the backyard, staring at the Ford Fairlane, sitting up on concrete blocks. Why did I care one way or the other? The old guy was dead. If it comforted his son and his grandson to believe he was a war hero (or, more grandiose yet, a spy whose cover had gone undetected now for more than forty years), what difference did it make to me? I wasn’t being paid to shoot holes in Johnny’s story. I wasn’t being paid to do anything. So why not let it drop?
Because it�
�s contrary to my nature said she to herself. I’m like a little terrier when it comes to the truth. I have to stick my nose down the hole and dig until I find out what’s in there. Sometimes I get bitten, but that’s the chance I’m usually willing to take. In some ways, I didn’t care so much about the nature of the truth as knowing what it consisted of.
I became aware of the big six-inch key digging into my hip. I stretched my leg out and slid my hand into my jeans pocket. I pulled out the key and held it in my palm, hefting the weight. I rubbed my thumb along the darkened surface. I squinted at the tarnished metal just as Babe had done. The name of the lock company seemed to be faintly stamped on the shaft, but I couldn’t figure out what it said in this light. It didn’t appear to be any of the lock companies I knew: Schlage, Weslock, Weiser, or Yale. The safe had been an Amsec, strictly a combination lock, so I didn’t think the key was in any way connected with that.
I hauled myself to my feet and slid the key back in my pocket. I was restless, trying to figure out what to do until Chester got home. It was always possible his memory was faulty. I’d only heard the story from Bucky, and he might have gotten the dates wrong. Ray Rawson had told me he worked with Johnny in the boatyards just after the war started, which had to be sometime in 1942. It struck me as odd that someone who’d known Johnny in the “olden” days had suddenly shown up on the old man’s doorstep. Despite the offhand explanation, I wondered if there was something else going on.
The Lexington Hotel was located on a side street a block off lower State Street near the beach. The structure was a chunky five-story box of weary-looking yellow brick, spanning an arcade that ran across the ground floor. On one side of the building, a jagged crack, like a lightning bolt, staggered through the brick from the roof to the foundation, suggesting earthquake damage that probably dated back to 1925. The letters of the word Lexington descended vertically on a sign affixed to one corner of the building, a buzzing yellow band of neon with dead bugs in the loops. The marquee boasted • DAILY MAID • PHONE • COLOR TV IN EVERY ROOM. The entrance was flanked by a Mexican restaurant on one side and by a bar on the other. A blaring jukebox in each establishment competed for air space, a jarring juxtaposition of Linda Ronstadt and Helen Reddy.