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Strawberry Death probably had better tricks than that.
My tricks were limited by time, by who might be expecting Pennington’s office to be open. I quickly went through his desk drawers, the most interesting item being a nine-millimeter pistol in the top right-hand drawer, for all the good it did him. Or, if he really wished to kill himself, why not use that?
I did a quick study of his desk. The top was cleared of everything but a blotter and a telephone. Not even a laptop. In fact, there was no computer in the office, although there was a charging cord and a T1 cable. Strawberry Death took his laptop.
If it was her. Historians are warned against something called confirmation bias, where every piece of information backs up your existing hypothesis. It’s a big no-no. Pennington might have made many enemies. But she was the killer at-large whom I knew.
There was something else: besides the faint but growing odor of death from Pennington’s corpse, I detected traces of Chanel Number Five.
Coco Chanel had been a Nazi collaborator during World War II. She had hired a former perfumer to the Tsar to create the scent that would bear her name. Five was her lucky number. “Your mind is an amazing thing,” as Peralta told me.
That meant Pennington was connected to diamonds. Perhaps a fence.
The closet showed me a tantalizing file cabinet with combination locks on each of the four drawers. No time. I needed to be out of this office.
Still, I lingered.
“Well, I found him, what next?” I whispered.
Hearing nothing in the ether from Peralta, I played the best hunches I had in a dim room with a dead man. I studied the edges of the filing cabinets. It appeared as if they had been built into the closet itself. Only an inch of the heavy metal was sticking out of a black wooden frame.
I tapped on the drawers. They sounded empty. But diamonds weren’t likely to take up much space inside.
I spun the dials, pulled on the drawers, and nothing happened.
Four drawers.
I tried setting each dial to coincide with the last digits of Pennington’s birthday. Not one drawer opened. On each one, I ran his birthday as a four-segment combination. They stayed locked.
Being there was growing from foolhardy to insane to linger this long. But only the quiet kept me company.
Then I remembered the class ring and started setting the four combinations from the top town: one, nine, nine, five. I don’t know why I tried it, but when I slid the last dial over to five, the wall clicked and the file cabinets popped ever so slightly toward me.
Reaching around again, I pulled on the left side. It gave way and I was staring at the door to a safe. The safe had a digital keypad and an inset handle that looked as if you turned it, the result would be a missile launch. “Valberg,” a modern black-and-orange label said. The file cabinets were a false door.
Another ten minutes went by as I tried putting in different combinations. Each time, a small light went red and who knew what might have happened if I kept at it.
I closed the false door and it sealed with a soft but definitive sound. I spun the combination knobs around to random numbers.
When the phone rang it was a low, muted tone. But you might as well have attached jumper cables to my spinal cord, connected to a fully charged battery. I stared at the desk phone. The digital read-out glowed lagoon green. It said, UNKNOWN.
I approached it warily. Two rings. Three.
My hand touched the receiver.
Then I picked up.
“Pennington,” I said.
A long pause followed and I was instantly sorry I had answered.
Then a man’s voice said, “What’s wrong, Mister Pennington? You’re late. ”
“I was tied up.”
“Is everything in order?”
The voice was a medium timbre, speaking standard American English, no movie villain German, no cartel Spanish.
