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Goddamn it, I don’t.
“It’s a rather expensive digital,” Matt said.
“That only narrows the field down a smidgen, I fear,” the man said.
“If I saw one, I’d know it.”
“That sort of item is updated as often as the sun rises,” the man said. “I rather doubt if it would still be in our inventory. You did say you have the serial number?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Then it will be a simple matter to go through our sales records and find it. We assiduously record the serial numbers of all our better merchandise.”
“Then we have no problem here?” Lieutenant Lacey asked.
“None whatever. I am delighted to be of service. I will return momentarily.”
He headed for the back of the store.
“Good luck, Sergeant,” Lacey said.
“Thanks very much, Lieutenant,” Matt said.
“No thanks are required. I wasn’t in here with you. I never ever saw you. I would never act in a case like this without the full authority-in writing-of the New York Police Department’s Office of Inter-Agency Cooperation to do so.”
He turned and walked out the door.
The turbaned man who spoke the Queen’s English returned to where Matt stood a few minutes later, trailed by two turbaned men, each of whom held two large cardboard boxes in his arms.
He gestured rather imperiously for the men to place the boxes on a glass display case.
“The sales records are filed, Sergeant, to comply with IRS requirements, sequentially, or perhaps I should say chronologically. I have brought you the records for the last six months. If there is anything else I can do for you, please do not hesitate to ask.”
Not quite an hour and a half later, Sergeant Payne found the sales slip he was looking for, near the top of the left stack of sales slips in Box Three.
The sales slips had been stored in the manner in which they had come out of the sales registry machines-that is to say, fan-folded. Each stack contained 250 sales slips. They had been placed in the storage boxes eight stacks high, six stacks to a box.
By the time Matt found what he was looking for, his feet hurt from standing, his stomach was in audible protest for being unfed, and his eyes watered.
And what he found wasn’t much.
A Kodak Digital Science DC 410, Serial Number EKK84240087, had been sold for cash three and a half months previously to Mr. H. Ford, 400 Lincoln Lane, Detroit, Michigan. Mr. Ford’s signature, at the bottom, acknowledging receipt of the camera in good working condition, was barely legible.
He then had a very hard time making the previously charming English-speaking proprietor understand that he would like, at the very least, a photocopy of the sales slip and would really like to have the sales slip itself.
Then he had an inspiration.
“What I really would like to have are several digital images of you. First in the act of separating that sales slip from the fanfold,” Matt said. “And then another of you initialing the sales slip.”
“And you have a camera?”
“No. But I thought if I bought one…”
“How interesting! I just happen to have a splendid, latest-model, state-of-the-art Kodak-a DC910 with fast-charge lithium batteries-that I could let you have at a substantial discount.”
“The pictures, you understand, would be useless to me unless I had the actual sales slip itself?”
“You do have a credit card?”
