AllFreeNovel
Share Us
—
Eddie heard a beep and went to look for an alarm screen. Somebody had entered the garage. Then another beep, and the symbol for the elevator lit up. Eddie locked the door from the study to the master bedroom and waited quietly, ready to bolt through the door to the laundry, if necessary.
FIFTY-EIGHT
Joan switched off the alarm with her remote and pressed the eighth-floor button. “Could I talk you into having a drink?” she asked Stone. “A stakeout makes me thirsty.”
“Done,” Stone said. “A stakeout makes everybody thirsty.”
She went into the study, to the bar, and poured them both a Knob Creek. “Joan,” he said, “when we were driving away on Sixty-Sixth Street, do you remember a man coming out of the garage and walking up the street?”
“Oddly enough, I do. At first, I thought he was Eddie, but he wasn’t.”
“Same here,” Stone said. “I know him, though. I just can’t remember where from. Maybe he was dressed differently than when I saw him before.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“It will come to me in a minute,” he said.
Joan sat down at the desk and began opening drawers. “I haven’t been through this thoroughly since I moved in.”
“What’s in it?” Stone asked.
“Just the usual crap you’d expect to find in desk drawers,” she said. “Hey, wait a minute, there’s a shelf or something that isn’t quite closed, but I can’t budge it. Give me a hand, will you?”
Stone struggled out of his comfortable seat and walked around to her side of the desk. “It looks like a stenographer’s shelf, but there’s no knob on it.” He ran his fingers along the underside of the desktop. “Hang on, there’s a button.” He pressed it and the shelf sprang open, as if spring-loaded.
“Well, look at that,” Joan said, pointing at the array of weapons.
“And one is missing,” Stone said. “From the indentation, it could have held a snub-nosed .38.”
“That’s what our murderer used, isn’t it?”
“And what Mac, your dead guy, was carrying.”
“Gotta be Eddie,” Joan said.
“Bryce something,” Stone said.
“What?”
“Bryce Newcomb.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“That’s the name of the guy we saw. Dino and I encountered him at Clarke’s. An old boyfriend of Sandy’s.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
“It’s the name I couldn’t remember before. He was the guy leaving the garage.”
“So what?” Joan asked. “Tell me that, please.”
“He was belligerent. It happened a second time, but Dino called somebody and got him and some companions braced.”
“ ‘Braced’? What’s that?”
“Put up against a wall and searched. We managed to leave unmolested.”
