Easy Prey

concrete block, double-glass doors, and a line of mailboxes and buzzers between the two doors. A Woodbury patrolman sent them to four, the top floor. His apartment door was open, and Lucas stepped in, with Del just behind. “Dope money,” Del said as soon as he was inside.
    All the walls had flocked wallpaper; the furniture all came from the same store, and that was Swedish modern; high-style graphics on the walls. A plainclothes cop stepped toward them. “Chief Davenport. I’m Dave Thompson.”
    “How are ya? This is Del . . . what’d you get?”
    “Not much. Yet. He’s got a lot of paper in his office, taxes mostly. . . . No suicide note, nothing like that. We checked the answering machine, nothing there. No computer in the house.”
    “Talk to his neighbors?”
    “He’s only got one on this floor,” the cop said. “We haven’t been able to find them yet. It’s a married couple, they left here about six. People downstairs said they looked like they were going out. A little dressed up.”
    “All right. . . . Mind if I walk through?”
    “No, like I said. There just isn’t much to see. Mirrors in the bedroom. . . . Big TV, he’s got a home theater.”
    Lucas and Del did a quick walk-through, all the way to the back. The master bedroom was at the end of a central hall: mirrors on the bedroom wall beside the bed, and two more on the ceiling. Heavy pine chests and chest of drawers, with black metal fixtures. The next room up was a small office, with a built-in desk, a Rolodex, a two-drawer filing cabinet, and a telephone. A cop was on his knees, going through the cabinet. “Grab the Rolodex,” Lucas said.
    “We will.”
    The theater had a projection TV and a wall of video and stereo equipment, with a big black-leather circular couch facing it; a leather-covered refrigerator sat next to the couch. The room originally had been two bedrooms, Lucas thought: The join was imperfect, a ridge running around the ceiling and walls. “Dope money,” Del said. “A goddamn dealer’s wet dream.”
    The Woodbury plainclothesman wandered toward them, and Lucas asked, “Find anything like a wall safe?”
    “No, no, nothing like that.”
    “You might want to tear the place up a little,” Lucas said. “It’s about five-to-one that he has a little hideout someplace in here.”
    “Check the power outlets, see if any of them don’t work,” Del said. “That’s a longtime crowd favorite.”
    Lucas had stopped in the kitchen. A book of matches lay open on the counter next to the sink.
    “You think he smoked?” Lucas asked Del.
    Del looked at the ceiling, then at the curtains, sniffed, and said, “I don’t think so. Why?”
    “Had these matches sitting here. . . .” Lucas picked them up, then looked at the sink. Grains of black stuff in the strainer. He put his finger in it, rubbed lightly, and took it out.
    “What?” Del asked. The Woodbury cop strained to see.
    “Looks like ash,” Lucas said.
    “He burnt something?”
    “Maybe,” Lucas said.
    And that was it: a group of cops standing around on a carpet with too-deep burgundy pile, looking at the Leroy Neiman print.
     
 
“WHAT’RE WE GONNA do now?” Del asked.
    “You think it’s a suicide?”
    “Yeah, I could buy it—it would solve a lot of problems. I’d like to know a little bit about his medical history, though,” Del said.
    “Doctors?”
    “Yeah. See if he was depressed, if he’d ever been treated. But maybe he just saw the walls coming down, walked up to that atrium and just . . . an impulse.”
    “From the second floor? Christ . . .” Lucas shook his head.
    “That’s a high second floor. You look down from there, you know you ain’t gonna bounce. I’m seeing a guy who’s freaked out, he’s got TV all over his ass, he knows he’s in trouble on the dope, he’s built up this fortune and he sees it drifting away . . . maybe he’s even guilty about Alie’e. Who knows? Anyway, he puts down his bag and dives over the rail.”
    Sounded good. “Maybe.”
    “I’d give it a strong maybe,” Del said. “Reserving the right to change my mind.”
    “So let’s see what the ME says.”
     
 
LUCAS DROPPED DEL back downtown, thought about going over to see Jael, decided against. Thought about calling Weather—but she wasn’t the one to talk to about death and destruction, not when they might be limping back to some kind of reconciliation.
    And was that what they were talking about? Is that what she meant when she said he