Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

to proceed. Maybe it was the gray skies in those windows that spooked me, that eroded my resolve. For whatever reason, I felt suddenly too deep into enemy territory. The compulsion that brought me this far was diminishing fast. I still wasn’t sure just what exactly it was I expected to find by being there. All I did know was that Augie was in jail and I had no leads. What was it I was hoping a look at this place would tell me about the Currys that their address already didn’t? I had to do something to help Augie, but this suddenly didn’t feel like it.
    I felt the urge to bolt. I considered that the last thing I needed was to get picked up here for trespassing by one of the Chief’s boys. I would be no help to anyone then, and so I decided fast that I had seen all there was to see – a great, empty house, nothing more – and was turning to get the hell out of there and back to the Hansom House and my part of town when something stopped me.
    There was a wide set of stairs leading up to a back porch and a set of French doors at the rear of the house. One of the panes of glass in the French door was broken, punched in. I stared at the door for awhile before I finally found what it took for me to begin to approach. When I reached the wide stairs I waited again, staring at the door, then started up them. When I was halfway to the top I could see that there was no broken glass under the shattered pane, no glass outside the door. I stepped onto the porch and walked to the door and could see that the all the broken bits of glass had fallen inside. It was then that I saw that one of the French doors was slightly ajar.
    Somewhere inside a phone started to ring. It rang seven or eight times, then ended. I looked through the French doors into a long hallway that ran straight down to the front door. It was wide and there was a long table against one wall. Across from it was an armoire. Paintings and antique mirrors were hung on the white walls. The hall had the look of a gallery, bright even in the pale morning light and a little sterile. Nothing, however, seemed to me to be out of place. There were no bare spots on the wall where a painting should be. Nothing but the window seemed disturbed.
    The doors opened out, so I put my hand in the pocket of denim jacket and gripped the handle, pulling the door open just enough for me to slip in. I was careful not to step on any of the broken glass or tiny shards or fine dust that covered the floor.
    On the wall inside the door was a security system touch pad. A small red light indicating that the system was disarmed was lit. Whoever broke in had known the code. I wondered if maybe someone had forgotten or lost their key, but the door was left open and the house seemed empty.
    I moved quietly, cautiously. My heart was pumping uncomfortably. With each step deeper into the gallery I thought of Augie and Frank and blocked out all thoughts of the Chief and his boys.
    There was a Pollock on the wall. It was the first thing I saw. It was a piece of shit. Near it was a de Kooning. The Pollock was a large painting. I knew it probably carried a steep price. My adoptive mother had collected some paintings, most of them South American, but her true passion was antique rocking and carousel horses. You couldn’t walk into a room in that thirty-room house without tripping over one. The Curry house wasn’t like that; it was neat and cold and sparse, everything in its place. The house I grew up in was dark and cluttered and full of, like many of the old houses out here, secret rooms. Even in these there was some kind of representation of a horse standing about somewhere, some costing as much as a hundred grand.
    Most of the art on these walls was New York or East Hampton art, most big names. I walked through the hall till I came to the long table alongside the wall. There was nothing on it but a Tiffany pear tree lamp. There wasn’t a hint of dust. With my hand in the pocket of my denim jacket I opened some drawers and found nothing but mail. Most were bills but some were personal letters addressed to James Curry. I checked the return addresses but saw nothing that seemed noteworthy. I closed the drawers carefully, quietly, then crossed the hall to the armoire. I opened its doors and found a bar stocked with expensive gin, Scotch, and a variety or cordials. Behind the bottles was a mirror. I saw my reflection and recognized the look of disbelief in my eyes. I shook my head, as if to say to