Hidden Riches

merry.”
    “Sorry to bust in on your cooking, but we had a little problem over here.”
    “Jody, let go of that cat! What sort of problem?”
    “Break-in. The shop below the apartment.”
    “They get anything?”
    “I have to have her check.” He brushed wind-tossed hair from his face and watched Dora shiver. “Took a couple of pops at me. Used a silencer.”
    “Shit. You hit?”
    “No.” He checked his cheek again. The bleeding was nearly stopped. “He had a car close. From the sound of the engine, it wasn’t an economy.”
    “Sit tight, Kimo Sabe. I’ll call it in and be on my way.”
    “Thanks.” He hung up and looked at Dora, who was dancing from foot to foot in a fruitless effort to keep warm. “Maybe you’d better break out that brandy again. Come on.” Because her hands were frozen, he took them, warming them automatically as they walked back to the shop. “You can take a look around, see if anything is missing.”
    “I’m not supposed to touch anything, right?”
    “You keep up with the cop shows.”
    “Can we close the door?”
    “Sure.” He took a brief glance at the jimmied lock, thenclosed out the cold. After he’d switched on the lights, he simply stood and absorbed.
    The storeroom was crammed. On one wall, boxes were stacked from floor to ceiling. Shelves held uncrated merchandise in no sort of order he could discern. There were two four-drawer file cabinets shoved into a corner. The top of each was piled with more boxes.
    There was a desk, which seemed to be an island of sanity. It held a phone, a lamp, a porcelain pitcher stuffed with pencils and pens, and a bust of Beethoven, which served as a paperweight.
    “Nothing’s gone,” she said.
    “How can you tell?”
    “I know my inventory. You must have scared him off.” She walked over to the shelves and tapped what looked to Jed to be an old perfume or lotion bottle. “This Daum Nancy is worth well over a thousand. This Castelli plate nearly that much. And this.” She took down a box with a picture of a child’s toy on it.
    “Nando? A kid’s robot?”
    “Boxed, it’s worth easily two thousand to a collector.” She sniffed and replaced it.
    “And you just leave this stuff out?”
    “I have a security system. Had one,” she muttered. “I can hardly drag all my stock into a vault every night.”
    “What about cash?”
    “We deposit everything but about a hundred in small bills and change every night.” She walked over to the desk, opened the top drawer. She took out an envelope, flipped through the bills inside. “Here it is. Like I said, you must have scared him off.” She stepped away and heard a paper rustle under her foot. Bending down, she scooped it up. “Charge ticket,” she told Jed. “Funny, this would have been filed.”
    “Let’s see.” He snatched it out of her hand. “Timothy O’Malley. Five-fifty and tax on December twenty-first. For saltcellars?”
    “His wife collects.”
    “Five hundred for salt shakers?”
    “Cellars,” Dora corrected, and snatched the receipt back. “Peasant.”
    “Bloodsucker.”
    Unamused, she turned to replace the receipt in its file. “Look at this!” she demanded. “These drawers are a mess.”
    He came to peer over her shoulder. “They’re not supposed to be?”
    “Of course not. I keep very careful records. The IRS terrifies me the same as they terrify all good Americans. And Lea spent a week purging and updating these files last month.”
    “So he was after something in your files. What do you keep in here?”
    “Nothing of value. Receipts, invoices, mailing lists, inventory printout, delivery sheets. Business stuff.” Baffled, she ran a hand through her hair. The stars dangling from her ears sparkled in the light. “There’s no reason for anyone to break in here for paperwork. A crazed IRS agent? A psychopathic accountant?”
    As soon as she’d said it, Dora bit her tongue.
    “What was that jerk’s name the other night?”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. Andrew would never do anything like this.”
    “Didn’t you say he was an accountant?”
    “Well, yes, but—”
    “And you fired him?”
    “That’s hardly any reason to—”
    “Andrew what?”
    She blew out a long breath, fluttering her bangs. “I’ll give you his name, his address, his phone number, then you can go do cop things like harass him for his alibi on the night in question.”
    “I’m not a cop.”
    “If it looks like a cop, sounds like a cop”—she sniffed at