“That’s his love chest,” said Slocum. “Open with care.”

Slowly I lifted the lid.

“Jesus,” I said. “He might not have been a boy scout, but he was sure as hell prepared.”

Inside the box were hundreds of loose condoms in different colors and shapes, lubricated, unlubricated, some of genuine goatskin. The little packets glistened in their foil wrappers and looking at them was a little like looking at a display window of a candy store. Beneath the layers of condoms were stacks of casino chips, heavy, in black and gold colors. There were hundred-dollar chips from Bally’s and Trump Plaza and Resorts, over a thousand dollars’ worth, and a series of heavy gold and green chips without a casino’s name printed on them, just the head of a wild boar embossed in gold. There was a small pot of ointment that smelled of sweet and spice, like liniment, with pictures of tigers on the outside. And there were little pipes with screens and a glass tube and, most interesting of all, a goldenrod colored paper slip with the words “Property Receipt” on top and a date stamp. It was signed by our Detective Griffin and indicated that the lab had been given one glassine bag of a chunky, off-white substance.

I lifted up the property receipt. “Now why didn’t the feds tell us about this?”

“It’s not relevant,” said Slocum.

“It’s not Brady?” Brady v. Maryland was a Supreme Court case that required the prosecution to turn over any evidence that would tend to exculpate a defendant. “It seems to me that knowing the victim was a drug user could show that the crime was drug related.”

“His blood was clean and he had no drug priors or drug history. You know what that little bag was?” said Slocum, gesturing to the property receipt. “That was his last chance aphrodisiac. Any hunter in this town knows enough to pack some coke if he’s really looking. If all else fails, you’ll always pull in something with free jam.”

“What about these casino chips without a name, just a wild boar’s head?”

Slocum shrugged. “Maybe some casino out of the area.”

“Seems to me there are a lot of maybes about this guy.”

“What’s not a maybe,” he said, “is that he’s dead.”

Detective Griffin waddled back in and dropped into his chair.

“I got to get to court,” said Slocum. “But hurry it up, Carl, so we can get the detective some sleep.”

“Just a few more minutes,” I said.

I started going through the documents as quickly as I could, checking for anything I didn’t already have, when I caught Griffin dozing off into his paper. His neck drooped, his head dropped lower, then lower still, until he snapped it up and looked at me with surprise on his face.

“Tough shift?”

“Up all night and then Slocum drags me in for this,” said the detective.

“Want me to get you some coffee?” I asked sweetly.

“No, just hurry it up, all right?”

I continued going through the papers, all the time keeping an eye on Detective Griffin as he kept a tired eye on me. He blinked a couple of times and then opened his eyes wide. His neck again began to droop and slowly his head fell off to the side until his cheek rested on his shoulder.

Out of the love chest I quickly grabbed one of the boar’s head casino chips and one of the condoms for good measure, stuffing both into my inside suit pocket. Then I took hold of the pictures and shuffled back to the photograph of the long pale woman. It wasn’t only the body that I recognized. On her arm, the same arm that was reaching back to get a solid hold on Zack Bissonette’s testicles, were two thick gold bracelets, stamped with runes and encrusted with diamonds. I considered taking that picture, too, taking it to protect her, but thought I might need it in Slocum’s possession if things turned out like I now suspected they might.

The photographs were back in the box and I was looking through one of the file folders when Detective Griffin snapped awake with a gasp. He blinked at me and grunted and turned back again to his paper.

“Hey,” he said after a few moments. “Can you believe this new stuff about Roseanne? Jesus. Listen to this.”

I listened. I figured I owed him that.

“MAYBE I’M NOT A LAWYER,” said Dr. Louis Saltz. “But it seems to me that until we find that crooked accountant, Stocker, we can’t really know the value of our case.” Saltz was a tall, gangly man with a long face and hairy arms who had a way of seeming to have figured out everything, which I guess is good in a doctor but which just then I was finding annoying.

“That’s true to a point,” I said. “Stocker collated the figures and made the projections that we claim were fraudulent. If we could put him on the stand and if he testified that the defendants told him to cook the books, we’d win for sure. We’d get punitive damages, too.”

“Exactly,” said Saltz, with a rich smile directed around the room. “We’d wipe the bastards out.”

We were in the conference room shared by all of Vimhoff’s tenants, the same ratty little place in which I had deposed Mrs. Osbourne and ruined Winston Osbourne’s life. In the room was a narrow formica table and walls of cheap particleboard bookshelves stocked with accounting journals and tax codes and sets of law books now out of date. Ellie used to spend hours each week updating our sets from West Publishing, from Collier, from BNA, replacing the pocket parts, slipping in the new pages, lining up the most recent volumes, making sure our Shepard’s Citations were absolutely current. But after Guthrie left and invoices went unpaid, one by one our contracts were cancelled and the updates stopped coming. A legal library falls out of date with a startling quickness. The fear of having our crucial arguments trumped by a recent case not in our now dated law books sent us scurrying to the Bar Association library, where for five dollars a day we could wander like ghosts around the association’s volumes with the rest of those second-rate lawyers too poor to own their own books. We could have sold what books we had for a small amount, but we kept them out of vanity – to the untrained eye these volumes gave the conference room a lawyerly sheen. Of course, when we met with other lawyers we always arranged to meet in their offices because to another lawyer, familiar with the volumes, our incomplete sets proclaimed with utter clarity our financial despair. But it wasn’t other lawyers I was meeting with that afternoon, it was Saltz and five of his fellow limited partners, there to discuss the settlement offer bestowed upon us by the good graces of William Prescott III.

“The problem, Lou,” I said, “is that we aren’t going to find Stocker before the trial. We’re not the only ones looking for him, there’s also the FBI and the IRS. The guy skipped town with other people’s money and his only goal in life now is not to be found.”

I looked at Saltz and then turned my gaze on the other men in the meeting. They were all white, middle-aged guys with so much money they couldn’t keep from throwing it away, which was exactly the state to which I aspired. Along with Saltz were another doctor, an owner of a plumbing supply company, a jewelry seller named Lefkowitz, and two partners in some sort of import/export thing that I never quite could figure out. There were two other plaintiffs who couldn’t make the meeting but had given their proxies to Saltz. I was trying to convince them all to accept Prescott’s settlement offer. Prescott had told me the check was already cut. If my plaintiffs said yes that afternoon, I could have the forty thou in our account by Tuesday.

“And even if we find Stocker,” I continued, hammering home my point, “we don’t know what he’ll say. He could bury us.”

“No way,” said Saltz. “The guy’s crooked as a corkscrew.”

“Can’t we just say how dishonest their accountant was?” asked Benny Lefkowitz, the jeweler. “Isn’t that enough to prove they lied on their projections?”