“You have a cat,” she said.

“I don’t exactly have him,” I said. “He just works here. He’s not a pet or anything like that.”

“What is he?”

“An employee, that’s all.”

“And what’s this, a fringe benefit? On Sundays the help gets to play catch with the boss?”

“We’re not playing,” I said. “It’s to sharpen his reflexes.” I walked around picking up paper balls, not for the first time. “He won’t fetch,” I said.

“He’s not a dog, Bernie.”

“His words exactly. If he could talk, I mean.” I threw a ball for him. “Look at that,” I said. “I swear he could play shortstop. Ozzie Smith would have been proud of the move he made on that last one. Of course, Ozzie Smith would have whirled and pegged to first instead of trying to kill the ball. That’s why Ozzie’s playing in the bigs and Raffles is snagging mice in a bookstore.”

“What happened to his tail?”

“You know how they’re always chasing their tails? Well, you see how fast his reflexes are. He was chasing his tail one day and he actually caught it.”

“And he killed it?”

“No, he scooped it up on one hop and rifled it to first base. What’s so funny?”

“You are.”

“It’s just nerves, Doll,” I assured her. “I’ll settle down once we get there.”

The cab ride uptown didn’t do much to settle either of us. We were blessed with a driver who clearly believed that his best hope lay in reincarnation, and the sooner the better. Neither of us said much, except perhaps in silent prayer, until we pulled up right in front of 304 West End Avenue. I can’t imagine the doorman would have challenged a well-dressed couple who arrived by taxi, but the fellow on duty barely noticed us. His attention was taken up by a little old lady who wanted to know what all the fuss had been about that morning.

“Cops in the hallways,” she said. “On a Sunday morning yet. This was always such a nice building.”

They’d come and gone, he told her, before he went on duty. We were waiting for the elevator when the old woman said, “So what did she do, kill her husband? Stupid! Does she think they grow on trees?”

The door opened and we rode up to the seventh floor. Doll asked me what I thought the woman was talking about. Domestic violence, I said, was what it sounded like to me. On the other hand, I suggested, maybe the old lady was nuts. She’d been carrying on about cops in the hallways, and I certainly hadn’t seen any. If the doorman didn’t care, why should we?

I turned the wrong way when we got out on seven, but Doll caught my arm and steered me in the right direction. Luke Santangelo’s lock yielded to me as to an old lover. In a matter of seconds we were inside.

“I guess you haven’t lost your touch,” she whispered.

I flexed my fingers. “Once you learn,” I whispered back, “you never forget. It’s like drowning.”

“You mean swimming.”

“Or falling off a bicycle,” I said. “Same thing.” I donned my plastic gloves, double-locked the door, fastened the chain lock, and put on the light. Doll pointed at my gloves and mimed putting on a pair of her own.

“Sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking. I only brought the one pair. Anyway, you couldn’t have worn gloves all the other times you were here, so the place must be full of your fingerprints. A few more won’t matter.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“Besides, you don’t think Luke’s going to dust the place for prints, do you?”

“No, but—”

“So let’s just find what we’re looking for and get out of here.”

That was easier said than done. She went first to the closet, and she did a pretty commendable job of ransacking it, yanking garments off hangers and tumbling boxes down from the top shelf. I guess that’s the way to search a place if you’re in a hurry, but it’s never been my style. I tend to walk lightly upon the earth, especially in other people’s houses.

“These are mine,” she said, holding a couple of sweaters and a pair of jeans. “But who cares?” She tossed them onto a wooden chair and spun around to glare at the open closet, her hands on her hips. “Come on, Bernie! I thought you were going to check the dresser.”

“I did.”

“How come you didn’t just pull out all the drawers and empty them in the middle of the floor? Isn’t that what burglars do?”

“Some do, I guess. This one doesn’t.”

“Well, you’re the expert,” she said, “but it seems to me—”

“Slow down,” I said. “Take a breath.”

“I know they’re here,” she said. “I guess I had this picture in my mind. You would open the door and we’d walk in and there they’d be, right out in plain sight. I expected to see Marty’s rosewood humidor sitting on Luke’s coffee table. But of course he left the humidor, didn’t he?”

“How would he have taken the cards? He didn’t just stuff them in his pockets.”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’d pack them in a shopping bag.”

“And walk out of Marty’s building that way?”

“Why not? He could just—Bernie, the attaché case! That’s what he would have used.”

“I hope the cards don’t wind up smelling like meat.”

“Meat? Oh, right, I told you how he used it for shoplifting. But I’ll bet that’s what he did. He put on his one decent suit, he shaved his larcenous little rat face, he packed up his attaché case, and—”

“What’s the matter?”

She ran to the closet. “Where’s his suit? Shit. Son of a bitch.”

“What’s the matter?”

“His suit’s gone. You don’t see a suit, do you? The son of a bitch took it with him.”

“You said he probably got an acting job out of town. Maybe they told him to bring a suit because the part called for it.”

She shook her head. “Bad casting. If the part called for a suit, you’d get a different actor. Did he take the attaché case? That’s the real question, isn’t it?”

“Where did he keep it, Doll?”

“In the closet,” she said. “Isn’t that where you’d keep it?”

“I might. What other luggage did he have?”

“I don’t know. We never went anywhere together. All he really wanted to do was go to bed. The bed!”

“What about it?”

“Under it,” she said, diving to the floor. I stood by as she fished things out—an olive-drab duffel bag, a maroon backpack, a carryall of light blue parachute nylon. There were other things, too—a couple of athletic shoes, a tennis racket, a sock. No attaché case.

“Shit,” she said. “I give up. They’re not here. If he had the cards in the first place.”

“You think he didn’t?”

“I don’t know what to think. I was positive, but now I don’t know. And if he did have them, they’re not here now.”

“We don’t know that.”

“We don’t? This is a tiny little one-bedroom apartment, Bernie. And we searched it from top to bottom. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Sit down,” he said. “I’ll show you how to search a place.”

The thing is, you can’t just dash around. You have to proceed methodically, taking it a room at a time, going through each room in a deliberate fashion. You don’t necessarily spend more time that way but you spend it wisely, and when you quit a place you know you haven’t missed anything.

Within reason, that is. If you put a little thought and effort into it, you can hide stuff so that it won’t be found other than by a crew of professionals with time on their hands. Of course, the right dog will sniff out drugs or explosives in nothing flat, but otherwise you’re safe.

I was willing to assume, though, that Luke had not enlisted a carpenter to build in some really good hiding places, in a baseboard, say, or as a false back to a cupboard or closet. The fact that he had three large bottles of pills in his freezer and a plastic bag full of some dried herb underneath the sugar in his sugar canister suggested to me that he probably stuck to the tried and true. Most people do.

I spent half an hour at it, and when I was done I’d have been prepared to swear that there was neither an attaché case nor a quantity of baseball cards in that apartment. I didn’t say a word during the entire half hour, and, after a few conversational ventures that I ignored, neither did Doll. When I gave up at last and let my shoulders sag in defeat, I realized that she was staring at me with something akin to awe. I asked her what was the matter.