We left the Annex through the postal dock. The freezing sleet had stopped, replaced by a low, gray ceiling of motionless winter fog that hung in the alleys between the brick warehouses. In the backseat of Harlan Cross’s dark green Buick, the smell of wet wool and engine oil was thick, but for the first time in eight hours, the radio on the dash did not crackle with Gantry’s sector orders. The municipal band was dead quiet. At eight fifteen, as Cross turned the car south onto Maple Avenue, the central dispatcher’s frequency finally opened with a dry, unfamiliar cadence—the county sheriff’s communications desk announcing that all operations of the Forty-Second Precinct property division were suspended by order of the State Supreme Court, with administrative control transferred immediately to the State Police Special Investigations Bureau.
The block in front of Bellamy & Rowe was not quiet. Two gray-and-blue state cruiser units were parked diagonally across the curb lane, their red rooftop beacons rotating slowly against the soot-stained brick facades of the jewelry district. A knot of shopkeepers stood on the slushy sidewalk outside the butcher shop—old men in canvas aprons, watchmakers with their leather loops hanging around their necks, and the counterman from the Greek coffee stall at the corner of Forty-Ninth. They did not shout or cluster close to the cruiser bumpers. They stood with their hands thrust deep into their coat pockets, watching two state troopers in gray greatcoats stand guard beside the shattered entrance of our showroom.
When Arthur and I stepped out of the Buick, the silence on the pavement was absolute. Old man Varga, who had run the diamond setting bench next door since the year the elevated train came down, took three steps toward me. He looked at the white linen tape bound around my right knuckles, then at the heavy shearling collar of Captain Rowe’s coat that hung down past my knees.
"We heard the sector cars screaming down Forty-Eighth at four this morning, Vance," Varga said, his voice gravelly from sixty years of bench smoke. "Gantry had three cruisers parked across your alley, telling the milk drivers that you’d cleared out the safe and run for the freight yards."
"The safe is still there, Mr. Varga," I told him, my voice cracking slightly as the cold air hit my throat. "The only thing that left the floor was what Gantry took five years ago."
Varga looked past my shoulder at the state troopers standing by the door. He didn't ask another question. He reached out with a hand spotted with nitric acid stains, touched the sleeve of the shearling coat once, and stepped back onto the curb.
Inside Bellamy & Rowe, the showroom smelled of wet soot, broken plaster, and the damp November wind that blew straight through the empty window frame. The green glass faceplate of the Toledo scale lay in hundreds of small shards across the parquet floor, glittering like crushed emeralds against the dark oak boards. But the iron column of the balance stood unmoving, its heavy base bolted deep into the structural joists of the sub-floor.
A glazier from the avenue glass works was already measuring the frame with a wooden folding rule, his helper sweeping the jagged teeth of plate glass into galvanized steel buckets. Beside the counter, two state investigators with leather field kits were dusting the fractured hasp of holding locker four, photographing the sheared lead transit seal and the splintered oak surrounding the brass deadbolt.
"The internal register ribbon was intact, Vance," Harlan Cross said, stepping behind the counter and resting his palm on the iron shoulder of the scale. "The state weights-and-measures inspector took the linen roll down to the appellate archive an hour ago. Every notch matched your ledger. The time, the delta, the tare weight. When Mercer levered the box off the brass pan, he signed his own warrant in machine ink."
I didn't answer right away. I walked behind the desk, pulled off the stiff sheepskin coat, and hung it carefully on the brass hook behind the intake stool. My ribs gave a sharp, grinding ache when I reached up, but the leather chair was right where I had left it at midnight. On the desk blotter, the green leather was scarred where Mercer’s revolver had gouged the grain, a deep pale furrow running through the municipal seal stamped into the corner.
At eleven o'clock, a black taxicab pulled up to the curb through the slush. The driver got out, opened the rear door, and helped Martha Rowe onto the pavement. She was not wearing her house slippers now. She wore a heavy black wool broadcloth coat that had belonged to her sister, black overshoes with brass buckles, and a small felt hat pinned firmly to her gray braid. Under her arm, she carried the black leather-bound property ledger she had kept beneath her kitchen breadbox for five years.
She walked through the broken showroom door without looking at the troopers or the glazier. She walked straight to the intake desk, her boots making a wet, measured rhythm on the swept floorboards.
"Vance," she said, setting the ledger down on the clean corner of the blotter.
"Mrs. Rowe."
She looked at the empty shelf inside locker four where Box 114 had rested since yesterday afternoon. "Arthur called from the courthouse fifteen minutes ago. Gantry’s attorney tried to ask for bail on his personal recognizance, claiming twenty-six years of honorable service on the city payroll. The surrogate judge denied the petition before the stenographer could change the ribbon. Gantry is being transferred to the state facility at Trenton by three this afternoon."