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million people out there. It'd take us years to canvass enough to find this
pair."
Brandy grinned. "You won't have to. See, they thought she was one of them, and
they smelled somethin' real odd about this dude even if he did have the
handwriting and all. After all, Whitlock was their sugar daddy or mama or
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whatever. So when he left, they tailed him. I have the address."
I almost jumped across the table to kiss her. Naturally, this spilled my
coffee and her Coke, but I didn't care. Finally I said, as the waitress and
several patrons stared at us in disgust, "I think we go out there after I make
two phone calls."
"Little Jimmy and who else?"
"Agent Kennedy. I'm gonna give 'em both everything up to the sex change. If
they're any good, they might get further, but maybe not. In the meantime, I'm
in good with them and we'll be the first there."
There were still several hours of setup and work involved. The place was one
of those older middle-class apartment houses with sixteen apartments in the
place, and there was only so much you could expect even from Divine
Providence. You could use a hundred scams to talk to the neighbors, but I once
tried the insurance-agent ploy and half the people wanted to talk policies. It
was easier just to fall back on the old reliable and flash the badge while
Brandy cased the joint. It wasn't too hard to find their apartment; it was the
one couple nobody knew much about and everybody thought a little nuts.
That left getting into apartment 2-09. I wasn't much good at petty burglary,
but when it was clear that the place was dark and unoccupied, I turned things
over to Brandy. She had that nice, big safety lock picked in about two and a
half minutes of sweat. I did the sweating, of course.
At this stage, our pair had been pretty casual. They never expected to be
coming back, and they never expected anybody to be able to find the place. At
the end of the lease, which was prepaid only to the end of the month, the
landlord would use his master, open the place up, get a cleaning crew in, and
rent it out again.
These weren't furnished apartments, but it's tough to make a smooth getaway in
a moving van. Most of it appeared to be rental furniture, with the stickers
still on, pretty much like I figured. It wasn't terribly full of stuff,
though; a couch and a couple of chairs in the otherwise barren living room, a
queen-sized mattress and box spring in the bedroom, and a dresser. Most of the
clothes and some of the toiletries were gone, but the small fridge was still
reasonably full fortified skim milk, Perrier, some never-to-be fondue, and
even a couple of bottles of sixty-buck-a-fifth champagne. Overchilled, but not
bad. Brandy took care of the small tin of beluga caviar; I never could see the
appeal of solid-salt fish eggs that cost ten cents a pinhead-sized egg. Just
your average
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20-%20Labyrinth%20of%20Dreams.txt lower-middle-class apartment dweller's
emergency rations.
Then we started looking under mattresses and behind furniture. It didn't take
very long, considering the underfurnished nature of the apartment, but we came
up with a whole bunch of junk. It's amazing what falls in back of dressers,
and there is some sort of law that states that anything left for any period of
time will migrate to spots where you will never see it or find it. Most of it
was the ordinary debris a plastic hair curler, a couple of combs, some loose
change, a magazine sweepstakes form, that kind of thing. One very crumpled
little piece of tissue-thin paper, however, stood out and Brandy carefully
unwrapped it. "Aha!
The master detectives strike!" she announced with a flair and handed it to me.
It was a credit card slip.
The thing was hard to read and seemed to be fairly old, but I could read the
name and the number and the expiration date, and it was still current. Amanda
W.
Curry, and a card good until the end of this year. Now, for the first time, we
had a name and a way to track them. Whitlock just wasn't the type to go around
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packing suitcases full of cash, and he could hardly walk in and ask to buy two
and a quarter million bucks in American Express traveler's checks without
attracting a little attention. He would keep most of the money in dummy
accounts probably spread all to hell and back, and contract with a money
manager to pay the bills on this new set of credit cards. Little Jimmy had
provided me with a sample of Whitlock's handwriting, and I took it out of my
wallet and compared it. The charge slip was definitely signed in a woman's
hand, yet there were certain similarities in the way the letters were formed,
particularly the W. I
handed them to Brandy. "If it's not the same, then they grew up together and
learned from the same teacher," I noted.
She squinted, then said, "Yeah, that's right. I can't figure this out yet, but
it sure is strange. Every time we figure we're dealin' with one person, we
find two. Every time we figure two people, it looks like one. Don't make no
sense at all."
I handed her the other prize from the junk trove, a crumpled and torn business
card. She examined it carefully, but I had the strange feeling she wasn't
reading it. "Just how bad is your vision?" I asked her.
"Good enough."
"Uh huh. Then read that card."
She sighed. "Okay, so I can't. So I'll blow some of this money on new glasses,
all right?" She handed it back. "Now what's it say?"
"General Ordering and Development, Inc.," I told her. "McInerney, Oregon.
Never heard of the place, but it sure doesn't sound very big. No address. Two
phone numbers, though. One of 'em's been circled, sort of, in old pencil.
Funny, too, there's ho name on the card. Just 'Western Distribution Center.' "
She thought a moment. "Kind of crazy, but that name seems familiar, somehow."
I shrugged. "I wonder if they call it GOD, Inc., around the plant?"
She snapped her fingers. "Yeah! That's it! The Amazing Stork Knife!"
"Huh?"
She was rolling now. "And the Motorized Minnow, and Pet-er-cize, too!"
"Slow down. If you can't manage English, try it phonetically."
She looked excited. "You don't watch enough TV."
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