Claimed by the Detective and the Don

Chapter 7 — Matches

COLE

I found the matchbook when I came back from my tour arranged by Conti. I assumed it had slipped out of her coat pocket somewhere between the chair and the door, landed under the desk where the lamp light didn't reach. I almost missed it, sweeping up the mess. Small, black, cheap cardboard, the kind a bartender hands out free with a drink.

I turned it over in my fingers before I read it. Gold letters, half worn off from being carried too long in too many pockets. The Amber Room. Cortland. Same city she'd said out loud like it cost her something. I sat with that a long moment, the neon outside painting the desk red, then dark, then red again, same rhythm as always.

A woman didn't carry a matchbook for years unless it meant something she hadn't let herself forget.

I lit a cigarette off my own lighter, and set the matchbook flat on the blotter where I could look at it while I thought. Twenty years on the job teaches you that objects talk louder than people. People lie clean and easy. A matchbook just sits there being exactly what it is, waiting for somebody to ask the right question.

I asked it out loud to the empty room. "What happened to you in Cortland, Lenore."

The room didn't answer. But the matchbook did, in its own way, once I stopped looking at the gold letters and started looking at everything else. There was a phone number penciled faint on the inside flap, half rubbed away, the kind of thing a man writes down fast in a dark bar and a woman keeps without meaning to.

I copied it into my notebook before it faded any further. Then I sat back and smoked and let the shape of it settle.

Cortland wasn't a big city. I knew that much from the maps in Doyle's office, a river town two hundred miles north, the kind of place that grew fast on lumber money and grew mean just as quick once the money slowed down. I'd never worked a case that touched it. Didn't know a soul there. That was going to have to change before morning.

I thought about waiting. Nine days left on the badge, a captain who'd already told me twice this case didn't exist. Waiting was the smart move. I'd never once in my life made the smart move where Lenore Voss was concerned, and I wasn't about to start over a matchbook.

I picked up the phone before I could talk myself out of it.

Nobody answered on the number written in the matchbook. It took me three calls and two favors I didn't have left to spend before somebody put me through to a desk sergeant in Cortland who sounded like he'd rather be anywhere else on earth. I gave him my name, my badge number, nine days and shrinking, and told him I was working a homicide that touched his town.

"Homicide," he said, flat, like he'd heard the word so many times it had stopped meaning anything. "What's it got to do with us."

"I've got a name. A woman who used to work a club up your way. The Amber Room." I kept my voice even, the way you learn to when you want a man to think this is routine, nothing worth guarding against. "Wondering if anybody up there remembers her."

Silence came down the line first, thin and crackling, the kind of quiet that isn't empty. Then, "The Amber Room's been closed for years."

"Closed how."

"Closed how? Like they close places that make somebody upstairs nervous." He said it careful, each word set down like it might go off. "You said you had a name."

I almost didn't give it to him. Some old instinct told me to hold it back one more question. The same one that keeps a man's hand near his gun in a room he hasn't sized up yet. I didn't listen to it. I never do when I'm this close to something.

"Lenore Voss," I said. "Might've gone by something else back then."

The silence that came after was different. Longer. Heavier. I heard him breathe once, sharp, like a man who'd just recognized a face in a crowd he'd hoped never to see again.

"Where'd you say you were calling from."

"Port Verity. I'm a detective. I told you that."

"You told me a lot of things." His voice had changed completely now, gone tight and careful in a way it hadn't been thirty seconds ago. "You want my advice, detective, you forget you ever heard that name and you forget you ever heard of the Amber Room. Some doors up here don't open twice for the same man."

"I'm not asking you to open a door. I'm asking what happened to a woman four years ago."

"You're asking about people who don't like being asked about." Something shifted behind his words, not fear exactly, closer to the particular caution of a man who'd learned a hard lesson once and didn't plan on learning it twice. "I got a wife. I got a pension in six years I intend to collect. I'm not spending either one on a name some detective in Port Verity wants to play detective with."

"Just tell me who ran the place. That's all I'm asking."

"I'm hanging up now."

"Wait—"

The line went dead before I finished the word. Not a fumble, not a bad connection. A clean, deliberate click, the sound of a man who'd decided the conversation had already gone on four sentences too long.

I sat there with the receiver still in my hand, the dial tone humming flat and empty into the room, and looked at the matchbook sitting square in the middle of my desk like it had grown heavier in the last five minutes.

A cop who wouldn't say a name out loud. A club that had closed the particular way places close when somebody upstairs gets nervous. A woman who'd spent four years carrying a matchbook she never let anyone see.

I set the receiver back in its cradle, slow, careful, the way you'd set down something that might still go off.

Whatever Lenore Voss had left behind in Cortland, it wasn't the kind of thing a city forgot on its own. Somebody had made sure of that. And now somebody knew a detective in Port Verity was asking.