Read Partnerships Can Kill: The Third Charlie Parker Mystery for Free Online Page B

almost in worse
shape than the rest of the little office. He had one of those
little divided trays that is supposed to provide a place for
everything, but the drawer was so jammed that the tray couldn't
even rest flat on the bottom. Papers, pens, clips, little notepads,
and a variety of junk, including a wadded up hamburger wrapper, all
came at me as I pulled at the drawer. This was unbearable.
    I began to pull handfuls of stuff out,
attempting to locate the bottom of the mess. Finally, I had it down
to one layer. The heaviest objects had settled to the bottom, among
them a keyring. I picked it up. There were only four keys on it.
Three were obviously for doors -- his home, his office, and
something else. I could ask Sharon. The fourth was a safe deposit
box key.
    Setting the keyring aside, I replaced the
papers I had pulled out, one at a time. I glanced over each one as
I went, in case one would prove to be a suicide note. Nothing
there. The drawer closed a little easier than it had opened. I
picked up the keys, and tried them one at a time, until I
ascertained that one fit the door to the office, and another fit
the restaurant's back door to the alley. Presumably, the front door
would be keyed the same. That left one more door key, which was
most likely his home, and the safe deposit key.
    I felt like I'd checked what I could here.
Without delving into the books, or searching each of his files page
by page, I couldn't find anything that I thought would drive a man
to kill himself.
    Sharon was at the cash register, closing out
the sales for the day. She brightened a bit when she saw me.
    "We did better than I expected today," she
said. "How about you? Find anything?"
    "No, not really," I said. I showed her the
keyring. "Was this a spare set of keys David kept?"
    She looked at them. "I guess so. His regular
keyring had a little plastic thing attached that said 'I heart NM'.
You know the kind. His little sister had given it to him." She took
the keys from me, and flipped through them. "These two are for the
restaurant," she said, confirming what I'd already tested. "I don't
know about the others."
    "His house, maybe?"
    "Probably. He lived in those apartments on
Academy Road -- I can't think of the name, but they're just up the
street from the Food City grocery store."
    "Mind if I take those?" I asked.
    She handed the keys back. "Like I said, I
just want to find out the truth."
    Back on the road, I contemplated what I was
doing. I wasn't sure how the police would feel about me snooping
around in David's apartment. But, if I didn't remove anything...
Besides that, I justified, they had probably already searched the
place themselves. If there was a suicide note, I felt sure the
police or David's family would have recovered it by now. If not,
then what harm would I be doing?

    Chapter 7

    The Jeep headed back across town for the
second time this afternoon. A hot pale blue sky reflected heat
waves off the freeway. Bright chrome shining off other cars struck
my eyes. The traffic became a clog at the Big I, where Interstate
40 bisects Interstate 25. I slowed to twenty-five miles an hour,
thinking about the weekend I'd just spent in the cool deserted
mountains. Slowly, the pace picked up a little. I worked my way
over to the right, watching for the San Mateo exit.
    I found the apartment complex Sharon had
mentioned. The place consisted of five or six frame stucco
buildings styled and colored to look like adobe. According to the
mailboxes, D. Ruiz was in apartment A48. It took me a few minutes
of wandering around to figure out the numbering system and locate
the right one.
    The key slid into the well-worn lock with
hardly a whisper. I used a scarf over my hand to turn the knob,
just in case the police would come by later for fingerprints. The
apartment looked like David had just stepped out to do a quick
errand. The drapes were drawn; a lamp in the living room still
burned. A TV schedule was open on the coffee table to Saturday's
date,