Page 36 of Take the Fall
“It’s a flower bed with a gnome problem.”
“Same energy.” He straightened the rest of the way, and the straightening brought him round, and the strip of garden was narrow enough that turning put him close. Closer than the caseneeded. His shoulder a hand’s width off mine, the cold coming off his coat, the bright still in his face. He didn’t step back. Neither did I. For a second the gnome and the notes and the whole daft afternoon went somewhere else, and it was just the two of us in four feet of dirt with our breath showing, and his eyes did the thing they’d been not-quite doing across a desk for weeks.
A curtain moved in a second-floor window. I clocked it.
Not the wind. A hand. There and gone, the fabric settling slow the way it only settles when someone’s just stepped back from it.
He clocked me clocking it, and followed my eyes up, and the moment between us folded itself away, gentle, the way he folded most things now.
“Second floor,” he murmured. “Somebody’s very interested in two men standing over an empty hole.”
“It’s a building full of people who think you’re the law. They’re all interested.”
“Maybe.” But he’d gone still in the particular way he went still when a loose thing snapped into a slot. “Or maybe that’s our note-writer, watching the detectives stand on the X.”
We went back inside, out of the wind, and that was where I earned my keep, because seeing things is the one trick I’ve got.
The mailboxes. The labels. Half the boxes on that wall wore strips of label-maker tape, which told us nothing on its own. A building shares a label maker the way it shares a boiler. The ransom note was printed on a label maker too. Same machine, probably. Big deal.
But the note in Carlson’s hand had a flaw running through every line. The tape had gone a faded, ghosting gray at the edges of the letters, the way the print goes when the ribbon’s near the end of its roll and starting to skip.
And one box on that wall, second row up, had a name strip with the exact same ghost. The same dying ribbon. Not just the same machine. The same week of its life.
“That one,” I said.
Carlson came to my shoulder. Held the ransom note up beside the box. The gray matched the gray, letter for tired letter.
He read the name off the little strip. “Adler. Two-oh-four.” He looked at the note, then the box, then up at the ceiling, toward the second floor and the window with the curtain that didn’t move in the wind. “Second floor.”
“That was quick,” I said.
“It was a gnome, Hawley. I told you I’d have it inside the hour. I’m offended it took twenty minutes.” But the showman had quieted again, the way it had at the board, the bright in him gone thoughtful. He folded the note into his pocket. “Come on. Let’s go and meet the most wanted man in the building.”
The second-floor hall smelled of carpet and old radiators. 204 had a doormat worn to the backing and a label-maker strip under the peephole that read, in that same fading gray,PLEASE KNOCK. BELL UNRELIABLE.
“He labels his own front door,” Carlson said quietly, reading it. “God help me, I think I like him.”
He knocked.
It took a while. Long enough that I heard, on the other side of the door, the small frantic sounds of a man tidying something away at speed. Then the chain, then the bolt, then a face in the gap. Seventy, maybe more. Cardigan buttoned wrong by one. A pair of reading glasses pushed up into white hair, and under them eyes that went straight past Carlson’s coat to Carlson’s expression, and read it, and gave the whole game up before a word was spoken.
“You’re the detective,” Mr. Adler said. “From four-oh-two.” Not a question. “Rosa always said they’d send someone eventually.”
“Mr. Adler.” Carlson’s voice had changed. Gone level and easy, the warmth gone out of it now, only the thing underneath, the one he used when the stakes turned real. “We’re not here to make trouble for you. We’re here about Gnorman.”
The old man’s chin went. Just slightly. The exact tell I’d watched a hundred suspects give across a table, except there was nothing under this one but a man who’d been caught and looked, somewhere beneath the fear, relieved to be.
“He’s not out in the cold,” Adler said, fast, defensive, like that was the charge that mattered. “I’d never leave him out on a night like this. She’d have my hide.”
“Can we come in?”
He stepped back and let us into a small warm flat with a window that looked straight down onto the front garden bed. And on the windowsill, on a folded tea towel, facing the glass and the empty hole in the dirt below, sat a garden gnome in a red hat, dry and clean and entirely unharmed, with a smear of fresh polish on his ceramic boots.
“There’s the victim,” Carlson said, soft. “Looking well.”
Adler sat down heavily in a chair that had the shape of him worn into it. The chair beside it was the same model and held no shape at all, the cushion plumped and untouched, and I understood the two names on the mailbox before he said another word, and I understood why the second name had never come down.
“Eleven years we had that gnome,” Adler said, to his own hands. “Rosa bought him at a garden center the week we moved in. Named him before we’d got the boxes unpacked. Gnorman. She thought it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said, her own joke, she’d laugh at it every spring putting him back out.”His thumb worked at a callus. “She kept that board downstairs. The notices. She knew everybody. Whose kid was sitting exams, who’d had a fall, who was new and lonely. She ran the socials in the laundry room, terrible wine in plastic cups, and the whole building came, because she made them come. She made this a building where people knew each other’s names.”
