Free Jade in Aries by Donald E. Westlake Page A

a thick confusion of papers. I began to poke through them, and saw at once that the confusion was more apparent than real. The papers to the right had to do with the business of the store, but the papers to the left had to do with the killing of Jamie Dearborn.
    That they were still here disappointed me, to some extent. I had no doubt the killer had sat here last Monday evening, as I was doing now, and had gone very carefully through these papers. That he hadn’t taken them with him, or destroyed them, meant he felt there was nothing dangerous in them, nothing that would lead anyone to him.
    Unless he had been selective, had only removed one or two sheets? I would eventually bring the whole pile to Cornell at the hospital, and he could see if anything was missing.
    For the moment I just glanced quickly through all the papers, sorting out those that had to do with the murder. About half of them seemed to have some bearing on astrology, and I considered leaving these behind, but eventually decided to include them, too. Four books on astrology were also on the desk, up amid the secondary confusion on top, but I didn’t take them. I leafed through them for any papers or notes they might contain, found nothing, and returned them to their places.
    The desk drawers produced nothing of value to me except a large manila envelope in which to carry the papers I wanted, which made up a pile about an inch thick. I put the papers in the envelope, finished my search of the desk, got up to check out the filing cabinet, found nothing of interest there, and turned back to Jerry Weissman: “Now the stairs,” I said.
    “Sure. This way.”
    We went back out to the store proper, and immediately turned left, going along behind the counter with the see-through shirts, and then left again through another paisley drape, this time to a strictly functional rear staircase, which had obviously been left in its original condition. I became aware again of how totally Jammer had created its own environment within the building, so that the store and the rest of the building no longer had any sort of common bond at all.
    The stairs were very narrow, and seemed to have been put on the rear of the building as an afterthought. They doubled back on themselves halfway up each floor, and at these landings there were windows that looked out on, presumably, some sort of back yard. Only darkness could be seen out there now. Green wooden doors were closed at each story, facing other windows; at the third floor there was a bag of clothespins hanging on the wall beside the window. I heard nothing from within any of the apartments we passed.
    The final flight led to a trapdoor, fastened on the inside by a large nail stuck through the ring of a hasp lock. Weissman removed this nail, set it to one side on a step, pushed up on the trapdoor, and we went on up the stairs to the roof.
    And here was another reason for the killer to push Cornell off the back rather than the front. The rear edge of the roof was no more than three feet from the trapdoor. It must have been tiring work to drag Cornell’s body up four flights of stairs, and a strong temptation to simply roll him off the nearest edge at the top.
    And without leaving any sign. I had hoped for useful marks in the snow on the roof, but there were none. Of course, there had been more snow since Monday, and wind. I wondered if anything useful might have been found that first night, had the police been in a mood to look.
    “All right,” I said. “Let’s go back down.” It seemed colder up here than it had before in the street.
    We went back down the wooden stairs. The light was poor, low-wattage bare bulbs in the ceiling at each floor, but even with floodlights I knew I would find no signs of the murderer’s passage, not four days after the event.
    At the first floor, instead of a window facing out back, there was another green door, this one securely fastened with a padlock. I said, “Is the storage shed through