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“What’s going on?” asked Dooley.

“It wouldn’t surprise me,” I said, “if the bills in Willie Dornhauser’s wallet are the same ones Rosa Bond paid to her blackmailer last night.” I now remembered that Odelia had instructed Rosa to have the bank write down the numbers on the notes they gave her.

“Absolutely right, Max,” said Odelia, throwing caution to the wind and for once talking to us even when in the presence of others. She immediately regretted it, though, for Abe Cornwall had pricked up his ears and stood regarding us curiously. But then one of the techies drew his attention and they disappeared into the kitchen together.

“So Willie Dornhauser was Rosa Bond’s blackmailer, huh?” said Chase.

“So where is the rest of the money?” asked Odelia.

Chase quickly counted the small stack he’d discovered in the dead man’s wallet. “There’s five hundred here. So that leaves four thousand five hundred unaccounted for.”

And so they proceeded to turn the place upside down, looking for the rest of Rosa’s money. When an hour had passed, and both the police and the crime scene technicians had searched everywhere, and the money still hadn’t been found, Chase removed his plastic gloves and walked out to confer with his wife. We followed them out into the front yard, where a hushed conversation was carried out.

“Could be that he wasn’t working alone,” Chase suggested. “In which case his associate and Willie might have gotten into some kind of argument over how to split the money.”

“The associate conked him on the head,” said Odelia, describing a possible scenario, “and got away with the rest of the cash.”

“Or could be that somehow Rosa discovered her blackmailer’s identity, followed him here last night, and decided to exact some personal justice.”

“Rosa isn’t the vigilante type, Chase,” said Odelia. “Besides, if she’d known who her blackmailer was, don’t you think she would have told me?”

“We won’t know until we talk to her,” said Chase, very reasonably, I thought. He glanced up and down the street, where several people had gathered on the sidewalk, and stood talking animatedly, probably wondering what all the police activity was about. “First let’s do a house-to-house, and find out who Willie Dornhauser was.”

Chapter 9

Two of the people who had gathered in front of their house were Marge and Tex. So it stood to reason that we talked to them first. They’d lived on this street ever since they got married twenty-five years ago, and probably knew pretty much everybody on this block.

“Willie?” said Marge, looking surprised. “Yeah, of course I knew Willie. Great handyman.”

“Yeah, he was,” Tex confirmed. “Though we stopped using him a long time ago, didn’t we, honey?”

“And why is that?” asked Chase.

“Well, Willie had a bad reputation,” said Tex.

“What kind of reputation?”

“Let’s just say that when you hired Willie to work on your house, things had a habit of disappearing.”

“You mean he was a thief?”

“You can say that,” said Tex, “though nothing was ever proven, and we never filed a complaint against him. We just stopped using him.”

“The thing is that Willie had hands of gold,” said Marge. “If you wanted something done in the house, and you asked Willie, he got it done without any fuss, and he wasn’t expensive either. Just…”

“That things got stolen,” Chase completed the sentence.

Marge nodded.“It’s a pity, because he was very talented.”

“Willie did everything,” said Tex. “Electricity, heating, plumbing… When you wanted a wall stuccoed, Willie could do it in a flash. When your air conditioner broke down, he fixed it. He installed new windows, put in a new floor, driveway…”

“The man could do absolutely everything,” said Marge, nodding.

“So most people just put up with the occasional thing going missing,” Tex said with a shrug.

“But not us,” said Marge, “since the thing he stole when he worked at our house was very valuable to us.” She glanced to her husband, a little smile played about her lips.

“He stole one of my gnomes,” said Tex, and he wasn’t smiling.

Tex is a big fan of gnomes, you see, and when you touch his gnomes, you touch a nerve with the good doctor.

“Did he also have a reputation as a blackmailer?” asked Chase.

Marge frowned.“Blackmail? No, I never heard that.”

“Could be that lately he’d run out of customers,” Tex suggested, “and that he had to resort to some more illegal activities to supplement his income.”

“No matter how good you are at your job, at some point people get fed up,” Marge pointed out, “and stop hiring you.”

We moved to the house next door, where Kurt Mayfield lives, a retired music teacher. He seemed reluctant to talk to us, but when Chase reminded him that this was official police business, and not just a friendly neighborly chat across the fence, he stepped out onto the sidewalk. Up and down the street we could see other officers also conducting interviews with Willie Dornhauser’s neighbors, and Kurt frowned when he noticed all the activity. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Someone’s house got burgled last night?”