Small Town

“It could still be there,” Slaughter said. “Even if he came across it in a drawer or a jacket pocket, he wouldn’t see any reason why he had to get rid of it. By the way, I didn’t call it a fetish in my application for a warrant. I called it a figurine.”

“Good thinking.”

“Why would he pick it up in the first place, you got any theories about that?”

“We already said he was drunk, right? And who knows what’s gonna seem like a good idea to a drunk?” He shrugged. “Maybe he just likes rabbits.”

The downstairs doorbell sounded, one long buzz. He was drinking a cup of coffee and set it down on his desk and looked at his watch. It wasn’t quite nine yet, and who would be leaning on his bell at this hour? Some pest from the media? Or the Jehovah’s Witnesses he’d been expecting last week?

Before he’d finished wondering, the buzzer sounded again, two bursts this time. And he knew who it was, because who else would so effectively distill impatience and lack of consideration into noise?

He pressed the intercom and said, “Yes?”

“Detectives Slaughter and Reade, Mr. Creighton. Okay if we come up?”

“No,” he said.

“If you’d buzz us in, Mr. Creighton, it’d save making a scene in front of the neighbors.”

It was Mr. Creighton now, he noticed, because they weren’t in his space or his face, and the excessive familiarity could evidently wait until they were. “You’re not supposed to ask me any more questions,” he said, “and I don’t have to talk to you, and I don’t intend to.”

“Mr. Creighton—”

“Go away,” he said, and let go of the intercom button. He got all the way back to his desk before the next buzz. He ignored it, but when it was repeated he went and pressed the button again, told them again to go away.

“Mr. Creighton, we don’t have any questions and you don’t have to talk to us, but you have to let us in. We have a warrant.”

“For what? You’re going to arrest me again? You already arrested me, I’m on bail, remember?”

“A warrant to search your apartment.”

“You already searched it!”

“It’s a new warrant, Mr. Creighton, and—”

“Give me a moment,” he said, and went to the phone and found the slip of paper with his lawyer’s number. Would Winters be at his desk this early?

He was, and the first thing he did was assure Creighton he’d been right to call him. “You don’t have to answer a question, you don’t have to say a word,” he said. “What you do have to do, though, is let ’em in if they got a warrant. Where are they now?”

“Downstairs in the vestibule,” he said, and before he’d finished he heard them knocking on his door. “At least they were a minute ago. Somebody must have let them in, because they’re upstairs pounding on my door and calling for me to open it.”

“Don’t open it yet.”

“All right.”

“Tell them you want to see the warrant before you’ll open the door.”

He delivered that message through the closed door to Slaughter and Reade. One of them — Reade, with the reedy voice — said they’d be happy to show him the warrant, but first he should open the door. He relayed messages back and forth between Winters and the cops. They wouldn’t stick it under the door, but they compromised that he’d open the door a few inches with the chain latch on and he could read the warrant before letting them in.

He had the phone to his ear and Winters was telling him that the warrant had to be specific, that they couldn’t search the place again for general evidence, that they had to be looking for something they hadn’t known to look for earlier. And it would say what it was in the warrant.

His reading glasses were on the desk, so he had to squint, but the warrant was short and the part that was typed in was in larger print than the boilerplate. “ ‘A blue rabbit figurine,’ ” he read aloud.

“A blue what? Did you say rabbi or rabbit?”

“Rabbit.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“I have no idea.”

“Last time you looked, were there any blue rabbits in your apartment?”

“No,” he said. “No purple cows, either. What do I do now, Maury?”

“Let ’em in, and let me talk to one of them, and then stay on the phone with me until they’re out of there. And not a word to them, not even agreeing it’s a nice day out, which it isn’t anyway, it looks like it’s gonna rain. You got that?”

“All of it,” he said, “including the weather report.” And he opened the door and handed the phone to Slaughter. “My lawyer wants to talk to you,” he said. “But I don’t.”

They were there for close to two hours, but it wasn’t that bad. His lawyer chatted with him for a while, then put him on speakerphone with instructions to speak up if the cops pulled anything out of line. He picked up the magazine he’d been reading and poured himself a fresh cup of coffee and kept an eye on Slaughter and Reade, which wasn’t difficult because the apartment consisted of a single room.