A Brilliant Plan

Chapter 23

TIME FOR ME to start a little clandestine operation, Calendar style. The window was no problem at all. Simply take a piece of plastic to move the latch and slide it open. I cut some anonymous plastic from a water canister, to use a credit card was very amateurish and could prove very embarrassing if lost on the job.

I had to remove some little crystal animals from the windowsill and climbed in carefully; put the stuff back on the sill. The little Maglite shone through the bedroom and showed an empty, clean bed with a quilt on it and some colored cushions. The door to the living room was open, so was the door to the bathroom.

Phoebe Eastman had not picked up the phone when I called her house from a payphone just minutes before, so I was comfortably sure that she wasn't at home. Two of the windows had the circulation vents open so the air in the apartment was fresh.

I closed all the curtains and switched on the lights in each room. It looked much the same as it did the week before when Ron and I had visited her.

When I worked an apartment, it was usually to find jewelry or valuables. Except for what I had researched in order to come prepared, I generally had no direct connection to the owner of the property. But this time, since I was looking for indications of involvement into another crime, it was a little different. I was looking for anything that would give Phoebe Eastman away as the burglar of the Altward Gallery, the stolen Maximilian Jewelry or any other. I was also checking for insider alarm traps that would reveal to a careful owner that someone had searched the apartment. Little things such as positioning a bottle in the kitchen at an invisibly marked spot or sorting the socks in a special order. If little Phoebe was indeed in the same business as me, I was sure to find some indications.

Scanning the room, I decided to start with her personal affairs.

The small secretary in the corner of the living room didn't offer anything spectacular. The obituary of her father, cut from the San Diego Chronicle. Some notifications from the police regarding the murder, the coroner and some insurance paperwork. Her father's life insurance policy was worth a little over thirty thousand dollars, nothing spectacular. Another one from the security company where he had worked, another ten thousand. I found her checkbook; she was not rich, steady income from a job or some such in the five hundred dollar per week range. Some other incoming checks in various irregular periods with some thousand dollars over the last year or so. Seemed that this money was what kept her afloat and enabled her to live in La Jolla. Money from Altward?

She had a small laptop on a writing desk. I booted it up, got stopped by a Windows login screen. I inserted my little do-it-all-stick with useful hacker tools, rebooted and bypassed the security. But nothing worth mentioning on the disk. Some harmless private e-mails to relatives and friends. Some e-mails from Altward when he appeared to be traveling. Typical 'I miss you dearly, can't await our next time' content. A few letters to various galleries. Some pictures of unknown people and places. That was your life, Phoebe Eastman.

I moved on. No hidden doors, hollow wall spots or loose floorboards that I could find. A box with fashionable jewelry in the back of a drawer, nothing expensive, low and mid level retail. A diverse range of regular clothes from medium priced chain stores and some expensive designer stuff here and there. An expensive pair of jeans by D&G. An Armani jacket. A Versace bikini. Probably gifts from Altward or some other rich boyfriend.

Nothing that I found indicated that Phoebe was a cat burglar like me. Or she was as careful as I was, which would really bug my ego. But so far, nothing was out of the ordinary, a perfect simple life with few highlights.