X (Kinsey Millhone 24)

Henry said, “Can I buy you a drink?”

“Vodka martini. Three olives. Thanks for asking.”

“What about you, Kinsey?”

“I’m fine for now.”

“I’ll be right back,” he said. Ruthie watched him cross to the bar.

“How old is he?”

“Eighty-nine.”

She studied him. “He’s cute. Really, he doesn’t seem old to me. Does he seem old to you?”

“Knock it off, Ruthie. I got dibs on him.”

We chatted about nothing in particular, and it wasn’t until Henry returned carrying her martini and a Black Jack for himself that she brought up the subject of the box.

“So how’d it go?” she asked.

“The search was a bust, which was also part of the message you missed.”

“You didn’t find anything?”

“Nope.”

“Too bad. I was hoping you’d provide me with ammunition.”

Henry sat down and carefully placed Ruthie’s martini in front of her. “Ammunition for what?”

“Hang on,” she said. She held up an index finger, and I watched her lift the icy vodka to her lips and take a sip. She made that sound that only a vodka martini seems to inspire among connoisseurs. “That is so fine.”

I answered on her behalf while she savored the alcohol. “She has an appointment with the IRS tomorrow, trying to sidestep an audit. She was hoping I could provide documentation, but no such luck.”

“Oh well,” she said. “What are they going to do, put me in jail?”

I said, “Actually, I found something else. It probably won’t help, but it’s interesting.”

I leaned to my right and plucked the piece of graph paper from the outside pocket in my shoulder bag. I unfolded the page and put it on the table in front of her, then pointed to the grid of numbers. “You have any idea what this is?”

I watched her eyes take in the numbers on the page. “Looks like gibberish, but it’s Pete’s handwriting. No doubt about that,” she said. “He loved graph paper and he was a big fan of those technical pens. He kept dozens on hand.”

Henry leaned forward with interest. “Code.”

I turned to look at him. “You sure about that?”

“Of course. It’s alphanumeric and not terribly sophisticated. If I’m correct, he assigned a number to each letter of the alphabet and then grouped the letters in fours to make it trickier to crack.”

“How’d you come up with that?” Ruthie asked.

“I play word games. Cryptograms, anagrams, word scrambles. You see ’em in the paper every day. Haven’t you ever done one?”

“Not me. Pete loved that stuff. Most days I feel dumb enough as it is, which is why I don’t do crossword puzzles.” She pointed at the page. “So translate. I’d love to hear this.”

“I can’t off the top of my head. I’d have to work with it. Let me take a look.” He picked up the paper and let his eye run down the columns from left to right. “This is actually a cipher as opposed to a code. In a true code, each word is replaced by a specific word, which means you have to have a big awkward code book to accompany your secret messages. No respectable spy does that in this day and age.”

“Plain English please. I’m not following,” Ruthie said.

“It’s not difficult. In a cipher, each letter is replaced by a different letter or symbol. This looks like a simple number substitution. If he’d stuck to ordinary English, we could start breaking it down by looking for single letters, which are almost always ‘I’ or ‘A.’”

“What else?” Ruthie asked, chin on her palm.

Really, I could have done without her moony-eyed look at him.

Henry tapped the paper. “A two-letter word usually has one vowel and one consonant: ‘of,’ ‘to,’ ‘in,’ ‘it,’ and so forth. Or you might start with short words: ‘was,’ ‘the,’ ‘for,’ and ‘and.’ ‘E’ is the most commonly used letter in the English language, followed by ‘T,’ ‘A,’ and then ‘O.’”

I said, “I figured the zeroes were placeholders.”

“That would be my guess; rounding out the grid,” he said. “A block of numbers has an elegant look, as opposed to ragtag lines of different lengths.”

“Wonder why he went to so much trouble?” I said.

“He must have worried someone would read his notes,” he said. “Where did you find this?”