* * *
It took Ana Ruiz three weeks to find the storage unit, and when she did, she called Ray first, and Ray called Nadia, and Nadia called her father, and Gus Brandt, who had not driven on the Beltway since his shop closed, drove himself to a self-storage lot off Ritchie Highway in Glen Burnie and stood outside a ten-by-ten roll-up door with a detective and two uniformed officers and a man from an insurance company's fraud unit, and waited while they cut the lock.
The Rolex was gone. So was the painting. They had been sold within weeks, Ruiz said, through an auction house in New Jersey that was now very interested in helping. But there were other things in the unit: a box of letterhead from four different jewelers, three of them dead; a laptop; a file of forged appraisals; a stack of driver's licenses from three states; a Tiffany-style lamp; and in the back corner, in a battered tweed case, a 1964 Fender Jazzmaster in sunburst with a crack in the pickguard that Gus had glued himself in 2023 and would have known blindfolded.
He didn't cry. Nadia said afterward that it was worse than crying. He opened the case and looked at the guitar and closed the case again, very gently, and stood with his hand flat on the lid, and said, "Hello, sweetheart," the way you'd say it to a dog that had come home after a month in the woods.
The case against Dennis Carrow, whose real name turned out to be Dennis Carrow after all, which surprised everyone, ran to eleven counts within a month. The insurance company's fraud unit found two homeowner's claims he had filed for the "burglaries" and been paid on before the items were ever recovered. The State's Attorney's office filed motions to vacate Rosario Ocampo's probation, and he called Nadia to tell her, and then called her again an hour later to tell her again, because he wanted to hear himself say it.
No charge was ever filed against Walter Szabo. There was nothing to file. But on a Wednesday afternoon in late October, a manila envelope came in the mail to Szabo & Son with a letter inside on Baltimore Police Department letterhead, signed by the Major of the Northern District, regretting in two careful paragraphs any distress caused to Mr. Szabo and his customer in the course of an investigation. Walt read it twice. Then he took it to the back room and tacked it to the corkboard over his bench, beside a 1971 postcard from his mother in Vienna and a child's drawing of a clock that Lin had made when she was nine.
"Two paragraphs," Bernice said. "The man couldn't spare three?"
* * *
Ray brought the watch back on a Saturday morning.
He came in uniform, on purpose, at ten o'clock, which was when the Avenue was busiest. He parked the patrol car out front, under the gold-leaf letters, and got out, and walked in through the door with the bell, carrying the black box in both hands. Nadia was already there, because Walt had called her. So were Marco and Lin, and Bernice, who had taken off her hardware smock for the occasion and was wearing a blouse that Marco said made her look like the Queen Mother, for which he was struck with a rolled-up newspaper.
Ray set the box on the counter. He didn't make a speech. He was not a speech-making man. He took off his cap and held it.
"Mr. Szabo," he said. "Ms. Brandt. This is your property. It was taken from you because I didn't do my job carefully enough. I'm returning it now. I'm sorry."
He said it at a normal volume, to the two of them, the way you'd say it across a kitchen table. But the shop was full and the door was open, and the woman with the stroller was there again on the sidewalk, and the boy on the scooter with the dog, and half a dozen others, and every one of them heard it.
Walt picked up the box. He opened the lid. He unfolded the chamois. The watch lay inside, ticking. He had reassembled it himself, in the roll-call room, in eleven minutes, with Lin holding the lamp and Ana Ruiz watching with her chin in her hand.
He held it out to Nadia.