Chiun opened his mouth to say something but quickly closed it again and watched as Remo searched the rooms on the first floor of the house. Remo came back empty-handed.
"You know," Remo said, "I don't know what we've been looking for, but I haven't come up with anything remotely resembling it."
"Have you finished searching?"
"Yeah, I'm done. Damned if I can find anything that would help."
"You will if you go over to that corner of the living room," Chiun said, pointing with one long, tapered, wrinkled finger.
Remo stared for a moment and then said, "That corner?"
Chiun nodded. "As I might have expected, you passed by the obvious."
Remo walked to the indicated corner. "The obvious, huh?"
"Reach above you."
Remo put his arms up and found that the ceiling was a few inches beyond his fingertips.
"Stand on something," Chiun said wearily.
Remo pulled over a small footstool, stood on it, and said, "Now what?"
"If you'll look above you, you will see that there are very faint finger marks on the ceiling tile immediately above your head."
Remo looked up quickly and saw that Chiun was right. There were very faint marks resembling fingerprints.
"Match your fingers with those marks and lift the tile, and perhaps we will find something helpful."
Remo reached up, touched the tile, and lifted it easily. Something fell out and fluttered to the floor.
It was a fifty-dollar bill.
"Isn't that interesting?" Remo said, looking from the bill to Chiun. The old Oriental jabbed his finger at the ceiling. Remo stuck his hand into the opening and began pulling out banded stacks of bills.
"This is even more interesting," he said as each stack thudded to the floor.
When he pulled out the last one, he slipped the tile back into place, got down off the footstool, and began gathering the money up, then piled the bills on a coffee table.
"How much is there?" Chiun asked, coming over to look.
"A lot," Remo said. "I don't think the exact amount is all that important. I'm just wondering what a man who works on an auto assembly line is doing with an extra fifty, let alone this much of a stash."
"Put it back," Chiun said.
"Back?"
"Do you want to take it with you in your pockets?"
Remo paused, remembering a time when the answer might have been yes. "No, I guess there's no need to lug it along with us, unless Smitty wants it."
"It will go to the dead child's family," Chiun said. "Put it back."
"Anything to keep you from starting that child stuff again," Remo said.
He climbed up on the stool, but when Chiun refused to hand him the money, he had to get down, gather up a few stacks, put them back, and then repeat the process until all of the bills were back in the ceiling hideaway.
"Did you meet the minister when he was leaving?" Remo asked.
"We introduced ourselves," Chiun said.
"We're going to have to take a look at his church before this is over."
"Is there something unusual about it?"
"Yeah, they don't talk about God there."
"Most unusual," Chiun said. "What do they talk about?"
"I don't know," Remo said, looking up at the ceiling tile.
There was little more they could learn from the house, and the approaching darkness hinted that it was time to leave. Outside, they found a group of kids— fifteen and sixteen-year-old boys, actually— congregated around their car.
"They either want to mug us or tell us who killed Billy Martin," Remo said to Chiun.
"They are children," Chiun reminded his student. "They must not be harmed."
"I'll try and remember that."
As they approached the group, Remo wondered if these were the friends that the neighbor had told them about, the ones the Martin kid had hanging around all the time.
"Hey, who's your friend, man?" one of the boys asked.
"He is my pupil," Chiun said.
"Naw, I wasn't talking to you, old man," the youth said. "I was talking to you." He pointed to Remo.
"Too bad I wasn't listening," Remo said. "How about moving away from the car?"
"Oh, is this your car?" the same youth asked. He seemed to be the spokesman of the group.
"It belongs to a rental agency, but they don't like nose prints on the window either."
The kid sidestepped to cut Remo off as he approached. He was as tall as Remo, but thinner and lighter. "You're a funny man, ain't you?"
"I'm a patient man," Remo said, "but it's not going to last forever, so don't push your luck."