The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes by Michael Kurland

some books back on the shelf. “If she, or, I rather suspect, they, were merely vandals or had just wanted to search behind the books”—he brushed the books aside, and they scattered to the floor, several landing facedown and open and one losing its dust jacket.
    Brass quickly retrieved the books and gently closed them. “Oh pardon me thou crumpled piece of print,” he said.
    “Mr. Brass feels about books the way mother eagles feel about their eggs,” I told Sandra.
    “But these books were not scattered,’ Brass said, carefully returning the books in his hand to a shelf, “they are in a pile, where each was dropped after it was gone through.” He demonstrated, leafing through a copy of
The Maltese Falcon
and dropping it on the pile by his side. “Our vandals were searching for something that could be hidden in a book.”
    “Like what?” I asked, “the deed to the silver mine?”
    “Knowing my mom,” Sandra said, “it could be exactly that. The greatest silver mine in all the land, hitherto kept secret and out of production by the big silver interests. But now the Colonel is determined to give the little guy an even break.”
    “What colonel?” I asked.
    “It doesn’t matter. And the stock will be printed on thick, creamy paper. And the company will have an evocative name.”
    “Evoking what?” Brass asked.
    “Trust,” Sandra said. “Trust and great wealth. Like ‘The Prince of Wales Mine,’ with his portrait on the certificates—after all, he does have an American girlfriend, or ‘The Four Kings and an Ace Mine’—names suggesting that the property was won in a card game are very effective or ‘The Silver Bullion Mine.’”
    “What makes you think they didn’t find what they were looking for—whatever it is?” I asked.
    “Simple,” Brass answered for Sandra. “Our searchers have torn the whole apartment apart. If they had found whatever they sought, they would have stopped there.”
    “Right,” Sandra said.
    “Of course,” I agreed.
    “But they didn’t get Binny!” Sandra hugged her well-worn stuffed animal with the innocent, all-encompassing pleasure of an eight-year-old.
    Brass shelved a few more books and turned to look at Sandra. “Is that a bear?” he asked politely.
    “Binny’s a raccoon,” she told him.
    “Binny?”
    “As in bindle,” she told him, holding up the beast for his examination.
    “Ah!” he said. “A bindle. And is it?”
    I dropped into a clear spot on the sofa. “A what?” I asked.
    “It’s been my mom’s bindle for twenty years,” Sandra said.
    “And they went right by it.”
    “As they were supposed to,” Brass said. He turned to me and lectured—his favorite sport: “‘Bindle’ is a Carny term for a container holding your most precious possessions. It’s the bag of stuff you grab when your hotel room catches on fire. Hobos use the word for the sack holding all their worldly goods, since they have so few of them. If the sack is tied to the end of a staff, so they can carry it over their shoulder, the staff is called a ‘bindle stiff.’ In the grift a bindle is where you hide your poke, which makes it the repository for your secrets. I’ve always been fascinated by the way in which words take on divergent meanings according to the users’ needs.”
    “Me, too,” I said.
    “When I was a little kid Mom figured that one of my stuffed animals was a great hiding place. Let’s see if Mom has any secrets worth hiding these days.” Sandra parted the fur over the fuzzy beast’s stomach and unzipped a very thin zipper about four inches long, which had been cleverly concealed by the joint where the right leg joined the body. Reaching in to the body cavity, she removed four bankbooks and a small piece of yellow lined paper folded into quarters. We waited with well-concealed impatience while she examined her find.
    She riffled through the bank books one by one and whistled sharply through her teeth. “Either the Orphans of