Stillman seemed pleased. “Not at all. In that house up there to the right is Ellen Snyder’s apartment. Bottom floor, rear entry.”
“Wouldn’t she be at work? It’s barely three o’clock.”
“She would be, if she were doing that sort of thing these days, but she isn’t.”
“They fired her for paying off a policy?”
Stillman shook his head. “They didn’t fire her, and she didn’t quit, either. She just seems to have gotten scarce.” Stillman was up the driveway now, and he approached the door.
An uneasiness came over Walker. “Then why are we here?”
Stillman reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a pair of thin leather gloves.
“You aren’t . . . .” said Walker.
Stillman knocked on the door, then put his ear to the door and listened. He knocked again. He shrugged at Walker. “See? What can I do?” He took out a pocketknife, wiggled the blade around between the door and the jamb for a couple of seconds, held it there, and pushed the door open. Walker backed a few paces away, but Stillman muttered, “Sitting in the car doesn’t make you less guilty than I am, it just makes you easier to find.”
Walker stopped backing away. He was almost relieved that Stillman had misinterpreted his reluctance. He was horrified at this man making this kind of intrusion on Ellen, but the mention of guilt made him realize that it was better this way. If Stillman was honest, he would see that there was nothing but evidence of Ellen’s innocence, and leave her alone. If he was trying to frame her, then he had just made a mistake.
Stillman stepped in and held the door. “Come on in.”
Walker had just crossed the threshold into a small, dark kitchen when Stillman edged past him and held his arm. “Don’t touch anything.”
Walker followed Stillman’s eyes. He was looking at a window on the far side of the kitchen above the sink. The curtain swayed a little, then blew inward slightly as Stillman stepped toward it. He pulled the curtain aside to reveal electrical tape in an X shape from corner to corner of the upper pane, and a network of cracks. A couple of large triangles were missing.
“I guess she isn’t very good at fixing broken windows,” said Walker. “If I’d known, I might have tried telling her I was handy around the house.”
“It’s gotten lesser men where they wanted to go,” said Stillman. “But that’s not a repair job, it’s a B and E. If you whack a window it goes crash, tinkle. If you tape it, it just goes thump. You reach in and unlock it.”
Walker quickly moved through the doorway to the living room, his eyes scanning.
Stillman was instantly at his side. “What are you doing?”
“What if she was here when they broke in? She could be lying somewhere bleeding to death.”
Stillman held his arm again. “Not for four days. If she’s here, believe me, she can wait.” He stepped ahead of Walker. “I don’t think she is, of course.”
“At least let me look.” He jerked his arm away.
“I’ll do it,” said Stillman.
“Why you?”
Stillman sighed. “Because in your fit of chivalry you’ll tromp all over everything that might tell me what happened here. Besides, I’m beginning to like you. A four-day stiff starts to get ripe. That means if she’s here, somebody chopped her up and put her in a Coleman ice chest. You would find that looking at her would spoil the word ‘picnic’ for you forever.”
Stillman moved rapidly across the living room, stepping in a straight path along the wall with his eyes on the floor. He opened a closet, then entered a doorway to the left that Walker judged must be the bedroom. In a moment he emerged, moved into another room, then returned to the kitchen. He stepped past Walker to the refrigerator, knocked on the front, opened it, then opened the freezer door. “Nobody’s home in there,” he announced. “Sit down and relax for a while, and I’ll call you if I need you.”
Walker hesitated for a moment. Why wasn’t she here? He reluctantly admitted to himself that maybe if he left Stillman alone, he would find out. He sat at the kitchen table and watched Stillman through the doorway. He walked in a spiral motion around the living room, staring at the floor until he reached the center. He stepped to the bookshelf and moved books around. He examined the back of the television set, did something to the radio, studied the pictures on the wall, the empty mantel above the fireplace. He looked at the windowsills and latches, the light fixtures.
As Stillman completed each operation, Walker had to resist asking, “What’s that? What are you looking at? What does it mean?” At six o’clock, he heard a car in the driveway, and then there were footsteps above the ceiling. They were light and quick—a woman, probably. In the silence he heard water running, faint music that he recognized as the theme of a commercial for dog food. Stillman kept at it.
Finally, when the sun was down and the kitchen was almost completely black, Stillman came in and took off his gloves. Walker said, “Did you come to tell me something?”
“Yeah. I’m hungry.” Stillman walked to the door, opened it, and left. He was walking down the driveway when Walker came out. Walker hesitated, then pushed in the lock button with his fist, grasped the knob with his coat, and closed the door. He caught up with Stillman on the sidewalk.
After they had walked a short distance, Stillman reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded sheaf of papers. “I’d like you to look at this.”
Walker took the papers. “What is it?”
“It’s six sheets of paper. Look them over.”
Walker scanned the sheets as he walked, but that didn’t diminish his confusion. “It’s a lot of addresses and phone numbers. Restaurants, hotels, car-rental agencies . . . hospitals. Why do you suppose she had them?”
Stillman took the sheets back. “She didn’t. Whenever I go anywhere, I take a few addresses with me.” He folded the sheets and returned them to his pocket.
“Hospitals?”
“You want to start looking for them after you need one?”
“Oh,” said Walker. “Why did you want me to look at it?”
“Because I didn’t find anything in the apartment,” he said. “If somebody is watching the place, we want them to think we did.”
“We do?”
“Yep,” said Stillman. “If they broke in to look for something, they’ll think we found it. If they broke in to clean up, they’ll think they forgot something.”
“What if they broke in because they’re burglars who do that for a living?”
Stillman turned up a long, narrow alley that ran along the backs of the stores on the street where they had parked. “It’s tough to get anywhere as a burglar if you leave all the stuff you can sell. The TV set is there. The radios are there. You can’t get by stealing women’s clothes and personal papers . . . and for Christ’s sake, stop looking over your shoulder.”
“Sorry, I—”
A weight collided with Walker and spun him around. His back and head hit a brick wall hard, and he felt a wave of nausea. When his eyes tried to focus again they couldn’t seem to find a reference point, because there was a face too close to his in the dark, and a forearm across his chest, a big man leaning against him so that he could barely breathe. The face was full of anger and hatred. The emotion was so unwarranted that the face was a monstrosity more frightening than the pain in his chest.
“Don’t move, you son of a bitch. LAPD.”
The instinctive notion that his survival might depend on his doing something melted away. His survival depended on not doing anything. He was going to jail for burglary. He tried to turn his eyes to see what was happening to Stillman, but the man gave his chest a push that felt as though it was cracking his sternum. “Don’t move!” snarled the face. Reports of people being killed struggling with the police floated on the edge of Walker’s consciousness.
Then his ears were assaulted by a terrible sound. It was a loud, angry shout from Stillman, but the shout was almost instantly augmented by another voice, this one in pain. Both Walker and his captor turned in alarm.
Stillman’s leg was on its way down from delivering a kick to the other policeman’s groin, and he seemed to have punched him at least twice. The injured man bent over and appeared ready to topple.
Walker’s eyes shot back to his captor’s face in time to see that the fist was already on its way. Walker was
