'When she went to bed… tell me what happened,' Flack said.
The pattern, the two officers agreed, had been the same all three nights. Alberta Spanio brought a drink into the bedroom, took two sleeping pills, said 'good night' with drink in hand, dead-bolted the lock, and presumably went to bed. There was a television in the bedroom, but the two men guarding her hadn't heard it, and it wasn't on when they broke down the door. They hadn't heard the bath or shower running either though they knew they would have had Alberta used them. She had showered two nights earlier. Besides, they had seen her take the sleeping pills and a long swallow of Scotch. She should have been asleep about a minute after they left her room.
'What the hell happened?' Collier asked, looking toward the bedroom and probably imagining the rest of his life in his current grade, if he was lucky.
Flack didn't give an answer. He knew Collier didn't expect one. He closed his notebook.
3
LUTNIKOV'S APARTMENT WAS SMALL- a living room and a small bedroom with an alcove kitchenette.
The living room was more like a library with books haphazardly filling the floor-to-ceiling cases on three walls. A large wooden desk with a typewriter sat in the middle of the room. The desk, covered with a mess of papers, newspaper clippings, and magazines, faced away from the wide window so the light would come over his shoulder as he worked. The pile on the desk threatened to tumble to the floor, and in fact some of it, three sheets of paper, seemed to have done just that.
There was a recliner chair not far from the desk with a lamp behind it and a small table piled with books next to it. Across from the recliner was a sofa that was soft, brown, in need of repair, and almost but not quite old enough to qualify as a 1950s nostalgia antique.
The only other room in the apartment that the building manager had opened for Aiden and Mac was Lutnikov's bedroom. It contained more bookshelves loaded with books and stacked magazines, a dresser, closet, chest of drawers with a white twenty-seven-inch Sony television on top of it, and a double bed that was blanketed and tucked in military style in contrast to the chaos of the rest of the apartment.
'Kitchen's over there,' said the manager, a man named Nathan Gremold, who was in his sixties and well dressed with a wide, bright silvery tie. Gremold was a senior manager for Hopwell and Freed, the third-largest building management company in Manhattan, specializing in upscale apartment buildings. He had been trying not to show his disapproval of Lutnikov's apparent indifference to the high-end dwelling he occupied.
The area he pointed to was not a kitchen but an alcove and it didn't need pointing out.
Aiden and Mac moved across the living room, past the desk to the kitchenette a step behind Nathan Gremold. The kitchen alcove was immaculate. It was more than tidy. It was scrubbed clean, its counter clear, nothing on it but matching wooden salt and pepper shakers.
Mac opened the cupboards. Cartons and cans were neatly aligned. There was one shelf completely devoted to boxes of organic cereal.
'Man liked his cereal,' said Aiden.
Mac took out a box, examined it briefly, and put it back.
The refrigerator was well stocked but not overly full. An almost unused carton of vanilla soy milk sat on the top shelf next to a neatly tied half-finished loaf of whole-grain, sprouted bread.
They moved back into the living room where Nathan Gremold hovered, hands at his sides.
'We're fine,' said Mac. 'We'll lock the door when we're finished. Just two questions,' said Mac as Aiden moved to the desk and began looking at the stack of papers and the typewriter.
Gremold hesitated. 'Yes,' he said.
'Did Mr. Lutnikov own this apartment?' asked Mac.
'No,' said Gremold. 'It's a rental.'
'How much is the rent?'
'Three thousand a month,' Gremold said. 'This is one of our few economy apartments.'
'How did he pay?'
'By check. On the first. Never late.'
'Do you know what he did for a living?'
'I checked his original application when the police called our office,' Gremold said. 'If you'd like a copy…'
'We would,' said Mac.
'On the application, Mr. Lutnikov said he was a writer, a writer of copy, mostly for the catalogues of high-end clothing and furniture companies.'
'Income?' asked Mac.
'As I recall, he said his earnings were $130,000 per year on average.'
'Did he list references?'
'I'm sure he did,' said Gremold, 'but off the top…'
'Thanks,' said Mac, taking out a card and handing it to Gremold. 'Please fax a copy of that application to my office.'
'Of course,' said Gremold. He took a notebook from his jacket pocket and inserted the card into it.
When he was gone, Mac turned his attention back to the apartment.
'Most of this,' Aiden said, looking at the pile on the desk, 'looks like notes, some typed.'
'What kind of notes?' asked Mac, moving to the bookcase against the wall on his left.
'Like this one,' she said, holding up a sheet.
The scribbled note on a blue Post-it read:
'He should have come to us,' said Mac, scanning the shelves.
'Odd notes for a guy who writes upscale catalogues,' she said, looking deeper into the pile.
'Odd guy,' said Mac. 'Makes his bed like a marine drill sergeant, keeps his kitchen operating room clean, and works in a mess.'
'It's a mess,' said Aiden checking a pile of magazines, 'but it's clean. You'd think he'd have a computer.'
'Throwback,' Mac said, not looking up.
He stepped back, looked around, searching for something. There were no file cabinets and he didn't see what he was looking for nearby so he made a slow walk-through of the apartment. About half the books on the shelves were mysteries. The rest were a broad, eclectic spectrum of history, science, geography, and the arts.
When he walked back into the living room from the bedroom, Aiden was going through the drawers of the desk.
'Notice anything that shouldn't be here?' he asked.
She paused, looked around, shook her head, and turned her eyes to him.
'How about something that should be here but isn't?' he asked.
She looked again, and then it struck her.
'He told Gremold he made his living by writing for upscale catalogues,' she said.
'You see any catalogues in this apartment?' he asked.
She shook her head.
'Man had no pride in his work,' said Aiden.
'Or he didn't make his living writing catalogues,' said Mac.
Using the list the doorman Aaron McGee had given him, Mac started on the fifteenth floor. Using a portable ALS in a flashlight and an amber eye shield, he checked the small hallway in front of the elevator carefully for blood, saliva, drug traces, anything he might use. He also searched for, but didn't really expect to find, the murder weapon or the bullet. The killer had probably removed them both, but stranger things had happened, much stranger. He would repeat the procedure on each floor.
