at his two other people, one at each corner, by the litter baskets. Oh, and there was somebody across the street leaning against the skinny tree in front of European Imports. The Lieutenant wasn’t taking any chances.
Roberts opened the downstairs door with no trouble. They trooped up the stairs with Braun in the lead. He had to move aside on the tiny landing at the top so Roberts could get at the door. There were four locks on it. Roberts worked on them for about thirty seconds. He got all four unlocked, and went inside.
For a second Mike and April stood outside on the landing while Braun and Roberts, stuck in the doorway, fumbled around for a light. A single pale bulb shone over their heads.
“Weird,” April murmured softly.
“Yeah what?”
“The whole setup. Guy owns a chandelier shop and look at what he’s got hanging here.” She pointed at the bare bulb. It flickered, as if in response.
“That’s not the only weird thing. Maggie Wheeler was hung on a chandelier,” Mike reminded her.
From inside the apartment came the sound of a crash as something was knocked over.
“Shit.” Braun’s voice sounded pained.
A light came on, the logjam was broken, and April quickly followed Mike through the door.
“Wow.” Mike whistled.
The four detectives huddled together for a confused instant, frozen with surprise. The place was not exactly what they had expected. It looked like some kind of warehouse. All kinds of furniture, a huge mirror, lamps, tables, settees, chairs, and sideboards were jumbled together, apparently at random, in the room fronting Second Avenue. There was so much of it, they could hardly get through it to the kitchen and the stairs. It almost seemed as if the furniture had been assembled that way to form a barricade to block entry to the living quarters.
The place smelled dusty and stale. Braun and Roberts began picking their way through it, turning on more lights as they went.
“This is going to take a while,” Braun muttered. “You could hide anything in here.”
April took another route, behind a sideboard, a desk, the mirror, and three chairs to the kitchen. Positioned behind the stairs between the front room and back rooms, it was a pretty sad affair. The walls hadn’t been painted in decades. The plaster of the ceiling was crumbling to a fine powder in several places. The refrigerator, sink, and stove were from another era. Dirty dishes filled the sink and covered every counter surface. April studied the dishes with interest. All fine china, several patterns. The glasses looked like crystal.
She pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the refrigerator. Inside was a loaf of moldy bread, a pizza box, two six-packs of Amstel light beer, five packages of film, and a little girl’s jewelry box of pale blue leather with faded gold tooling around the top. Carefully, she removed the jewelry box from the second shelf of the fridge, reminding herself where to return it later.
“What’s that?” Mike was peering over her shoulder.
She could feel him breathing on her neck again. She shivered.
The little box wasn’t locked. It swung open.
“What is it?”
There were only a few things inside. A broken necklace of American Indian beading, some crudely made enamel earrings with screwbacks. A cheap gold filigree bracelet with a cameo in the middle, and a gold pin of some sort with Greek letters on it. She picked up the gold pin and held it to the light.
“What is it?”
Mike shook his head.
“It’s a sorority pin,” Roberts said scornfully. He had pushed in behind Mike. “You two know what a sorority is?”
“Sure,” Mike said pleasantly. April could see the word
April put the jewelry box back in the fridge, then joined him in the back room. It was empty, looked as if it had been cleared for a renovation that never happened.
Braun looked around and had nothing to say. He cocked his head toward the stairs. Once again the four of them trooped up a flight of stairs in a line.
This time Braun had something to say. “Jesus H. Christ. Get a load of this.”
“Isn’t this fun.” Mike let April go in first.
She stopped suddenly, stunned. Nothing downstairs prepared them for what was up there. Unlike the mess on the floor below, this level had been very carefully decorated. The floor in the bedroom was pickled white, stenciled in a colorful pattern around the edges. An Oriental rug filled in the center. The walls were covered with fabric. April could tell it was high-quality silk, had a pattern of stripes and tiny flowers in pink and gold and green. The fabric was gathered at the ceiling and pulled up to a point at the top to look like a tent. From the center point hung an ornate chandelier with cherubs of painted porcelain.
A king-size four-poster against one wall was made up with a rich red brocade bedspread and topped with dozens of tapestry pillows, tassled and velvet-trimmed. The head- and baseboards were ornately carved, gilded wood.
There were only two other pieces of furniture in the room. A dressing table with a mirror attached, completely inlaid with ebony and mother-of-pearl, and a chair in the corner with faded and threadbare upholstery the same color as the jewelry box in the refrigerator.
Speechless, the four detectives studied the room. Then they moved to the bathroom, which had a Jacuzzi bathtub and black walls. In the closet they found only men’s clothes, and several shoe racks filled with cowboy boots of different colored leather—ostrich, alligator, snakeskin.
Up on the third floor they found a stark white room which held an old-fashioned cot and a painted chest of drawers. There were some rumpled sheets, an old quilt and one pillow on the bed, bars on the windows. The floor was bare except for a bowl of water with a dead cockroach floating in it, and a small white bathroom rug that was badly stained with a lot of little yellow circles of what April guessed was puppy urine.
“What’s that?”
Braun pointed to some soiled laundry in the corner. Roberts leaned over and picked it up. His forehead furrowed with alarm as he displayed the straitjacket, the straps showing quite a bit of wear.
April glanced at Mike. What did this picture tell?
Braun shook his head as if one ear were filled with water.
“Looks like he kept her up here in more ways than one.”
April took out her notebook and made a quick note. She wondered how Jason Frank was doing with the suspect.
55
After they saw the restraint on the third floor, Braun called in one of his detectives from the street to help search the house. A few minutes later he found April in the other bedroom on the third floor. She was leaning over a table, studying Camille’s hairbrush and the tangle of long reddish-gold hair in its bristles. Arrayed around her were a number of rolling racks hung with women’s clothes. All kind of clothes. Up there, there seemed to be a warehouse of blouses and dresses and jackets and skirts the way the downstairs was a warehouse of furniture. Some items still had price tags on them. It looked like Camille did a lot of shopping.
Braun gestured at April. “Go check out the basement. See what you can come up with.”
Basement! Immediately her heart began to pound. Why the basement, when there was a treasure trove right here? She struggled to swallow the protest that jumped onto her tongue. What was wrong with this guy? Didn’t he know she was the first one in on this case and knew what she was looking for?
“You got a problem?” Braun said nastily.
She turned away for a second, lowering her eyes so the hot rage didn’t spill out there either. She didn’t have a problem. She didn’t love dark places like basements, but cops weren’t supposed to admit to little weaknesses like terror, repulsion, nausea, or rage at incompetent supervisors.
“No, sir, no problem.”
She had wanted to see if the missing items from Mrs. Manganaro’s store inventory were in this room. And he
