“I’m sorry. I have to be going,” Faith told her, slipping her coat from the back of the chair. Sadie got up, too, and put her hand on Faith’s arm. She lowered her voice and, in a conspiratorial tone, asked, “You want to have a look at his place?”
“How? It’s all locked up.” Faith couldn’t believe this was happening. How was Sadie going to get her into Fox’s apartment? A hidden door in the closet? Morph her through the wall?
“You can get onto the fire escape from Stella’s, and it goes right past his window.”
The image of Stella, and maybe Sadie, too, as a Peeping Thomasina was almost too much for Faith. In days that weren’t filled with any laughter, this one was rapidly becoming high comedy.
“Is Stella home?”
“Stella’s always home on Mondays. We’ll go up.” Which was how Faith shortly found herself crouched on a cold metal grid, peering through the grimy locked window of Nathan Fox’s apartment, the apartment where he had met his death.
The police must have taken various articles away, but Faith didn’t have a clue as to what they were. The small room was a shambles. The card table where he wrote was overturned, the typewriter lying on its side.
Clippings and papers from the file cabinet covered the floor. There was a cabinet over the sink. The door was open and it was empty, except for a saucepan. There was a plate and a glass in the dish drainer. The refrigerator door was closed. There were no postcards on it and nothing lay on the floor beneath. The grill at the bottom had been pried off. The oven door was open. It needed cleaning—since sometime in the forties. Directly opposite the window was a closet. That door was open, too. The hangers were empty and there was a pile of clothes on the floor. A flat pile. No picture of Emma and Michael. She couldn’t see into the bathroom, but she’d seen enough to know how thorough the search had been. She’d also seen enough to know what the person—or persons—unknown had been looking for. The books that filled an entire wall in floor-to-ceiling shelves were virtually undisturbed.
And they looked carefully arranged, separated by metal bookends into groups. If the police had picked them up from the floor, Faith doubted they would have replaced them so carefully. The only volumes that had been disturbed were the oversized ones. True, somebody looking for goods to fence wouldn’t walk out with a stack of books, but they wouldn’t search under the refrigerator, either, or go through the file drawers.
Somebody had been looking for something specific—
something the size of a finished manuscript.
If there was an outline where Fox had fallen, she couldn’t make it out from this angle, but there was a clear space by the door. He’d answered it—expecting
whom? Emma—back for a pair of forgotten gloves?
No, he’d have noticed them. Emma back with another treat? Who? Who was it who’d knocked—and entered?
“Are you all right, Karen?” Sadie was leaning out the window. “Don’t get chilled.”
But it was too late for that. Faith was already chilled.
Chilled to the bone.
Lorraine Fuchs lived in Bay Ridge, not far from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge. The first thing she told Faith when she opened the door to her tidy brick house was “I watched them build the bridge when I was a little girl—the Verrazano, not the Brooklyn Bridge.” She gave a halfhearted laugh, yet what struck Faith was not the woman’s attempt at a joke, but the enormous change in her appearance. She was positively unkempt.
Both her turtleneck and slacks were wrinkled—as if she’d slept in them. But her red-rimmed bloodshot eyes weren’t indications of a good night’s sleep. Her hair hadn’t been braided, and the result was truly scary.
Faith was tempted to march her off to a decent stylist then and there, subtracting ten years from her age with the removal of a foot or two of hair.
“I didn’t know how to reach you. I was going to tell you not to bother to come, but since you’re here, you might as well come in.”
What had happened to the keeper of the flame? Her desire to help Faith with the “legacy”?
The house was tidy. Faith was sure Lorraine hadn’t moved a thing since her mother died. The living room was papered with dark green leafy fronds. The matched set of sofa, easy chair, and ottoman sported the original nubbly dark brown upholstery. A bookshelf held the classics. A wedding picture, a graduation shot of Lorraine—with significantly less hair—and several sepia prints of a bygone generation stood framed on top of the bookcase. There was a window seat beneath the largest window, overlooking the narrow driveway and detached garage next to the house—
its twin to the other side, with the repeat of Lorraine’s house next to it. The whole street was the same—
house, garage, garage, house—with an occasional low fence or folly such as a wishing well the only distinguishing features. Even the shrubs looked uniform.
There was a shelf under the window seat, and Lorraine gestured toward it. It was filled with scrapbooks, folders, and boxes.
“There they are. His whole life. My whole life.” She began to cry.
“It must have been such a shock.” Faith tried to comfort the woman. She was glad she had her son left at least. “You must miss him terribly.” Lorraine yanked her head up. “Miss him! That bastard! You want to write about him? You want to see scrapbooks? You want to see a book? I’ll show you a book!” The woman was screeching. She ran to the shelf below the window seat and grabbed a thick manila envelope from the top of a stack of other items. These teetered, spilling out on to the floor. She kicked at them, waving the other parcel about. There was no address on the front of it, just her first name.
‘Be sure I’m really gone, Lorraine,’ he said. ‘Wait till
the funeral, Lorraine—if there’s a funeral. Then wait some more.’ Well, I waited. Yes, I waited! For what?
To find out just who he thought ‘Lorraine’ was. That’s what!”
With her tangled hair draped about her shoulders, she looked like a crazed twentieth-century version of Miss Havisham. The cause for the change between last night and this afternoon? It was obvious. Lorraine Fuchs had read Nathan Fox’s magnum opus and blown her lid.
“Who the hell is this?” A young man forcefully pushed open the front door, sending it slamming against the wall, where the torn wallpaper and exposed plaster revealed that this was an habitual form of entry.
Everything about him was large. Tall, verging on obesity, but broad-shouldered, he had a mane of tangled, dirty hair that reached to his shoulders, mingling unpleasantly with his beard on the way. Something about the Fuchses and long hair, Faith said to herself.
His jeans were fashionably ripped at the knee, and when he took off his leather jacket, he revealed a Kurt Cobain T-shirt and several tattoos—a large one of Woody Woodpecker in full Klan regalia on his fore-arm. None of them said MOTHER.
It had to be Harvey.
It was Harvey. “Harvey,” Lorraine mumbled in a voice that was both placating and awestruck, “this is Karen. I met her at . . . at the . . . last job I had. She’s a friend.” The last sentence struck a pleading note.
Faith was willing to bet Harvey wouldn’t let his mother have a pet, either. Lorraine’s luck with menfolk was on a par with Desdemona’s.
Harvey walked past them, leaving his jacket on the
floor, and pushed open the swinging door into the next room. He appeared to take no notice of his mother’s di-shevelment or the mess on the carpet. He was back right away with a can of beer, his attention still else-where,
