77 Shadow Street

“How did it leave? Well, just like that. Whoosh and gone.”

“Did it pass through a wall?”

“A wall? I don’t know. It was just gone.”

“Oh, walls mean nothing to demons,” Edna assured them.

“Demons,” Martha said derisively enough to make it clear she considered such talk nonsense.

Sally said, “I don’t know if it was any demon, ma’am. I didn’t conjure it, for sure. But it was something, all right. As real as me, it was. I don’t nip at a bottle when I’m working, and I didn’t hallucinate it.”

As earlier, a rumble arose from underfoot, and this time the Pendleton shook sufficiently to rattle glassware in cabinets and flatware in drawers. Dangling from a rack over the center work island, copper pans and pots swung on their hooks, although not enough to clang against one another.

The shaking persisted longer than previously, ten or fifteen seconds, and halfway through the tremors, Bailey pushed his chair back from the table, getting to his feet as though anticipating calamity.

Sally Hollander warily surveyed the kitchen, as though she expected that cracks might zigzag up its walls, and Martha stepped away from the counter when upper cabinet doors rattled behind her.

Seemingly amused by her companions’ alarm, toying girlishly with the rucked silk at the lace yoke of her dress, Edna said, “I spoke earlier with sweet Mr. Tran, and he’s quite sure these quakes are just because of bedrock blasting to carve out the foundation for that new high-rise on the east side of Shadow Hill.”

Tran Van Lung, who had legally Americanized his name to Thomas Tran, was the building superintendent. He lived in an apartment in the basement, next to the security center.

“No. That went on too long, much too long, for blast waves,” Bailey insisted. “And the first one I felt was in the pool room this morning, about four-fifteen. They wouldn’t be starting construction work at that hour.”

“Mr. Tran is the finest superintendent the Pendleton’s ever had,” Edna said. “He knows everything about the building. He can fix anything or knows who can, and he’s as trustworthy as anyone I’ve ever met.”

“I agree,” Bailey said. “But even Tom Tran can sometimes be operating on misinformation.”

When most young men of Bailey Hawks’s age squinted, they had but two or three small darts at the outer corners of their eyes. His years at war had stitched the memory of worry into his face so completely that when he was alarmed, his smooth skin folded into an array of pleats that aged him and gave him the aspect of a formidable man of fierce intentions.

When Bailey had sprung up from his chair, Martha Cupp glimpsed something even more revealing of his state of mind. Under his sport coat, he carried a gun in a shoulder holster.

13

Apartment 3-D

When Logan Spangler, chief of security, stepped out of the north elevator on the third floor, the double-door entrance to the Cupp sisters’ apartment was to his left. The single-door entrance to Silas Kinsley’s apartment stood directly in front of him. He thought of this as the geriatric corner. He liked the old dames and the retired attorney. They were quiet, proper, and considerate. The only owners who gave him fewer problems were those in 1-B, who had died nine months previously and whose estate was still being settled, and Mr. Beauchamp in 1-D, who had passed away of pneumonia two weeks earlier.

Having retired from the police department, Logan supposed that when he retired next from the Pendleton job, he might become head of security for a cemetery. A field full of stiffs in their narrow little condos would be even more quiet and proper than Edna and Martha Cupp. And when he retired from that job, he could just lie down in a prepared hole and let them cover him with a dirt blanket.

He wasn’t bitter about being forced out of the department at sixty-two. That was six years earlier, ancient history. Though not bitter, he had become a cynic. In truth he had always been something of a cynic and a grump on the job—which served him well when he was dealing with homicidal dirtbags, helped him to understand them and find them and bust them—but he had been good-humored and relatively easygoing when off-duty. With all of that action now gone from his life, however, Logan wasn’t working off this negative energy every day, and as a consequence, he suspected that he might be souring into an around-the-clock grump.

He could live with that.

From the elevator, he turned right, walked about twenty feet, and turned right again into the north corridor. The apartments were all on the right side, three of them, with views of the courtyard. The farthest belonged to Mickey Dime; in addition to having inherited money, Dime was supposed to be a successful corporate consultant for matters of employee-conflict resolution. The inherited money might be true, but Logan was convinced the rest of it was the product of a bull’s back end. Next door to Dime was the Abronowitz apartment. Bernard Abronowitz was in the hospital, recovering from surgery.

The nearest and largest of the three apartments belonged to the former senator, Earl Blandon. If the disgraced politician had gotten on the elevator but had never gotten off, as the security cameras seemed to suggest, there was a mystery to be solved that might test the wits of the cleverest of detectives. Considering how lacking in drama the past six years at the Pendleton had been, Logan doubted that any such puzzle waited to be solved, and he expected Blandon to answer the doorbell in one state of inebriation or another.

After Logan rang three times but received no answer, he rapped sharply on the door. He waited and then rapped again.

Earlier, he had phoned the day-shift concierge, who had relieved Norman Fixxer at 6:00 A.M., and had ascertained that the senator had not left the Pendleton through the lobby during the morning or early afternoon. Now he called the evening concierge, Padmini Bahrati, who had come on duty at 2:00 this afternoon, and she was certain that since she had been at the front desk, the senator had neither departed the building on foot nor asked for his car to be brought around to Shadow Street.