‘Well, to tell you the truth, I feel like Mongolian.’
‘You goddamned
They had almost reached the door when the phone rang on Walter’s desk.
‘You going to answer that?’ asked Charlie.
‘What? No. Absolutely not. It’s trouble.’
‘How do you know it’s trouble?’
‘It’s trouble because it’s going to postpone the moment when I can open my mouth and take my first bite of a Rally’s triple cheeseburger.’
‘You should answer it, Walter. Really. I got a hunch, that’s all.’
‘You and your goddamned hunches. You got more hunches than Quasimodo.’
Charlie raised one eyebrow, and when the phone went on ringing, and ringing, Walter eventually went back to his desk and scooped it up. ‘Wisocky,’ he snapped. ‘What?’
‘Officer John Skrolnik here, detective. We got called out to a house on Corydon Road, reports of a young woman screaming.’
‘Screaming? What was she screaming about?’
‘Nobody knows, because she disappeared.’
‘What do you mean, disappeared?’
‘She’s not here. The owners of the property heard her screaming upstairs in her apartment but when they went up to find out what was wrong she wasn’t there, even though they never saw her leave the house.’
‘Who was she?’
‘A student. Her name was — hold on — Maria Fortales, just twenty years old. She was studying law at CRWU.’
‘I thought all the Crew students had to live on campus, in a dormitory or a sorority house or something.’
‘Only for the first two years.’
Walter took a deep breath. ‘Maybe she went out for lunch. That’s what I’m trying to do, believe it or not. Go out for lunch. Why don’t
‘Her landlord said that she was screaming like somebody was killing her. He said he never heard nobody scream like that before, never.’
‘But there’s no sign of her?’
‘None. That’s why I called you. Don’t you remember, the last time we had a missing persons case, you said I could always call you?’
‘OK,’ Walter admitted. ‘So I did. How sweet of me. Corydon Road, what number?’
‘Twenty-four eight hundred.’
‘Roger that,’ said Walter. ‘Give us ten minutes.’
He hung up the phone. Charlie was standing right next to him with an expectant look on his face. ‘You and your goddamned hunches,’ said Walter.
‘What is it? What’s happened?’
‘Apparently some young girl was yelling her tits off like she was being murdered and then she took a powder and nobody knows where she went. And for that I have to forego my lunch.’
‘I don’t know, Walter,’ said Charlie. ‘As soon as that phone rang — for some reason it gave me this incredibly strong feeling that something seriously bad is going to happen.’
‘You bet your ass it is. My stomach’s going to start rumbling, and you’re going to have to listen to it.’
They parked behind Officer Skrolnik’s white squad car, and climbed out. It was starting to rain, quite hard, and the rain came rustling down through the rusty-colored trees like an expectant audience waiting for the arrival of a great concert pianist.
‘Had to fucking rain, didn’t it?’ Walter complained, and by way of punctuation there was a loud bang of thunder from the direction of Cleveland Heights.
Corydon Road was a quiet suburban avenue less than a half mile from the university campus, and many of its residents let out rooms to students during term-time. Number 24800 was a small green-painted house with a gray- shingled roof and a veranda, with a sagging 1969 Buick Riviera parked in the driveway.
Officer Skrolnik was waiting by the front door. Inside the hallway, his partner was talking to an elderly man with white hair and a baggy gray cardigan. Officer Skrolnik was very tall, with a prominent larynx that bobbed up and down like a Halloween apple whenever he spoke.
‘Thanks for coming so quick, detectives. The landlord and his wife are really spooked.’
‘What’s the landlord’s name?’ asked Walter.
Officer Skrolnik flipped open his notebook. ‘Richard Yarber. His wife’s name is Maude. They said that Ms Fortales came back very early this morning, around five thirty, after spending the night with some of her college friends. Around eleven forty-five they heard her screaming but the door to her room was locked and they couldn’t get in to find out what was wrong. Mrs Yarber went across the street and asked one of their neighbors to help them — Mr Herman Eisner, he’s a retired fire marshal. He managed to kick the door open but the room was empty. No sign of Ms Fortales or anybody else.’
Walter sniffed. ‘Couldn’t she have climbed out of the window?’
Officer Skrolnik shook his head. ‘It used to be their grandson’s room and the windows all have childproof bars. Apart from which, it’s a sheer twenty-foot drop down to the side of the house.’
‘Well,
He entered the hallway and Charlie followed him. He showed Mr Yarber his badge and said, ‘Detective Wisocky, sir, and this is Detective Hudson. Sounds like you’ve had a kind of a weird experience this morning.’
‘I’ll shay,’ said Mr Yarber, with his false teeth clicking. ‘Shcared the living Jeshush out of ush.’
‘You heard Ms Fortales screaming?’
‘Never in my life heard nothing sho terrible. More like a pig being shlaughtered than a human being. And shomething elsh, too. Both of ush heard it. Like a
‘A rasping noise like a saw? But when your neighbor broke into Ms Fortales’ room, you didn’t see a saw?’
The young officer who had been talking to Mr Yarber had to cover his mouth with his hand to hide his grin.
‘No,’ said Mr Yarber. ‘No shign of a shaw anywhere.’
‘OK,’ Walter told him, laying a reassuring hand on his steeply-sloping shoulder. ‘Do you mind if my partner and me took a look at Ms Fortales’ room?’
‘Shure. Go ahead. Be my guesht. It’s upshtairs, shecond on the left.’
Walter and Charlie climbed the narrow, beige-carpeted stairs. The staircase was wallpapered with faded brown roses, and twenty or thirty photographs of the Yarber’s sons and daughters and grandchildren were hung higgledy-piggledy on either side, not one of them straight. The house smelled sweetish and musty, as if the windows hadn’t been opened in years, and there were dead blowflies lying on the window sills.
Walter carefully pushed open the door to Maria Fortales’ bedroom. The Yarbers’ neighbor Herman Eisner had kicked the door so hard that he had split the side of the frame and the tarnished brass knob was hanging at an angle. Walter eased himself inside.
On the left, against the wall, there was a single bed covered by a rumpled pink candlewick bedspread. It had three purple cushions on it and a small collection of soft toys — a floppy-eared rabbit, a bright green frog, and a pale green hand-knitted gnome.
Under the window stood a pine desk, with an Apple laptop on it, a half-empty coffee mug, and a thick red notebook bound with five or six elastic bands. A white home-knitted cardigan was drooping over the back of the chair. As Officer Skrolnik had told them, the windows were fitted with horizontal metal bars, so it would have been impossible for Maria Fortales to have climbed out.
On the right-hand side of the room there was a cheap plywood clothes-closet, painted cream. One side of the closet was plastered with dozens of cut-out pictures of circuses and clowns. Almost in the center was a large photograph of a gray-faced clown. He had wild staring eyes and tangled gray shoulder-length hair and dark green lipstick which was curved upward into a maniacal grin, even though his real lips were curved downward.
