'I need to take another look at Craig Sampson's apartment.'
I closed my wallet and stowed it. I knew she had no idea what she had just looked at.
'Well, I wish you'd be a little neater this time,' she said.
'I'm going to have to rent that place.'
'Lady, my heart bleeds,' I said.
'All I got to think about is how somebody shot your tenant full of holes.'
I figured nice didn't work with her.
'Yeah, well, you already looked once,' she said.
'And I got no rent coming in from the place.'
I nodded and jerked my thumb up the stairs.
'Just unlock the deceased's door,' I said.
Still muttering, she turned and walked up the stairs ahead of me, limping on her bunion.
'I got a mortgage to pay… I don't get income out of this place, I still got to pay the mortgage… Bank don't care who got killed, or who didn't. I don't pay the mortgage, I'm out in the street… You people just take your own sweet damn time about it… What am I supposed to do with his stuff, anyway?'
At the third floor there was a tiny landing, lit by a 60-watt bulb in a copper-tone sconce. She took some keys from the pocket of her house coat and fumbled at the lock.
'Don't even have my glasses,' she said.
'Can't see a damn thing without them.'
She finally found the keyhole and opened the door and stepped aside.
'Close the door when you leave,' she said.
'Downstairs too.
They'll lock behind you.'
'Sure,' I said and stepped past her into the apartment and closed the door. I listened for a moment and heard her limp back down the stairs. Then I turned my attention to the apartment.
CHAPTER 27
There was a bathroom directly opposite the front door, a two stride hallway to the right that led into a bed- sitting room with a huge black-and-white theater poster filling the far wall, and some gray light coming in wearily from the single dormer window. The poster was of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. The bed was one of those oak platform deals with storage drawers underneath. There was a green Naugahyde arm chair, and a gray metal desk and chair.
At the foot of the bed was a gray metal foot locker. The walls were white, but an old white and one that hadn't been washed very often.
I could hear the rain on the roof. I looked out of the one window for a moment and watched the rain fall gently past me and down three stories and onto the roof of my convertible. The rain had hurried the fall of leaves along the street. They plastered the roadway with limp, green-tinged yellow spatters, and collected in the storm culverts and backed up the water. A gray and white municipal bus moved past, sending spray up from the puddles onto the sidewalk. I turned back to the room. Everything was neat. Ms.
Rebello had probably stepped in after the cops had tossed it. Funny they should have left it messy. Usually they don't.
I started at the bathroom and went through the room slowly.
Even in a bath-and-bed apartment there are lots of places to look when you don't know what you're looking for. I looked under the rug and in the toilet tank. I felt inside the water spout in the tub.
I used the plier part of my combination tool to take off the shower head. I pulled the stopper from the drain and shined my flashlight in. I shook out the towels, and felt carefully over the shower curtain. I checked the tiles in the shower to make sure there wasn't a loose one with something hidden behind it. I did the same with the baseboard, and the ceiling molding. I removed the nut from the tap in the sink drain and found a wet soap-and-hair ball. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew that wasn't it. I shined my light into the sink drain. I emptied the wastebasket and put the stuff back in. I smelled the shaving lotion and looked at the bottle against the light. I tasted the baby powder and then emptied the container into the toilet. There was nothing in there but talc. I flushed the toilet and threw the container in the wastebasket. I held the shampoo bottle up to the light. I examined the toothpaste tube, and the deodorant stick and the shaving cream can. All of them were what they appeared to be. I took the toilet paper off the roll and looked at it carefully from each end. There was nothing rolled into it. I shined my light between each vane on the radiator. I checked the medicine cabinet. When I was satisfied that there was nothing that would do me any good in the bathroom, I moved to the big room. And in about ten minutes I found it.
Taped to the bottom of one of the storage drawers in the platform bed was a white envelope and in the envelope were eight Polaroid pictures, seven of a woman with no clothes on, one, taken in a mirror, of a man and woman with no clothes on. The man was Craig Sampson. The woman was holding a towel in front of her face.
I took the pictures over to the desk and sat down and spread them out on the desk and turned on the gooseneck lamp that sat on the back corner of the desk. I studied them in an entirely professional way. She was lying on, or standing beside, a bed in what was probably a hotel room. She was either stark naked (five pictures, including the one with Sampson) or wearing the kind of garter belt and stockings get-up that has so successfully weathered the test of time in Playboy (three pictures). I was comforted by the garter belt poses. I'd begun to think only of and I still cared for that sort of thing.
The room was very still while I looked at the pictures. There was the white sound of the rain on the roof, the occasional settling creak of an old house responding to the steady weight of gravity, and an occasional sound of
