“I was there. I saw him follow Sayre Rauth.”
“Sayre…? That what she call herself here? You meet her?”
“I have.”
She tilted her chin at me. “And are you working for her?”
“No.”
“Then why are you collecting this for her?” And she nodded toward the black plastic bag on the floor, the one she’d tried to hand me when I came to the door.
“A man named Paul Windmann hired me.”
She smiled.
“Oh, Windmann. Did he enjoy his nap?”
“So that was you then? The woman he picked up and took back to his place?”
“Yes. It was George’s plan. How we get the lever edge.”
Elena beamed as she described how Owl had cleverly arranged it all. Setting up Windmann, providing the roofie, so they could steal his keys and break into Rauth Realty’s townhouse, where Windmann worked as her second-in-command. George, bless his 84-year-old heart, had done the actual break-in. I could almost hear him crowing about it, chuckling over how he’d neither lost his touch nor fallen behind the times in terms of tools. Once he’d gotten inside, he’d plugged an ordinary iPod into the USB port on her computer and used it to siphon information off her hard drive. The iPod that lay at the bottom of the black plastic bag. The iPod Windmann had hired me to get back for him.
“But Elena,” I said, turning the plastic bag over in my hand, “if you and George stole her files so you’d have something to hold over her head, why did you agree to sell them back to Windmann? Why were you ready to hand them over to me at the door?”
“Because everything’s gone wrong!” Elena said. “I can’t reach George, I don’t know where he is, he don’t call…I’m scared again. Maybe something happen to him, maybe if I stay something gonna happen to me. I know I have to go, run, get away. But for that I need money. So I contact Windmann and I sell the files back to him. Only thing I have left to sell, Mr. Sherwood. I’m not eleven anymore.”
She stopped talking. The silence pressed down on her. On both of us.
“I need to know,” she said finally. “Did George suffer? Was he in any pain? How…”
“He was dead by the time I got to him,” I said. “Less than a minute. He’d hit his head badly. I think it killed him instantly. I don’t think he suffered.”
Her face went waxy pale and she ran for the bathroom door. She was sick.
I took the iPod out of the plastic bag and powered it up. Brought up the menu. The device had a 40 gigabyte memory, but only one song was listed on the screen. One song, when a machine like this can hold ten thousand. What was on the rest of the machine’s memory? What sort of files had Owl found?
I set the bag aside and looked around the apartment. I opened the writing desk’s drawer. Inside were pens, loose change, utility bills addressed to L. Andrews, pink parking garage ticket stubs probably belonging to the boyfriend.
Hanging over the desk’s chair was a pair of grease-stained coveralls with the name “Jeff” stitched on them. Through the open closet door I could see another couple pairs hanging. I turned to the bookshelf Elena had pointed to earlier. Not searching for any particular title, just allowing my eyes to take them all in. One book on the third shelf down stuck out half an inch farther than all the others in the same row. Its spine was brown.
I pulled it out the rest of the way. It was a tall book titled
And Michael Cassidy was the woman Addison had run off with when he skipped out on bail. The same Michael Cassidy who’d had a key to this apartment…
I could almost feel the gears shifting into place.
Owl wouldn’t just have recognized her when she walked in on them—he’d have made the connection between her and her fugitive boyfriend. If Michael Cassidy is back here in New York, he’d have thought, Addison’s probably with her, or not far behind. Or at least she’d probably know where he was.
So Owl must’ve confronted her, told her he knew who she was, told her that if he’d recognized her other people would, too; he’d have convinced Michael Cassidy that if someone was trying to kill her and she wanted to stay out of sight she’d be better off going with him than trying to hide on her own. It was something people said Owl had always been able to do, persuading people, getting them to follow his lead. It had been one of his strengths as a private eye, and now that he was a harmless-looking old man it must’ve been even easier for him— he could play on people’s sympathy, and even the most beautiful young woman wouldn’t worry about his intentions, about going back to this nice old man’s hotel room.
I noticed that the sounds of Elena’s retching had ceased.
I went and looked into the bathroom. She was asleep on the bathroom floor, curled next to the porcelain toilet.
I looked at her cut arm. The blood-soaked t-shirt was brown now, not red.
I let her sleep.
With the black plastic bag in my hand and the hardcover copy of the
I’d come looking for answers. I’d found some, but now I also had a heap more questions. That was life, the deck was stacked; always the questions outnumbering the answers.
The corridor to the vestibule and the street door looked marginally different than when I had gone into the apartment. The telephone directories had been pushed aside and both doors shut. It was relatively quiet cut off from the street noise.
Daylight from the partially open courtyard door still came from beneath the slant of the stairwell, but I no longer heard the sound of the garden hose rinsing out trash barrels.
Before I left, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to get some more information about Mr. Andrew from Luis. That’s what I thought.
I started for the courtyard door and reached out a hand to push it farther open, but from the corner of my eye I saw something that registered as completely wrong.
Under the stairwell were more stairs, in shadow, leading down to a storage basement. A man was on them, but he was neither ascending nor descending, he was lying prone.
His workboots were toes-up on the top step, his head was awkwardly bent back over the seventh step down. Below his chin was a vivid, frown-shaped welt across his throat. Blood on his lips and red drool in his chin stubble. He was looking up, only he wasn’t looking, not anymore. Nevermore.
It was disorienting for a second, like meeting someone face-to-face on an Escher staircase: going up/coming down? coming up/going down? Maybe he was really standing up and I was the one lying down.
Then, no maybe about it. The slant of daylight from the courtyard changed shape, the rhomboid widening. I turned, but not quick enough. Something crashed down on my head and I fell forward.
Last thing I was aware of: a steely sound, a sound like a roulette wheel at the moment when the croupier drops the ball in—No more bets,
Chapter Eleven: INCH-HIGH PRIVATE EYE
I came to, not in darkness but gauzy half-light, wondering why my head hurt so much and why the mattress was so lumpy: what was it stuffed with, juice boxes and chicken bones?
I was lying on top of the dead man, the both of us in a heap at the bottom of the basement stairs. I
