“I was meeting a man.”
Sal said nothing, looking at her hard.
Audrey Ackenheimer shrugged beneath her tent-like robe or night gown. “The woman was average height and weight, I suppose. Had on a light raincoat because it had been drizzling all evening. As she was entering she turned slightly, and I would have gotten a good look at her face, except…” She shrugged again in her noncommittal way.
“The elevator door closed,” Harold said.
She looked at him and grinned. “Amazing!”
“That’s you,” Harold said. “I’m psychic.”
“Hair?” Sal asked.
“Yes,” she and Harold said simultaneously. They both laughed.
“Jesus!” Sal said.
“I think brown, light colored like mine, but I’m not sure. The lighting isn’t great in the halls here. We keep telling the super about it, but nothing’s ever done.”
Sal rummaged through his notes. Harold had already talked to the super, a guy named Drucker who’d spent the murder evening with his wife in front of a blaring flat-panel TV that took up half his apartment wall. Sal had discussed him with Harold and read Harold’s notes. Drucker knew nothing.
“Little guy with blond hair and a mole near the tip of his nose?” Harold asked.
“Yes. You’ve talked to him?”
“Never saw him or even heard of him before just now,” Harold lied.
Audrey’s eyes widened. “That’s amazing!”
“No. You’re ama-”
“Stop it!” Sal said. Harold could turn any interrogation into a shit storm.
“I wouldn’t recognize the woman if I saw her again,” Audrey Ackenheimer said, thinking it was time to get serious before Sal blew his cork. Harold, the nice one, looked at her and kind of rolled his eyes, letting her know he understood. “I have seen her around the building before. Once from a distance, coming out. Another time from the back as she got in the elevator.”
“On her way to see Ann Spellman,” Sal said. “If she was home.”
“Might have paid her a visit, anyway,” Harold said. “If she was sure she wasn’t home.”
“What about men?” Audrey said.
Sal looked at her. “What about them?”
“I did see a storybook-handsome guy, kind of stocky, with wavy dark hair, come and go a few times. Saw him and Spellman leave together once holding hands.”
“I think we know who that is,” Sal said.
“Any other male callers?” Harold asked.
Audrey gave them her shrug again. “Couldn’t say yes or no.”
It was the woman who interested Sal. He wanted to know if she actually existed outside Audrey Ackenheimer’s and Fernandez the super’s imaginations. No one else seemed to have seen this woman, except maybe Theo the cat. And cats were notoriously uncooperative witnesses.
“I don’t spy on people’s personal lives,” Audrey said. “Poor Ann Spellman could have been chaste as a nun, or led a life of wild debauchery. It’s something we’ll never know.”
Sal didn’t agree with her, but didn’t say so.
24
T here wasn’t much pain if she kept her little toe scrunched up.
Pearl was striding along West Seventy-ninth Street toward the office, wearing her New Balance jogging shoes. They were her most comfortable shoes for walking, but her left sock had bunched up and might be causing a blister. She figured she didn’t have far to go, so the hell with it.
She had spent much of the day verifying Louis Gainer’s alibi for the night of Ann Spellman’s murder. Gainer’s fiancee had been aware of his relationship with Spellman, and she described it as “long over.” Pearl let that one pass. It looked like Gainer was innocent, so why screw up a marriage before it even started?
Restaurant receipts and witness statements indicated that Gainer and his fiancee were where he’d said they’d been, with the people he’d named. And the old college friend Gainer had run into in the theater lobby at the approximate time of the murder described their meeting the same way Gainer had. The play they’d attended was titled Chance Encounter. Gainer wouldn’t have chosen that one to lie about. Unless he had a dangerous sense of humor, or no sense of humor at all.
If anything, Gainer was too alibied up for the night of Spellman’s torture and murder. Something Pearl would keep in mind.
Does this job make you cynical, or what?
Pearl’s cell phone, clipped to her belt beneath her light linen blazer, came to life and instinctively her hand moved toward it.
Then paused.
Pearl had a new phone that enabled the use of individual ring tones to identify callers. She stopped walking as she heard the musical strains of “You Talk Too Much,” Joe Jones’s old rhythm-and-blues hit from the sixties. When she looked at the phone’s caller ID, sure enough, she saw Golden Sunset Assisted Living in New Jersey. Where her mother lived, and called from at the most inopportune times.
Not that this was one of those times. But still…
While she was debating whether to take the call, the phone fell silent.
Her mind had been made up for her. She told herself she’d been about to answer, even though she didn’t feel like hearing her mother harangue her for everything from her job to not being married, or for being married to her job.
She decided she really didn’t want to talk with her mother-or, rather, listen to her-even though she had a spare moment.
Pearl smiled. There was nothing like being honest with oneself.
No doubt her mother had left a message. She’d listen to it later.
As she clipped the phone back on her belt-turned off, just in case-the movement of her head caused her to glance behind her.
A tickle moved up her spine. Subtle, but she recognized it.
Something was wrong. She scanned the block she’d been walking along. Nothing seemed unusual. Yet in her initial glance, something hadn’t been right. She knew it. Like many cops with a talent for tailing people, she had a talent for knowing when someone was tailing her.
There!
A woman, slim, average height, wearing yellow, one of those girly sundress outfits that were popular these days. Moving gracefully away from Pearl, slipping in among the throng of pedestrians coming toward her. Even in the bright yellow dress, she’d disappeared. Half a block away, and she made the last of the walk signal. It would be impossible for Pearl to catch up with her.
The woman was familiar, but in a way Pearl couldn’t grasp. There was something unsettling about her.
Then it all clicked into place, how Pearl had caught glimpses of the woman on the subway platform, near the deli she frequented, crossing the street near the office. During the past few days, she and the woman had been in the same place at the same time too often for it to be coincidental.
The woman was a talented tracker, but not a pro. That was how Pearl had spotted her. A pro would have kept her wardrobe drab and wouldn’t have worn the standout yellow dress.
Still, there was something about this woman that suggested she wasn’t to be taken lightly. Something that triggered an emotion deep in Pearl’s consciousness. Fear? She wasn’t sure. Not of what it was or why she was feeling it.
Was the woman Daniel Danielle? It wasn’t impossible. After all, the original Daniel Danielle was sometimes
