“You keep a sharp eye out,” Daniel said, starting the engine. “So will I.”
He drove west, meandering some to get a closer look at a ruined building, or simply a pile of wreckage.
After about ten minutes he saw a house that was leveled, near a barn that was damaged but still standing. Nobody was in sight in any direction.
“Think I might have caught a look at a brown and white dog,” Daniel said, stopping the SUV. “Mighta gone behind that barn. Why don’t we-”
But Gretchen was out of the vehicle and running toward the barn.
Daniel drove after her, making sure he didn’t run over anything sharp. He parked the truck where it couldn’t be seen from the highway.
He was smiling.
“I don’t see her,” Gretchen said. “She mighta gone inside the barn.”
“Then let’s go in and look,” Daniel said.
He got down out of the SUV and followed Gretchen into the barn. It was dim inside, and there was nothing there but some old rusty tools and a tractor that looked as if it hadn’t run in years. And a length of rope draped over a peg in a supporting beam.
“Take a look there behind the tractor,” he told Gretchen.
While she was doing that, he went to the broad wooden door and tried to pull it shut. It wouldn’t move much, and jammed a couple of feet short of closing. That was okay, if there was a little light beyond what was leaking in through the separated wooden slats.
“How come you’re shutting the door?” Gretchen asked.
“If Candy’s in here, we wouldn’t want her running outside,” Daniel said.
Something in his voice must have alerted Gretchen. She gave him a wide-eyed look and bolted for the barn door.
Daniel tripped her, then lifted her and held her upright by her hair and marched her toward one of the stalls. She was surprisingly light and it was no effort.
He snatched the rope off the peg with his free hand along the way.
Gretchen was trembling with fear.
Daniel with anticipation.
9
New York, the present
T he city was still in the sweaty grip of summer heat and humidity. Sal and Harold didn’t find much relief inside Macy Collins’s apartment building, but it was better than outside.
Macy had lived in 5E. Harold knocked on the door of 5D, and Sal took 5F. They would work their way in opposite directions around the hall. Usually old apartment buildings like this one smelled like urine, disinfectant, and over-fried bacon, in various mixture and degree. This building made a different and less offensive olfactory impression that Sal couldn’t quite place.
Nobody answered the knock on 5F’s door. Sal moved along to 5G and heard Harold meet someone and enter 5D. “Are you baking something?” Sal heard Harold ask, after identifying himself. “It smells wonderful.”
“Carrot cake,” said the voice of an older woman.
“I love carrot cake.”
“Your nose seems to be running. Do you need a handkerchief, detective?”
“That’s not-”
The door closed. That was fine with Sal.
The door he’d just knocked on opened, and a woman in her thirties smiled out at him. She was short and plump, and her dark hair, combed straight back as if she were standing in a stiff breeze, emphasized a sweet, fleshy face. She was perspiring heavily, and her apartment didn’t smell as good as the one Harold had drawn. “You’re with the police,” she said.
“I’m usually the one who says that,” Sal said.
“But I’m not,” the woman said. “I mean, with the police. You see, if you said-”
“I understand,” Sal said, wishing Harold had knocked on this door.
“I’m Charmain Graham,” the woman said, stepping back so he could enter. “Do you want to know if I was home last night? Did I see or hear anything unusual? Did I know the dead woman well? Do I have something to say that might provide information about the murder?”
“Do you want me to sit under a bright light while you question me?” Sal asked.
She appeared puzzled. “Why would I-” A wide, wide grin. “Oh, I see. You wondered, was I going to hamburger you.”
“Hamburger?”
“You know-grill you. That’s police slang.”
“I’ve never heard that one,” Sal said.
“It was on one of those CSI programs.”
Sal knew he was going to have difficulty with this woman. She seemed to see conversation as a kind of oblique jousting with rubber lances. She motioned for Sal to sit on a small sofa with a worn green slipcover. A ginger cat glared at him and then skulked away. “I won’t do anything with a telephone directory,” she said.
She had Sal there. Again. He sat and looked at her.
Charmain grinned. “Isn’t that what the police do sometimes with a stubborn suspect? Whack him in the head with a phone directory? So there are no marks?” She acted it out, swinging hard with her arms parallel to each other.
“That’s right,” Sal said, playing along. “The more serious crimes get the biggest boroughs.”
“Now you are joking with me.” Charmain Graham laughed. She had a nice, musical laugh. Sal found himself liking her, despite that fact that she might be certifiably insane.
“So did you?” Sal asked. “See or hear anything last night?”
“Anything suspicious, you mean?” She sat down in a small upholstered chair angled toward the sofa. The chair creaked a warning, but she ignored it. There was a low wooden coffee table between them, bare except for some back issues of New York magazine fanned out like a hand of cards. The apartment was cheaply furnished but impeccably clean and ordered. There was nothing superfluous. No gewgaws, no photographs. Sal had talked to plenty of potential witnesses like this; Charmain Graham was lonely and glad for the company, even if it meant there’d been a murder next door.
Sal shrugged and smiled at her. “Tell me anything that comes to mind. I’ll figure out whether it’s suspicious.”
“The policeman who was here earlier said the murder took place in the park, but the killer came here afterward to clean up. How weird is that? They know that’s what he did because of the blood all over-”
“Yes, we’ve already established that,” Sal said, putting a little bite in his already gruff voice. He wanted some free association here, but he didn’t want the conversation to go off a cliff.
Charmain got the message. She teetered for a moment as if about to lose her balance, and then righted herself, her fingertips touching the base of her throat, and assumed a new attitude. She was an actress in one of those CSI episodes now. “At approximately seven minutes after three this morning, I heard laughter from next door.”
“You mean Macy Collins’s apartment.”
“It would be her bedroom, to be exact,” Charmain said. “I couldn’t sleep, like usual, and I woke up about quarter to three and just laid there. You know, tired but mostly awake and hoping I’d pass out altogether. But all I could do was keep changing positions. I had the air conditioner on high, but it wasn’t doing much, so I went over to adjust it and found it had frozen up, like it does sometimes. It was shooting out little flecks of ice but not much of a breeze. Well, there’s nothing to do then but switch it off and wait for it to thaw out, which it does pretty fast in this weather.”
“So that’s when the room got quiet,” Sal said, trying to keep her on point.
