She prepared herself, then carefully touched the door handle at apartment 3F and tried to turn it, just in case Catherine had forgotten to lock it. The handle didn’t budge. She looked closely at the lock on the door. She didn’t need to try to slide a credit card between the door and the latch, or try to pry it open with the steak knife. She could see that the hardware was the heavy and expensive kind that was fitted tightly and would be sunk too deep into the receptacle to be opened.
She resumed her walk along the hallway. There was an unmarked door, so she tried it. The door opened. Inside were a set of circuit breakers and a supply of cleansers, carpet cleaners, mops, and rags. She stood with the door open and thought. She could pop the circuit breakers. People would come out of their apartments, and one of them would check the panel and flip the breakers back. But that wouldn’t work unless the one who did it was Catherine. If she was asleep, she would never know it had happened. What would rouse her? Pulling a fire alarm would do it, but that would bring firemen and cops. She closed the door to the little room and moved on.
The only barrier that kept Judith away from Catherine was a single wooden apartment door. She had to think of a way to get past that door. Was there a way around it? Was there a way onto the roof? Maybe she could find a rope or make one, tie it to something solid—the central-air-conditioning unit, a pipe—and then lower herself down outside Catherine’s window. She could look in and see her lying in her bed asleep. She could stay pressed against the window like a night creature. And then, when she was ready, she could fire through the glass. No. That was far too athletic for Judith—crazy.
She kept going, looking closely at everything she saw. The windows at the ends of the hallways opened, but that didn’t seem to her to do any good. She studied the ceilings. They were made of plasterboard. If she’d had a ladder, she could go to the ceiling outside of Catherine’s apartment, cut a hole in the plasterboard with her knife, climb up, and carve a hole into the ceiling on Catherine’s side so she could climb down. It was crazier than the first idea: far too loud, and too likely to get her caught.
The doors were beginning to look less substantial. After all, they were made of wood. Maybe, in an hour or two, she could carve a hole through one of them with the knife, reach through it, and turn the handle.
If she had to, she could simply stay here—maybe in the third-floor storage closet across from Catherine’s apartment—until dawn. She could wait and watch until Catherine came out. She recognized that as the first sensible strategy that had occurred to her. She had done the hard part, gotten in past the outer doors without being noticed. If she just stayed in the building, her chance would come. She decided to finish her tour of the building before she gave up and hid in the closet.
She reached the stairwell again, went back down to the lobby, and looked at the triple row of mailboxes. If the Dymo labels told her where people lived, then maybe an empty one would tell her which apartments were vacant. If she could find one, maybe she could break into it and wait in safety.
“Is something wrong?” It was a male voice from behind her.
She turned, her body instantly tense and ready to fight. He was in his fifties or sixties and he wore a uniform, but it wasn’t medical like hers. He was balding and chubby. He looked like a janitor. She said, “I forgot my keys.”
“Your apartment key?”
He didn’t seem threatening now, but she knew it was an illusion. She couldn’t make a mistake. “Yes. I thought it was in my purse, but here I am, and it’s not there. I’m hoping I didn’t lose it permanently.”
“How did you get into the building at all?”
“As I was coming up the steps somebody else was going out. He held the door for me. I didn’t know I didn’t have my key until I got up there.”
“Do you have your ID?”
“Sure.” She was making a plan. It was just a series of pictures in her mind, a flash of images. She would fire, and step around him to go out the front door. She would dash back along Northeast Russell Street to the hospital. If she was being observed, she would go into the building as though she were late for the midnight shift, then come out of the hospital at the parking lot entrance with whatever stragglers were left, make her way to her car, and be gone.
She opened her wallet and held it up so he could see the Catherine Hobbes driver’s license and the credit card. She pointed at the mailboxes. “See? That’s me—Catherine Hobbes.” She let her hand linger near the pistol she had taped to her body.
The man held out his hand. “I’m Dewey. I do the handyman work for these apartments and three others that the company owns.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Judith. She managed a sad smile as she shook his hand. “We’ll probably see each other a lot while I’m sleeping in the hall.”
“Don’t worry,” said Dewey. “I’ve got a grand master key for the building. I can let you in.”
“You can?” Her eyes widened, and her smile became real and grew. “Oh, that’s wonderful. You don’t know how awful I felt. Thanks so much.”
“Don’t mention it. What’s the apartment again?”
“Three-F. But there are six or seven interns on my floor, and at least half of them will be trying to sleep off a forty-eight-hour shift. Do you think we’d be quieter if we took the stairs?”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve had all kinds of calls to come here in the middle of the night, and the elevator never wakes anybody up. When it’s a plumbing thing on an upper floor you’ve got to get up there quick, or it’s going to start coming through the ceilings. You a nurse?”
“Hmm?”
“A nurse. Are you a nurse?”
She tried to think of something he would know nothing about. “Yep. A surgical nurse.” She was fairly sure that anybody who’d had surgery would have been unconscious.
“You mean like when the surgeon says ‘Forceps,’ you’re the one who says ‘Forceps’ and hands them to him?”
“That’s me. Only sometimes I hand him the monkey wrench or the pruning shears for fun.”
Dewey chuckled. He looked at the numbers lighting up above the elevator door: 2, then 3.
She had to get whatever talk there was going to be out of the way before the elevator door opened, and she needed to head off trouble. She reached into the pocket on the side of her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “I’d like to give you something for helping me out.”
He said, “It’s nothing.”
“Please,” she said. “I insist.” She had to hold him off this way or he would expect to come in, have a soft drink, and be sure her faucets weren’t leaking. She had to keep this under control and foreclose all chances of a mistake.
The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. She tiptoed to the door of apartment 3F, almost pantomiming the act of being quiet.
Dewey slipped his key ring off his belt and tried a key, but the lock on Catherine’s door wouldn’t accept it. As Judith waited, the noise of the keys on the ring seemed to her to be terribly loud. What if Catherine heard that jingling right outside her door? Even if he got the door open Judith might step inside and see Catherine standing there with a gun in her hand. Dewey held up his key ring again, picked another that looked like the first, and tried it. He pushed the door open, but Judith stepped forward and held it open only an inch. She leaned close, whispered, “Thanks,” then slipped inside and closed the door.
It was dark. There seemed to be no sounds of movement in the apartment. Judith stood absolutely still, listening. She heard Dewey’s heavy feet move off. After a few more seconds she heard the elevator doors open, then heard them slide shut. The last barrier was gone. She was in.
56
Judith felt relief, but it was only tentative. She was not yet sure that Catherine had not heard her enter. She listened and waited for a long time, and then began to orient herself in the darkness. This was a big open space, and ahead of her was the large window she had seen at the front of the building. She was standing in the tiled entry where Catherine had left a pair of shoes that must have been wet from yesterday’s rain.
Judith stepped over them and onto the soft carpet, across the room to the window. She took her time, not
