his cache. He didn’t expect to meet me on the street. He didn’t have the right weapon to kill me.”
“That’s a hell of a guess.”
“It feels right.”
“I mean about the weapon.” Scarly scowled. “He might have just decided you were an animal or an obstruction and knifed you.”
Tallow sucked a stray strand of onion out of his left back teeth. “You are a little ray of sunshine, Scarly.”
“You want to get with a sketch artist? Try a digital composite?”
“You’re the one who called him a ghost. No. We have to hope he left some DNA in the paint.” Tallow took another scan of the emulation. “This is about ghosts. And maps. I’m going to need a map. A big-ass map of Lower Manhattan. And some more books.”
“Is this working for you?” said Scarly, taking her own turn around the room.
“It’s helping.”
“I wish I’d seen the real place.”
“Me too. You might have been able to identify some of the scents, if nothing else. And I still don’t know how that door worked.”
Scarly stepped to the photographs of the rear of the apartment’s front door. “Yeah,” she said. “Bat looked at these. He thought he might be able to puzzle it out if he could see it properly but that the photos didn’t have enough information.” She looked back at Tallow, eyes narrowed. “You really think you met the guy?”
“I really do.”
“Fuck. Don’t tell anyone else, all right? You don’t want to be the guy who talked to his suspect and let the asshole walk.”
“No,” said Tallow, bumping back to ground level with a chill shudder. “No, I guess I don’t.”
Scarly walked past him to the elevator, punching his arm as she went. “Fucking correct.”
“Thanks for having my back.”
“You’re all right, John. Also, you bring good food. Even if it was a little late. Come on. We’ll collect my pet retard from his robot-fondling session and you can drive us over to Pearl Street. We can take a look at that door. That is some high-end security shit, and if nothing else,
The words
They went to collect Bat, who was hunched over the bench looking at some paperwork and hugging himself.
“We got some more ballistics processing back. John, do you know of a guy called Delmore Tenn?”
“Del Tenn?” said Tallow. “Sure. He was once assistant chief for Manhattan South. Years back. There was some accident, he pensioned out…I want to say his kid got killed? Something like that. The poor bastard fell apart.”
“Yeah,” said Bat, not taking his eyes off the paper. “Stray bullet from a gang firefight. His daughter was shot through the head. But they never found the gun.”
“Oh no,” said Tallow.
“A Kimber Aegis handgun. There was some weird rifling on it, like someone had been fucking around with the barrel. Would have been a snap to match bullet to gun. If they’d ever found the gun.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“You know what the worst thing is?” Bat said, his voice getting muted and flat. “The kid’s name was Kimberly. No one would have thought twice about it at the time. Would have made a sick joke, at most. Kim getting killed by a Kimber.”
Tallow didn’t have anything to say.
Bat wrapped his arms tighter around his body. “What the hell are we into? What’s fucking happening?”
Scarly walked around him to rescue a light coat that had slumped by the bench. “We’re going to take a look at the apartment on Pearl.”
Bat wanted to protest, or perhaps explain, but he visibly lost the energy for it even as he opened his mouth. Instead, he got up, went to a set of drawers with a wobbly column of paper and files balanced atop it, opened the second drawer, and took out a holstered gun. He silently clipped the holster onto his belt, picked up a grimy field bag from behind the bench, and then shouldered past Scarly and Tallow on his way to the elevator.
Scarly watched him go and then, mouth set in a little line, went to the top drawer, pulled out a holstered gun, and clipped it to her belt. She shrugged her thin coat on, arched an eyebrow at Tallow as if daring him to say something, and walked past him toward the elevators.
Tallow lifted and reseated his own gun.
“You didn’t tell me to bring a fucking shovel,” Bat said.
“Just get in the back of the fucking car,” Scarly said.
“I would, but I didn’t bring any fucking ropes. Seriously, John, how does your rear fender not just scrape along the fucking street?”
“Bat, just…I don’t know, just give it all a shove.”
“What if there’s a landslide? I might never be seen again. Jesus, what
Tallow ran a hand through his hair. “You people work in the Collyer brothers’ toilet, and you give me trouble about this? Push it all to one side. Get in.”
“The Collyer who?”
“Ride in the back or ride in the trunk, Bat.”
“Okay, okay. But I’m telling you, I think I see the Dead Sea Scrolls at the bottom of this, and I’m only getting in here because I’m afraid of what’s in the trunk.”
Scarly got in the front passenger seat, which was almost as strange to Tallow as the persistent weirdness of being in the driver’s seat. “Who were the Collyer brothers?” she asked.
“Langley and Homer Collyer. First half of the twentieth century. Two hermits in Harlem, lived on the far-ass end of Fifth Avenue.”
Tallow began navigating the car out of One PP.
“Weirdness ran in the family. Their father used to paddle a canoe to work, down the East River to Roosevelt Island. Somewhere around 1925, pop disappeared, mom died, and the two brothers were left this house. The locals thought they were eccentric and wealthy and started sniffing around the house, snooping, maybe trying to pop a window or two. But the Collyers didn’t actually have a pot to piss in and were kind of crazy to boot. So they boarded up the windows, set up mantraps, and only went out at night. They’d sneak out, find stuff that looked useful or interesting or capable of being turned into a trap or weapon, and drag it home. Which is, you know, not a hell of a lot different from your office, except you get that stuff delivered.”
“So this is what fills your car?” said a hunched Bat from the back, looking like the world’s ugliest bit of origami. “Obscure New York history? Anyway. That doesn’t sound so bad. I’d love to do nothing but collect shit all day.”
Tallow gave a small dry laugh. “So in 1947, the whole block is suffused by this awful stench. The only people who aren’t out complaining about it are the Collyers. So eventually people go in. And discover that every piece of trash that dropped on that block in the last twenty years was picked up and stored by the Collyers. A hundred and thirty tons of it. Twenty-five thousand books, fourteen pianos, most of a car, bits of people, uncountable newspapers and boxes. You could get around in there only through tunnels and crawl spaces. Homer Collyer was found dead of a heart attack brought on by starvation. His eyes had hemorrhaged out fifteen years earlier, and he had been completely paralyzed by untreated rheumatism. Langley Collyer was found in one of the tunnels. It looked like he’d been transporting food to Homer when he’d tripped one of his own traps and been crushed to death by a weighted suitcase and three massive bales of newspaper. He was actually the source of the stench. Blind old Homer had taken another week to die.”
“Presumably wondering where his brother had gotten to with lunch,” said Scarly. “This is why you need to call people when you’re carrying sandwiches and taking a detour, John.”
“Bits of people?” said Bat.
“Human organs in jars, stuff like that. Their father was a doctor, but he was ob-gyn. So I’m guessing it wasn’t
