pieces by now in some forensic garage. I wondered whether he’d been carrying any identification, whether the car had been registered to him, whether there was any way the cops could have put a name to him. Whether, in short, his beautiful wife, Theresa, was still pacing the floor wondering when he’d stroll through the door, wrapped in his Jimmy Dean cool.
Talk about fallen stars.
Okay, as far as I could see, there were no watchers at the moment. So. Park on a parallel street and walk, keeping my car out of sight of anyone who might come by while I was inside? Or just grab the closest space, in case I had to leave in a hurry?
Habit dies hard. I pulled around a corner and parked a couple of blocks away. I figured if anyone was going to try to come into the apartment while I was there, it would probably be marginally better if they didn’t know I was inside. It might give me the ten to twenty seconds of surprise I’d need to leave the place standing up.
Up the dirty stairs for the second time that day, quietly, just in case, and slowly so I could sort out my lock picks. I paused a few steps from the top and singled out the two I thought I was most likely to use, and then climbed the rest of the way and made the right into the hallway. And then stopped dead, trying to figure out whether to stay or run. One thing was clear. I wouldn’t need the picks.
Halfway down the hall, Thistle’s door sagged inward on a single hinge. The top panel had been hit by something heavy enough to splinter and buckle the entire door, yanking the latch of the lock right out of its socket. I found myself thinking that the noise must have been thunderous.
I stood still, breathing shallowly through my mouth, the same way I do when I think I hear someone moving in a house that’s supposed to be empty. It’s the quietest way to breathe, but it doesn’t let you smell much of anything. We humans have lost maybe ninety-nine percent of what was probably once a pretty keen sense of smell, but the impulse is still there, and even the human sniffer, if the human who’s using it is sufficiently attentive, can occasionally deliver some information: perfume, cigarettes, someone we love, the presence of death.
And, surprise: I learned something. I learned that someone had spilled a large quantity of cheap red wine in the vicinity. The fumes had an acidic edge that went straight to the back of the nose and stayed there. But whoever spilled the rotgut, if he or she was still around, wasn’t making a sound.
My imagination is actually too active for the career I’ve chosen. It’s always too easy for me to visualize someone else, standing just as quietly as I am, waiting for me to give myself away. Waiting for the whisper of furtive movement that says
So be Mister Neighbor. People walked up and down this hall all the time. Time for one of them to come along, and he wouldn’t be on tiptoe. In fact, he’d probably be whistling. So I started to whistle and headed on down the hall, my eyes on the open door. The rank stink of the wine thickened as I approached. When I was opposite it, I slowed, just another curious yobbo, and looked in.
Devastation. The couch was tipped forward, the rug half pulled aside. Junk was everywhere on the floor.
I kept whistling and walked the rest of the way down the hall, to the fire door at the end. I pulled it open and then closed it, loudly enough to be heard by anyone who might be in Thistle’s apartment. Then, moving very quietly, I worked my way back down the hall, my back hugging the wall. I was wishing for the second time in two days that I carried a gun.
At the edge of the door, I stopped, my back still touching the wall, and counted very slowly to ten. Not a sound. I pivoted around and took the three quick steps that put me inside and against the wall, just beside the door. Invisible from the hall, but a nice, close, resolutely life-size target to anyone who might be inside. The smell of the wine was strong enough to choke me, and I breathed through my mouth again, mainly for self-defense. Before I moved another inch, I surveyed everything I could see.
The couch had literally been tossed halfway across the room, as though it had been doll-house furniture. Some serious muscle had been here. The table that had stood in front of the couch was splintered on the floor, beneath a deep dent in the wall, where it had obviously been thrown. One leg had snapped off, and the whole thing leaned against the base of the wall at a vertiginous angle, balanced improbably on a single corner. The carpet was soaked with wine, and the three dirty glasses had been shattered and ground into the rug. Dark shards from the bottle gleamed here and there. The damage extended into the kitchen, where everything small enough to lift had been thrown to the floor, spilled, and broken. The refrigerator lay face-down. Even the open packages of cookies had been trampled to crumbs. As ugly and violent as all of it was, that particular detail relaxed me. I was looking at the uncontrolled malice of fury, not the results of a successful search. Whoever had been here hadn’t found Thistle, and he’d trashed her world, or what remained of it, as punishment.
And he was gone, I was certain of that. I had no sense of anyone being near, and I’m good at that. Still, I moved to the bedroom door on the balls of my feet, as my burglar-mentor had taught me all those years ago, and peered in. The mattress had a huge ragged X slashed into it and it had been thrown against a wall, the boxes of belongings were upended and their contents scattered and broken underfoot. The clothes had been cut up, the notebooks thrown everywhere, some of their pages ripped out and crumpled into tattered little balls.
Just to be thorough, I checked the bathroom. Empty and pretty much intact, spared for some reason by whoever had rampaged here. Maybe he’d been making too much noise; maybe he’d been interrupted. Thistle’s brush was beside the sink, fringed with long flax-colored hair that caused a surprising tug on my heart. There were still damp spots on the floor from the fight with Doc under the cold shower, a fight that felt like it had taken place two days ago.
On the way across the living room, I pushed the front door closed as best I could and shoved the little table against it, just so the noise would give me some warning. Not that I really thought whoever had done all this would be back. But it occurred to me how little I actually knew of Thistle’s life. Who, for example, were the guests who had drunk from the bottle of red wine that now saturated the carpet?
It took me about eight minutes to put the bedroom into some sort of order and to discover that there was no address book. Either Thistle didn’t keep one, or Destructo the Furious had taken it with him, or perhaps eaten it. When I had the mattress back in place and Thistle’s miscellany of possessions returned approximately to the boxes they had come out of, I sat down on the floor and sorted through her notebooks, journals, whatever they were.
I handled them first without opening them, just arranging them chronologically by the dates on the covers. There were twenty-three in all, and the earliest was a little more than two years old. The newest had been begun only a week ago, and I overcame my reluctance to open the covers and flipped through its pages. Only ten or twelve sheets had been used, covered with a tiny, crabbed writing obviously done with a very fine-tipped pen. The writing demonstrated a reckless, aristocratic disregard for the blue lines printed on the pages. She’d written some pages at a diagonal and others horizontally, so the book would have to be held sideways to read the words. Spidery lines framed some paragraphs, and long zigzag squiggles, like a child’s drawing of lightning, linked them to other paragraphs lower on the page. On some pages, Thistle’s writing was a spiral.
Here and there I saw a picture, in the margin or in the middle of a page surrounded by text, just an arrangement of a few lines, all identical: a girl’s face, broadly similar to the younger face Thistle had shown the world on television, eyes downcast. The same face, over and over, eyes always down. A couple of times she had drawn a hand in front of it, fingers spread, as though in the first stage of reaching for something, some item nearly forgotten. Sometimes the spiky words slashed through the face. But it was always looking down at something.
Silently begging Thistle’s pardon, I opened the oldest of the books and began to read.
30
