“What do you do now?”
“I’m an architect. An apartment I lease across the hall is my office.”
“Skyscrapers?”
He grinned. “Not hardly. I mostly tell people how to reroute plumbing, or which walls they can tear down without the building collapsing around them.”
“You good at your work?”
“Nothing’s collapsed yet.”
“About that other part of your life. . ”
“I suppose you’re checking out everyone in my old unit.”
“Yes. Routine.”
“Oh, sure. May I ask why?”
“We’d rather not say right now.”
“Uh-huh. I was positive you were going to say you were touching all the bases.”
Paula felt like telling him she didn’t have time to play dueling cliches. “I’m interested in your whereabouts on these particular evenings,” she said, making her tone official, as if she’d never had an impure thought in her life. She read off the dates of the Night Spider murders.
“On one of those nights I was at the Bas Mitzvah of a friend’s daughter, all afternoon and most of the evening. The other nights I’d have to check on.” He uncrossed his legs. “But I might be able to save you some trouble. May I show you something?”
“Of course.”
He bent forward and pulled up his left pants leg to reveal a nasty, barely healed jagged scar running down the inside of his knee. Stitch marks were still visible. “From radical knee surgery. My surgeon will tell you this scar is from the third of three operations over the past year, the last one about a month ago. I can’t put my full weight on this knee, run or take stairs fast, or climb. Haven’t been able to for months.”
Paula sized up the operation scar. It appeared to be as serious as claimed. She couldn’t imagine anyone scaling buildings or hand-walking across ropes or cables with such an injury. “An old war wound acting up?”
“Rugby injury. I was playing in a league. Stepped on a tent peg somebody had driven into the practice field in the park, and forgot when they broke camp. I wrenched my knee and messed it up permanently. Dumb thing to do.”
“Forgetting a tent peg?”
“No. Tripping over one.”
Paula lowered her notepad and pencil to her lap and looked at him.
He gave her his handsome white grin set off by tanned features. “If you don’t believe me, you can talk to my surgeon at Kincaid Memorial Hospital. He’ll verify what I’ve said, tell you it was a classic tent-peg injury. He might even attest to my good character, as I’ve paid him what I owe.”
“You know I
“Of course.” He braced himself with a hand on one of the chair arms, then stood up with some difficulty. Paula watched as he limped to an antique kneehole desk and wrote something on a white card. His business card, which he handed to her before sitting back down. Paula thought the limp looked genuine enough.
So did the business card, with the address of the apartment across the hall. On the back he’d written the name of a doctor at Kincaid Memorial.
Paula slipped the card into her purse next to her gun. “I do have a few questions about your SSF unit,” she said. “Nothing that would cause you to reveal any state secrets.”
The tooth-whitener-commercial smile again. “I don’t know many of those. Our operations were always narrowly defined.”
“What did you think of your commander, Colonel Gray?”
“Nobody has so far,” Paula told him, thinking he might be a dangerous man in a serious disagreement. “Kray seems to have had the respect of his men.”
“He earned it.”
Paula glanced down at the notepad and papers in her lap. “I have another name on my list, without an address. Maybe you can help me with it. Aaron Mandle.”
Linnert sat back and looked. . Paula wasn’t sure of his expression, but it certainly made his blue eyes darker.
“I couldn’t tell you where to find Mandle,” he said. “Haven’t thought of him in a long while.”
“So maybe you can tell me something about him. Anything that might help me locate him.”
“He was a peculiar guy. But then we all were, I guess. It takes a certain type, in that kind of unit.” He looked at her and seemed to be considering what he’d just said. “But Mandle was an oddball even in our outfit. Damned good soldier. Knew how to. . Knew his work and did it well. I guess you know we were primarily a mountain combat unit. Climbing was almost as important as fighting, and we moved every which way on mountainsides-or, for that matter, on building faces in urban settings-as if we were born to it. In a way, you had to be. It’s gotta run in your blood. Mandle always removed his right boot and sock before an operation that entailed climbing. He climbed barefoot, and better than any of us. Had this weird extra-long big toe that allowed him to gain grip and leverage.”
Paula remained outwardly calm. “Barefoot, huh?”
“Just one foot. He’d sit down on the ground and whip off that right boot and sock, stuff the sock down in the boot, then sling the boot from his belt by its laces. Carry it that way all through whatever happened next.”
Paula was having a hard time breathing. “He ever explain the freaky toe?”
“Nope. Wouldn’t talk about it. But he could extend that toe out to the side, almost like a thumb; he really knew how to use it. Used that foot like a hand, if he had to.”
“Odd, all right.”
“You sure you don’t want a cup of hot chocolate? Detective. . Paula?”
“Paula,” she confirmed. “Paula Ramboquette.”
“French. Cajun. Ah, that explains your accent!”
“Cajun,” she confirmed. “And thanks anyway but no to the hot chocolate. Listen, Mr. Linnert-”
“Harry.”
“Harry, was there anything else peculiar about Aaron Mandle?”
“Well, he wasn’t easy to talk to. Kept his thoughts to himself. A loner, I guess you’d call him. But when it came to teamwork, he was there. There was no other way. We had to trust each other.”
“Male bonding.”
Linnert nodded somberly. “You can joke about it, Paula, but it kept us alive. The ones of us that stayed alive.”
“I wasn’t joking,” she assured him sincerely.
She stood up. She knew she’d better get out of there or she’d be curled up on the sofa and sipping hot chocolate before she knew what happened.
“Thanks for your time and cooperation, Mr. Linnert- Harry.”
“Want me to phone my surgeon and tell him you’ll be coming by? Doctor-patient confidentiality and all that.”
“No, no. I’ll take care of it. I won’t have to know any details about the injury. Just his general opinion on how it would incapacitate you. You’ve been helpful.”
“Have I?”
“Well, maybe. We never know for sure until later.”
She felt a mild jolt of alarm.
But he was smiling and merely escorting her to the door. He opened it for her and stood at an angle to let her pass. She felt uneasy with him so close and wasn’t sure why.
“I wouldn’t mind being interrogated by you again,” he said.
