students.”
“What kind of classes?”
“Well, she enrolled at the New School and started becoming interested in metaphysics and things like that.”
“Why did she do that?” I asked. “Once she finished grad school she said she’d never set foot in a classroom again.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it was like something to do with the current atmosphere-liberalism, new age thinking, the environment, that sort of thing.”
“She was never like that. You knew how she thought. She hated fuzzy thinking. She liked things to be hard, clear and precise.”
Laura gave me a little smile. “Yes, she did. But that was then…”
“What do you mean?”
She considered for a minute. “Well, she really seemed to take to this Eastern mysticism. The teacher was almost like a master and the students were his disciples. They…” She seemed reluctant to continue.
I waited. Finally I prodded her. “Go ahead.”
She still didn’t speak. Then she said, “Well, they all had…sex…”
I raised my eyebrows. “Yes?” I had a notion this was going to be a good one.
“I mean sexual relations.”
“Yes. So what?”
She blushed. “As part of the…religious practices.”
“And the teacher encouraged this?”
Her face turned redder. “Not only encouraged it-he demanded it. Alicia said he told them it was the only way they could get in touch with their true natures. She said it didn’t matter which sex or sexual orientation.”
I nodded. “Sure. I know these cults. Polymorphous perversity. Any orifice in a storm. And did Alicia join in the fun and games?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. That hurt because it was the first time in our lives that she kept a secret from me. She started to keep other things from me, too. I think it was because she became close to one person in particular. A woman in the class. They started spending a lot of time together.”
She stopped walking, breathed a sigh that came from some place deep inside her anguish, and looked up at the street sign as if she were trying to get her bearings.
We were standing in front of a Korean greengrocer with its orderly rows of produce. The place was immaculate. On the sidewalk in front of the store, the Korean work ethic was getting a severe workout. The women and children were working the counter inside, but in front of us the father and the grandfather were wasting time playing a board game. The board was a piece of corrugated cardboard from some fruit carton, crudely hand-drawn, and the moving pieces were hand-made. Had they finally become that Americanized? Were they getting soft and lazy? No longer so hungry?
Laura turned to look at me. “You know, you’re going to get into trouble. The police sealed up her apartment. Nobody is allowed inside.”
“Don’t you fret,” I told her. “It’s just a minor inconvenience.”
CHAPTER VI
The yellow police tape covered the front door in an X-pattern, like an emblem to ward off evil spirits. I peeled it off and unlocked the door. The apartment was just the way I imagined it. It was on the ground floor of an old brownstone and it was furnished in a traditional style with muted colors. There was a vestibule as you entered, a small kitchen and bathroom on the left, a living room straight ahead and the bedroom to the right of the living room. Both the living room and the bedroom had doors that opened out onto a tiny garden.
The garden was well-tended. You could see someone had given it a lot of care. This time of year the flowers were in full bloom. The area was completely walled in by an eight-foot high stockade fence. There was a double steel door to the basement that was padlocked on the outside.
Someone had started to tidy up the apartment, but the effort hadn’t helped much. Furniture was put where it didn’t belong, clothing and papers covered the floor, and pots and pans were all over the entrance hall. Whoever ransacked the place was looking for more than just valuables.
I took a look in the kitchen. The room was so cramped there was only enough space for a half-height refrigerator. But there was every kind of cooking utensil imaginable. It put me in mind of how much she loved to cook and how she’d make an elaborate project of her meals, from getting up early and tramping down to Chinatown or Little Italy or wherever she’d have to go for the proper ingredients.
Dammit to hell. I shook off the thought.
I checked the contents of the refrigerator and the freezer-opened every container, emptied the ice-cube trays, unscrewed the refrigerator light, took apart the microwave and emptied every container in the cupboard.
Nothing.
Then I did what I love best. Made an in-depth survey of the garbage. It was well on its way to stinking to high hell. What surprised me was the McDonald’s container next to the yogurt cup and a couple of Twinkies wrappers. That wasn’t like Alicia.
Next I checked out the bathroom. Under and behind the sink and toilet, the shower stall, the light fixture. Then the medicine cabinet. You can tell a lot about a person by looking through the medicine cabinet. There were half a dozen prescription vials-five of them from a Dr. Pasternak. She would never have taken those medications before. The names were familiar-Prozac, Nembutal. Grown-up candies.
There were also a lot of expensive cosmetics. That was a departure too. She used to wear eye shadow and blush, but that was the extent of it. She didn’t need much make-up. She had a clear complexion and a healthy look about her.
After I’d searched the place for a couple of hours, I took a break. There were five bottles of Michelob Dry in the fridge. I took one. She wouldn’t have minded. The apartment was sweltering and the beer was cold going down. I put the bottle against my forehead to cool off. A drop of water ran down my cheek and into my collar. I wiped it off with the back of my hand.
Then I did what I didn’t want to. I went back into the living room and studied the chalk outline on the floor. I stared at it for a good ten minutes. Then I knelt down and felt the rug. It was a hand-woven Iranian in a pattern that looked like a fruit tree with an intricate branch structure. Small fragments of skull bone and brain tissue were splattered all over the weave, disturbing the symmetry of the design.
The sofa, armchairs and coffee table were the same ones we had in our place when we were married. The same sofa we had sex on.
There was just one little oversight.
The police didn’t know it was a convertible because they hadn’t opened it up.
Careless-or maybe they didn’t give a damn.
I opened the sofa the same way I’d done so many times before. A rumpled sheet was wedged inside. I unfolded it slowly and spread it out. A small hard white pebble was caught in one of the creases.
You didn’t have to be Marion Barry to know what it was. Employee drug testing was a lucrative and growing business. This was like spinach to Popeye.
It was a cocaine rock.
That didn’t mean too much. It was probably just recreational use. Snorting cocaine on weekends. The fact that it was in the sofabed meant they were screwing. Snorting and screwing.
Well, it wasn’t surprising. Lab studies always showed coke was the drug of choice among primates.
I was about to fold up the sheet when something else caught my attention. It was the heavy sweet scent of Shalimar. Alicia didn’t use Shalimar-at least not that I remembered.
So I returned to the bathroom and checked out the perfume bottles. There was Jess, Lauren and Je Reviens-but no Shalimar.
