Then I walked back into the living room, folded up the sheet and closed the sofa. Next to the sofa was a bookcase.
What was she reading now?
There were some books on metaphysics, a book by Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, one by Schopenhauer, some works on Eastern mysticism, some books of pop psychology and a few psychiatry textbooks.
What caught my eye was a shelf of feminist writings. That was unusual. When we were married, she never read any feminist material-never paid it much attention. She seldom read fiction. Her reading tastes ran to contemporary non-fiction, mostly biographies, and some history. She didn’t read ephemeral subjects like psychology, philosophy or mysticism, and never advocacy literature.
Interesting how her reading tastes had changed so radically. It was almost as if the library belonged to a different person. I would never have known that these books were hers.
A book was on the floor next to the side table. The bookmark was on page 124. It was The Handmaid’s Tale.
She never would have read that kind of book before.
Alongside the bookcase was a computer on a wooden stand against the wall. It was a Dell mini-tower with a Pentium III processor. I switched it on.
An icon of a padlock appeared on the screen. My stomach sank.
I typed, “FUCK YOU.”
A little x appeared next to the padlock.
After a couple more feeble attempts, and a couple more little x’s, I gave up. At least I could take her floppies and run them back at the office. I looked for them but they weren’t in the stand and they weren’t in the bookcase either. As far as I could tell, they weren’t anywhere in the apartment.
Did the cops take the floppies? Or did the killer?
The bedroom was next. I opened the door and looked in. It was a small room. Everything had been tossed about like the aftermath of some berserk tornado. The contents of drawers had been emptied on the bed and the floor. The bed was a single against the far wall. A night table next to it had been knocked over. The closet held a lot of dresses, but they had all been shoved to one side. I inspected the dresses, one by one.
Most men don’t know the first thing about women’s clothing and I was no exception. You approach the subject the same way you consider some Eastern religion. It’s there, it has its own mystique, its own rules, but you can’t even begin to comprehend it.
Alicia wore only dresses. She wore soft flowing dresses that emphasized her height and her femininity. She never wore skirts and blouses. Occasionally she wore Levi jeans with a sweatshirt or a T-shirt. And she never wore designer jeans.
Jesus, I’d forgotten so much about her. But I still remembered a lot. Like the way she cocked her head to one side when she gave you her throaty laugh. And the way she could look through you without saying a word when she thought you were holding something back from her.
I knew I was going to miss her. And I didn’t have even the faintest beginning of an idea of who killed her.
CHAPTER VII
The traffic was moving freely as I drove north up I-95. I was averaging seventy. It was ten AM. The skies were a leaden overcast and threatening rain.
I used to think people never changed. Now I had to allow for the possibility that maybe people could change. Only not so radically. Like Hanoi Jane turning into a Conservative. How did something like that happen? It was almost as if she’d become a different person. Would I have married her if I’d known her in this incarnation? That was a tough one to call.
It was when I hit Greenwich that the car started to overheat again. I slowed down until the gauge came back to the mid-point.
Chisolm’s company was located in Norwalk, about an hour from the city. I pulled off I-95 at exit 15 and drove north a mile and a half up route 7 past fast-food franchises and sleek industrial buildings until I got there.
The place sat on two acres surrounded by a chain link fence with rolled razor ribbon on top. The entrance had a guard post with a swinging barricade. Next to the guard house was a discreet sign that read INSIGNIA BIOTECHNOLOGY LTD. The guard had some kind of comic opera uniform with a gold braid that made him look like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan. He shouted my name through the intercom and got the OK to let me in. He pushed a button and the barricade swung open while another guard looked at me without much interest.
There were two small buildings in the compound. Modern, gray and impersonal, with not a superfluous line in sight. Cookie-cutter designs without an original architectural thought, interchangeable with a thousand other nondescript industrial structures.
I pulled into a visitor’s parking slot in front of the administrative building. An electric eye opened the front door for me and I stepped into the reception area. The dark brown carpeting was deep and the lighting was subdued. The place was decorated in earthy autumn colors. There was a young woman with an absent look on her face at the console. She gave me her visitor’s smile, asked me to sign the log and escorted me down a featureless corridor to Chisolm’s secretary’s office.
Chisolm’s secretary was one of those lookers who’d just passed her prime. She was a tad hefty around the middle and had on too much make-up. Her hair was an artificial shade of reddish-brown that came right out of a bottle. It was done up in a style that strove for fashion but didn’t quite make it. She reminded me of Melanie Griffith on a bad day. I wondered how long she’d been with him. Some secretaries stayed with their bosses longer than their wives did.
She led me into his office. Her gray knit dress clung to her backside as it swayed. She was wearing sheer stockings and high heels with straps.
“Have a seat, Mr. Rogan,” she purred. “Mr. Chisolm is in the laboratory, but he told me he would be back shortly.” She eyed me up and down. “Would you care for some coffee?”
“Few things would please me more. I’ll take it black.”
“Sugar?” she smiled.
I smiled back. “Yes, I’ll have some sugar, sugar.”
The eyes with too much mascara glinted. “I won’t be long.”
Was Chisolm her type? Or was I? Or was Antonio Banderas?
She brought me the coffee in a Rosenthal cup and saucer with little flowers. There was a little mahogany coffee table in front of a couch across from Chisolm’s desk. She bent down and placed the coffee gracefully on the table, together with a linen napkin and a small silver spoon.
As she straightened up, she looked into my eyes and said, “My name is Justine. If there’s anything…” She didn’t finish the sentence.
If she’d been ten years younger, maybe…
“Thanks, sugar.” I gave her the sincere look right back. “Your kindness warms my very soul.”
She left me alone in the room. I took a sip of the coffee and felt like I was at a garden party. It was lukewarm and watery. You could see the little flower at the bottom of the cup through the light brown liquid. Blumschencafe.
Chisolm was no tightwad. It was obvious he wanted to display every nickel he had. The furniture, the carpeting and the paneling must have all set him back a pretty bob. There was a picture window to my left that looked out onto the quadrangle with an expanse of blue-green grass, trimmed hedges and a row of fountains, each one higher than the one in front of it.
The door opened and Chisolm stepped in, letting it close behind him with a muted click.
“Mr. Rogan,” he said, with what could have passed for a genuine smile in a dark alley if you didn’t look too closely. I stood and we shook hands.
“Have a seat,” he said and motioned me over to the couch. He took a seat in an overstuffed leather chair that
