I didn’t want to leave her alone just yet. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.
She nodded agreement. I could sense she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts.
We walked a few blocks without speaking. A few puffy clouds had appeared in the sky but the day was still sunny and dry. After a while she fixed me with a sideways glance and asked, “Why did you leave Alicia?” Her voice was soft but the tone had an edge to it.
The question caught me off guard. I didn’t answer for a minute. “I thought you knew. She left me—I didn’t leave her. It was…you know…the guy…” I let it trail off.
She shook her head urgently. “No, she told me you left her a long time before that. Not physically, I mean. It’s just that you weren’t there emotionally.”
Christ, I was there. What the hell did women mean? How could you communicate with them?
“Laura,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was there. Same as always.”
“No, that wasn’t it. She kind of felt you withdrew from her. You seldom spoke to her. She said you weren’t concerned about her needs.”
This wasn’t where I wanted the conversation to go. I took another tack.
“Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill her?”
She shook her head and said quietly, “No. That’s why it’s so strange. It’s so unreal—like a fairy tale I used to hear when I was a child. I’ve never known anyone who was murdered before. And now, my big sister…”
“Did you notice any changes in her recently?”
She thought for a while. “Well, she did seem sort of edgy…tense the last few weeks, but I thought it was just pressure from her job.”
“You were the closest person to her,” I said. “If she had a problem, she would’ve told you.”
She shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair. “I used to be. But when she started taking some evening classes she began to drift away from me…she really became involved with the teacher and the other 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.
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 gave him three inches in height over me. The guy had evidently studied the literature on Power Placement.
He reached over and pressed a button on the side of the coffee table. Inside of ten seconds Justine appeared. She looked at him and asked, “Coffee?”
The corners of his mouth turned up imperceptibly.
She nodded and turned on her heels.
Inside of fifteen seconds he had his coffee. That’s what it’s like when two people have been together for a long time. Non-verbal communication.
When we were alone, he said, “Frankly, Mr. Rogan, I’m interested in you. I was curious to see what kind of a man Alicia was married to. Obviously, a woman of that nature would have married an exceptional man.”
Where was he going with this line of horse hockey?
“I was surprised to learn you were a private investigator. You don’t look like one. You look more like a corporate executive, as if you just stepped off the cover of Fortune.”
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