If I Should Die

by Hilary Norman

  The doctor took Lally to one side. To left and right, people surged from the airport building carrying bags, wheeling carts, searching for cabs, tipping Red Caps, some of them taking their first breaths of freezing Chicago air, others coming home.

  “Will you trust me?” Morrissey asked Lally quietly.

  “I think so.”

  “My partner and dearest friend, Marie Ferguson, died nineteen days ago.”

  Lally stared at him. “Because she had one of these pacemakers?”

  “Yes, but that’s not the whole point.” Morrissey looked right into her eyes. “The point is, her husband was in bed with her when it happened. They were about as close to each other as they could get. And nothing happened to him. Not a scratch.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Lally said.

  “Me too.” Morrissey managed a smile. “So will you get in the car now, Lally? You don’t mind if I call you Lally, do you?”

  “I wish you would.” Lally paused. “And thank you.”

  They walked back to the car. Without another word, Hugo got into the back and slid across the seat, and Lally got in beside him, Chris following. “I’ll travel with the lieutenant,” Morrissey said.

  The doors banged shut. Joe started the engine. Lally reached out both her hands, and held onto Hugo and Chris.

  In silence, they headed for the city.

  “I need your help,” Joe said to Chris, while Lally was being settled into her room and Hugo was off somewhere getting coffee. “That is, I could do what I have to alone, but it would be a whole lot easier with back-up, and I can’t ask another police officer.”

  “Anything,” Chris said instantly.

  “It’s illegal.” Joe wasn’t exactly sure why he was involving Webber, except that all his instincts were still pushing him to trust the man.

  “Is it for Lally?” Chris asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “Name it.”

  Joe kept his voice low. “Tell Hugo you’re beat and I’m taking you to my house for a rest.” He saw Webber’s hesitation. “Morrissey says they’re going to be taking X-rays and assessing Lally for a while before they decide what to do, and I’ve already asked one of our bomb squad people to sit in.”

  “Where are we going?” Chris’s blue eyes were alight with relief. There was nothing worse than waiting when you were afraid for someone you cared for. He’d done enough of that over the last few months for a lifetime.

  “I’ll tell you on the way.”

  The doorman at Fred Schwartz’s apartment building, a burly man of around fifty, with beery breath and a ready smile that didn’t touch his eyes, eyed Joe’s badge with undisguised distrust.

  “I can’t let you in unless Mr Schwartz says it’s okay.”

  “Mr Schwartz is in the hospital. We’re here to get some stuff for him.”

  The man still looked dubious. “I should call and check with him.”

  “He’s too sick – they won’t let you talk to him,” Joe said.

  The man wavered. “I don’t have a passkey.”

  “No problem, Mr Schwartz gave us his key.”

  “Who’s your friend?” The doorman eyed Chris.

  “A friend of Mr Schwartz’s, here to help.”

  “I’ve never seen him here.”

  “I’ve only been here at night,” Chris said.

  The doorman hesitated a little more, just enough to let Joe know he was not above a little financial incentive. Two twenties changed hands.

  “Don’t mess anything up, will you?”

  “We won’t,” Joe said.

  “I’ll need you to sign for anything you take out, okay?”

  “Whatever you say,” Joe told him.

  “I should come up with you, but I can’t leave my post.”

  “We wouldn’t expect you to,” Chris said.

  They were in luck. Schwartz’s corridor on the twenty-second floor was deserted. Joe, working deftly and silently, was through with the lock in less than a minute.

  “A little knowledge comes with the territory,” he said quietly.

  “If I wasn’t so scared for Lally,” Chris muttered nervously, “this would almost be fun.”

  “Don’t start enjoying it too much,” Joe said, opening the door. “I won’t have my sister consorting with criminals.”

  “Let’s hope the neighbours don’t call the cops then.”

  “Let’s hope.”

  They stepped inside and shut the door.

  It was quite dark in the hall. Joe waited several seconds until he felt certain they were alone, then switched on the light. Everything looked as it had when he’d visited just over a week earlier.

  Chris wrinkled his nose. “What’s the smell?”

  “Some kind of menthol rub. I smelt it when I was here before.”

  “What do we do now?”

  “We start looking.” Joe looked at Chris. “You have to have steady hands if you’re going to help.” He took off his heavy outdoor gloves, stuck them in a pocket of his zip-up jacket, and handed Chris a pair of latex gloves, pulling on a pair of his own. “Remember this is an illegal search. The more you help, the greater your share of the guilt. The more careful we are, the better our chances of getting away with it.”

  Something was nagging at Chris. “What if we do find something? Wouldn’t it be ruled inadmissible in court?”

  “Uh-huh.” Joe walked silently into the living room. The drapes were drawn, as they had probably been when Schwartz was taken to the hospital the previous night.

  “So what’s the point?” Chris followed three feet behind.

  “The first point is maybe we get to help Lally through this thing as safely as possible.” Joe was very calm. He was always calm when he was doing something, it was sitting on his ass that made him crazy. “The second is we use – I use – whatever we find very carefully.”

  “How?”

  “Never mind how.” Joe flicked a switch and the crystal chandelier sprang into brilliant life. “Just start looking.”

  “What I am looking for?” Chris stared around the room.

  “You know as much as I do. Just make sure you don’t smash anything, and leave everything the way you find it. If you pick up a rumpled cloth or a crooked cushion, study it before you pick it up, and get the angle exactly right when you put it back.”

  “This place is quite something,” Chris said.

  “Sure is,” Joe agreed grimly, looking at the brocade-covered furniture and velvet drapes and Persian rugs. He gazed up at the woman in the ornately framed portrait that hung above the sofa. The painting Schwartz had claimed had been painted by his nonexistent father. Joe ought to have known right off that she was no housewife. He wondered how much of this stuff had come from Eva Schwartz’s brothel.

  “How about I take the bookshelves?” Chris asked.

  “Fine. Flick through every book – there could be papers, plans, whatever – and check behind them carefully. Look for a safe, panels that move, anything.”

  “What if we find a safe?” Chris wondered where Joe would draw the line.

  “We’ll worry about that when we do.”

  There was no safe. Their search of the sitting room and kitchen yielded nothing, the bedroom, bathroom and closets even less. The bed was unmade, so it was clear that Schwartz had been taken out of the apartment in a hurry, yet nowhere was there a single scrap of evidence to incriminate him. Joe felt sick at heart and intensely angry with himself. The search could lose him his job, but worse by far, if it came to a prosecution it could lose them Schwartz. Four people were already dead, and Christ-alone-knew how many were in danger. And Lally . . .

  “You still think it’s him?” Chris said.

  Joe gritted his teeth. “Yes.”

  “Do we go on looking?”

  “There’s nowhere left to look, not here anyway.”

  “Maybe he has a garage or storeroom or something?”

  Joe nodded. “Maybe.”

  “Think the doorman migh
t tell us?”

  “For the right price.”

  It cost Joe fifty bucks to ascertain that Schwartz had no more than a parking spot in the underground car park, and another twenty to persuade the doorman to tell them the number of his bay. The car was a well-polished old Studebaker.

  “Let’s get the trunk open,” Joe said.

  “Are you going to force the lock?” Chris was freezing cold. He’d gone from snowy New England to hot Florida and back to even more frigid Chicago, yet he’d hardly noticed the temperature till now.

  “Why would I do that?” With a grim smile, Joe pulled out a small bunch of keys and tried just two before the lid groaned open. “Ask me no questions,” he said lightly, “and I’ll tell you no lies.”

  Both men peered into the trunk. It was tidy and clean. They saw a spare tyre, a jack and a tool kit. Aside from that, there was a tartan blanket, neatly folded, a US road atlas too large to fit into a glove box, and a big flashlight. It was the car trunk of a methodical, organized man, but it was no help at all.

  Hope fading fast, they headed back to the lobby.

  “Find what you were looking for?” the doorman asked.

  “Not yet,” Joe said. “Does Mr Schwartz have a lock-up garage anywhere, or a storeroom maybe?”

  “Maybe.”

  The front doors opened, and an icy blast of air accompanied two young men, both bearded and wearing fur hats, into the building. The doorman greeted them obsequiously, and waited until they’d disappeared on their way upstairs before he returned his attention to Joe and Chris.

  “So what now?”

  “You were saying something about a storeroom.” Joe was as pleasant as he could manage.

  “I was?”

  “You were,” Chris said.

  The man gave one of his smiles. “I must be losing my mind.”

  Joe’s wallet emerged again. “Anything coming back?”

  “Could be.” He stared greedily at the fifty in Joe’s hand. “Yeah, it seems to be getting a little less fuzzy.”

  “This is it,” Joe said with finality.

  The flicker of despair in Joe’s eyes that went way beyond the professional hunger of even the keenest police officer, transmitted itself to the doorman, who would normally have snatched the fifty dollar bill and been grateful for his most profitable morning in years.

  “It’s not enough.”

  Chris made a move towards him, but Joe put out a restraining hand, and through his haze of anger, for just an instant, Chris wondered again what he was coming to. He’d never experienced so many moments of aggression in his entire life as he had over the past few days. He was an artist and the father of a ten-year-old girl. He realized he hadn’t even thought about Katy for almost four hours.

  “It’s okay,” Joe said, calmingly. “This is it, and he knows it.” He held on to the last fifty. “Where is it?”

  “What?”

  Joe held his temper. “The storeroom.”

  “I didn’t say anything about a storeroom.”

  “Listen, you bastard – ” Chris’s voice was almost a snarl.

  “Take it easy.” The doorman raised both his hands in defence. “It isn’t a storeroom, is all I mean.”

  “So what is it?” Chris demanded.

  “An apartment.”

  “Where?” Joe asked.

  “Here.”

  “Schwartz has two apartments?” Joe was disbelieving.

  “Sure has.”

  “Why didn’t you mention it before?” Chris asked.

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “What number is this apartment?”

  “1510.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a passkey to that either,” Joe said.

  The doorman shook his head. “But I’m sure Mr Schwartz gave you his set for that one with the others.” His smirk was back. “Why don’t you go use it?”

  Joe and Chris were already at the elevator.

  “Hey, what about my fifty?”

  “You’ll get it when we come down.”

  Joe punched the fifteenth floor.

  “Hey!”

  The doors began to close.

  “So sue me,” Joe called quietly.

  There were two locks on the front door of 1510, both newer and tougher than the one on Schwartz’s first apartment. Twice, Joe had to stop work when neighbours and visitors passed on their way to and from the elevator.

  “This is it, Joe, isn’t it?” Chris felt his excitement rising.

  “Maybe.”

  “Don’t you have a feeling about it?”

  “I’m way past trusting my feelings.” The second lock gave.

  “All right,” Chris said.

  The first thing they noticed when they entered apartment 1510 was that it was oppressively warm. The next thing they noticed was that the walls of the entrance hall were covered with artwork of varying kinds – paintings, drawings, carvings, tapestries, samplers – all of them relating to dragons. The last thing, though neither of them mentioned it, was that there was an atmosphere in the place that set their teeth on edge.

  “Is this weird or what?” Chris murmured.

  Silently, Joe shut the front door and drew his gun. “Stay back,” he whispered, and headed for the room to the right of the hall. He opened the door and went in, fast but careful. No one home. He put the gun away.

  “Shit,” he said.

  “What?” Tentatively, Chris came through the door. The blinds on the windows were drawn, and the light in the room was an eery kind of early twilight.

  “Take a look at those guys,” Joe said.

  Chris stared into the glass enclosures. “Lizards?” He gave an involuntary shudder. He’d always hated reptiles, knew it was foolish, when they were harmless, but there it was.

  “Lizards,” Joe confirmed.

  The two big green iguanas reposing on wood chips in the largest central vivarium, regarded the men unblinkingly. To their left, four tiny leopard geckos, huddling close together on a decorative branch in their smaller glass-walled home, also watched and waited. The right hand enclosure, medium-sized, its floor covered with sand and a couple of rocks, was empty.

  “The big ones look like dinosaurs,” Chris said, unable to tear his eyes from the iguanas.

  Joe shook his head. “Dragons.” The artwork was all over the walls in this room, too. “Our man has a fixation with dragons.”

  “Does that help us?”

  “Not anyway I can think of.”

  “Weird,” Chris said again.

  “Let’s get moving.”

  Joe put on the latex gloves again, and Chris did the same. There was just the one room, plus a kitchen, a bathroom and a large walk-in closet. Joe took the kitchen, while Chris went over the bathroom – finding nothing except terry towels, soap, toilet tissue and disinfectant – and then picked his way carefully through the closet.

  “Nothing.”

  “Same here.”

  They took another look over the main room. But for the lizards, it might have been an ordinary living space. The floor was parquet, without rugs, and it was far more modern in style than Schwartz’s main apartment, the furniture – a black leather couch, one matching armchair with footrest, a glass and chrome table with two straight-backed chairs – minimalist, but comfortable enough.

  “It’s very clean,” Chris said. “Almost sterile.”

  Joe knew. It looked like a regular living room, but every pore of his skin, every hair on his body, every nerve end told him that this was where Schwartz had carried out his work.

  “Come on,” he said.

  “Not much to look through.”

  Joe nodded towards the state of the art compact disc player and the small black matt-finish cabinet beside it. “You take the discs.” He pulled out his keys and selected one of the two small screwdrivers on the chain. “I’ll check the speakers.”

  They set to work in silence, Joe intent, Chris uncomfortably aware of the six sets of reptilian eyes watching them.


  “I think they’re hungry,” he said, trying not to look at them.

  “Concentrate,” Joe said.

  “Right.” Chris bent back to his task. “Wagner,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The CDs are all Wagner operas.”

  Joe started on the bookshelves, cut from the same matt-black wood as the cabinet. Books on German mythology, and on opera, on the care and breeding of lizards, and at least a dozen books, some of them leather bound and gold tooled, on dragons. There was nothing, no neat little parcels of evidence hidden at the back of the shelves, no convenient clues concealed within the books themselves.

  They both finished at the same time. Chris knew Duval was going to make them search the enclosures next. He loved Lally, but he hated the idea of getting too close to the big suckers with the pointy crests and dewlaps.

  “I’ll take the iguanas,” Joe volunteered.

  “Okay.” Chris felt sweet, guilty relief.

  The central vivarium was big enough for Joe to get right inside, hardly stooping at all. He took off his jacket and hung it over one of the chrome and glass chairs, then unfastened the glass doors. The bad smell hit him instantly, of the creatures’ droppings and a dish of what looked like mouldy dog food in the far corner. Joe stepped through, trying not to inhale, his feet squelching on the damp, soiled wood chips. The big lizards backed away warily, and he got down on his haunches and started digging around with his hands.

  Chris watched him, putting off the moment, and then he pulled himself together and got the geckos’ door open, grateful that this enclosure wasn’t big enough for him to get right inside. The pretty creatures scuttled to the back, and he knelt down on the parquet, took a deep breath and stuck his head and upper body through, raking his hands through the damp, smelly sand on the floor, forcing himself to comb thoroughly, the way the lieutenant was next door, glad of the thin layer of latex that made it possible to feel around effectively without physically touching the dirt.

  “Nothing here,” he said, after a while. “Except lizard shit.”

  “Same here.” Joe was still feeling around, his frustration starting to mount again. He knew he was right, he just knew it, and yet still there was nothing to show for it, no hard evidence, no damned proof that Schwartz was their man.

  Chris extracted his head and arms and straightened up, resisting the temptation to brush the dirt off his hands, knowing Duval would make them clean up when they’d finished. “I’ll take the other one,” he said, emboldened by its emptiness.