Shallow Graves - Jeremiah Healy

by Jeremiah Healy

  I looked at the only other door off the foyer, the one I took to be Sinead Fagan's apartment. "Okay. Let's go upstairs and work our way down."

  I followed Ooch up a flight of coiling balustrade. On the second floor was a door that looked identical to Sinead's. The carpet runner wasn't new but it was of good quality and still surprisingly plush.

  The flight to the third floor was more enclosed, the stair shaft narrowing as it ascended. We stopped at a door that looked identical to both the other two.

  Ooch said, "I'm gonna open this, but it's okay with you, I feel a little funny about going in."

  "I understand"

  He put a key to the lock. "After they — the cops — was finished with her, I had to go in and clean up some. There was . . . this smell, you know?"

  The human body pretty much lets go at death, including the muscles that control the bowels. "How about you just stand outside here, so I can call to you if I need something."

  Flick, sniff/sniff. "You got it."

  Ooch opened the door, and I crossed the threshold of Mau Tim Dani's apartment.

  It was bright and might have been airy if it hadn't been shut up for a week. The layout seemed to be the same as Ooch's place, but the dimensions were bigger with the absence of a boiler room and major staircase. The apartment door opened more onto the living room, with the futon sofa more centrally placed. There was a tiled fireplace, probably gas originally, and bookshelves on either side of it. One wall was sacrificed to a home entertainment center with stereo receiver, CD player, science-fiction speakers and a television/VCR hookup. A small gateleg table sat in sunshine by the bowfront window, two straight-back chairs with it, and a choir of plants on risers around it. The rug was a Dhurrie, hardwood floors polyurethaned underneath.

  Moving toward the back of the apartment, I passed a wider kitchen and a squarer bath than Ooch had. The window with the fire escape was in the bedroom. The furnishings there were all ruffles and quilts, which surprised me until I remembered how close Mau Tim had been to Grandmother Amatina. I checked the quality of work on the fabrications. The slight imperfections of the lovingly handmade.

  I crossed to the window itself. An old one, still with iron sash weights hung in the jamb to allow its mass to be raised. The window was closed but not locked still. I shoved it up and looked out on the fire escape. The metal seemed solid but a little rusty. Holding the bannister by the windowsill, I swung one leg onto the escape and pushed down. The ironwork gave, but only a bit. I swung the other leg out and shifted up and down on it. I got back the sound Larry Shinkawa had described. Not much and not continuous, but a clang every time I moved on the landing.

  I climbed back into the bedroom, trying to picture the burglar possibility. From the ground, he somehow pulls down the first flight of fire escape and comes up to the third-floor landing. Mau Tim's just taken her shower. Sinead Fagan told me that Friday had been warm. Maybe Mau Tim has the bedroom window open. Or had it open and closed it without engaging the lock. She's somewhere in the apartment, not making any noise or making so little the TV or stereo is covering it. Then I thought back. Larry Shinkawa said the TV and stereo were off, no other sound beside the fire escape.

  That probably meant Mau Tim was still in the bathroom, toweling off and being quiet. Our boy comes in through the window, place looks deserted, he starts with the jewelry box. Finds the iolite necklace, stuffs it in a pocket or bag, scopes some other pieces maybe, then . . . Wait, the necklace was

  broken.

  I walked back into the living room and over to the futon. The pendant part of the necklace was found under one of the corners. I closed my eyes, trying to see the eight-by-ten Holt had showed me from the Homicide file. The pendant was partially under the left front corner of the couch as you sit on it, the corner nearest the front door if you're struggling with somebody who's holding the necklace.

  So, the guy has the necklace in his hand in the bedroom. Mau Tim comes out of the bathroom toward the bedroom. They see each other, or he hears her or she hears him. She runs toward the front door of the apartment, he chases her . . .Wait. Why doesn't he go back out the window and back down the fire escape? He's in the bedroom, right by it. If he's in the bedroom. Maybe he's moved to the living room while she's still in the bathroom. He's sizing up the home entertainment center, figuring on maybe the CD player as the best candidate. Then she comes out, sees him, and heads for the door.

  In other words, heads toward him and not away from him? And he still has the necklace in his hand so it can abrade her throat and break as he strangles her? And walking past the bathroom, he didn't feel the humidity from her shower or hear a telltale noise right next to the bathroom door itself?

  I looked over at the front door to the apartment. The chain plate had been unscrewed from the jamb, a rectangle of bare wood in the painted molding. Then I realized that Ooch was staring at me.

  Flick, sniff — sniff. "You okay?"

  "I'm okay, Ooch. Why?"

  "You looked, I don't know, kinda queer there, talking to yourself and walking back and forth."

  "I'm okay. Thanks."

  I shook my head. I wasn't okay, because I couldn't picture what happened. It's a small apartment, she had to be somewhere when the guy came in. Somewhere he couldn't see her or be aware of her, because no burglar, even an addict, is crazy enough to try a rip-off from a third-floor fire escape when somebody's in the place.

  If it was a rip-off. If it was a burglar.

  I went back into the bedroom. At the window, I looked out and down. The bottom, raised flight of the fire escape contrasted sharply against the background of the bricked yard. If our boy had used the green trash cans to reach and pull the last flight on his way up, Shinkawa should have seen them after our boy used the fire escape on the way down.

  I walked to the front of the apartment. "Ooch, can we try the second floor now?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, sure."

  He locked the door behind me, then started down the stairs.

  At the next landing, he jingled the keys again. "Fuck, I can't never . . . There, there it is."

  Ooch turned the key twice through the compass, though I didn't hear it snicking. He pushed the door open but this time went in first.

  "Kinda close in here, ain't it?"

  I said, "It is."

  He moved into the bedroom and to the window at the fire escape, opening it without bothering to play with the lock on top. It gave me a minute to examine the lock on the apartment door. The keyhole on the outside looked the same as the one on Mau Tim's door, but on the inside, there was another keyhole, and the dead bolt operated vertically, not horizontally. On the inner surface of the metal were those screwheads you can't turn without a special tool.

  From inside the apartment, I closed the door. There was no sound at the knob, and the dead bolt didn't engage. I used the knob to open and close the door again. Same.

  I walked to the bedroom doorway. Ooch was taking some breaths at the window.

  I said, "You can't lock that door without a key?"

  He turned to me. "Huh?"

  I pointed back toward where I'd come from. "Somebody inside this apartment would need a key to lock that door and a key to get out again?"

  "Oh, yeah. The family, they just use this place to stay when they're in the city for whatever."

  "And they lock themselves in?"

  "No, no. You don't get me."

  Ooch passed by and took out his keys again. "See, Claudette, Joey's wife, she was all the time forgetting her key. She's a real polite lady, she locked herself out, she don't like to come bothering me." Ooch held up an odd, pimpled key. "So my Uncle Tommy, he says to me, 'Ooch, you go see they got a lock you need a key for, let you out, too.'

  Ooch inserted the key on the interior face of the door lock and turned it twice, again without a snicking noise, then pulled the key out. "This way, she don't forget her key because she can't lock up without the thing."

  I tried the door. Locked, dead bolt vertic
ally engaged.

  "Who else has a key to this place?"

  "What, you mean this apartment here?"

  "Right."

  "All the family's got one. They don't know when they need the place, they want to be able to use it, right?"

  "Does Sinead have a key?" Ooch seemed taken back. "Sinead, she ain't family. She's a nice kid and all, but she's just a tenant."

  "How about Tina?"

  "Yeah. Yeah, she had one."

  "Where?"

  "In her apartment."

  "Where in her apartment?"

  "Kitchen. Drawer by the faucet there."

  I looked around the second-floor unit. Modestly but functionally furnished, a notch above a suite in a good hotel. Ooch was back at the bedroom window, me joining him there. I leaned out, looking up to Mau Tim's landing above, then down to the flight to Fagan's apartment before the raised last link. I said, "You afraid of heights, Ooch?"

  "Me? No."

  "Mind climbing out onto the fire escape and going up to the next floor, then down again?"

  Flick, sniff/sniff. "You want me to climb up, then down?"

  "Right."

  He motioned for me to stand back a little. He moved agilely over the sill and went up to the third floor, just one hand on the railing. I could hear a clang with every step.

  Ooch said, "Okay?"

  "Fine. Now come back down again. This time, slow and light on your feet."

  "Huh?"

  "Come toward me slowly, light on your feet."

  Ooch shook his head, but used the bannister to ease down the escape. No clanging until he hit the landing outside my window.

  "Tina's parents were coming up the day after she was killed, right?"

  "Yeah." Flick, sniff/sniff. "They was coming up on Saturday, see her and have a birthday dinner Saturday night."

  "So you didn't do any cleaning up for them?"

  "No. I mean, yeah, I did."

  "I don't follow you."

  "See, I didn't know what time they was coming up on Saturday, so I was in here Friday afternoon, before I went out to the gym."

  I inclined my head toward the window. "You aired the place out."

  "Sure. You gotta do that, these buildings. Otherwise, they been closed up a while, they get musty like today, you know?"

  "And you locked the door to this apartment when you left?"

  A blank look. "A course I did. I'm the super, remember?"

  "When did you close the window here?"

  Flick, sniff/sniff. "Saturday."

  "Saturday."

  "Yeah. Saturday, it starts to rain. I remember, the windows're open on the second floor, so I come up and shut them."

  "And the door to this apartment was locked then, too."

  "A course it was. What's so hard to understand?"

  An honest face. Roughed up some, and maybe not quite everything you'd want behind it. But enough to make me rethink a lot of things I wasn't sure I wanted to.

  -19-

  WHEN OOCH LET ME OUT OF THE SECOND-FLOOR APARTMENT, I HEARD strident rap music from downstairs and saw that Sinead Fagan's door was half-open. Ooch hurried past me and down the staircase.

  At her entrance, he stopped and said, "What's going on?"

  Somebody turned down the stereo. I could hear Sinead's voice before I could see her. "I'm moving the fuck out, Ooch."

  Over the super's shoulder I took in the living room. Fagan in designer sweatshirt and blue jeans, her red hair in that cocklebur cut. She was dumping audiocassettes into a shopping bag. Behind her, Oz Puriefoy separated two cardboard boxes on the kitchen counter. He stopped what he was doing, but stayed by the boxes and out of the conversation.

  Ooch said, "Where you gonna go, Sinead?"

  "I'm moving in with Oz for a while, get my head on straight."

  Ooch glanced at Puriefoy and muttered something. Then,

  "You mean, I'm gonna be all alone here?"

  "Aw, Ooch." Sinead came toward the super, towering over him at close range as she put her hands on his shoulders, consoling a Little Leaguer who made last out. "I'm sorry, you know? But I just can't stay here after what happened to Mau."

  "Tina," said Ooch, wrenching away from her without using his hands and bumping by me. "Her name was Tina."

  As Ooch headed toward and down the stairs to the basement, Fagan worried her lower lip with her upper teeth. Then she remembered I was there, too. "The fuck you want?"

  "Ooch was taking me on a tour of the building. Part of the investigation?

  "Well, the tour's over."

  "Not quite. Mind if I come in?"

  "What if I do?"

  I looked to Puriefoy, whose expression said he was still staying out of it.

  "Your bosses at Lindqvist/Yulin need for me to finish what I started."

  Fagan stopped, the way she had at the photo shoot when a question threw her. "They're not my bosses. They're my agents."

  "You're moving out, what difference does it make if I take a look at your place?"

  Fagan wasn't buying it. I didn't think she was so much thinking as being stubborn.

  Puriefoy said, "Sinead, the man wants to look, let him look. We leave, he can just get Ooch to let him in anyways, right?"

  Fagan finally stepped away from the door, stiffly motioning me into the living room. "You can't stay long. We just got started here, and we still have quite a lot to do."

  Quite a lot. I shook my head.

  In size, the first-floor place was between Ooch's little cave and the second-floor guest suite. The living room shared an open space with the breakfast-countered kitchen, the doorways to bedroom and bathroom on one wall.

  I walked past Puriefoy to the kitchen, going around the counter to stand between refrigerator and stove. I could see the railing of the fire escape through the window. Above me, pipes crooked out of the ceiling and into the wall, painted to blend in with the surrounding planes.

  "These the water pipes?"

  Fagan said, "Yeah."

  "Had anybody been staying on the second floor recently?"

  Fagan looked at me. "The fuck would I know?"

  "Footsteps overhead"

  Puriefoy said, "We couldn't hardly hear you and Ooch up there just now."

  "But you could hear us."

  Puriefoy shrugged. "A little."

  I tumed back to Fagan. "So, anybody up there recently?"

  "Not that I heard. Go ask the family, you want to."

  "Sinead, where did Mau Tim keep the key to the second-floor unit?"

  "Didn't know she had one."

  "All right. You're both here. Shinkawa, too, would be nice, but let me play him. Walk me through what happened that night."

  "Fuck you," said Fagan, Puriefoy keeping his own counsel.

  "You can walk through it with me now, when you're already here and blowing off the morning, or the cops can pull both of you from shoots somewhere when it pleases them to do it. Your choice."

  Puriefoy moved his tongue around his mouth before saying, "You running a game on us, man?"

  "No game. Just a simple reenactment."

  They looked at each other.

  I said, "We're spending more time arguing about it than it's going to take to actually do it."

  Fagan said, "Awright, awright. Let's get the fucking thing over with. Where do you want me?"

  "Where you were when Puriefoy rang you from outside the building."

  "When he came back with the wine?"

  "No. Before that, when he first arrived that day."

  Fagan looked around, closed her eyes. "I was standing by the sink there, washing celery."

  I stepped out of the kitchen. "Go ahead."

  "I don't got no celery in the fridge."

  "Just stand at the sink."

  Fagan did it. She was two feet from the fire escape through the window, a hunk of wood six inches square on the sill.

  I said, "Was that window open?"

  "Huh?"

  "Was your kitchen window op
en?"

  "Yeah. Nice night, I wanted a little fresh air."

  "Can you show me?"

  "Show you how to open a window?"

  "Show me how it was that night."

  Fagan turned from the sink. Heaving at the window, she niggled the hunk of wood under the frame as it came back down.

  I said, "The window won't stay open on its own?"

  She shook her head. "Something's wrong with the things inside the walls."

  The sash cords were probably broken. "Can I try?"

  Fagan let me replace her. I lifted the old window. It took a lot to move it another six inches off the sill, the sides shuddering like furniture hauled over a bare floor. I said, "How would you get out if there was a fire?"

  She pointed behind me. "Door's right there."

  "Okay." I looked at Puriefoy. "How about you leave the apartment and close the door. Then go outside the building, close the front door, and ring Mau Tim's bell."

  Puriefoy spoke evenly. "I didn't ring Mau's bell, man. I rang Sinead's."

  "Please. Just ring Mau's bell first, wait a few seconds, and then ring Sinead's."

  His expression stayed neutral as he left the room, closing the apartment door behind him. Over the stereo, which wasn't on loud, I couldn't hear any noise from Puriefoy opening and closing the building's front door. Then a harsh doorbell sound, muted by distance, followed by its twin, even harsher, inside the apartment.

  I said, "You really can hear the third-floor bell down here, can't you?"

  Fagan said, "Like you was next to it."

  "You didn't hear anybody ring Mau that day."

  "No."

  "What about when Shinkawa arrived?"

  "Him I heard. Yeah, I remember thinking it must be Larry Shin when I heard Mau's bell."

  The harsher bell inside Fagan's apartment rang again.

  "Well, you want me to answer it or what?"

  "Whatever you did that day when Oz rang your bell."

  She left the kitchen, crossed the living room, and opened her apartment door, leaving it open as she left my sight and went into the foyer. Listening hard, I could just hear her opening the building's front door for Puriefoy. She came right back into the apartment, Puriefoy behind her.

  "What did you two do next?"