by James Hayman
He climbed up to the second floor and turned back toward 2F. There was no padlock on the door, no yellow crime scene tape crisscrossing the opening. Jacobi’s team must’ve finished going over the place. He tried the lock, hoping it, too, had been left open. It hadn’t, but it didn’t much matter. The lock was an old-fashioned lever tumbler. Easy pickin’s, my man McCabe, easy pickin’s, he could hear his ex-NYPD partner Dave Hennings whispering in his comforting baritone. He fished in his wallet for two paper clips he kept stuffed at the bottom. He hadn’t practiced the trick in a while and never had the deft hands Hennings had. Still, he was pretty sure the lock wouldn’t present much of a challenge. He opened the first clip and bent one end to a ninety-degree angle. Then he opened the second and folded one of its ends over on itself, forming a loop. He squeezed the sides of the loop as closely together as he could and pushed it into the lock, applying steady tension to the left. At the same time, he inserted the angled end of clip number one into the lock just above the loop. He poked around until he found the first pin and pushed it down. Then he froze. He’d heard a sound. Had it come from inside the apartment? A radiator turning on? The creak of a floorboard from someone sneaking around inside? He stood silent and listened. Nothing. He waited a few seconds. Still nothing. He went back to his work. One by one he found the other pins and pushed. The lock slid open. It might have been easier with a set of professional picks, but not a whole lot faster or quieter.
McCabe pocketed the flashlight, drew his weapon, reached across, and slipped the latch. He pushed the door, waited a count of three, and swung into the room. He swept the .45 across the open space in a wide arc. Goff’s living room lay empty and silent before him. From the opposite wall, ambient light from streetlamps reflected off the flakes of snow falling from the sky and spilled through the uncovered panes of a pair of large double-hung windows. He closed the door and flipped the lock. He stood motionless. Job number one was making sure he was alone.
In front of him were a white couch, two matching oversized easy chairs, and a glass-topped coffee table on its stainless steel base. All nearly identical to things Sandy bought for the apartment they shared on West Seventy-first Street and hauled off seven years later to Peter Ingram’s house in East Hampton. It seemed beyond coincidence. Was God laughing at him, making him the butt of some sort of cosmic practical joke? The thought provoked an involuntary shiver. Then he pushed it away. Oversized white couches and glass coffee tables were as common as dirt, and the rest of the furnishings were different from anything he and Sandy had. Besides, Goff’s stuff was new. Right out of the carton. By the time Sandy moved out, theirs was anything but.
He looked down at the high-concept Angela Adams rug in brownish reds that covered the floor under the coffee table. Kind of an autumn leaves motif. Nothing like anything on West Seventy-first Street, though he had seen the same one in the Adams window on Congress Street a few months back. Sandy might have liked it, but they’d never owned anything remotely similar. Goff had a lot of new stuff. New Beemer. New furniture. New rug. Plus an even newer two-week vacation at a high-end resort. Seemed to be upgrading her life to first class. Her six-figure salary was more than ample for a single woman living alone – sure as hell more than he was making – but why buy all these things at once? Had she just landed the partnership Kotterman said all young associates lusted after? He’d ask Ogden.
A small French writing desk stood against one wall. Rosewood with a leather top. It was either a real and very expensive antique or a very good repro. A pretty thing, beautiful wood and elegant curves – but, like the beautiful woman who owned it, the desk had recently been violated. Its three drawers hung open, a clutter of papers carelessly pulled from each. Most lay scattered on the floor below. A few stragglers floated indecisively, halfway in and halfway out. The bookcase on the opposite wall had suffered similar indignities. Volumes pulled from its shelves lay on the floor in haphazard piles. Many were still open, spines facing up, as if they’d been shaken to unearth papers hidden inside, then carelessly discarded.
Jacobi’s crew never would have done this. They were too methodical, too professional. Maggie certainly would have told him if they’d found it this way. No. Someone had searched the place since Jacobi left. A searcher who might still be here, hiding somewhere in the inner recesses of the apartment, his search interrupted by McCabe’s unexpected appearance. What else could the sound he’d heard on the landing have been?
There was a single wood panel door to the right of the bookcases. McCabe stood to one side and yanked it open. He ran the beam of his flashlight across the interior. Coats and clothes on hangers. Boots and boxes on the floor, boxes neatly taped. The searcher hadn’t looked in them. At least not yet. And no one was hiding behind them. The kitchen also showed signs of a hurried search. The cupboard drawers had been left open. One, Goff’s junk drawer, had been upended, the drawer and its contents left in a pile on the floor. McCabe knelt and poked through the mess with a gloved hand. Nothing of interest that he could see.
He moved to the bathroom and entered gun first. A shade covered the locked window, and instead of raising it he used his light to see. It was an older bathroom, nicely outfitted. A shower curtain, decorated with staggered rows of little green palm trees, covered the claw-footed tub. He swept it aside in a single motion. No knife-wielding killer was hiding inside. Nothing to notice except some mascara and lipstick lying on the marble vanity next to the sink. A toothbrush and a tube of Crest were in a glass. Stuff she would have taken to Aruba. If she’d gone. Unless she had a duplicate set.
That left the bedroom. The searcher’s last hidey-hole if he was still in the apartment. McCabe checked his watch. Less than two minutes since he’d picked the lock. Not much time, but if the freak was in the bedroom, it was enough. His anxiety would be well cooked by now, pretty much reaching fever pitch. That made him more dangerous, more likely to do something stupid. Like attack a cop. McCabe had to assume he’d be armed. He killed Goff with a knife, but a gun was more lethal, and who said bad guys had to be consistent? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. Ralph Waldo Emerson, American philosopher, poet, and essayist. Born May 25, 1803, died April 27, 1882. More detritus from the brain-files of Michael McCabe. If the bad guy had a gun and killed McCabe, think of all the useless shit that would die with him.
Right now he wouldn’t have minded backup, and he kind of wished Maggie were here. Too bad. The visit hadn’t been planned, so he was on his own. But hey, they didn’t call him the Lone Ranger for nothing. Right? Right. Hi-yo, Silver. He pressed his body against the side of the wall, hunkered down as low as he could get, and aimed his .45 slightly up and dead center. At that angle, if the bad guy was standing on the other side of the door, McCabe’s shot ought to blow his balls off.
He rapped on the door with the barrel of the gun. No sound came in response. No bullets exploded through the thin oak panel. He rapped again. Still silence. He rose from his squat to a runner’s crouch, slid his arm across the door frame, grasped the knob, and turned it as silently as possible. He willed the little hammer in his heart to stop pounding. He counted. One. Two. A pause. A sigh. His mouth formed the word ‘three.’ The door flew open. McCabe moved in fast and low, sweeping the room, light in one hand, .45 in the other ready and eager to start blasting away.
The room lay empty and silent before him. He pointed the light this way and that. Nothing. He peered under the bedskirt. Still nothing. Just a book, a single slipper, and an impressive collection of dustballs. He crossed to the closet and pressed himself to one side of the door. He flung it open. Something black and silky fluttered in the whoosh of air. Everything else was still. McCabe peered in. Poked his light through the hanging clothes. More boxes. All stacked, sealed, and presumably checked only by Jacobi’s ETs. He turned from the closet and looked at the windows. Draperies across all three. In Hamlet, Polonius met his maker behind the arras. Would the same hold true for the searcher? McCabe yanked the curtains aside. Nothin
g. Nobody. Just the windows, closed and locked.
He breathed easier. Maybe the searcher had found what he was looking for and left, or maybe he slipped out when he heard McCabe enter downstairs. Either way McCabe was alone. He holstered the .45 and took a deep breath. He was getting too old for this shit.
He looked around at a good-sized room, not crowded with furniture. The king-sized bed had been left unmade. Next to it was a nightstand with a lamp and an open paperback. Sue Grafton’s S is for Silence. The lone drawer had been opened and searched. Ditto the drawers in the bureau on the opposite wall. A pile of neatly folded clothes sat next to a tub chair in one corner; a red canvas suitcase lay open and half filled on the floor. No ambient light entered this room. None would escape. McCabe turned on the lamp on the nightstand.
The wall above the bureau was covered with good art photography. He moved closer. Black-and-whites. Chemical prints, not digital. All matted and identically framed in black. A dozen pieces in all. Half were abstracted visions of a derelict urban landscape. Abandoned mills and factories. Broken bridges. Rotting piers. Hard black shapes crisscrossing in starkly graphic depictions of ruin and decay. The photographer had talent. Whoever he was. None of the shots was signed. All but one of the rest were female nudes. Erotic images of a single model, white body caught in angular, athletic poses silhouetted against an even whiter seamless background. In each, delicate patterns of light and shadow played against the model’s pale flesh. All were beautiful, all anonymous. In three of the shots, dark hair covered the model’s face. In two, head and face were cut off from view.
One image in particular held McCabe’s gaze. Here a naked torso arched backward across a large black exercise ball. White legs were parted and thrust forward, knees bent, feet on the floor. Pubis, stomach, and ribs formed a smooth runway rising away from the camera to a far horizon of breasts and nipples, behind where both head and arms disappeared from view. Gazing at the picture, he felt a familiar stirring. Odysseus drawn by a siren’s song. Was he lusting for a dead woman he’d never met? Or was it the wife he hated, yet still longed to possess? Awareness of desire brought revulsion. He turned his eyes away.
The one photo that didn’t show Lainie’s body showed her face, a silhouetted oval, luminous features emerging, seemingly disembodied, from the inky blackness of the background. Her eyes, light blue in life and gray in the black-and-white of the photograph, seemed to follow him as he moved from left to right in front of the picture. He closed his own eyes, not wanting to let what he was feeling overtake him. Like an addict resisting an alluring display of the opiate that once held him captive. Like a dry drunk hanging out in a bar. No. He couldn’t go back. He wouldn’t. Yes, Goff was dead. So, in her way, was Sandy. He knew he had to keep it that way.
Four o’clock. Hours until dawn. Feeling nothing inside but an aching weariness, McCabe went back to the kitchen. Except for the evidence of the search, the room was both empty and ordinary. Cupboards, cabinets, and appliances lined the wall to the right. An oak table with two chairs sat against a single window to the left. A pile of dirty dishes was stacked on a counter above an open and half-filled Bosch dishwasher. A dirty bowl and spoon sat on the table, contents dry and crusted – the remains of breakfast cereal eaten two weeks earlier. It was unlikely Goff would have left it this way before leaving for Aruba. Further evidence she never made it home that Friday night. McCabe squinted at the fridge door. A Concord Trailways timetable, held in place by a magnetized version of Slugger, the Portland Sea Dogs mascot. The 8:30 A.M. departure to Logan Airport was circled in red. He opened the fridge a crack, squeezed his arm inside and unscrewed the lightbulb, then opened the door wider and shined his own light in. Looked like Lainie was a fan of Stonewall Kitchen, a local purveyor of high-end jams, jellies, and sauces. There was also a plastic box of eggs laid by free-range hens fed, according to the label, a strictly vegetarian diet, a half-empty bottle of Vouvray, a bottle of skim milk with a use-by date of January 2, and two cardboard cartons of Chinese takeout. McCabe opened one. The chicken and pea pods inside had developed a serious case of fur. Had Goff ordered this stuff after leaving the office on the night of the twenty-third? No. Cleary said she used her Visa card at a Chinese restaurant on the twenty- second. If she’d made it home Friday, she would either have eaten or tossed any leftovers, knowing she’d be away for the next two weeks.
He closed the fridge and rooted around until he found what he was probably really looking for in the first place. A mostly full bottle of Chivas Regal. He looked at the amber liquid inside. He found a glass, poured out a couple of inches, closed the top. Then he reopened it and poured the whisky back, washed and dried the glass, and returned both bottle and glass to the pantry, exactly in the position he found them. He wasn’t so far gone that he had to start drinking a murder victim’s Scotch.
He went back to Goff’s bedroom, moved the pile of clothes from the tub chair to the floor, and sat. Empty stomach or not, the whisky would’ve felt good going down. Just what he needed. Just what he didn’t need. He closed his eyes and let his mind wander. Why had Lainie posed for the nude photographs? Why had she hung them here? If she was an exhibitionist, she was a careful one, exposing herself only in the most private of places. Whose eyes were the pictures intended for? Lovers and potential lovers? If so, why? To arouse them to a higher level of excitement? That idea seemed both ridiculous and redundant. Lainie in the flesh would arouse far more powerfully than any framed image, no matter how erotic. No, he decided. The pictures weren’t for her lovers. They were for her.
He looked across at the bed and saw Lainie, or Sandy, he wasn’t sure which, lying under him, dark hair fanned across white pillows, pleasure skittering across her face, shallow and transitory like cat’s-paw ripples on the surface of the sea. From a vantage point of years, McCabe the auteur observed McCabe the lover’s urgent thrusts, trying always to reach something deeper in the woman he married. Trying but failing. He knew their lovemaking was an act. It had always been an act, but it was an act that for years he couldn’t resist. He looked into her eyes, preposterously blue, filled with love, but not for the extraneous, if sometimes useful, appendage she had married. Instead she focused on the images on the opposite wall. Narcissus at the pool, utterly enchanted with the perfection of her reflected self.
McCabe was jarred from his reverie by the sound of the apartment door opening and closing. Had the searcher returned to finish the job? McCabe slid the .45 from the holster to his hand, switched off the light, and felt his way through the dark to the other side of the room. He pressed himself into a corner between the bedroom door and the wall of photographs. He heard a soft thump, a whispered shout of ‘Shit.’ A dim light came on, leaking under the closed bedroom door. Not a steady light but moving like the beam of a flashlight in someone’s hand. He heard steps coming closer. He held his breath.
The bedroom door opened. The searcher stood there, moving a circle of light across the wall above the bed. He paused on the chair where McCabe had been sitting, then moved on. Seconds passed. A small man advanced into the room, his back to McCabe. He was no more than five-three or -four and slender. No, not slender. Skinny. One thirty, one forty tops. Thinning hair. Maybe the oddest thing about him was that, with ten-degree temperatures outside, the searcher wasn’t wearing a coat. Just a checked shirt and an open cardigan. Mr Rogers visits a murder. He supposed the guy could have left his coat in the hall or taken it off in the other room, but why would he? Maybe he lived in the building.
The intruder had no sense he wasn’t alone. No sense someone was standing less than four feet away pointing a .45 at the center of his back. Most people can tell. This guy couldn’t. McCabe watched as he continued moving the beam of light around the room. He stopped when he got to the nude photographs. He moved closer and gazed at them, transfixed. Then he looked down into the open dresser drawer. Instead of continuing to rifle through the contents as McCabe expected, he pulled out a pair of Lainie Goff’s lacy black thong panties and pre
ssed them against his cheek. Finally McCabe raised the .45 so the guy would see it. ‘First I’d like you to put the flashlight on the bureau,’ he said, ‘nice and slow, beam up. Then drop the panties.’
The guy turned toward McCabe, his expression more puzzled than surprised. He looked down at his own right hand, the one holding the light, but made no move to do as he was told.
‘Be a good boy.’ McCabe wiggled the barrel of his gun. ‘No discussion. No arguments. Just put it down.’
The guy did. ‘Are you the one who killed her?’ he asked. His voice was quavery, as if he thought he might be next on the hit parade.
Maybe it was an honest question. Or maybe just a way to divert suspicion. McCabe moved to the bureau, picked up the flashlight, and pointed the beam against the opposite wall. ‘Please step over there, lean against the wall with both hands, and spread your legs.’
‘You mean assume the position?’
‘Very good. Assume the position.’
‘Who are you?’ the guy asked in a high-pitched voice.
‘I’m the man with the gun. That means I get to ask the questions and you get to do as you’re told.’
The guy went to the wall and leaned against it. His left hand was still clutching Lainie’s panties.
McCabe switched on a standing lamp next to the bureau. The sudden brightness revealed that the intruder was a soft, nerdy-looking man in his early forties, more milquetoast than murderer. He was wearing a brown leather tool belt around his waist. Pliers, screwdrivers, a hammer, some other stuff.