If I had to smile much longer or harder my ears were going to drop off.
“You wait here,” Mrs. Schneiders said testily, which seemed to be her normal tone. She shuffled back into her apartment and returned a few moments later clutching a small set of keys attached to a cross-stitched square the size of a slice of bread. She wore ancient scuffs that clack-clack-clacked against her heels as she led me back down the hall to the front of the house. The clacks echoed faintly in the poorly lighted corridor.
The lock worked like they’re supposed to work. Mrs. Schneiders opened the door slowly, an inch at a time, one hand on the doorknob and the other tapping sharply at the door as it swung inward. “Miss Berens? It’s Mrs. Schneiders. Are you here …?”
She was not. It was instantly evident: The apartment was one square room with a bath and no good hiding places. Mrs. Schneiders scuffed three feet into the room and stopped, peering around the gloomy, cluttered space. I stayed in the doorway.
The lock, as I had guessed from my brief inspection of it, was a standard spring lock. You pushed in and turned a button set in the inside doorknob, and the door locked automatically when you closed it after you. There was no deadbolt, just a chain to set when you were home.
The moment Mrs. Schneiders’s back was toward me, I reached inside my windbreaker and silently peeled away the small square of duct tape I had lightly affixed there. The tape was from the roll I carry in the trunk of my car, an ancient Impala whose ever-increasing unreliability necessitates an ever-growing emergency-supplies kit. I slapped the patch of tape over the latch bolt, that spring-activated wedge that pops into the opening in the strike plate on the doorjamb to hold the door closed. When the old woman turned back to me, I was standing between her and the door, blocking her view of my handiwork.
“She’s not here,” Mrs. Schneiders said unnecessarily.
“No, she’s not,” I said, equally unnecessarily. “Well, okay, I guess I’d better report back to her mother. Thanks so much for your help, Mrs. Schneiders. We really appreciate it.”
During the speech I was gallantly holding the door for her, ushering her out into the hall. Then I made a small show of depressing the lock button and swinging the door closed—quickly, before she noticed the tape. The door fit snugly enough to stay closed with no help from the latch bolt, if you didn’t put much pressure against it. Tugging the knob toward me slightly, I twisted it a few times to prove that it was locked, which, as far as the lockset was concerned, it was.
“Safe and sound,” I assured Mrs. Schneiders, beamingly.
She was convinced. I escorted her back down the hall. She remained outside her apartment door and watched me go down the three steps to the back door. I paused at the threshold and looked back. “Thanks again.” More smile. “Good-bye.”
There are few certainties in this imperfect world, but one of them was that Mrs. Schneiders was already shuffling toward the front of the building to make sure I was leaving. So I did. I went out to the Impala and, without a backward glance, got behind the wheel and drove off.
I explored the neighborhood for five or six minutes, then headed back toward the old house, coming around from the back way and parking a block away on the cross-street.
I came up on the building from the south side, the side opposite the Schneiders woman’s apartment. I bumped open the back door as quietly as possible, quickly ascended the three steps to the first floor and then, without pausing, went on up to the top floor, where I stopped at the top of the stairs.
Below me a door opened. I heard the shuffle and clack of scuffs on threadbare carpet and in my mind’s eye saw the emaciated woman peering down at the back door. More shuffling. She turned and peered down the corridor. I heard a thready voice: “Hello … ?” I stayed put. There was no sound from downstairs for the longest time, then the scuffs dragged across the carpeting and the door closed again. I waited until I heard the scrape and rattle of the chain in its plate, then set off down the hall.
The upper floor was a duplicate of the lower, except that the hallway was straight until it reached the front of the house. I assumed that was because the hallway was part of the upper floor’s original design instead of an add-on, as it was downstairs. The carpet was in no better shape here than below, however. I moved down it slowly, mindful of vocal floorboards. There were none, none of any significance, at any rate. Toward the front of the house the hallway ended in a largish, high-ceilinged space at the top of the front stairs. At the bottom of the stairs was Meredith Berens’s apartment.
My trick with the duct tape had worked. I pushed open the door, peeled away the tape, closed the door, and locked it after me.
And resumed breathing.
The apartment, as I said, was one large room—the house’s original living or sitting room. I’m sure the tiny apartment was very pleasant on a sunny day. This was not a sunny day. At first glance, the place seemed a bit of a mess. Second glance confirmed this. Oh, not your call-the-board-of-health kind of mess, but something more than your ordinary day-in-the-life clutter. Odd, I thought, given the cold, sterile precision of Meredith’s mother’s home. Who was it said the apple falls not far from the tree? Probably the same DJ who insisted it was going to be dry this afternoon.
I checked my watch. It was twelve past one. I wanted to be out of there by one-thirty, one forty-five at the latest. In and out—it lessens the chances of being caught where you oughtn’t be.
Meredith Berens had a lot of clothes, and most of them were in plain sight, draped over furniture, piled on an unmade bed, spilling out of a wardrobe that was weighted down with stacks of more clothes. I gave the room the once-over and decided it hadn’t been tossed; this was just the way it was. Then I stepped into the middle of the apartment and surveyed it more carefully.
The door opened into the living area: a sofa, a floor lamp, and two low-backed easy chairs under the tall front windows. A black metal trunk, serving as coffee table, supported a portable television set in a pink plastic cabinet. The phone hung on the wall next to the door. Below it, a cheaply made two-legged table was bolted to the wall. Directly opposite the windows, against the east wall, were a twin bed, a dresser with mirror, and the oak-veneer wardrobe, its doors standing open, its innards crammed full of clothes and shoes. The shoes tumbled out of the wardrobe and lay scattered on the thin indoor-outdoor carpet. The clothes marched out of the wardrobe and hung huddled over the doors. A yellow refrigerator stood guard over the bed. Next to the fridge was a junior-sized gas range, also yellow. Two saucepans and one skillet were nested on a back burner. Against the wall opposite the door, under another set of windows smaller than the front windows, was a kitchen counter and stainless-steel double sink. A drying rack piled high with dishes, a toaster, a twist-tied loaf of Wonder Bread, a couple of coffee cups, a stainless-steel percolator and a dirty table knife filled most of the available counter space. A small dining table and chairs were shoved up against the front wall, south of the windows. The table was piled with clothes and other possessions, including a steam iron. The bathroom was a tiny room created in the back corner of the place, near the foot of the bed. Stool, sink, shower—no tub—and your standard mirrored medicine cabinet.
Every investigator has a different way of going about the searching of a place. Me, I like to spend a moment soaking up the ambience. Is anything upset or out of place? Or carelessly set straight after having been out of place? Is something missing? Is something there that shouldn’t be? Has someone been here before me? In the case of a place like Meredith Berens’s—namely, an unholy mess—it’s hard to form definite answers to those questions. But as near as I could tell, as near as I could feel, the answer to all of them was no.
After taking inventory for a couple of minutes, I went to work.
The wardrobe, as I’ve indicated, was full of wardrobe—more than full. Blouses, jackets, pants, and skirts hung from the single rod and the tops of the two doors. Shoe boxes were piled three deep on the floor, more shoes were stacked a
top the boxes, with fellow shoes strewn here and there on the carpet. On top of the wardrobe, clear plastic boxes stacked halfway to the ceiling held folded sweaters and sweatshirts, a couple of purses. Empty. Empty, that is, of anything important or especially useful: They contained the usual assortment of crumpled Kleenexes, loose change, aspirin tins, lip balm, and other minutiae that women almost invariably leave in a purse when they “empty” it.
A yellow Samsonite suitcase hid under the bed, along with a dozen old, forgotten newspapers, three months’ worth of Savvy magazine, My Secret Garden in paperback, and some dust mice hunched on the hard, thin, industrial-strength carpet. In keeping with the decorating philosophy evidenced by the rest of the apartment, there wasn’t much unused space under the bed—certainly not enough to have once contained a second suitcase, now missing. Not a good sign, I thought, though not necessarily a bad one.
The dresser held more clothes. Top drawer: underwear, hose, and a small, black-velvet-covered jewelry box containing a few pieces of good jewelry, gold and white-gold, some passably decent costume stuff, and, oddly, a chintzy gumball-machine ring whose plastic “chrome” had flaked away almost completely. I wondered what significance the ring could have for its owner. In the shallow chamber under a false bottom in the box I found Meredith’s passport, some old wallet-size graduation pictures of people I didn’t know, a crumpled thousand-lire note. Also a tiny yellow key on a piece of blue yarn.
I opened the passport. It had been issued in 1981, the year Meredith had gone to Italy, according to the blurred stamps. The passport photo showed a plain-featured, brown-haired girl staring glassy-eyed at the camera. Mug shots are more flattering. The photograph that Meredith’s mother had given me was far better. It was Meredith’s high school graduation picture, but Donna Berens insisted that her daughter still looked exactly the same. Which is just the sort of thing a mother would say. The picture in my pocket showed a quiet-looking, long-haired brunette with wide, dark eyes, a small, pouting mouth, and a long, angular face.
Second drawer: socks, T-shirts, sweatshirts, shorts, two pairs of sweatpants, two one-piece bathing suits, one black, one fuchsia with mint-green flowers across the midriff. Under the bathing suits there was a small book with pink leatherette covers and a ridiculous little phony-brass-plated lock on the right-hand side. I went back into the first drawer, into the jewelry box, and fished out the yellow key. It fit the diary lock. The book’s pages were blank.
Why would you separate your diary and its key—hide the key, even, albeit pretty halfheartedly—if your diary was empty?
I flipped through the book again, seeing only white pages with faint gray rulings. Then I examined the top edge of the book. Half a dozen pages had been painstakingly razored out of the front, so close to the binding that you could see it only by looking down at the top of the book, near the spine, and observing the sixteenth-of-an-inch gap.
The first page in the book—the first page left in the book—was blank and smooth. No impression left by the writing on the previous page. Only TV detectives get that kind of luck.
I put the diary and the key back where I had found them.
Third drawer: towels and sheets. Towels to the left, crammed up against the side and back of the drawer. Sheets to the right.
Bottom drawer: miscellany. Cancelled checks, check blanks, and a savings-account passbook showing a balance of eight hundred fourteen dollars and thirty-nine cents; wrapping paper; greeting cards received and to be sent; note paper; an orange plastic flashlight; a lidless box of unlabeled keys; a sticky-paper lint picker-upper; and a box that said it contained one dozen blue-ink Bic roller pens but in fact contained three pens and forty-eight U.S. cents.
The top of the dresser was protected by a thin lace runner on which sat a collection of commonplace junk. I sorted through some more loose change, a miniature porcelain birdbath that contained, in addition to a miniature porcelain bird, a collection of straight pins and rubber bands; three small bottles of inexpensive perfume; a pair of folding scissors; and a framed five-by-seven portrait of Donna Berens. I slipped the photo out of the dime-store frame, but there was nothing behind it but corrugated cardboard.
Another photograph, a four-by-six snapshot, was tucked between the dresser mirror and one of the four brass-plated clips that fastened the glass to the metal railings that supported it. Mother and daughter this time, captured slightly out of focus against a green and leafy tree. Donna Berens smiled toothily at whoever was behind the camera. Meredith did not. I left the picture untouched and leaned in close to peer at another brass-plated fastener, identical to the first, under which something else had been tucked and then removed, leaving a scrap of paper barely visible behind the clip. Using the nail file on my money clip, I freed the torn scrap.
This, too, had been a photograph—the paper had that slick, emulsified finish to it. The bit that remained was a triangle, half an inch on two sides with the third side a jagged, cockeyed tear.
If Meredith had valued the photograph, she would have removed it carefully from its place. If she hadn’t valued it, she wouldn’t have displayed it where she would see it every day. Ergo, Meredith had once valued it but no longer did.
Or still did, but had removed it hurriedly, for whatever reason.
Or someone besides Meredith removed it.
Whatever its history, the scrap was by itself useless to me. I saw what might have been the arm, possibly the leg, of a Caucasian of undeterminable gender, and, just above that, a bit of navy blue that could have been a short sleeve or the leg of a pair of short pants. From this Sherlock Holmes would be able to deduce the subject’s height, age, school, regiment, wife’s mother’s maiden name, and political affiliation—not just the subject’s, but also the subject’s wife’s mother—but I found it considerably less helpful. I pocketed the scrap and turned my attention to wastebaskets.
There was only one in the main room—the place was hardly big enough to require more than one—a tall, brown plastic kitchen wastebasket that stood at the end of the kitchen counter. I popped off the swing-lid assembly and peered into the white plastic liner-bag, holding my breath. When I used to do this kind of thing fulltime—snooping, I mean, to earn what I facetiously referred to as my living, not prowling through people’s garbage—I kept a box of rubber dissecting gloves in my car. You can get them at any college bookstore. They’re perfect for sifting through other people’s garbage, or your own, for that matter, I suppose, although I doubt that’s what the manufacturers have in mind. However, the heyday of my garbage-sifting career had passed, and so had the necessity to carry rubber gloves, or rubber anything else, everywhere I went. I took a quick tour through Meredith Berens’s kitchen cupboards and drawers—there were two of each—and came up with nothing worth mentioning except a plastic Ziploc storage bag that I slipped over my right hand when I went through the garbage.
Luckily for my favorite private detective, Meredith had emptied the trash recently, and what lay in the bottom of the white bag wasn’t unreasonably stomach-turning: three damp tea bags (Lipton Flo-Thru variety, if you care) and the red and yellow box in which they and ninety-seven of their brethren had arrived; curled, dried scraps of orange peel; a thin flimsy paper box that a tube of mascara had come in; a small brown bag that contained the receipt for the makeup, dated a week earlier; half a dozen pieces of junk mail, all opened; and a white business-size envelope addressed to Meredith in a solid, masculine hand.
The envelope was good quality, not the kind you pick up at the supermarket in boxes of twenty-five. The exterior had a texture to it, a subtle grain; the interior was patterned to protect the contents from prying eyes.
The contents, incidentally, were missing.
I sifted through the trash again, even going so far as to open all of the junk mail, whose glossy come-ons Meredith Berens had conscientiously reinserted in the envelopes before tossing. Nothing.
Moisture from the tea bags had smeared the address on the white envelope, although it wa
s still perfectly legible. There was nothing noteworthy about the hand in which the address had been penned in blue felt-tip ink: small, squarish characters, all caps, marching crookedly across the middle of the envelope, evidently leaning into a strong wind. Appropriately enough, the postmark was the Windy City, the date on it a little more than a week back.
There was no return address.
That was it for the garbage. The wastebasket did not contain the rest of the picture whose torn corner was in my shirt pocket.
I trashed the Ziploc bag and returned the wastebasket, which I had set up on the dining table, to its rightful place on the floor. I gave the little room another looking-over. There were a couple of nondescript, generic pictures on the wall: I would check behind them. There were half a dozen book-club hardcovers on a crooked wall-mount shelf over one of the easy chairs; I would go through them. There were sofa and chair cushions; I would look under and behind them. Looking for … whatever might be there.
Which was nothing. Except for eleven cents under the sofa cushions. I figured the woman had to have fourteen-hundred dollars lying around the place, here and there, in small change.
There were three pennies on one of the two glass shelves in the bathroom medicine cabinet. Also a tube of Crest, a blue Reach toothbrush, a vial of Secret roll-on antiperspirant, a bottle of Pepto-Bismol, a bottle of Robitussin, a bottle of aspirin, a digital thermometer, a Massengill box, a bottle of Cutex, a jar of Noxzema, a jar of Vaseline, half a bag of cotton balls, some Q-Tips in a chipped ceramic mug, and a couple throwaway razors. On the lid of the toilet sat a low basket that contained makeup supplies, an emery board, a long comb, and two hairbrushes. Not to mention seven cents in loose change. Next to the basket were balanced a portable blow-dryer and a curling wand. The blow-dryer was plugged into the single outlet in the light fixture above the mirrored cabinet doors.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 3
