Easy Street

by Elizabeth Sims

  I plunged down, returned to the kitchen, and flung open the basement door. The light switch didn't work, so I grabbed Porrocks's flashlight, a vintage Kel-Lite police model heavy with a fistful of D batteries, from the kitchen counter. "Audrey! Oh, damn, damn." I switched on the flashlight, thundered down the steps, and ran around throwing the strong beam across the concrete floor, along the walls, into every damp corner. I smelled mustiness but not death. Nothing. No one.

  I stood for a minute with my hands on my hips, the flashlight beam shining out in front of me.

  "Shit," is about all I've ever been able to say at a time like this.

  I noticed something curious and went over to take a better look. It was the house's electrical box, an antiquated fuse-type one. It stood open, and every fuse had been unscrewed and dropped on the floor, where they lay scattered like glass tops.

  I puzzled over that, then remembered seeing a tangle of electrical wire hanging threateningly from a gash in one wall. Sure—whoever had done the demolition had known enough to take this important precaution, especially given the age of the wiring. That clump of wire was insulated with cloth covering, safe when perfectly intact, but easily torn.

  I headed back upstairs.

  Where the hell was she? A completely different thought crept into my mind, but I pushed it out.

  How can I describe my feelings? The ugliness of the damage was so shocking I couldn't even mutter curses, after the first few minutes. No dust hung in the air, except for what I stirred up as I moved about. My wrecking bar, which I'd left in the upstairs bathroom, lay on the living room floor on top of a pile of debris. Shoe prints slightly smaller than mine were visible here and there where the dust lay thickest. My stomach felt as if someone had chopped it out with an axe. Porrocks's fine house—what a fucking mess.

  With a heavier, slower step this time, I visited every room and peered into every hole with the flashlight and groped around. No dregs of treasure today.

  Looking closely and knowing what I'd seen in the boathouse, I found two gypsum-board patches on walls still standing and broken pieces of it lying in the rubble in one other place. Jimmy Donovan, then, had stashed money in three places in that house, but the person who went after it hadn't known which walls to look in and hadn't thought to look first for patches. If she had, she'd have saved herself a lot of trouble—and Porrocks and me a whole lot of grief.

  Yeah, she. For it hit me at last: Audrey Knox was all right. She wasn't dead, wasn't battered, wasn't anything but somewhere safe. She was counting money and carrying out the rest of her plan, and if she was thinking one single thought about me, it was to the sound of a condescending laugh.

  Audrey. My dear Audrey.

  "Damn you, Audrey!" I spat, kicking a pile of rubble. "Damn you and your perky little outfits. Goddamn your sweet lips and your naughty smile and your sparkly eyes." Fury welled in me. "You little sneaking thief. You bouncy little betraying murderer."

  Could she be that too?

  As I hopped over a pile of trash, the floorboards creaked sharply, painfully. "Yeah, old house, I bet this hurt," I said. "I bet all this hurt pretty bad."

  I couldn't begin to think what I'd say to Porrocks.

  I perched on the dust-thickened arm of the couch. A sort of schizophrenia came over me; I thought at once, I must tell Audrey Knox what happened; we must work together to solve this situation, all the while knowing it was Audrey who had executed this destruction. It was crystal clear—she'd all but told me she was going to do it. As the author of the Calico Jones books so often writes, everything fell into place. Audrey had learned there was treasure here—somehow she'd learned that—and she'd taken that apartment across the street to watch for an opportunity to get it. Why hadn't she done it during the time the house stood vacant while it was on the market? Well, Porrocks had said there'd been break-ins. Maybe they had been exploratory.

  Of course. She hadn't known where exactly in the house the loot was. I pictured her climbing up the trapdoor to the attic and rooting through that junk, looking inside the toilet tanks, behind the stove, inside the furnace ducts, and around all the crevices of the basement. Only after she'd done all that would she begin to think about the walls themselves. And by that time Porrocks was moving in.

  What about the two guys Porrocks said she hired to tear down the first wall in the boathouse? They must have found the money by accident and, unmolested, took off with it before Audrey Knox got set up in that apartment across the street, or while she wasn't looking.

  I imagined the two guys: ordinary guys, workmen, finding the first batch of dough and ecstatically splitting it up. Thinking only like regular marginally dishonest, greedy people—not like practiced crooks or druggies—they'd gone their separate ways, not wondering yet whether there might be more. It wouldn't have entered their minds to savage a whole house on the chance that another glory hole might exist. I imagined them smoking cigars in Orlando, ordering surf'n'turf in Branson, testing out their Spanish on hookers in Tijuana—"Hot fuck for ten buck, chickie?"

  Porrocks was innocent. All she'd done was buy a house with too much of the wrong kind of history. Just that was enough to get her almost killed.

  Was I the most enormous jackass in the world? When I brought Drooly Rick to the place of his death, did I anticipate anything but a lovely outcome? But there was Audrey Knox, watching and waiting like a little spider up there in her hastily rented apartment. She was there when a scraggly dude and a scrawny chick walked into that boathouse with wrecking tools. She saw us go in and panicked, thinking we were after the loot.

  It had been broad daylight. She hesitated. Eventually, she saw me leave empty-handed and figured she could take on Rick. And she did.

  In his half-coherent desire to do demolition, Rick had torn into that wall. A cascade of wealth had burst forth, and he was sitting there scratching his head and trying to remember how much he'd had to drink, and trying to think what to do when Audrey Knox sneaked in with one of her softball bats. Even a gentle blow with such a weapon against the long-addled specimen of Rick would have hurt him enough to make him draggable the short distance to the boat well. Man, oh, man.

  Then she grabbed up as much treasure as she could and scurried home before I came back. I remembered the missing curtain—of course she ripped it down to bundle up her bounty.

  And then I in my nerdy excitement came over to her building, and she saw the outstanding possibilities in getting into my life. She befriended me, and I allowed her to seduce me, and she'd done so without giving a goddamn about me at all. The night we'd spent in Porrocks's house together—the night before last—she had intended to get me out of the way. A bonechill shot through me as I remembered our conversation about my wrecking bar. I remembered the way she'd hefted it in her hands and looked at it so thoughtfully, there when we were alone together in that house at night. I remembered the look in her eyes when I asked if she'd ever used a tool like that.

  She'd intended to kill me, and if I'd waited an hour longer to tell her I was leaving in the morning, she would have.

  Chapter 19

  I supposed I'd been angrier in my life, but it was hard to remember when. I picked up my wrecking bar and wiped it off on my jeans. I slipped it up my coat sleeve, then changed my mind. I set the bar on the kitchen counter and rooted in Porrocks's broom closet where I found an interesting brush, a nice soft-bristled one with a two-foot-long wooden handle. I supposed you could use it to wash a car. I left my coat on Porrocks's counter, took the brush, and went out.

  I stood on the street and looked up at Audrey Knox's windows. The windows themselves were the crank-style kind, and they were old, probably as old as the building. I thought about Audrey's apartment door, which was a steel security door like all the others. I could've gotten into the building easily enough, but I doubted I could force or jimmy that door open without alerting someone.

  The apartment building was red brick, with protruding sandstone blocks as details at the corners. I approac
hed the shrubbery in front as if looking for a lost cat. I slipped between two cedars and assessed my route. Those sandstone blocks were a lucky thing. I stuck the brush into a side belt loop of my jeans and boosted myself to the first sandstone block, then to the next one about eighteen inches above. The route was fairly easy all the way up the corner of the building: grasp, step, boost, grasp, step, boost. I took the brush out at every step and scrubbed industriously at the sandstone. The scrubbing had no effect, of course, except as camouflage.

  I was almost to the second floor when a voice called from below, "Hey there!"

  I looked down. "Yes?"

  The elderly woman who had fled from my toplessness the day Rick died said, "Would you do my windows next?" She wore a head scarf with a picture of Tahquamenon Falls on it. She shaded her eyes as she looked up.

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "One-D, all right?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Because they're filthy."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  The crux move was from the corner block to Audrey's windowsill, which was also stone, nicely sturdy. The move was easier than my around-the-wall swing at Porrocks's boathouse, yet fifteen feet off the ground I had to steel myself for it.

  I willed my brain chatter to stop for one bitching minute, then took a deep lungful of cold autumn air. I let go with both hands, sprang sideways the necessary few inches, caught the sill with my left foot, and grabbed new handholds on the metal window frame. I allowed myself a quiet "Ha!" A good omen.

  There were actually three windows set into one frame, three vertical panes each with its own crank.

  I inspected the frame as I scrubbingly moved the brush around. I stuck the brush in my belt loop again and reached into my back pocket for my trusty jackknife. I easily pried away the screen, then set the screen tidily on the ledge. I was betting Audrey hadn't locked all three of her windows. Locks on windows are usually balky except if they're really new. I pantomimed scrubbing the window and then, hiding what I was doing with my body, slipped my knife blade between the window and the outer frame. The windows opened outward, so this was easy. I couldn't get much leverage, though; this window was either locked or had no play in its crank mechanism.

  I tried the next window, the middle one, with better results. I was able to get my fingertips inside, and once I got a good grip, I pulled steadily, careful to keep my balance. The window edged outward an inch. Then it was simple to insert the wooden brush handle as a lever and force the window wide open. I flourished the brush, then climbed inside Audrey Knox's apartment. I turned and leaned out the window for the screen and put it back in place. I closed the window.

  My pretty playful lover had made a hasty, though not unplanned, exit. She'd left all the furniture, perhaps having rented the place furnished. Her bed was tousled, the linens and blankets all there, and her towels were still hanging in the bathroom. Her toiletries were gone, however, except for a lime-green comb. All that was in the cupboard beneath the sink was a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels.

  I looked at her pillow, the indentation of her lovely head, the almost clear body lines she'd left in the bed. The intimacy of her right now was almost unbearable.

  The closet was empty of clothes, as were the drawers of a small bureau. Her softball bats were gone. She'd left behind some trash in a bag beneath the sink, which I inspected: Wendy's wrappers, a frozen-pizza box, an empty bag of spaghetti, an empty jar of Ragu tomato sauce. There were some grocery receipts corresponding to those items, as well as a drugstore receipt for candy and sunscreen. "Hmm," I said into the empty kitchen. You don't need sunscreen in Michigan around Halloween. All the bills had been paid in cash.

  The refrigerator was empty except for half an onion, an apple, and a bag of carrots. There was no array of condiments, as you'd see cramming the door of anybody's refrigerator; a couple of flat bladders of McDonald's ketchup was all. This had been a short-term rental, all right.

  I sat on the couch and thought. Should I report the damage to Porrocks's house to the police? If I did that, I'd of course have to tell her about it. She'd have to file an insurance claim. I couldn't even begin to imagine telling her about this, upsetting her so much right when all she needed was to get well. I looked at my watch and wondered if she was in surgery right now. It was eleven o'clock. "Oh, God," I muttered.

  I had to catch up with Audrey Knox, and I had to talk to Vic Toretti, who might be with her now. She might essentially be working for him, or—I remembered Lisette Donovan's words about Toretti's girlfriend: spooky little thing, bitsy pretty vampire, well-dressed.

  Yeah. Lisette said Toretti's girlfriend's name was Bev, but that meant nothing. Most likely, Audrey Knox was an alias as well. Blast it all to hell. I'd never seen her driver's license, never glimpsed anything with her name on it. I could figure out a way to learn the name under which she'd rented the apartment from the building's manager, but for what good?

  I took the Windex and paper towels from the bathroom and let myself into the corridor, first carefully blocking the lock open with a bit of twisted paper. I went outside to the windows of 1-D and began cleaning them. The old woman appeared instantly and cranked one of her panels open to critique the job I was doing. After a minute I was able to tap into her lust for gossip by saying, "You know that little cutie in 2-B?"

  The old woman's eyes chirked up and she lifted a brow as if to say, Yeah, that slutty thing—whatcha got?

  "Looks like she took off," I muttered, shaking my head. "I lent her some valuable records, which I'd like to have back. You wouldn't have heard anything, would you?"

  "Huh," said the woman. "Well, good luck with the likes of her." Her blue-veined hands gripped the inner window frame like talons. "I saw her packing her car yesterday. She's long gone."

  "Yeah? What's she drive, anyway?"

  "I don't know. A purple car."

  "That purplish Avalon that was out front?"

  "Yes, that one," the woman said decisively and scornfully, as if Audrey's choice of car showed just what a lousy person she was.

  "Well, do you know where she might have gone? I mean, did you ever talk to her?"

  "Oh, we spoke occasionally." This was delivered coyly, and I saw that she'd no idea where Audrey went, probably never had spoken to her, but wanted to keep me engaged, wanted to keep me talking. It was a pity the woman was lonely, but I had too much to do to waste any more time with her.

  A voice behind me said, "I know where she went."

  I turned, wet wad of paper towels in midair.

  A young man who resembled an isosceles triangle stood there with a two-wheeled shopping cart full of groceries. He wore a long black overcoat similar to Drooly Rick's, but the coat was stiff and flared out at ground level. Then it narrowed to his unbroad shoulders and relatively small but well-groomed head. His crisply avant-garde haircut and the fact that his hair was dyed white proclaimed him to be a contributing member of society—artistic species.

  I understood that a young person who dyes his hair white is making an ironic statement, the opposite of what an older person tries to do with a bottle of hair color. His leather shoes were paint-spattered and he carried, slung over one shoulder, a canvas bag with a picture of Mr. Peanut on it. The dad-style overcoat teamed with the tot-style accessory—yes, this young man was a nonconformist.

  "Well, where?" I finally said.

  He said in a gentle tone, "Where else do lost people go?"

  Oh, brother.

  "What'd he say?" queried the old woman through her window.

  "Home," the young man said intensely. "She went where we all dream of going."

  He seemed a really nice guy beneath all that individuality. I said, "Do you know that for a fact, as in she actually told you where she was going, or have you just made a theoretical, philosophical statement?"

  "I never theorize."

  "OK. You mean her ancestral state? Would you just sort of talk to me here, man? I'm Lillian, by the way."

  He stepped forw
ard and shook my hand. "James."

  "I'm Pamela!" called the old woman.

  "OK, good to meet you, James. You know who we're talking about? This woman named Audrey Knox?"

  "I think I know who we're talking about. Initially, I knew her as Beverly, but lately she was calling herself Audrey."

  "How come, do you know?"

  "She said it was her middle name and she preferred it. I think she did in fact go back to Idaho. Why are you interested? She's not dealing anymore, if that's what you need."

  So James and I talked there on the sidewalk for a few minutes, and although his information was good, it wasn't quite paydirt. I explained about my missing valuable records and found out he'd known Audrey slightly for a couple of years. He lived in the apartment building, painted in oil colors he mixed himself, attended classes at Wayne State, and worked at a bar called the Gridlock.

  "I saw her in the neighborhood and realized she'd moved into this building. She'd come into the bar once in a while and we'd talk, not much, you know. She had an interesting gestalt—you know, her look. It was very of a piece."

  "Yes, I know what you mean."

  "People like that interest me. But she never really opened up to me. Last I saw her—I guess a couple of nights ago—she said she had some scores to settle back home."

  A couple of nights ago. "Yeah, like what? Do you know?"

  "No, she never said. She acted tough about it, like she was trying to impress me. I could tell she's a lost soul, though. Very sad underneath. Said she'll be happier at home. Maybe she will be."

  "Well, I'm really pissed at her. I don't want to make a federal case out of it, but I want my stuff back."

  "I'd guess that unless you go to Idaho, you won't get your records back. Were they, like, some jazz 78s?"

  "Uh, yeah. In fact, I lent her some Bessie Smiths and some Little Memphis Jims."