by S. J. Rozan
Sam took a breath, preparing to explain to the ignoramus. “I needed a pencil, so I came to get one. See how the pencils are all different numbers? So are the erasers, sort of. They don’t have numbers, but different erasers work better on different pencils. I keep them where they go. But see how that one, that light grayish one, is with the white ones? And see how they’re all kind of pushed over on that side? Someone stuck something in there and then took it out, but they didn’t put the erasers back right. See?”
I saw. The erasers, like the pencils in Sam’s apartment this morning, weren’t quite straight, the ones in the middle not quite centered. And a light grayish one was on the side with the white ones. Their shades were very close, so I could see how someone could make that mistake. Someone; but not Sam.
I wondered if the disruption could be accounted for by something as simple as the drawer sticking, so I slid it in and out. I guess I should have expected that it had been oiled within an inch of its life. Nothing in it moved even a millimeter.
“Someone put something there,” Sam insisted. “And then took it out again.”
“Sam—”
“I know! I know, it’s crazy, why would anyone do that, break in here and put something in my drawer and then take it out again? It’s crazy. But that’s what happened. Somebody came in and—”
“I believe you.”
He stopped. “You do?”
“Shouldn’t I?”
“You should.” He nodded quickly, up and down, up and down. “But sometimes you don’t.”
“Sometimes you don’t make sense. I think this time you’re right.” I took out my phone, turned on the flashlight, and examined the drawer. “Can I move this stuff?”
Sam made a face but said, “Okay.”
I lifted out the contents, inspected the drawer again. I slid it out of the table, checked it and the table’s underside for anything taped on, or signs of anything recently removed. Nothing. Whatever had happened here had left no trace except out-of-place erasers.
I put the drawer back and clicked the flashlight off. “Do you keep anything in there, or maybe attached to the drawer or the table? Something someone might have been looking for?”
He gave me a look that said there were times when I didn’t make sense. “I keep pencils there. And erasers. Stop, don’t put them back. I’ll do it.”
“Nothing else?”
“What else would I keep in there? That’s the pencil and eraser drawer.”
Of course it was.
I texted Lydia. In Sam’s studio. Someone’s been here. “Okay, Sam,” I said. “When was the last time you opened this drawer and everything was normal?”
He thought. “The day before yesterday.”
“What about the rest of the studio? Anything else wrong?”
“Oh. I don’t know.” He swiveled his head like a searchlight, as though he could inspect the whole studio from one spot.
“Can we look?” I said.
“Walk around, you mean?”
I raised my eyebrows. Reluctantly, he started forward, and we reprised the slow assessment of his apartment from earlier in the day. Probably because the studio was one big room with no place to hide, and probably also because I wasn’t Lydia, Sam didn’t insist on my staying right at his side. He scrutinized drawers, studied paper piles, and peered at pads. He finally declared everything except that one drawer intrusion-free.
“All right,” I said. “Now. Who has the door code? Peter, and Sherron Konecki, right? Who else?”
“Well.” He put some thought into the question. “I think maybe Tony. Yes, Tony. And Ellissa, I remember I told her. We traded.”
“And if Peter knows, Leslie might, too?”
“Ugh. You think?”
“Could be.”
Sam frowned. “So you mean it was one of those people who broke in here? Wow. I thought they liked me. Well, except Leslie. I guess it must have been her.”
“Your logic’s off, Sam, but you might be right. We’ll find out. Meanwhile, I have a friend who’s a locksmith. You want me to call him?”
Sam emphatically did.
Ernesto Luz (“Luz for Locks!”) was, as it happened, not far away and finishing up a job. He promised to rush over. I described the combination lock we were looking at. “Can you reprogram it?”
“If you got the paperwork.”
“If not?”
“Then we replace it. I got a couple in the truck.”
Just after I hung up the call, someone knocked on the door.
Sam jumped.
“Should I open the door?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Sam said but I did anyway, and when it turned out to be Lydia, he smiled.
“I got your text,” she said. “What happened?”
Sam said, “Do you still have your gun?”
“Sure, I have it. Do I need it?”
“No,” I said. I pushed the door shut behind her. “Someone was here.” I explained about the pencil-and-eraser drawer, showed her.
“Oh,” she said. “We’re positive?”
“We are.”
“Sam? Are you okay?”
Sam nodded.
“Ernesto should be here any minute,” I told her. “How did you do in there?”
“In where?” Sam asked.
“Ellissa’s studio,” Lydia said. “And not so well. She could talk about her work and her gallery all day”—I caught Sam’s eyeroll when Lydia said that—“but she wouldn’t let on anything about what she wanted to tell Sam. Except she hinted it was important. Sam, you need to find out what it was.”
“You mean, go talk to Ellissa?”
“Yes.”
“No. I don’t care what it was. Nobody can tell me anything today. Nobody. Anything. Anybody. Nothing. Even you guys. Go away. Wait, not now! After the locksmith comes. Then go away.”
I said, “Sam? Maybe Ellissa knows who broke in here.”
Sam took a long pause. “Oh. You think maybe?”
“I do.”
He frowned, then grinned. “Okay, go ask her.”
“She won’t tell us.”
“Tell her I want her to.”
“I think—”
The buzzer let us know someone was downstairs.
“Probably the locksmith,” I said, asked at the intercom, and turned out to be right. I buzzed Ernesto in, opened the door, and waited.
He greeted us as he ambled from the elevator. He glanced at the lock and said to me, “You got the paperwork? The manual got the owner’s code in it.”
“Sam?” I asked, but Sam shook his head.
“Okay, then I got to replace it. Costs more.”
“Go ahead,” I told him.
While Ernesto set to work on the door, Lydia and I tried to set to work on Sam. “If Ellissa knows who was here,” I said, “we could—”
“Shhh!” Sam said. “I want to watch. Besides, it was Leslie. And it doesn’t matter, whoever it was. If we change the lock, they can’t come back.”
Having solved the intrusion problem with Sam-logic, he refused to listen to another word from either of us. He bent, hands on knees, to focus, with that laser-like attention he could bring, on Ernesto’s dismantling of his hardware.
“Give it a few minutes,” Lydia said softly. I didn’t see another choice, so I leaned on the studio wall and wished you could still smoke in New York buildings.
Sam’s concentration, being like a laser, could also suddenly switch off. After a while he straightened, looked around as though reorienting himself, and walked back to his easel by the window. He started sharpening pencils, peering at his painting, glancing at the street. I was about to start another offensive, when he jumped back.
“Oh no!” Sam pointed out the window. “Oh no!”
“What’s wrong?” Lydia charged over, me right behind.
“Sherron! Sherron just came out of Tony’s. She looks mad. She can’t come here. I won’t talk to her.” He raced to the front of the room. “Lock
the door! Oh, no, there’s no lock!”
Ernesto looked up. “Soon,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
“Too long!”
I watched Sherron Konecki practically stomp across the street to the door of the building we were in. “Get lost,” I told Sam. “I’ll deal with Sherron.”
“Okay. Say I’m not here. Say you’re waiting for me and you don’t know where I am but I won’t be back for hours. Say that.”
Sam ran down the hall and made it to the bathroom just before the elevator door slid open and Sherron Konecki, in black skirt, hose, and heels, ivory sweater, and obsidian pendant, stepped from it. A dozen clicking steps and she stopped short at Sam’s door.
“What in the hell are you doing?” she demanded.
Changing the lock would have been gratuitous, so I said, “Someone broke in.”
“You can’t do this without my permission. I lease this studio. What do you mean, someone broke in? Is everything all right?” By the way she peered past me, it was clear Konecki meant the drawings and the large canvas—her assets. “Where’s Sam?”
“Not here. We’re waiting for him.” The bathroom door, I noticed, cracked open a tiny bit.
“How did you get in if he’s not here?”
“He was. He left. He said we should take care of the lock and he’d be back later.”
“It’s not his lock to take care of.”
“He said he’d never come back here unless the code was changed. He didn’t have the manual, so we decided to put on a new lock.”
“Of course he didn’t have the manual. My office has it. You should have called.”
“Sorry, didn’t occur to me. I figured it was an emergency. Finish up,” I told Ernesto, who seemed to be trying to hide a grin. Stepping out past him into the hallway, I said to Konecki, “Sam will call you later.”
“Don’t you patronize me. Who appointed you Cerberus?”
The answer seemed too obvious to state, so I said nothing. Konecki glared, letting out a small hissing sound like a pipe about to blow. She spun and stalked down the hall. The bathroom door clicked shut, but Konecki didn’t go that far. She stopped at the next door, where her knock was answered with the speed of someone who’d been waiting for it. She disappeared into Ellissa Cromley’s studio.
21
I walked down to the bathroom and knocked. “It’s okay, Sam,” I said. “She’s gone.” Ding, dong, the witch is dead.
Sam emerged. “I heard you, you know. I had the door open a crack. You lied.” He grinned as we walked back to the studio. “You said I said I would never come back here. I thought you didn’t lie.”
“Only to you, Sam. To everyone else, I lie all the time.”
For some reason that made Sam’s grin widen.
“Who’s Cerberus?” Lydia wanted to know.
“Guardian of the gates of hell,” I told her, and added, “a dog with three heads.”
“Oh.” She narrowed her eyes, regarding me.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Though it’s a cheap shot.”
Lydia said, “You’re right, I’m better than that. Where did she go?”
“Konecki? To Cromley’s studio.”
Sam frowned. “No, she wouldn’t go there. Except to find me. They hate each other.”
“I saw her go in. Maybe this has something to do with what Ellissa wanted to tell you.” I had no idea if that was right, but the opportunity was too good to pass up.
“Oh.” Sam thought. “Oh, well, then, maybe I will go see Ellissa.” He looked at me and added, “After Sherron leaves.”
That was likely to be the best we were going to get. Ernesto stood up. “Okay, papi,” he said to Sam. “It’s ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“You got to program the number you want.”
“I choose it?”
“Sí, papi. You don’t got to tell nobody.”
“Except Lydia,” I added quickly. I caught Ernesto’s eye.
“Oh,” Ernesto said. “Yeah, somebody else got to know. Maybe Lydia.”
Sam pursed his lips and nodded. “Okay, Lydia. But not Peter, or Sherron, or anyone else.”
With Ernesto’s guidance, Sam chose his code. He tried it twice, then again, grinning like a kid with a Christmas toy. “Come on,” he said to Lydia, “I’ll show you.” She joined him at the door, and the two of them poked buttons and whispered to each other.
I paid Ernesto and took the paperwork. “He’s funny,” Ernesto said, packing up his tools.
“You don’t know the half of it. Thanks for coming so fast.”
“For you? Never a problem. Bye, Lydia.”
Lydia waved and Ernesto headed for the elevator.
“Sam,” I said, holding out the manila Luz for Locks envelope, “put this somewhere safe. In case you need to change the code again. You’re in charge.”
Sam gave the envelope a strange look. “I’m never in charge of anything.”
“You are of this.”
After a hesitation, he took the envelope from me, walked it to the window wall, and put it in a drawer in the back table. He looked at it as though he was unsure that was where it went. Then, resolutely, he closed the drawer.
A moment later, where that envelope belonged was no longer Sam’s biggest problem. The elevator door slid open. Ernesto stood aside to let two people get out before he got in. The two new arrivals walked toward us. One was a uniformed NYPD officer. The other was Angela Grimaldi.
“Smith.” Grimaldi nodded. “He in there?”
“Sam?”
“Who the hell else? He got a lawyer? Call him. I came to take him up.”
“Sam?” I said again, as if there were a question. “Why?”
“On suspicion of homicide—Kimberly Pike. Why do you think?”
“You have new evidence? This morning you had nothing.”
She nodded. “New physical evidence.”
“On the clothes you took?”
“His? No. On hers. And that’s all I’m giving you. Now, move.”
Sam joined us at the door. “Hi, Angela.”
“Hi, Sam. I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come with me.”
Sam’s eyes went wide. “Are you arresting me?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Sam,” I started.
“Quiet! I did kill her, didn’t I? Last night. Whatever her name was. I killed the other ones, too, right? But now I won’t kill anybody else, because you’re going to arrest me!” Sam looked at me, and then at Lydia, almost glowing. “I did kill them, and she’s going to arrest me. Arrest me!” he demanded, turning back to Grimaldi.
She gestured to the uniformed cop. “Read him his rights. And cuff him in front.” The uniform, whose nameplate read SEGURA, looked a little perplexed, but he did his job, muttering Sam’s Miranda rights and clicking on handcuffs.
“I guess you can get forensic evidence off a body in a meat truck after all,” Grimaldi said to me.
“What’s the evidence, specifically?”
“Are you serious?”
“All right. But listen. Someone broke into Sam’s apartment this morning. And into here sometime yesterday or today, too. That’s why we changed the lock.”
Grimaldi looked at Sam. “That true?”
He nodded earnestly.
“Did they take anything? Either place?”
Sam shrugged.
“Did you report it?”
Sam shook his head.
“Why not?” Grimaldi directed the question to me.
“It would’ve been hard to prove. I wasn’t even sure it was true at the apartment until I saw what happened here.”
“It was,” Sam chimed in.
Grimaldi asked, “So, what happened here?”
I showed her the pencil and eraser drawer. She listened and looked. When I finished, she said, “That’s it? Are you as crazy as he is?”
“If it were anyone else, I’d agree with you. But he knows.”
She shook her he
ad. “Well, good luck getting a crime scene team in here. I’m not requesting one. No way you’re making a fool of my ass with this.”
“I’m just thinking, whatever you have, something more’s going on—”
“Stop it!” Sam said loudly. “Stop trying to talk her out of it. She’s arresting me. She knows I killed those women. You didn’t figure it out, so you’re fired. Come on, Angela, let’s go. Bye, Lydia.”
Grimaldi lifted her eyebrows at me. “I guess you’re fired.” She looked around. “Are you Lydia? Smith’s partner? I want to talk to you.”
“Lydia Chin. Yes, Bill told me. Whenever you want.”
Grimaldi shook Lydia’s extended hand and then nodded to Segura, who gripped Sam’s arm. The three of them marched down the hall to the elevator. Grimaldi pressed the button. As they got in and the elevator door started to close, she said to me again, “Call his lawyer.”
22
I called Susan Tulis.
“Yeah, I heard he was out,” Susan said, when I told her I was calling about Sam. “He’s Picasso now, right?”
“He may be back in. He’s just been arrested. I’ll fill you in and I’ll cover your bill, but right now he needs someone down there to help him keep his mouth shut. I get the feeling he’s about to sing even though he doesn’t know the tune. Or the words.”
“Stick to straight narrative. Your metaphors are always baroque. I’ll send someone. But find somebody else to pay me, because I want you working for me, not the other way.”
Susan was the defense attorney who had called me in on Sam’s original arrest six years earlier. We had a retainer arrangement: she paid me a dollar a year and that meant I was working for her any time she said I was, actual bill to be determined later. It made sense to invoke it here. Anything I learned working for Sam’s attorney would be protected by attorney-client privilege, but there was no such thing as PI-client privilege. Plus, Sam had fired me.
Susan said, “Give me the details.”
I told her what she needed to know about why I was working for Sam again, finishing with his recent arrest.
“Okay, I’m on it,” she said. “And tell me this, not that it matters. Do we think he did what they picked him up for?”
“I don’t. But he does.”
“Ah, yes, that’s our Sam.”
