“So, you’re in the market?” the man asked.
Rollins moved his hands a bit to screen off the lights. He could make out a shadowy figure against the car—a big green Land Cruiser, he could see now.
“Great little piece of property, isn’t it?” The man laughed a comfortable, genial laugh. “Hi, Jerry Sloane, Sloane Realty.” He extended a hand in what was obviously a practiced gesture. “And you are?”
“Harris.” Amazing how easy it was to lie.
“Harris, you say?”
Rollins nodded.
“Great to see you. That the Mrs.?” Sloane turned back toward Marj, who, Rollins could see, had gotten out of the car and crossed to their side of the street. She was standing on the sidewalk, her hands up by her face protectively.
Rollins said nothing. He wanted to keep Marj safe from all this.
“Oh, girlfriend, huh?”
Rollins looked over at Marj, who looked back at him.
“Doin’ pretty well,” Sloane whispered to Rollins conspiratorially. Then he clapped him on the back and spoke up. “Well, come on, come on. What are you waiting for? Let me show you the house. Believe me, it’s a steal at a hundred seventy-nine.”
“It’s really for sale?” Marj called from the sidewalk.
“Jeez, sweetheart, I hope it is,” Sloane replied. “We wouldn’t want to be caught trespassing, would we?” He gave out a big laugh and flicked out a forearm at Rollins in an unsuccessful effort to get him to join in. “I got the listing a few days ago. You’re the very first one to check it out.” He handed Rollins a business card.
“Anyone living here?”
“God no. You’ll see—it’s all cleaned out.”
Rollins went up the path to the house, aware that he was following in the steps of the gaunt man from the night before. “It just looked like someone might be living here, that’s all.” Somehow, Rollins thought he needed to explain.
Sloane dug into his pocket, pulled out a key, and fitted it into the door.
“You know who owns it?” Rollins asked.
Sloane pushed the door open. “Off the record?”
Rollins nodded.
“Can’t tell you.” Sloane laughed again. A real joker, that Sloane.
While Sloane went inside, Rollins returned to Marj and laid out the situation.
“So the guy’s a realtor?” Marj asked quietly, obviously confused. “I thought you said you thought he was in insurance.”
“This isn’t the man I followed,” Rollins whispered. “This Sloane fellow is a real estate agent, at least he says he is. He gave me his card.” He handed it to Marj, who looked at it very carefully. “He thinks I’m looking to buy the house. I told him my name was Harris.”
“Is it?”
Rollins ignored that. “I thought I’d take a look around inside, since we’re here.”
“This is majorly weird.” Marj took a step toward the house. “You’re going to get in trouble, I just know it.”
Going up the walkway together, Rollins thought they might be a couple of newlyweds, then dropped the idea.
“Jerry Sloane.” The realtor thrust out a hand to Marj at the top of the stairs.
“Hi.” Marj did not give him a name.
Sloane looked from Rollins to Marj and then back again. “So, you two house hunting?” he asked. “Or”—he turned to Marj—“you just giving him real estate advice?”
“I’m afraid that’s personal,” Rollins interrupted.
“Oh, absolutely! The wife says I shouldn’t be so nosy. Bad habit, but it goes with the territory.” Sloane flipped on the lights and ushered them inside. The place was completely empty, just as Sloane had said, and it smelled of mildew and industrial cleaners. “It’d help to have a little air in here.” Sloane raised some shades and threw open a few windows.
Rollins glanced about. All that remained of the previous occupants were some ghostly rectangles on the wall where a few pictures had hung. While Sloane lectured Marj on the details of the house’s closet space, taxes, and proximity to local schools, Rollins slipped away to go through the kitchen cabinets, the drawers under the built-in bookcase in the living room, the hall closets. Nothing, hardly even any dust. Leaving Sloane to show Marj the back porch, Rollins crept downstairs to the basement. It was damp, with a small furnace. Rollins stepped warily, sure the gaunt man would jump out at him at any moment and put a knife to his throat. Still, he kept searching for a memento, a photograph, a vault, a passageway, a secret compartment—something, anything, that would explain the mystery of the night before. But he found nothing. As he trudged back up the basement stairs, he couldn’t imagine why the gaunt man had come to such a place, why he’d had a key, what he’d done inside, what had become of him.
He could hear Sloane’s voice, a low monotone, from the master bedroom as he moved back through the living room. It was a small house—the living area all flowed together, the kitchen, dining room, and sitting area all merging into one. No privacy, Rollins thought. At the big house in Brookline where he’d grown up, space was all there was. Everything and everyone seemed so far apart—shut away in that vast house behind thick, oak doors down long hallways that were hung with oils and silenced by thick Persian rugs. But here, the slightest sounds rang through the walls like gunfire.
“Harris?” It was Marj calling from the master bedroom. It took Rollins a moment to realize that she meant him. He turned and found her coming toward him. “I didn’t know where you were.” She sounded frightened.
“I was showing her the Jacuzzi,” Sloane explained. Was there a note of guilt in his voice? “Worth the price of the house right there. Want to see?”
He guided Rollins back to the master bath. Water was pouring into the tub through a golden spigot, pooling with a froth of bubbles.
Rollins didn’t like the look of it. “We should be going.” He headed back out of the bedroom and down the hall to the front door.
“You want to leave an address or phone number or something?” Sloane shouted after him.
“I don’t think we’re interested after all,” Rollins replied. “Thanks anyway.”
“Well, you have my card if you change your mind.” Sloane stood just inside the screen door, watching them. “People do, you know, all the time.”
Outside in his car, Rollins could feel Sloane’s eyes on him from the threshold as he released the hand brake and switched on the ignition. It was like being X-rayed. He shouldn’t have been able to feel anything, but he did. The whole left side of his head seemed to buzz where it was exposed to Sloane’s gaze. He eased the car away from the curb.
“Find anything?” Marj asked.
Distracted, Rollins didn’t quite take in what Marj was asking.
“I said, did you find out anything while I was in with el creepo?”
“No. Nothing.” He took a right, to double back onto 62. He still felt Sloane’s gaze.
“You sure he wasn’t the guy you followed?”
“Yes.” Rollins nodded emphatically.
“Then why do you suppose he was so interested in you?”
Sometimes, Rollins felt things before his brain registered them: His palms suddenly felt oily, and there was a murky pulsing deep in his chest. “What makes you think he was?”
“Are you blind? You didn’t notice the way he looked at you?”
“Of course not.” All his senses had been on high alert. But he had been distracted, first by Marj and then by Sloane’s suddenly pulling up out of nowhere, his headlights blazing. If only he’d had a little warning, time to prepare.
“It was like he was trying to figure out if he knew you from somewhere,” Marj went on. “You sure you never seen him before?”
“Positive.”
“Then, when he had me alone with him by the Jacuzzi, he kept asking me stuff about you—like where you worked, where you lived. He kept it casual, but I could tell he really wanted to know. That’s why I yelled. Freaked me fucking out.”
Sloane’s fa
ce loomed up in Rollins’ mind, big as a billboard. “You didn’t tell him, did you?”
“I had to tell him something!”
“Why?”
“He’d think I was holding out on him. Rolo, it would have been strange. I kept it real general, don’t worry. I said you were in mutual funds, and you lived, like, in town.”
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Look, maybe he was just trying to tell if you could afford the house.”
“Anybody could afford that house.”
“I couldn’t.”
An offhand remark, Rollins was pretty sure. Marj hadn’t meant anything by it. All the same, it shamed him. Clearly, his parents had been right about one thing: It was never wise to discuss money. He vowed to avoid the topic with Marj in the future.
The rest of the ride back to Boston passed uneasily for Rollins. He dropped Marj off at her apartment building. Despite her demurrals, he saw her to her front door and opened it for her.
“Thanks.” Her voice seemed to be almost all breath. “You don’t suppose anything bad will happen, do you? I mean, we were just playing around, basically, right?”
Rollins assured her that nothing would come of it.
Marj smiled. “Well, good night then.” She extended a hand. Still smarting from the pushy way that Sloane had thrust out his hand, Rollins was determined to be more suave with Marj. But somehow he miscalculated and, rather than lock onto the meat of her hand, he ended up grasping mostly her fingers.
Instead of driving home, he went through the first intersection, then curved back to watch her windows for a few minutes from a taxi stand. Things were starting to swim a little, and he just wanted to make sure that she was okay. That’s all. He saw her speak on a cordless phone as she paced back and forth in front of what he guessed were the living room windows. He watched her gesture with those very same fingers, the ones that had touched him. He watched her run them through her hair.
Three
It was past eleven when he returned to his own apartment building, a former row house on Hanover Street in Boston’s North End. The neighborhood was home mostly to Italian-Americans, but also to an increasing number of well-heeled young professionals like himself, who were drawn to the cappuccino bars and not put off by the lingering mob associations of the place. At that hour, Rollins was surprised to find his landlady, Mrs. D’Alimonte, still up. “Oh, Mr. Rollins!” she cried, bustling out of her ground floor apartment with a plateful of cannoli. She was wearing a faded housedress, and her hair looked limp from the heat. “I baked them for you special.”
Rollins was in no mood for dessert, but he didn’t want to be impolite. He selected one of the pastries and delicately bit into the end, careful not to make a mess of the ricotta filling. “Delicious,” he said. “Thank you.”
“You’re out late tonight,” said Mrs. D’Alimonte, widening her round eyes. “A pretty girl, I hope.”
Rollins flushed, then realized she was just fishing for information. He headed upstairs, eager for the solitude of his apartment, his wide bed and soft pillow.
He had made it only a few steps up the stairs before Mrs. D’Alimonte called out to him again. “I’m glad you like the cannoli, Mr. Rollins.” She raised her voice a little. “Because I—well—I meant to tell you—this came for you the other day.” Rollins craned his head around. She was holding an envelope by one corner as if it were some sort of legal evidence. “And I—oh dear—somehow it ended up in my apartment under the newspapers and—”
Rollins returned a few steps down the stairs and took the envelope from her hand. As he did so, Mrs. D’Alimonte’s jaw started to quiver. Rollins hadn’t thought he could have such an effect on anyone, least of all his oversize landlady. He inspected the envelope. Rollins was handwritten in ballpoint on the front, nothing more; there was no stamp, postmark, or return address.
“Someone must have dropped it off for you,” Mrs. D’Alimonte said. “I—I found it on the floor just inside the front door.”
“When?”
“A week ago? Maybe ten days? I’m afraid I don’t exactly remember.”
“Mrs. D’Alimonte, I have to ask: Do you usually examine my mail?”
“No, never, Mr. Rollins!”
But Rollins had made his point. He pocketed the envelope and continued back upstairs.
“Mr. Rollins, are you in some kind of trouble?”
Rollins stopped again. “Whatever makes you think that?”
“You seem—oh, nothing. Never mind. Good night, Mr. Rollins. I’m sorry about the letter. I should have given it to you sooner. I’m just a mixed-up old lady.”
Rollins waited until Mrs. D’Alimonte had retreated back into her apartment before he opened his door. He had installed several dead bolts, and it always took him a while to unlock everything. Inside, he punched in the code disconnecting his burglar alarm, then flipped on the lights and checked to see that all the shades were pulled.
Rollins lived in a one-bedroom apartment with dark wallpaper he’d selected to bring out the dusky hues of the oil landscapes on the walls. Restfully English in their gilt frames, they’d been acquired by a great-aunt for a song at Knoedler’s nearly a century earlier. Another family heirloom stood by the window, next to the radiator. It was an early Victorian mahogany sideboard that had come down from his maternal grandfather. It was a little large for the space, but Rollins had always been fond of it. As a child, he had liked to hide in the lower cabinets, especially during his parents’ dinner parties. That was how he’d learned his father considered him “withdrawn” and “enigmatic,” two words he’d had to look up. Now, the sideboard was decorated with a scissored angel from the younger of Richard’s two children, an eight-year-old named Natalie; it had come two Christmases ago, but Rollins hadn’t thrown it out. The angel stood, somewhat faded and curled up, beside some ceremonial silver and an extremely handsome, inlaid Parisian humidor. Since Rollins didn’t smoke, the humidor had remained empty for years until, through a previous job, he got to know a private investigator by the name of Al Schecter. Actually, Schecter always called himself a “professional investigator” to downplay the lurid Hollywood associations of his career. Rollins hadn’t talked to him in years, but he thought of him fondly every time he looked at the humidor. Schecter had given him a dozen cigars—illegal Cubans from his collection—to fill it. In tribute to Schecter, Rollins had never removed them.
Envelope in hand, Rollins settled into the large leather chair that stood by the bookcase stuffed with a few of his Latin texts from college, some business books, an Arnold genealogy volume (covering his mother’s side of the family), and a complete leatherbound edition of James Fenimore Cooper that his grandmother had given him as a graduation present. He switched on the antique lamp that curved over the chair, pulled on his reading glasses, and looked at the envelope. The Rollins was written with a definite scrawl, whether it was a mark of haste or slovenliness he couldn’t guess. A cheap pen, anyway. A blob of ink had congealed at the top of the R and on the second l.
He took a breath, poked an index finger under the flap, and ripped the envelope open. There was a note inside, written on plain paper. It bore no name or letterhead, merely a number scrawled with the same blobby ballpoint: 9427503. At first, Rollins assumed it was some sort of account number or possibly an entry code. But then he noted the seven digits and decided that it had to be a telephone number, even if it lacked the usual hyphen separating out the exchange. He glanced over at the telephone, the heavy, black, rotary type now considered old-fashioned, at his elbow. He considered dialing, but it was nearly midnight, no time to phone.
The note on the side table glowed slightly yellow in the tawny morning light that filtered through the window shades. Rollins was tempted to crumple it up and toss it into the wastebasket like other unsolicited correspondence. It was rude, after all, to be so inexplicable. The note seemed to demand something from him that he wasn’t sure he wanted to give.
It brought back to mind all the strang
e events involving the dark house, events that were likewise inexplicable. Could those events and this obscure note be linked? On the face of it, two oddities in close succession seemed likely to be related. That’s the conclusion that he’d come to last night, anyway, as he was struggling to go to sleep. But now, in the daylight, he wasn’t so sure. If Mrs. D’Alimonte was to be believed, the note had arrived well before Rollins had gone to the dark house, before he’d ever thought of going to the dark house, before there ever was a dark house so far as he was concerned. And it was as pointless to contemplate a link between these two unrelated occurrences as…well, as it would be to project matrimony between him and Marj based on the previous evening’s car ride. After all, that night’s pursuit had been purely arbitrary, as always. Rollins had simply looked up from the Herald’s gossip column in front of that newsstand in Somerville, spotted the Audi going by, and followed it.
He took the sheet of paper into the kitchen and propped it up against the salt and pepper shakers on the table and sat down before it, bringing his head low to study it. It was just a number. A number from nowhere. That was all. No watermarks, stray doodles—or any indentations left from other correspondence, which a cop show recollected from his childhood inspired him to check for.
For comparison, he retrieved the envelope from the telephone table and tipped it up against a candlestick. He looked from one document to the other. On both, the handwriting was light, almost spidery. Looking closer, he thought he detected a trace of femininity in the delicate loop of the first 9. In Rollins’ experience, men’s handwriting tended toward jagged angularity, women’s to a more supple roundness. The idea came to him in a spasm: Might Marj have written it? In a kind of brain-burst, he pictured her laboring over the paper, tongue protruding through tightened lips, ballpoint in hand.
The Dark House Page 3
