I got to the end of the hall where the door to the stairs was. Though I had kept my eyes peeled, I did not spot any apparent sluts, Irene Handler or otherwise. Too bad. I wanted to practice not wardrobe-shaming them by congratulating them on their outfits. I had a passion for tolerance and self-expression. I started up the stairs. It was a good thing I had done all that legwork at the gym before in preparation. A good Hero was prepared to deal with any obstacle that might present itself.
I exited the stairwell at the seventh floor. Hennings’ apartment number was 77. Using my keen detective skills and the gold-colored numbers mounted on each front floor, I located apartment 77. It was near the middle of the hall. I looked right and then left. No one was around. If there were security cameras, they were so cunningly placed and camouflaged I did not see them. I scanned the interior of the apartment with my water senses. No one was inside. I also scanned behind the door of the apartment across the hall from where I was to make sure no one happened to be looking out the peephole at me. The coast was clear. I pulled out of my pants pocket a small case containing my lock-picking tools. It was a crime to be in the possession of such tools. By owning them, I was doing my part in keeping them out of the hands of criminals. Working quickly, I used the tools to try to unlock the door’s two locks. Locksport—the art of defeating locks—was a hobby of mine that had the side-benefit of being useful in my occupation. I was a card-carrying member of the Open Organization of Lockpickers—and yes, there is a such a thing. Usually I could pick a lock as easily as picking my teeth. Why, then, was I having such a hard time with these two locks?
I sensed someone coming with my powers. I quickly pocketed my tools. I started walking down the hall again, acting like resident who did not have a care in the world. A man walked by at the other end of the hall. He did not pay me any attention. Perhaps he had seen so many superheroes who were being balked by a locked door before that we were no longer a source of interest. Once the man walked out of view, I returned to apartment 77 and resumed work.
Finally, the first lock clicked open. The second lock was similar to the first, so it went faster as I now had a better idea how to defeat it. It clicked open about a minute or so after the first. I let out a sigh of relief as I pocketed my tools again. I had been bent over the locks for far longer than I ever would have anticipated. As much as I enjoyed a challenge, I did not enjoy the prospect of being caught breaking and entering. I had gone to jail relatively recently in connection with another case, and I had little interest in making an encore appearance. Jail inmates had little love for Heroes since many of them were in jail because of us.
Before opening Hennings’ now unlocked door, I walked down the hall a bit and eyeballed the locks on some of the nearby apartment doors. They all appeared to be standard-issue apartment locks. The locks on Hennings’ door were very much not standard-issue. If they had been, they would have barely slowed me down before I had gotten his door open. Interesting. Did Hennings keep something valuable in his apartment, prompting him to go through the trouble of installing different locks?
I went back over to Hennings’ door. I knocked on it. My powers were still telling me no one was inside, but it still did not hurt to knock to be extra sure. Besides, it was polite. I heard no response. I opened the door, stepped inside, and closed and locked it behind me.
I took a moment to let my eyes adjust to the dark room I was in. The same thrill I always felt when I had reason to break into a place washed over me. Being a Hero and private detective had brought me into contact with a lot of professional thieves over the years, and I knew from talking to them money was but a fringe benefit of them doing what they did. The main reason why they were thieves was for the rush they got out of going and being where they did not have a legitimate reason to be. That same rush was what thrilled voyeurs. Though I was no thief or voyeur, I could understand where they were coming from.
I pulled on some thin latex gloves I had brought with me. The air of the apartment was still and musty, as if it had been a while since the door or a window had been opened. The apartment was as quiet as a mouse. The only illumination came from across the room where closed vertical blinds glowed dimly thanks to sunlight shining on them through a large glass door. The glass door no doubt led to the apartment’s terrace. Though I had a small flashlight in my pocket, the glow from the glass door was enough for me to have a quick look around without stumbling over any of the furniture in the place.
All the windows in the place had thick blinds that were firmly closed. No one would see me if I turned the lights on, so that was what I did after doing a quick survey in the dark. I began a thorough search of the place. I was in no rush, so I was careful to put things back the way I found them as I went through them.
The apartment was completely unremarkable. There was a living room, a small kitchen, a bedroom, and a bathroom, all with unusually high ceilings. The place was as neat as the living quarters of a Marine and, except for a thin layer of dust that coated everything, as clean as a whistle. Hennings was clearly a fastidious housekeeper. It appeared that he lived alone.
I saved the bedroom for last, having found nothing of great interest in the rest of the apartment. I started with the closet, above which was mounted a stereo speaker high up on the wall. As tall as I was, I could not reach the speaker even if had stood on my tippytoes. I knew that because I eyeballed the distance, not because I actually stood on my tippytoes. I did not do it mainly because a fearless and death-defying Hero like me should not use a word like “tippytoes.” A matching speaker was on the wall over on the left.
There were no capes or superhero costumes in the bedroom closet. Finding some would have made searching for a hidden superhero go a lot easier. Nothing was ever easy. I did find inside the closet, though, two sets of plastic and metal leg braces, as well as two sets of crutches, one wood, one metal. It made me think Hennings was handicapped in some fashion. Avatar was the most imaginable opposite of handicapped. This find made it seem unlikely that Hennings was Avatar’s secret identity. But, I had already gone through the trouble of getting inside the apartment, so I continued my search of it though I was coming to suspect it was a waste of my time.
As I did so, something about the closet hovered at the edge of my consciousness. Every time I tried to figure out what it was that nagged at me, it skittered out of reach, like the name of someone you know you know, but can’t quite recall despite, or perhaps because of, how hard you thought about it. I tried to put the nagging feeling out of my mind, hoping it would coalesce and become clear before I left the apartment.
On top of Hennings’ chest of drawers were several framed photographs. Only two people were in the photographs, a man and a woman. In most of the pictures, the man and woman were together; in a few, they were alone. The man was white, with thinning brown hair and a narrow face that looked almost emaciated. He looked to be in his early thirties. He wore leg braces, used crutches, wore thick glasses, and his back was slightly rounded. Hennings, presumably. I wondered what was wrong with his legs.
The woman featured in the pictures was a bombshell. She was blonde and white, though her skin was sun-kissed. She had light freckles under her eyes and on the bridge of her nose. She had high cheekbones and a squarish jaw that made her face seem ever so slightly masculine. She was toned, but with unmistakable curves. She was a bit taller than Hennings, but that might have been because Hennings’ posture was not straight due to both his slightly curved back and his crutches.
In the pictures where Hennings and the woman appeared together, they looked at each other the way I looked at a ham sandwich. The love they had for one another was as clear as day. If it had not been for that look and their body language, I would have assumed the two were relatives, perhaps brother and sister or maybe cousins who had grown up together. You did not often see a woman who looked like the blonde did romantically involved with someone who looked like Hennings did. Yes, beauty was only skin deep, but most people did not have x-ray visio
n. Outer beauty was all they saw. I mentally congratulated Hennings and the woman on bucking the typical dating conventions. I did wonder, though, why someone Hennings had contracted to do work for had reported him missing rather than the blonde who appeared in these pictures. Perhaps Hennings was not really missing, but rather he and this blonde were off canoodling on a beach somewhere. If I had not just gotten finished canoodling with my own beautiful girlfriend a couple of days ago, I might have been a little jealous. Jealousy ill-suited a superhero.
Since I was standing in front of it anyway, I went through Hennings’ chest of drawers. One at a time, I pulled each drawer out, put it on the bed, and took everything out of the drawer and went through the items. I felt like a dirty old man pawing through Hennings’ underwear. But, if you were going to do something, you might as well do it right.
The drawer at the bottom of the chest of drawers, the fourth one, felt slightly heavier once empty than the preceding ones had. Visually, it appeared to be identical to the three others. I tapped at the planks of wood that made up the drawer with my knuckle. The wood at the bottom of the drawer sounded slightly hollow. I played with the empty drawer for a while, searching for a hidden compartment. After a few minutes of finding nothing, I felt like a blind man groping in a dark room for a black cat that was not even there. The empty drawer being heavier than the others and the wood sounding hollow was not my imagination, though. I continued poking and prodding at the drawer. I resisted the increasing temptation to throw it on the ground in frustration and crack it open with brute force. Someone trying to do a covert search was like a good camper, though: you left things the way you found them.
Frustrated at not finding anything, I put the empty drawer back down on the bed. Shooting it would not accomplish much, but that was what I felt like doing. I closed my eyes and I took a long breath. I reopened my eyes, pretending like I was seeing the drawer for the first time. Suddenly it hit me. There was a latch on the rear of each of the drawer’s metal sides that did not serve any purpose that I could discern. I pulled out each of the other drawers I had already put back into the chest of drawers. There was no such latch on the other three drawers.
“Aha!” I said aloud. “Could this be a clue?” The room remained quiet. No one answered. Where were ghostly sidekicks when you needed them?
I pressed down on the latch on the right, and then on the one on the left. Nothing happened. I let go of both latches, and then pressed down on them again in reverse order. Nothing happened again. Perhaps my thought that this was a clue was premature. In a flash of inspiration that would have occurred to any inquisitive four-year-old, I pressed down on both latches simultaneously. There was a small click, and a rectangular panel at the bottom of the outside back of the drawer popped open. I upended the drawer. A large yellow envelope closed with a string-and-button closure slid out onto the bed.
I loosened the string, and opened the envelope. Hennings being a man, I halfway expected to find pornographic pictures inside, perhaps of the blonde I had seen on top of the dresser. There were pictures inside all right, but they were not pornographic. There were five large black and white photos inside—one of a man, one of a woman, one of a boy who looked to be around three-years-old, one of the same man and woman together, and the fifth of all three together. Based on the style of the photographs, the weathering of them, and the clothing worn by the people depicted, the pictures appeared to date from the late 1800s or maybe the early 1900s. The young boy looked like a mixture of the man and woman. I surmised he was their son. The word “detective” was not on my business cards for nothing.
The people in the old pictures bore a resemblance to Hennings. His ancestors, perhaps? My heart started to thump hard as I closely examined the black and white pictures. The boy in the pictures bore more than just a passing resemblance to Hennings. I held the solo picture of the boy up next to one of Hennings. If you aged the boy a few decades and put him in leg braces and on crutches, he was Hennings. But how was that possible? Based on the evident age of the black and white photos, Hennings would be well over a hundred years old. According to the pictures on the chest of drawers, he did not look to be a day over thirty-five.
It suddenly hit me. Avatar had helped found the Sentinels in the 1940s and had evidently not aged a day since then. It was widely speculated he was immortal. Maybe Hennings actually was Avatar despite Hennings’ disability and the fact he looked nothing like Avatar. It would not be the first time a Metahuman had the power to completely change his appearance. Doppelgänger, for example.
The resemblance borne by Hennings and the young boy was striking, but it did not prove the two were one and the same person, much less that Hennings was Avatar. Some said I looked like a movie star, but that did not mean I was one. By “some said,” I really meant I had said that, but perhaps someone would agree with me one day. Hope springs eternal.
I was peering into the drawer’s hidden compartment to make sure there was nothing else concealed there when the thing that had been hovering on the edge of my consciousness about Hennings’ closet jumped out into the center of my mind and waved hello. Water vapor was everywhere in the air. When conditions were right, you could see it in the form of fog or steam. When you could not see it, it was still there, from a trace amount to up to around four percent of the total mass of air. Because of my water manipulation and sensing powers, I was more aware of that fact than most people. Walking around for me was like swimming in a mass of invisible water. I was a walking hygrometer, an instrument that measured the water content in the atmosphere. I was so used to being attuned to the amount of water in the air surrounding me that I normally tuned it out of my conscious mind, like someone in a crowd who tuned out the hum of the conversations surrounding him. Because of my abilities, I now realized what had been bothering me about Hennings’ closet—directly next to the closet was a mass of moist air where there should have been drywall and lumber and whatever in the hell else laid behind most walls.
Excited, I put the photographs down on the bed. I went back over to the closet. Now that I was focusing on it consciously, I clearly sensed an empty space full of air to the right of the closet. The space was around eight feet high, five feet wide, and four feet deep. Was it a hidden room? Or, just a weird but completely innocent gap in the room’s construction? I was guessing the former. My suspicions were now fully roused thanks to the photographs I had found hidden in the drawer.
I knocked on the wall in front of the space I sensed. It sounded solid, and no different than any other parts of the wall I knocked on. I examined the contours of the space on the wall both with my eyes and my fingers. I neither saw nor felt any seams in the wall. I poked and prodded at the wall like a particularly handsy customer at Spread Legs, but nothing happened.
Hmmmmmm. I stepped back. Contemplating, I stood in front of the space I sensed.
“Open Sesame,” I said. Nothing happened. No door opened, no trumpets blared, no genie appeared, no hidden treasure was revealed, and worst of all, no lightning strike of inspiration hit me. “Open Sesame” was supposed to work. Could it be that Arabian Nights had misled me?
The black speaker above the closet caught my eye. It occurred to me that if I walked with the aid of crutches, I would be able to reach the speaker with my crutches from where I was standing. I went back out to the apartment’s kitchen and grabbed one of the chairs from there. I took it back into the bedroom, positioning it at the bottom of the speaker. I stood on top of the chair. I examined the bottom of the speaker. There was a small black toggle switch on the bottom of it. Even this close to it, it was nearly invisible as its color and texture blended in perfectly with the speaker. I flicked the switch, hoping it would do more than merely turn the radio on.
A radio did not turn on. Rather, a portal in front of the space I sensed behind the wall slid upwards with a nearly silent hiss. The portal disappeared into the wall above it as if it had never been there. I got down from the chair. I stood in front of the newly-reveale
d space. The interior of it was a dull silver color. There was nothing inside the space. I poked my hand inside experimentally. Nothing happened. Emboldened, I stuck my head in. Again, nothing happened. It was said that fools rushed in where angels feared to tread. Maybe so, but an angel had not been hired to investigate the death of Avatar. So, I stepped inside the silver colored chamber. As soon as I was inside, the portal that had receded into the wall above it lowered back down, closing with an ominous click before I could even react. The walls around me glowed slightly, enabling me to see. I spun around, pressing against the portal. It did not reopen or respond in any fashion. It was as unyielding as a steel beam. I pressed against the other walls. The same. The walls were perfectly smooth, all of the same dull silver color, and warm to the touch, like someone with a fever. Now that I was inside of the space, it seemed smaller than I had at first estimated it to be. I could not spread my arms out without hitting the walls. I was not claustrophobic, but if I stayed in here for long, I could learn to be. I imagined this was what being in a coffin felt like.
The glow emanating from the walls dimmed momentarily. My skin prickled and my hair stood on end a bit, like I was near where lightning was about to strike. I felt panic rising within me when abruptly the glow returned to normal levels.
“Unidentified entity,” a voice said. I jumped, startled. The voice was masculine and had a slightly metallic quality to it. Computerized? The voice seemed to be coming from everywhere around me. “Please state the Hero’s password to gain admittance.”
Hero’s password? I did not know any password.
“My name is Truman Lord,” I said. “I am a private detective and licensed Hero.” That worked at dinner parties, why not here?
A small circular red light appeared at eye level. When was seeing a red light ever a good sign? This was no exception to the rule. “Password incorrect,” the voice stated. “Please state the Hero’s password.”
Superhero Detective Series (Book 4): Hunted Page 17
