When it was clear we weren’t going to find anything of interest, the four of us proceeded to look stupidly at one another. In official tones, Potbelly announced:
“There’s no one here.”
If he hadn’t seemed quite so solemn, I’d have assumed he was going for a laugh. His sort is incapable of such irony, though. Yes, he was serious. I bit my tongue to suppress a giggle.
Aynur didn’t hide her immediate reaction. “So what are we supposed to do now? Are we just going to leave?”
“What do you expect us to do?”
“Ayol, the flat’s been turned upside down; Sabiha Hanım’s missing,” observed the pink-cheeked amateur detective. “I’d most certainly like to file a complaint.”
“You’re free to. But there’s nothing more we can do right now. You can make a missing persons report.”
“Oh, I see. You’re saying we should sit around until they come to kill us, too.”
How she had reached this conclusion was beyond me. Maybe she was privy to certain information.
“Look, ma’am,” he said. Sweaty Potbelly had switched to “ma’am,” a sure sign that he was feeling less tolerant. “There’s nothing else we can do here. There’s no sign of a murder, or a corpse. All we have is a messy house and a missing blind lady.”
“But what about the body upstairs?” She began to speak in a nasal voice, and was flushed with rage and a sense of thwarted purpose.
My man intervened. “Calm down, lady . . .”
Ay! I don’t think much of men who use the term “lady,” either. It reeks of the lower classes. The sort who imagine romance can only end in marriage.
“I can’t be calm! And I won’t . . .” She was scarlet. “You’re supposed to ensure our security. You can’t just walk away.”
“But we can’t just sit here and wait . . .”
“You’re absolutely right, Officer,” I agreed.
I must have said something sensible. I was deaf to Filet Mignon’s protests. I’m skilled at filtering out such unpleasantness. Exceptionally so. The police both agreed with me.
As we thanked the officers, I didn’t fail to seize the opportunity to touch mine, grabbing his arm right at the point where his blue sleeve ended. He didn’t pull back. The hair on his forearm was light-colored.
“I’ll calm her down. Thank you for coming,” I said. For no particular reason, I gave his arm a squeeze as I said this. He knew what I was doing. But he didn’t react. The frosty thing!
There was no point in being more insistent. I released his arm. We watched as they walked down the stairs. He looked back only once. I made an instant evaluation: This was going nowhere!
I once again allowed Filet Mignon’s protests and complaints to reach my eardrums.
“This is outrageous! If they think I’m just going to wait around until the killers have picked us all off, one by one. . . !”
As the police left the building, the doors of all the flats opened, and heads of various ages and sizes poked out into the landings. They all wondered what was going on. Chubby Cheeks milked the situation for all it was worth. Like an actress who has prepared for the role of her career, she first gave a highly significant glance to each of them, then began a full rundown of events. Leaving her with her audience, I ventured into Sabiha Hanım’s flat for one last look.
Chapter 16
I wandered through Sabiha Hanım’s ransacked flat, trying to put my thoughts in order. I went into Buse’s bedroom and sat on the bedsprings. The mattress had been shoved onto the floor. The room had obviously been unchanged for years, and was decorated in the style of Buse’s teenage years. There was even a fuzzy pink bedspread. The nightstand against the opposite wall had been used as a dressing table. Lining it were rows of nearly empty bottles of fragrance, not a single one of them aftershave lotion. All were cloyingly sweet: siyah beyaz; Diorella, with its Prince de Galles label; a purple bottle of Poison; L’Air du Temps de Nina Ricci, in its original Lalique bottle; YSL Rive Gauche; a square bottle of Givenchy; Samsara by Guerlain. I much prefer lighter, spicier perfumes. But then again, you wouldn’t catch me dead in a Chanel suit.
The contents of the drawers of the dressing table had been spilled out onto the floor. Piled high were colorful boxer shorts, classic white briefs, lace panties, and sleeveless T-shirts with scalloped straps. A pair of flesh-colored silk boxer shorts caught my attention. I picked them up. They smelled of lavender.
I looked at the posters on the wall. They all depicted impossibly standoffish sirens and gorgeous hunks. Richard Gere featured prominently, including a bare-chested poster promoting Breathless. Part of it was torn off.
I didn’t know what I was looking for. A photo album, journal, or diary would be quite a find. I wandered through the other rooms of the apartment, but nothing turned up. Other than a few books written in Braille, there was nothing. This was, after all, a flat inhabited until very recently by a blind woman. Perhaps written documents of all description had been carted away.
What had happened to Sabiha Hanım? Where was she? Why was her flat in this state? Where were those notorious photos and letters?
I had hit a dead end. I fled the gloomy place, so lacking in color coordination of any kind.
Chubby Cheeks by now thoroughly mottled, I was subjected to a tirade by my old friend in the corridor. She was expecting me to join in.
“I’m going,” I announced instead.
“Where?” she wailed. “This all happened because of you, and now you’re just running away?”
Those were the words she addressed to me. Then she turned to the neighbors still watching us—watching her, would be more accurate—pointed to me and said in an even louder voice:
“That’s the one, the friend of Fevzi’s I told you about!”
I grabbed her by the arm and dragged her into her flat. She was so astonished she didn’t resist. The moment we entered, I shut the door behind us. The bell rang immediately. We had forgotten the sniveling girl-child outside. I let her in.
“Calm down and listen up!” I ordered.
“Okay,” she said. Without a trace of the dramatic pitch of only a few moments earlier, she walked into the living room and sat down. The daughter was tugged into her lap.
“I’m listening,” she said. “I’m willing to listen to any explanation you may have for all of this.”
I drew for her a rough outline of my main fears and concerns.
“I want you to tell me about every relationship ever mentioned by Buse,” I concluded. “There may be a clue of some kind.”
“All right. I’ll tell you everything I remember . . . But first I want you to know that I don’t know any of them personally. She’d come and tell me about them. I may have seen a couple of them when we were in middle school, but that’s it. All I know after that is what she told me. Oh, and at one point we would go to eat profiteroles at İnci Patisserie in Beyoğlu, to the cinema, shopping in Nişantaşı and such. We’d point out our favorites to each other. If we liked the same man she’d tell me off, even pinch my arm. She wouldn’t talk to me for two weeks just because I said I liked Richard Gere, too.”
She was off and running. Meanwhile, her “baby” was being given an early and detailed version of the facts of life.
“Over time I learned to like only the ones she didn’t. Ay, you can’t imagine how jealous she was. Then she started wanting the ones I liked. And she’d get them in the end. I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I didn’t really do anything. I’d cut out pictures of my favorite movie stars. Or admire someone from a distance. It was all talk, really. Nothing more.”
The classic claim of female chastity.
“Fevzi, that is, Buse, started fooling around at a young age. I mean, we hadn’t even finished middle school yet. She was off kissing other boys and such. And then, you know, she did the rest. And she would tell me exactly what she got up to.”
I wasn’t so certain. Our girls aren’t to be taken quite so literally. What they say is o
ften one part fairy tale, two parts John Holmes. I have never heard, for example, of a case where the boyfriend had a tiny one. That’s not to say they’re all lying, but reality is inescapable even in Turkey. There are such things as statistics and probability.
“Now, I suspect that there must have been certain things she kept to herself.” And there were certain things Chubby Cheeks was keeping back about herself, too.
Her suspicions were justified. She knew exactly what was going through my mind, or at least some of it.
“Like what?” I asked. By commenting, I had created the illusion that she was engaged in a conversation, rather than being subjected to an interrogation. She continued:
“I mean, look at what happened. She even had a relationship with someone famous. She showed me lots of pictures, but I never saw anyone I knew. Maybe he became famous later.”
“Well, where would she hide her pictures?” I asked. “I couldn’t find anything in her mother’s flat.”
“Yeah . . . They took everything, I suppose . . .”
I’d had it. I was getting sleepy. I don’t have much patience even for the girls’ tall tales. A censored version of the youthful indiscretions of a middle-class housewife was more than I could bear. We wouldn’t get anywhere like this.
It was noon by the time I left her. I had pushed my tolerance level to the limit. I was hungry. I declined Chubby Cheeks’s offer to “whip something up to eat,” thanked her, and got out of there.
The neighborhood was unfamiliar to me, so I jumped into the first taxi that came along.
Chapter 17
In order to relax, I was in desperate need of a quiz show. Preferably the most imbecilic show possible. A program in which the contestants hesitated when asked what their names were. I had an unbelievably strong desire to foam at the mouth, to fly into a rage, in front of the TV.
The nostalgic items of the previous night were still piled high, a worthless heap of trash, on the sofa. The impulse to clean them up disappeared as quickly as it had arrived. Satı could take care of it when she came.
I listened to the answering machine. Ali had phoned to tell me that Wish & Fire was considering our proposal. I decided to allow them no more than a week to do so. Not a second more. If they didn’t call before the allotted time was up, I would content myself with crashing their local Web sites, international stock systems, or even, if I could, their entire network. I despise companies that demand hours of meetings only to get cold feet over a couple of dollars.
There were no other messages of note. Ferruh had called for some reason, claiming he needed to meet me “in private.” I found his persistence nauseating. He’d been on my tail since the previous night, and had phoned my home twice. Belkıs must have been preoccupied, either with shopping in Milan or gambling in Cyprus. Left on his own, Ferruh was harassing me. My friendship with Belkıs did not mean I intended to pleasure her husband—particularly without her knowledge. I ruled out the possibility of any “private” meetings.
I made myself a cup of fennel tea. Then I rang Hasan on his cell phone. I wondered how the arrangements for Buse/Fevzi’s funeral were going. Everything else was a total mess; I needed to know that at least the funeral would go smoothly.
Hasan did not have good news. Because of the suspicion of murder, the morgue would not release the body. An autopsy would have to be performed, and would last for a few days. At this news, I began spewing out all my fury and frustration at poor Hasan.
At my first pause for breath, Hasan managed to get in, “But abi, someone else has claimed the body.” I momentarily lost my voice.
“Who?” I demanded to know. “The only relative I know of is her mother. And she’s blind and missing.”
“That’s what I thought, too. But apparently not. If we are claiming the body as her employers, or place of employment, we’ll have to do the paperwork, produce a work permit.”
“Hasan, don’t be ridiculous! Since when have transvestite hookers working a clip joint been registered on any employment rolls?”
“That’s what I said,” he replied.
“You did well to! Well, at least find out who it is.”
“I will,” he said. He then added, “My battery’s running out,” and the line went dead. The shameless pantywaist.
Every time I was about to call off the whole Buse business, some new bit of information would pop up and I’d be strung along until I hit another dead end. And each time some new bait was dangled in front of me, off I’d go, imagining myself to be in hot pursuit of an important lead. Now someone with claims on Buse’s body had materialized. Fine. It wasn’t as though I had a thing for corpses. Whoever it was, they were welcome to her. I’d put on my mourning best and simply attend the funeral. If it was held at a relatively convenient location, naturally.
I called Hasan back to tell him not to bother pursuing the funeral arrangements. There was no response. Either his battery really had gone dead or he’d switched off his phone.
I was exhausted. It was time to look after myself. I rummaged through the beauty treatments I had on hand. Clay masks, collagen creams, rejuvenating mud and creams I’d picked up in Ölüdeniz. There was also a selection of soothing lotions and aromatherapy oils. I was all set to pamper myself, but suddenly I started to dread the mess I’d make. The salon would be best. I called, and was told they had an immediate opening. Abandoning my own beauty treatments, I was out the door. My home was getting messier by the day.
The technicians at the salon know me well and treat me with respect. I decided on a deep-cleaning steam facial, firming massage, and a full-body solarium séance.
As I waited for the facial, the lady friend who had come to the club with Belkıs, the journalist whose name I couldn’t remember, emerged from the steam treatment room. Just as I was asking myself if she’d recognize me in my comparatively male state, she stopped right in front of me.
“Merhaba, what a coincidence. How are you, darling?”
“Darling” was of course me. I thanked her for her interest. I still couldn’t remember her name. She leaned over to kiss me, but then remembered her newly opened pores. She contented herself with retaining both of my hands as we continued our conversation.
“Thank you so much for the other night. I spent the next two days telling my friends about what a riot we had. And about what a beauty you are.”
I thanked her again. And then, on some sort of strange impulse, flattered her with, “But the real beauty is yours.”
Encouraged, she instantly sat down beside me. She smoothed the skirts of her bathrobe and curled one foot under it. Then she turned her attention to me.
“So tell me, what’s next?”
I must have looked slightly taken aback at the rather oblique question, for she added, “After the steam treatment, sweetie,” then let loose a phony chuckle. Next, she placed a hand on my knee. And off we went. She was going to hit on me; I was going to pretend to be oblivious to it. The one with the most patience and determination wins.
I could have given her a tongue-lashing, but my business sense forced me to hold back. After all, she was a customer at the club. That said, her efforts at becoming a client of a more intimate nature were for naught.
It was my turn. They called me into the room. I sailed off on winged steps, and floated into the steam room flushed with the unbearable lightness of the newly liberated. Naturally, I did not neglect to toss one last flirtatious glance over my shoulder. One for the road, so to speak. How was I to know what this would lead to? It all started so innocently.
Despite being able to breathe only with difficulty, I endured the steam for the appointed time. When it was over, my face glowed with the radiant pinkness of a newborn’s bottom.
I thought I’d have a lemon soda in the lounge before moving on to the solarium. On my way there, I nearly fell straight into the lap of the waiting journalist. She gestured to the chaise longue beside her, so I reclined there.
“I was so sorry to hear about your frien
d,” she began. “It happens all the time, doesn’t it?”
“Murder, you mean? Unfortunately, yes,” I replied.
Buse’s fame seemed to have a taken an upturn now that she was dead.
“And the police aren’t of much help, are they?” she continued.
“That’s right . . .”
All I wanted to do was concentrate on my soda.
“Tell me a little about it,” she persisted.
The tone of professional sweetness was unmistakable. It made my skin crawl.
“Are you trying to interview me?”
“No, not at all.” She backtracked. “It’s my fault, I’ve given you the wrong idea. Do forgive me. I was just curious—I suppose it’s an occupational hazard. The moment I begin asking questions I’m somehow transformed into a pesky reporter.”
The Kiss Murder Page 10
