by Archer Mayor
He didn't turn on any lights at first. He just stood there, looking around, letting his eyes adapt to the darkness. He could see from the faint glimmer seeping in through the far door facing him that he was already in a small, narrow kitchen. He'd noticed earlier that the building easily dated back a hundred and fifty years, maybe more. The kitchens had probably all been afterthoughts, put in where entryways had once allowed visitors to take off their coats.
Moving slowly, he passed by a counter, sink, and stove to his left, a closet and a shallow pantry on his right. At the doorway opposite, he stopped again.
Light through a dirty window on the right wall etched a glowing rectangle across the floor and partially up the wall beside him, brightly enough that he could see most of the room's details. There was a dark, caved-in couch before him facing the window, a narrow coffee table in front of it, and some shelves lining the wall opposite, bracketing both sides of the window. In the corner across from him was an armchair, covered with a shawl. Hard to his right, doubling back and paralleling the kitchen, was a tiny bathroom, and just beyond its open door was a wooden crate, also draped, supporting a small, ancient television set. A little incongruously, given the cool temperature, there was a plastic electric fan balanced on top of the set.
On the far side of the living room was another open door.
He studied the gore and debris spread across the couch and the floor before it-the bodily fluids showing black, and the gloves and other discarded medical paraphernalia looking like bits of bleached wreckage in the gloom. Overlying it all, quivering and moving with a barely perceptible clicking, a carpet of cockroaches was feasting.
His heart rate didn't increase, he made no gesture or comment, he showed no emotion whatsoever as he recreated in his head the scene that had left such a signature. He could almost see Mary's body sprawled across the couch, and the paramedics doing whatever they routinely did to bodies they had no real intention of reviving.
He'd seen too much of this kind of thing to do anything other than look at it clinically.
He crossed over to the last room in the apartment, noticing as he did that the window overlooked a fire escape and a dark alleyway below, and that the light seeping through it came from an assortment of apartments across the way.
He was now looking into a small bedroom, the darkest corner yet, especially with him filling the doorway. Its one narrow window had been blocked with a colorful poster and jammed shut with a wad of old subway Metro cards. But the lingering odor in here, even tainted by what was behind him, was fresher, cleaner, and faintly scented by intimate memories of a bright-eyed, smiling, happy young woman.
He returned to the living room window, drew down the paper shade for privacy, and began turning on lights.
This should have resulted in a jarring contrast: a place of misery cloaked in darkness, revealed in brittle brightness as even worse than imagined. Instead, the reverse proved true. What Willy discovered was a poor, rundown, seedy little apartment enhanced by paint and colorful fabrics, highlighted by fake flowers and cheerful calendar pictures. The mask couldn't hide the reality of the setting, but the attempt had been heartfelt and thorough, and by and large successful. The mess covering the couch stood out not as confirmation of the lifestyle echoed throughout the rest of the building and the neighborhood, but in gruesome contrast to Mary's concerted efforts to make this hole a home.
Willy made a second survey, still not touching anything, carefully placing his feet. The apartment was far from tidy, although the mess had clearly been made by others: the bedroom drawers had been rifled, the nearby desktop pawed over, the closets opened and their contents disturbed. All signs of a typical police search. Somewhere in here, the detectives who'd caught this case had found Mary and Willy's divorce papers in their pursuit of a next-of-kin, and, he assumed, had removed them and any other relevant records and items of value for safekeeping. What they'd left behind was the miniature version of a passing army's pillaging.
But as with any army, what had been taken were things of specific worth, here relating to identity and research and to closing a case quickly. Left behind was the rest, details of a life interrupted in midcourse, and the very items Willy Kunkle most wanted to peruse.
He returned to the kitchen, scattering all but the most brazen of the roaches, and began reacquainting himself with his ex-wife from the outside in, starting with her eating habits. Using his pocketknife or grabbing things by their edges, he opened drawers, doors, and cabinets and took inventory.
What he found didn't fit the usual profile of a junkie. The standard binge items heavy in sugar or fat were missing, the lopsidedness of a larder composed solely of canned soup and frozen dinners was also absent. Instead, he was left with an economical and healthily varied assortment, neatly sorted and arranged. He closed the last cabinet softly, leaned up against the doorjamb, and gazed out into the living room again for a moment's careful reflection. A process born of instinct but without particular purpose now shifted gears with this finding. He began thinking like an investigator.
He crossed over to the bedroom, knowing the living room would hold the least, although perhaps the most subtle, information.
He started with the bed. It was disturbed, but only slightly, as if the person sleeping in it had just gotten up. Otherwise, its bottom corners and far side were tucked in, indicating the habitual tidiness he remembered of Mary in her prime, and he could tell from the single pillow and the way the night table and reading light were arranged that she was used to sleeping alone. Pushing his nose against the sheets to close off the odor from the room next door, Willy found they were also clean, and smelled faintly of detergent.
He checked beneath the bed. The floor was free of dust, and all he saw was a small, empty suitcase and a pair of well-worn slippers, neatly arranged.
Next came the closet. Again, he was struck by the same sense of order that had ruled the kitchen. There were no clothes on the floor, the few shoes were lined up, the odds and ends found in every closet were either stacked on the overhead shelf or hidden away in several small cardboard boxes. He checked their contents and found only belts, gloves, rolled-up pantyhose, hair clips, and an assortment of other mundane items. He went through the two purses he also unearthed and the pockets of every coat, jacket, and pair of pants. All he located were a few neighborhood grocery receipts, an old movie stub, and several more expired Metro cards, which he placed in a small stack along with the other Metro stubs he now extracted from the window jamb.
He moved to the desk, knowing the most obviously useful material had already been removed. Still, as he went through what was left-mostly old bills-he was once more struck by the sense of a life under control, rudely interrupted.
The desk doubled as a makeup table, and after looking through its one deep drawer, Willy sat back and studied the boxes, bottles, and paraphernalia spread before him, again mentally subtracting from them what had obviously been disturbed in the search. What it revealed to him was a woman concerned with her appearance, whose aids in caring for it were new or well maintained. All the containers of lipstick or powder or mascara were capped, carefully arranged, and out for ready use.
Willy paused thoughtfully. Now that his professional interest had been called up, he regretted the thoroughness of those preceding him. They'd taken almost everything of value. Mary had used a date book in the old days. It was missing. She'd always kept personal letters. There were none around. No phone records were in the desk, no bank statements. Oddly, touchingly, tucked into the mirror's edge was a small snapshot of Willy and Mary on a ferryboat crossing Lake Champlain, with Burlington in the background.
He reached out and plucked it from its niche. On the back, in pencil, was the year they were married. He stared at it for a while, studying both their faces, watching his own eyes for any signs of what lay ahead, thinking he saw it all clearly, and wondering why she hadn't. He also looked at his then-functional left arm, draped casually across her shoulders. The guy who'
d taken the picture had asked him to do that, saying it would look friendlier. Willy had told her later he'd thought the guy was an asshole. She'd merely looked at him sadly. In his mind's eye, he could again feel the warmth of her shoulders through the fabric of his shirt.
He tossed the picture onto the tabletop and got up. So far, he hadn't found any sign of her being involved with another man.
He went to the small bathroom beside the kitchen. There was a shower curtain running around the inside of an old claw-foot tub, a pedestal sink facing a wall cabinet with a mirrored door, and a toilet. It was all ancient and battered, but built to withstand the average artillery assault-heavy porcelain, cast iron, a tile floor. What Mary had been able to make clean, she had. The rest was either chipped, cracked, or stained beyond the help of minor surgery. It was standard New York fare, and made him think back to his own bathroom as a boy, or at least the one he'd shared with the rest of the family. He'd hated that bathroom-the constant interruptions when he'd hoped to be alone, the presence of so many other people's personal items, from Kotex pads in the pail by the toilet, to mangled toothbrushes and mysterious smears of whoknew-what around the sink. And his mother used to leave her underwear hanging off the shower nozzle overnight, after washing it in the sink. Drove him nuts.
Not Mary, though. Here, nothing was out of place. That had driven him nuts, too.
He opened the cabinet door: aspirin, brush, comb, a headband to hold back her hair, cotton balls in a dish, a variety of lotions and creams, toothbrush and paste, a backup bar of soap, still in its wrapper.
And a birth control dispenser, its dated slots empty up to the day she died.
He held the plastic clamshell in his hand, reading the prescription on its cover. These were sometimes taken medicinally, he thought, not just for practical purposes. Other times, they were merely wishful thinking in pill form, and didn't actually indicate any active sexuality. Given the lack of romantic evidence elsewhere in the apartment, Willy was left to wonder.
Finally, ignoring the stench, he returned to the living room and tried imagining the life it had once contained. Here, books were read, conversations held on the phone by the couch, the TV was watched. Sometimes, the walls were studied during daydreams or in thought-or in despair. Frugality spoke for itself. Everything was threadbare, worn, or cheaply made. But there was pride as well. The place was clean, the colorful accents he'd noticed earlier had been strategically placed to either please the eye or cover a defect, or both.
He approached the pine-board-and-brick bookshelves next to the window and studied their contents. Romantic novels, a few standard reference works, carefully piledup fashion and travel magazines. Gaps between volumes were filled with plastic figurines or a cheerful piece of inexpensive pottery. He recognized an odd-looking rock she'd collected when they'd been walking together near the river back in Brattleboro, and which he'd told her was a stupid thing to lug around. There were other familiar odds and ends he saw from their time together.
A few pictures stood among the books, either framed and free-standing on a pop-out cardboard leg or simply propped up and slightly curling. He recognized the mother who would have nothing to do with her-a hardbitten woman with cold, judgmental eyes. There was a sunset photograph of some Vermont mountain, probably Jay Peak. And a group shot of Mary surrounded by five others, all laughing at the camera, their arms interlaced. Willy brought this last off the shelf and held it under the light, studying the faces before him, his eyes lingering over Mary's. She looked absolutely, totally happy. In the background was a sign mounted against a gritty, urban brick wall, which he assumed belonged in this city. It read, "The Re-Coop." There was nothing written on the back of the photograph, but tucked into the corner of the actual image was a burned-in date. The picture has been taken only two months before. Willy slipped it into his breast pocket.
He continued his search, carefully riffling through the books, checking the magazines for earmarks or stray pages or notes. He looked under the small rug, checked under the pillows of the couch and armchair. Other than some change, a couple of paper clips, and a petrified pretzel, he found nothing.
Finished at last, he was left standing beside the coffee table, almost absentmindedly staring at the one utterly discordant note in the whole place: the clotted, fetid remains of what Mary's body had left behind, and the reemboldened army of cockroaches that had taken his ignoring them as encouragement to resume their meal.
After a pause, Willy moved to the kitchen, retrieved what he needed, and set to work cleaning up the mess, double bagging what he could collect using a sponge, and scrubbing the remaining stains with disinfectant and cleaning fluid. It took him over an hour, and when he was done, the damp spots he'd created looked worse than what had been there before. But he knew they would dry and disappear, and already the air smelled better. It wasn't as good as Mary could have done, but it returned the apartment to being a more suitable monument. As for the scene's integrity, Willy didn't even want to think what the cops would say of his handiwork. Assuming it mattered. He knew this police department. He knew this city. He even knew how he would have dealt with this situation had he caught the case. This wasn't a crime scene, as far as the NYPD was concerned. It was just an apartment caught in the limbo of a ponderous bureaucracy which would take six months or more to decide that nothing unusual had happened here.
And maybe they were right, although Willy now had some questions.
He gathered his refuse together, added to it the increasingly odorous garbage from under the kitchen sink, and dumped it all down the chute he found partway down the third-floor corridor.
Afterward, he neatened the disarray the cops had created in their search, killed most of the lights, lifted the window shade, settled into the dry corner of the couch, and watched the play of lights and shadows in the windows across the alleyway.
Eventually, without intending to, he finally yielded to the anxiety and adrenaline that had fueled him most of the day and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 4
NYPD precinct houses generally come in two basic models: old, dating back to before Teddy Roosevelt and awkwardly retrofitted for almost everything, including electricity; and modern, meaning circa 1970, implying some up-to-date conveniences, but only in exchange for an architectural style as lacking in taste as the clothing of the same era. When Willy Kunkle had worked for the department, he'd been stationed at one of the old-timers, which, despite its many drawbacks, had appealed to him for its sheer sense of place. The huge, elaborately carved golden oak sergeant's desk in the entrance lobby, the wrought-iron and brass details throughout the building, and its solid stone appearance had all reminded him of the history and traditions that helped see the department through its rough times-and occasionally led it straight into them.
The Seventh Precinct house, however, had none of that. Of the modern era, made of red brick, and sharing its roof with a fire department ladder company, it was blandness personified, as creatively and sensitively designed as a security-minded high school or a low-profile prison. It was spacious, though, or a least bigger than many of its ancient brethren, and so had more room for its occupants to complain about.
One detail all these buildings shared, however, came back to Willy's memory before he was a half block from the front door: The parking was lousy. For some reason, none of the precincts were equipped with more than a minuscule number of designated spots, which meant anyone who wasn't in management double-parked on the street, pulled up onto the sidewalks, or otherwise caused enough of a problem that the precinct commander was constantly in meetings with irate neighborhood representatives.
Willy walked past car after haphazardly parked car with special plates thrown onto their dashboards before finally passing through the Seventh Precinct's front door. He was greeted with a familiar chorus of sights, sounds, and smells he doubted was much different from any one of the other seventy-five houses sprinkled across the city's five boroughs. The ringing phones, general milli
ng population, and the institutional decor consisting of framed portraits of department leaders and motivational posters all brought him back to the very first day he'd entered this world, feeling awkward in his bulky new uniform. It was early enough in the day, in fact, that the morning patrol shift was still in the muster room across from the long, battered, pressed-wood sergeant's desk. Willy could see, through its broad doors, the uniformed assemblage facing the duty sergeant at his podium, taking notes as he read from a binder and pointed from time to time at a collection of glassed-in wall maps covered with variously colored pins-crime maps indicating current trends in the precinct.
"May I help you?" the receptionist asked him from her school-style desk.
He looked down at her as if she'd interrupted him in mid-dream. "I'm here to see Detective Ogden. My name's Kunkle."
She glanced at his left arm, its hand as usual stuffed into his trousers pocket. "Upstairs, second floor, third door on the right."
He glanced over her head at the activity at the long front desk, manned by an oversized, avuncular sergeant and his frazzled-looking aide. These were the precinct's air traffic controllers. They knew which prisoners were in holding, who was out on patrol and where, what weapons had been logged in for safekeeping, and a multitude of other details that helped keep the place running. They took messages, handled phone calls, assigned tasks throughout the building, and acted as human bulletin boards, all amid a din of colliding human voices. They were the keepers of the Patrol Guide, the bible of the uniformed cop, and knew its contents the way they knew their own family members, dispensing advice whenever called upon. The flow of officers and civilians alike in front of this desk, picking up or dropping off paperwork or just chatting briefly, was nonstop.
Upstairs, the noise was less of a commingled babble, being segregated into a series of offices extending off to both sides of the landing. He counted three doors on his right, walked past several stacks of old boxed case files, and stepped into an office with a cardboard sign labeled, "Detectives."
