by Jane Haddam
“Was Alder Properties trying to get her evicted?” Gregor asked.
Patty Denning shook her head. “You never want to evict someone who doesn’t cause any trouble and always pays her rent on time unless there’s some other reason, like you want to convert the building to luxury condos or sell it. And nothing like that is going to happen in that neighborhood, at least any time soon. One of the girls in the office said that Miss Warkowski’s family had had that apartment since all the way back in the Forties. Can you imagine? She grew up there.”
“Is there a reason why the super would want her evicted, even if the company didn’t?” Gregor asked.
“I’m not sure,” Patty Denning said. “It’s a very large apartment, three bedrooms. Miss Agerwal said that Mr. Hernandez thinks that if you’re going to have a large apartment you should have a large family to live in it, and if you’re by yourself you should have a small one. It might be about that.”
“Who is Miss Agerwal?” Morabito asked.
“She’s the head of the department,” Patty Denning said. “She’s from India. But she doesn’t wear saris, or anything like that. And that’s why I’m here, you see. When I saw the picture, I called everybody over to look, because I didn’t want to make a mistake. And we all recognized her right off, in spite of the fact that that picture was so awful. It really was awful. We all thought she looked dead.”
“She’s in a coma,” Horowitz said, “but last we heard, she was alive and hanging in there.”
“Well, good,” Patty Denning said. “It was a terrible thing, wasn’t it, stuffed in a black plastic garbage bag like that. You don’t like thinking about someone you know being treated like that. And what could it have been about? I suppose she must have some money, to go on renting that place month after month now that she’s retired. But if she had any real money, she wouldn’t live there in the first place.”
“So your office sent you down here—” Morabito started.
Patty Denning’s shake of the head was vigorous. “No, no. Miss Agerwal didn’t want anybody to talk to the police. She didn’t think the office should get involved at all. Did I tell you she’s from India? I don’t think she understands how the police work here. We tried to tell her you’d find out eventually and then everything would get crazy, but she wouldn’t listen. We tried to tell her you’d send someone down to the office, but she wouldn’t listen to that, either. She practically threatened to fire anybody who tried to get in touch with you.”
“Ah,” Gregor said.
“I just couldn’t stand sitting there thinking about it,” Patty Denning said. “I don’t think Miss Warkowski has any family living. All the family she ever talked about were dead. I didn’t know what it would mean, with her being in the hospital like that. So, I said I was feeling bad and had to go home early. I didn’t know if it would work, but Miss Agerwal has the flu so there wasn’t as much lecturing as there usually is. She’s always lecturing about how Americans don’t work very hard and they want all these special privileges. But I think she had a headache today. She didn’t say much of anything.”
“There’s just one more question,” Gregor said. “Do you happen to have the exact address of this apartment Miss Warkowski has been living in all her life?”
3
It was a classic example of the problems with cases of attempted murder. Since Marta Warkowski was still alive, they needed permissions. It took so long to get them, it was already getting dark by the time they arrived in front of the four-story tenement where Warkowski was supposed to live, and the young woman sent by Alder Properties to let them in was already furious.
“You don’t want to be a woman alone on a street like this even in broad daylight,” she said, as Gregor climbed out of the back of the unmarked car. Her voice was high and her accent was the singsong of a native Hindi speaker. Gregor thought she might also have a cold or the flu. She would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been so implacably angry.
Gregor straightened himself up on the sidewalk and looked around. It took him a minute, but he realized he almost recognized this neighborhood. It was the part of St. Catherine’s Parish that spread out from the church in the other direction from Cavanaugh Street. As a neighborhood, it looked to Gregor not much more dangerous than dozens of others. It didn’t give off the menace of some of the places in North Philadelphia. It wasn’t as placid as some of the neighborhoods on the Main Line. It was just a street that should have been crammed full of people. Instead, it was deserted.
“They can spot a cop car three blocks away,” Morabito said. “Even the unmarked ones.”
Horowitz ignored him. “Are you Ms. Agerwal?” he asked the young woman.
“I am Meera Agerwal,” she said. “And it’s Miss Agerwal. I’m going to need to see some identification.”
Horowitz and Morabito brought out their shields and cards. Meera Agerwal turned to Gregor.
“I take it you’re the other one,” she said. “I’m going to need to see some identification from you.”
“Mr. Demarkian is acting as a consultant on this case for the Philadelphia—”
Gregor already had his passport out. Meera Agerwal looked at the picture there, then at his face, then back at the picture again.
“It’s ridiculous, what goes on in this city,” she said. “If you’re the police, you should go right in. You shouldn’t have to drag me all the way down here. I could be killed.”
“I don’t know,” Morabito said innocently. “It looks pretty deserted to me.”
Meera Agerwal gave him a withering glance. “It’s deserted because the police are here. That’s what these people are all about. They’re like criminals everywhere. They hate the police.”
She whirled around and marched up the four steps of the stoop, expecting them to follow her.
They did follow her, with Gregor bringing up the rear, holding back a little so that he could look around at the buildings and the cars. The cars were all old and dilapidated. The buildings were also old, but most of them had been decently kept up, and there were no vacant lots in his direct line of sight. That didn’t mean the neighborhood was a good one, but it did mean it was a better one than most. That answered one question. Even if the neighborhood had changed significantly over the years, even if it had become Spanish and Marta Warkowski was not, it made sense for the woman to want to hold on to her apartment here. Three bedrooms, Patty Denning had said. It would be hard to find an apartment that large in all of Philadelphia. To find one in a stable neighborhood would be a kind of miracle.
Meera Agerwal and the two detectives had disappeared into the building. Gregor hurried a little to catch up. He found himself in a cramped little foyer with a bank of mailboxes built into one wall. None of the mailboxes looked as if it had been jimmied or forced.
Meera Agerwal was marching up the stairs right in front of him. “You’d better get ready. It’s a climb. It should be Hernandez taking you up here, not me. My God, I don’t know what it is with these people. You can never get them to do anything. And when you really need them, they disappear.”
“And Hernandez is?” Gregor asked.
“The superintendent,” Meera said. “He’s got an apartment on the ground floor in the back. He’s not there, of course. He’s not next door, either. And he’s not in any of the bars that I could see. And yes. I tried to call him. I’m not an idiot.”
“Alder Properties owns the building next door?” Gregor asked.
They’d reached the second floor. Meera Agerwal was out of breath. “Alder Properties owns a total of four buildings on this street,” she said. “They’re all apartment houses, and they’re all fully rented. Of course, the rentals are all problematic. The rents are always late or short or I don’t know what, and you have to watch the supers, because they steal. We tell people moving in that they should always get a receipt from the super when they give him their rent. Of course, half the time they’re not paying their rent and they don’t have a receipt because they did
n’t hand in any money, so they just lie. It’s supposed to be profitable running buildings down here, and if Cary Alder says it is, I’ll believe him. It’s his money. But, my God.”
They had started up another flight of stairs. Gregor was beginning to get a little fatigued himself. Morabito and Horowitz had just clammed up.
“I take it Marta Warkowski wasn’t like that,” Gregor said. “She paid her rent on time.”
“Marta Warkowski is a pain in the ass and a bitch,” Meera Agerwal said. “There’s more ways to be a pain in the ass and a bitch besides not paying your rent. And just you watch. She’s going to be a bitch about this, too. We’re going to have to watch our rear ends every second. If she comes out of that hospital alive, she’s going to expect to move right back into this apartment.”
“It is her apartment,” Gregor pointed out. “Shouldn’t she move back into it?”
“She could be in that hospital for months,” Meera Agerwal said. “And the rent could go unpaid all that time. But we’d better not move her out of it and somebody else in. She knows the law. She knows all the agencies, too. She’d crucify us as soon as she woke up.”
“I see,” Gregor said.
Meera Agerwal shrugged. “There was no need for her to come down to our office every month. I’m not an idiot. I am aware of the problem. I would have double-checked to make sure her rent checks were being passed along. And what she expected us to do about the handymen, I don’t know. We hire handymen. They fix things. As long as they fix things, who cares who they are?”
“Isn’t it the supers who fix things?” Gregor asked.
“Of course it is,” Meera Agerwal said, “but we keep these places up. There’s no point having trouble with the city or the housing people. The supers take extra people on when they have to. Why should that make a difference? And Marta was in housing court every time you turned around. There was always something wrong.”
“Is she in housing court now?” Gregor asked. “Does she have a case in proceedings?”
“Not as far as I know,” Meera Agerwal said. “Not at this exact minute. Trust me, though. She’d have gotten there. Mr. Alder hates going to housing court. I hate it. Every time you do it, you have to unearth all the records and make copies and waste an entire week documenting things people ought to be able to look up on their own computers.”
They had reached the third floor. Meera Agerwal led them to the front of the building. In the other direction, toward the back, there was a series of doors. Here, there was only one.
Meera Agerwal got a set of keys out of her purse. “Here it is,” she said. “It’s the biggest apartment in the building. It’s the biggest apartment in any of the buildings we own on this street. That’s because it’s never been partitioned. You can only partition an apartment when it’s empty, when somebody moves out. Marta has never moved out. Marta’s parents never moved out. It’s like they’re all ghosts haunting the place.”
Meera had the key in the lock. Horowitz stepped forward and put his hand on it. “Why don’t you stand back and let me open that,” he said. “Just in case.”
“Just in case of what?” Meera demanded.
Horowitz first tried turning the doorknob, but the door was definitely locked. Then he braced himself, turned the key, and turned the doorknob again.
The door swung open onto a large and overly furnished living room. There were pictures in frames on every surface. There were antimacassars on the backs of the couch and all the chairs.
There was the body of a man with the back of his head blown off lying on the living room rug.
PART TWO
ONE
1
The body on the floor of Marta Warkowski’s apartment belonged to Miguel Hernandez, the superintendent for this building and the building next door. That much they learned from Meera Agerwal immediately.
“I don’t understand what he’s doing in here,” Meera Agerwal kept saying. “He’s not supposed to be in here ever. Not even to fix things. He’s got handymen he can use to fix things without coming in here. We have a consent decree with the housing court.”
Horowitz got on his phone to call the usual suspects: ambulance and medical examiner’s office; forensics and photographers; a couple of mobile units who would blow their sirens coming in and then deal with crowd control. If there was any crowd control to deal with. People were coming out of the other apartments, slowly and furtively, to see what was going on. Still, “furtive” was the operative word. Nobody wanted to get too close to the police, or make herself too visible. And “her” was the right pronoun, too. The building seemed to be full of women.
Morabito was trying to usher Meera Agerwal back into the hall without touching her. The woman would not stop talking.
“Mr. Alder is going to have a raging fit,” she said. “You have no idea what kind of trouble we had over that consent decree. God, the woman was just such a bitch. And completely irrational. And down at the office all the time. We couldn’t get rid of her.”
Gregor moved around the living room, carefully touching nothing. It was a large, old-fashioned apartment from the days when families lived in apartments more often than they lived in houses. Before Alder Properties came in and started cutting up the apartments into smaller units, there had probably been six or seven places like this scattered over the four floors. Gregor remembered such apartments from his own childhood. The people who lived in them were considered “rich” in the neighborhood. Not-rich people lived in smaller places, or railroad flats.
Over on one side of the room there was a television console that had been covered by a large fringed shawl. On top of that there was a new flat-screen television, not very large, but very modern looking. On either side of the television set there were more pictures, in frames like the other pictures in the room, and mostly black-and-white. All the photographs were posed, the kind of thing that came from school photo sessions or a photographer’s studio visited to commemorate a special occasion, like First Holy Communion or confirmation. The children were all dressed to the gills in stiffly starched clothes. Their hair was so perfect it might have been fired in a kiln.
Gregor found the gun on the floor about a yard away from the console, lying half under a straight-backed chair that looked as if it had never been sat in. He motioned to Horowitz. The detective came over, looked down to where Gregor was pointing, and blew a raspberry.
“Well, that settles that,” Horowitz said.
“Maybe,” Gregor said. “Assuming it’s the murder weapon. But even if it is, it raises a number of questions.”
“Like what?”
“What’s it doing over here when the body is over there?” Gregor asked. “This isn’t a huge room, but it’s big enough so that a shot couldn’t have been fired from here and made that mess over there. Whoever shot Mr. Hernandez had to have been standing almost right up against him. So why is the gun over here?”
“Maybe it isn’t the murder weapon,” Horowitz said. “Maybe it’s Marta Warkowski’s gun.”
“And Marta Warkowski didn’t shoot Hernandez?”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” Horowitz said. “Do you? Marta Warkowski ended up in the garbage bag. There had to be a third person who did both.”
“There had to be a third person,” Gregor agreed. “I wonder if it is Marta Warkowski’s gun. Would she have had a gun? What do you think that is, a .38?”
“I’m not touching it until forensics gets here.”
“I’m not touching it, either,” Gregor said. “But it looks like a .38. You can buy those fairly easily on the street. They aren’t even expensive. You do have to ask yourself, though, how she would have found somebody to sell one to her.”
Horowitz looked incredulous. “For God’s sake, Mr. Demarkian. I’ve had people waltz right up to me on the street and offer me one. Not only .38s, you know, but other guns. Bigger guns. They’re everywhere.”
“I believe they’re everywhere,” Gregor said. “I don’t know if I
believe that somebody would have gone up to a middle-aged white woman like Marta Warkowski and offered her one. I wish the woman was awake and talking.”
“So do I.”
“I wish I knew if she was a woman who fit this room,” Gregor said. “You have no idea how many women I’ve known in my life who did fit this room. There are—parameters to behavior.”
“Anybody can do anything,” Horowitz said. “People act out of character all the time. People get upset or they go crazy or they get hysterical.”
“True,” Gregor said, thinking that didn’t answer any of the questions he had.
He moved away from the gun and across the living room. At one end there was a narrow hallway. He moved down that, looking to the right and the left, still touching nothing. Two of the doors were shut, but the door to the bathroom was open, as was the door to a largish bedroom. The bathroom was pristine. Every white ceramic surface shone. The light from the ceiling fixture glowed. The fan purred in the background.
“She wouldn’t have just left the light on,” Gregor said. “She would have been worried about her electric bill. Even if Patty Denning’s impression was right and she had ‘enough’ money to live on, whatever that means, she would have been brought up to worry about the electric bill.”
He drifted the rest of the way down the hall and stood in the door of the largish bedroom. It contained a four-poster bed that was covered with a white-patterned bedspread with fringe on it. Next to the bed was a small night table that was also covered with a white-patterned something with fringe on it. It looked to be part of a set with the bedspread. On top of the nightstand was a lamp. Its shade was also white and patterned and had a fringe.
“I wonder if Marta Warkowski was married,” he said.
Horowitz had come up behind him. “We’d better go. That’s the cavalry arriving on the street.”
“It makes a difference if she was married or not,” Gregor said. “Look at this room.”
