by Jane Haddam
“What the hell is wrong with this room?”
“These things”—Gregor gestured at the bedspread and the night table and the lampshade—“these are the kinds of things women get as wedding presents. Or at wedding showers. If Marta Warkowski was married, that would be one thing. But I can’t see it. Didn’t someone say that Marta had lived here all her life?”
“What of it?”
“She wouldn’t have stayed here with a husband,” Gregor said. “They’d have rented their own place. Which means these things would have been given to her mother. And they’re in wonderful shape. Which means her mother barely used them.”
“You are making absolutely no sense,” Horowitz said, “and we’ve got to get back out there. That’s the EMTs out there.”
Gregor took a last look at the bedroom, and turned to head out into the fray.
2
If a body is dead, you can leave it in place for a very long time. Gregor knew this was considered to be a good thing. He even knew why. It was just that he’d never really liked it. There was something inside him that wanted dead bodies to be valorized: in open coffins, the centerpiece at a wake; in churches in front of the altar. He always wondered what people had done before forensics became so complicated, and such a production. Did they leave dead bodies lying there when there was nothing much you could learn from them outside a coroner’s office?
It didn’t help that forensics now sent so many people, it was hard to get them into small spaces. This living room was not that small, but it was a tight fit for half a dozen people in hazmat suits along with EMTs, photographers, uniformed police, and an evidence clerk. Gregor let himself be pushed relentlessly into the hallway along with Meera Agerwal. There was nothing that was going to go on in that room right now that he had to see firsthand. Usually, it was well past this stage when he was called in on a case at all. If there were things they wanted him to know, they would send him a report.
Or tell him.
Or something.
He turned to watch two more people come upstairs. They were both official. Except for the various official people, the building seemed to be deserted. The doors were all tightly closed. Nobody had come out to check on what was happening.
Gregor felt a hand on his arm and looked around to find Meera Agerwal scowling at him. She was a very tiny woman. Gregor hadn’t noticed that before.
“You’re supposed to be someone famous,” she told him. “That’s supposed to matter to me.”
“I don’t think I’d call myself famous,” Gregor said cautiously.
Meera Agerwal wasn’t listening. “Look at all this fuss,” she said. “Just look at it. For a man who would be eating out of garbage cans if it wasn’t for Cary Alder. You can find a dozen like him actually eating out of garbage cans if you go down to the street. Those that don’t run away as soon as they hear somebody coming, that is. Most of them run away. Dirty and ragged and living in their own filth. And for that they send in the police!”
Now Gregor was interested. “Do you mean to say Miguel Hernandez was a homeless person before he came to work here?”
“Homeless,” Meera Agerwal said. “How am I supposed to know if he was homeless? I should be hiring and firing all the staff here myself. At least that way I could find people who could be trusted to do their jobs. But no, no. Mr. Alder has to do all that himself. He has to pick his staff personally. It’s total crap. It’s completely ridiculous. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
There was a soft cough just to their side. Gregor turned to find a tall, massively obese man moving up to them, rubbing the palms of his hands against his shirt and looking close to panicked.
“Por favor,” he said.
“Speak English,” Meera Agerwal snapped. “For God’s sake, how many times do people have to tell you?” She turned back to Gregor. “They’re all like this. All of them. Dirty and stupid and so lazy you don’t know how they get up enough energy to breathe. And we have to hire them. That’s Mr. Alder, too. You can’t hire a decent worker for a neighborhood like this. The neighborhood won’t put up with it.”
Gregor looked back to the man and tried to sound encouraging. “Can I help you?” he asked. “Do you live here?”
The big man rocked from side to side. “Sí,” he said. “Sí. I am—” He started speaking rapidly in Spanish, then stopped himself and tried again in English. “I am work here. For Señor Hernandez.”
“You work here as what?” Gregor asked. “What’s your name?”
This took a few seconds for the big man to sort out. Meera Agerwal nearly exploded.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “At least Hernandez could speak English. Even I can speak English, and it isn’t like I was brought up knowing it. What is wrong with these people?”
The big man concentrated on Gregor. “I am Juan Morales,” he said. “I am work for Señor Hernandez. I fix.”
“You fix what?” Gregor asked him. “Plumbing? That kind of thing?”
“Sí. Plumbing. Steps. Doors. Walls. With wood. Lightbulbs. Carpet.” He considered for a moment. “Steam clean?” he said finally, as if he weren’t sure.
“He’s one of the handymen,” Meera Agerwal said. “I told you people before. Hernandez has handymen. Two or three. Maybe four. They do the scut work. Badly.”
“Por favor,” Juan Morales said again. “Señor Hernandez?” He looked toward the door of the apartment.
“Señor Hernandez is dead,” Gregor said. “I am very sorry.”
“Sí. Gracias.” Juan Morales shook his head. “I do?” he ventured.
“Unbelievable,” Meera Agerwal said. Then she raised her voice as far as Gregor thought it could go. “I’ve already talked to Mr. Alder about it! There will be instructions later! Wait for instructions!”
“I wonder why it is that everybody, no matter where they’re from, thinks people who don’t speak their language will understand them better if they shout,” Gregor said.
“I speak four languages,” Meera Agerwal said, “and I only shout at stupid people. Don’t give me that sanctimonious horse manure. He’s got to wait for instructions. That’s it.”
“¿Señor?” Juan Morales touched Gregor’s sleeve and looked to the door of Marta Warkowski’s apartment. “¿La policía?”
“That’s right,” Gregor told him. “The police are in there. They’re going to be in there for a while. I don’t think they’ll let you in to do any work for a while yet. It might even be a couple of days.”
Juan Morales considered this. “¿La señora?”
“Miss Warkowski is in the hospital,” Gregor said. “She’s very ill. She won’t need to get back into the apartment right away.”
Juan Morales considered this, too. He nodded. “Sí,” he said.
A moment later, he was gone, melting away into the empty hallways as if he had the power to make himself invisible.
Meera Agerwal looked like she was ready to spit. “It’s unbelievable. There isn’t a handyman in these two buildings that hasn’t been with us for at least six years. Six years! How does he live here six years and not know the language?”
“Do you know him?” Gregor asked her.
“Of course I don’t know him. Why would I? Mr. Alder hires the supers and the supers hire the handymen. But you can bet Mr. Alder has them all checked out. As much as he wants to.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means what it says,” Meera Agerwal said. “I can’t help it if you don’t know what’s going on around here. And now I’ve got this. This is going to be a mess.”
“This is already a mess,” Gregor said.
“I don’t suppose that vile old woman killed him. That would solve all of my problems. Both of them gone in one fell swoop.”
3
It was two hours before the ambulance took away the body and Horowitz and Morabito were free. By the time he saw them coming downstairs to where he had parked himself on the second-floor landing, he was half convinced tha
t this was the end of his involvement in their case. It was hard to work it out. The willingness of the city of Philadelphia to pay for his services was predicated on the possibility that Marta Warkowski was in some way connected to Cary Alder. Who knew what was going on now?
Meera Agerwal disappeared as soon as she was told she could go. That took longer than it should have, but nobody was paying attention to her. The hallways remained as empty as they had been when they first arrived. Uniformed patrolmen went from door to door, knocking, and got virtually nowhere. Every once in a while, somebody opened up. When they did, they were struck deaf and dumb, or insisted that they spoke no English. If there were any children in this building, they had disappeared absolutely.
When Horowitz finally came up to Gregor on the landing, he looked exhausted.
“Listen,” he said, when he saw the way Gregor was staring at him. “You should see Morabito. He’s worse.”
Gregor got up and stretched his legs. “Did you make any progress? I assume it will take a while to check whatever fingerprints are on that gun.”
Morabito came over to them both. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “It feels like a mausoleum.”
The three of them went steadily down the stairs, past clutches of forensics people on their way out to cars and vans. They came out the front door to find that the street was no longer empty, but that what it was full of had nothing to do with the normal life of the neighborhood. There were dozens of police cars and vans, some with their bubble lights flashing. There were other vans, too, from the television stations. Those had disgorged cameras, complicated electrical equipment, and dozens of people, all of them training their attention on the door of the apartment house where the murder had taken place. What was not on the street was any sign of anyone who might actually live on it. It was too cold a day for people to be hanging out in doorways and on benches, but there would usually have been somebody.
“Know what we did?” Morabito asked. “We’ve got two patrolmen who speak Spanish on the scene here. We sent them to do a second round of knocking on doors. They might as well have been speaking Martian.”
“I keep telling you, you can’t blame them,” Horowitz said. “They’re afraid of being deported.”
“And they wouldn’t have to be afraid of being deported if they hadn’t broken the law to begin with,” Morabito said. “And don’t bother to give me the lecture. I’ve heard it before.”
“Morabito here has a bee in his bonnet about people breaking the law,” Horowitz said. “As if that’s the issue.”
Gregor decided he’d better get past this, fast. At least for now.
He gave the two men a quick rundown of his conversation with Juan Morales. “He was willing to talk to me,” he said, “chances are good he’ll be willing to talk to you. And he’s not the only one. From what Miss Agerwal said, there’s at least one more handyman attached to these two buildings. I don’t know how their employment works. I suppose they aren’t around here all the time. Even so, my guess is that if they don’t live in one of these two buildings, they probably live in one of the others owned by Alder Properties, on this street or close. And they’d know things about how the buildings run, what kind of security there is, even garbage collection and maintenance. Things that might help.”
“Juan Morales,” Morabito said. “It’s like saying John Smith.”
“Did the medical examiner’s people say anything useful?” Gregor asked.
Horowitz shook his head. “Not really. At one point one of them said something about if the shot didn’t kill him, he’d be a walking miracle. I guess that’s about right. That was one hell of a hole in his skull.”
“We should get something straightened out,” Morabito said. “I got to admit, I wasn’t really in love with the idea of you coming in and consulting, whatever that is. There we were, in the middle of everything, and suddenly you’re coming in.”
“You should have said something,” Gregor said. “I don’t usually take cases where the main detectives don’t want me. It’s hard to get anything done in that situation.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Horowitz said. “But the point is, we changed our minds. The city’s already paying you, right? So if they’re already paying you, we might as well use you. And there are aspects to this case where we could use you.”
“That’s nice to know,” Gregor said cautiously.
“He just means we could blame it on you if it all went horribly wrong,” Morabito said. “And those people,” he glanced up at the news vans, “already know you’re here. You know they do.”
“Just in case they didn’t, we told them,” Horowitz said.
Gregor shook his head. “Tell me one thing,” he said, “you didn’t happen to find any of that Alder money on the body?”
“Aldergold,” Horowitz corrected. “And no, we didn’t, but we weren’t looking especially. That Aldergold they found on the woman in the garbage bag—”
“Marta Warkowski,” Morabito said.
“We don’t actually know she’s Marta Warkowski yet,” Horowitz said. “We’re going to have to get somebody down there to confirm the identification.”
“There were pictures of her up there,” Morabito said. “In frames.”
“I saw them,” Horowitz said. “Like I was saying. The Aldergold always bothered me because it didn’t fit anything. There’s a whole bunch of other things going on, and if the Aldergold wasn’t there, it wouldn’t matter to any of them. There’s no connection.”
“She lives in an apartment in a building owned by Alder Properties,” Gregor said.
“Lots of people do,” Horowitz said. “They don’t have pockets full of Aldergold. Hell, even the people who live in those expensive high-rises don’t always have the stuff. It’s some kind of weird status thing. I can’t even figure out why she’d want to steal the stuff, if that’s how she got it. They’d take one look at her in the Cleopatra Bar and boot her right out the door.”
“Would they?” Gregor asked. “Even if she had the Aldergold on her?”
“The clothes she was wearing were ancient,” Horowitz said. “And I’m no good at that kind of thing, but my best guess is they came out of Walmart.”
“She would have looked pretty out of place,” Morabito said.
“And this guy upstairs,” Horowitz said. “There has to be a connection. It’s her apartment we found him in. Hell, maybe she even killed him. In fact, the best guess is that she did kill him. What does he have to do with Aldergold?”
“If she killed him,” Gregor said, “how did she end up in the garbage bag?”
“Got to be a third person involved in this,” Morabito said. “I’ve been trying to tell Horowitz that for an hour.”
“Obviously there has to be a third person involved in this,” Horowitz said. “I was never arguing that point.”
Gregor was beginning to think they argued every point.
Some of the police vans were packing up and beginning to gun their motors. The news vans were galvanized into activity, the reporters and the cameramen starting to press forward, closer and closer to the scene of action.
Gregor galvanized himself into action.
“We’d better get out of here,” he said. “We’re about to get caught.”
TWO
1
Tommy Moradanyan could hear his mother moving around in the kitchen—banging around, as he thought of it. There was a while after Russ had first been arrested when banging around was the only way she moved. She went from room to room and place to place picking things up and smashing them down again, as if she could hammer reality back into the shape she wanted it to be. There had been less of that for a time. Then Tommy had gone up to visit Russ, and the thing had happened on the street, and now here she was again.
Tommy didn’t really blame her. He wanted to hammer reality back into that same shape. He wanted to wake up one morning and find Russ in the kitchen, complaining that all his papers had gone missing overnight. He wanted to l
ook up into the stands while he was playing basketball and see Russ halfway to the rafters, staring at him as if he were the only player on the team. Most of all, he wanted adults to make sense to him again—and he didn’t think that was ever going to happen.
He checked his face in the bathroom mirror one more time, just in case he needed to shave. He didn’t. He’d shaved just last week, and he’d done it long before he should have. If you shaved little gray patches on your cheeks, all it did was make you bleed. It also made you look like an idiot.
He went out to the kitchen. His sister, Charlotte, was sitting at the table, calmly eating Cheerios from a Disney princess bowl. Charlie had a whole collection of Disney princess bowls. This one was Rapunzel, from Tangled, Tommy’s favorite one. If Charlie had to grow up to be a Disney princess, Tommy wanted her to be just like Rapunzel from Tangled.
His mother was putting away plates and bowls. If she didn’t calm down, she was going to break some of them.
“Hey,” Tommy said.
Then he came into the room and sat down at the table himself. Charlie gave him a great big smile and said, “Hi!” His mother stopped what she was doing and turned to look at him.
“The police called,” she said. “They want you to come down to some station or the other and make a formal statement. I wrote down the address.”
“Cool,” Tommy said. It seemed safe.
“I don’t think you should go down there by yourself,” his mother said. “I think you should have a lawyer with you. I should go with you.”
“And bring Charlie?”
“I called Bennis and Gregor. Gregor’s going to be in the same place later this morning. He can sit in with you.”
“You do understand I’m not in any trouble,” Tommy said. “I didn’t do anything wrong. Nobody thinks I did anything wrong. Father Tibor and I were just standing there on a corner when that van came by and dumped that woman in the street. And it was a good thing, because if nobody had been there to see it, the woman would have been left out there forever, and maybe she would have died.”
