ER - A Murder Too Personal (4 page)

“Don’t you fret,” I told her. “It’s just a
minor inconvenience.”

The yellow police tape covered the front door
in an X-pattern, like an emblem to ward off evil spirits. I peeled
it off and unlocked the door. The apartment was just the way I
imagined it. It was on the ground floor of an old brownstone and it
was furnished in a traditional style with muted colors. There was a
vestibule as you entered, a small kitchen and bathroom on the left,
a living room straight ahead and the bedroom to the right of the
living room. Both the living room and the bedroom had doors that
opened out onto a tiny garden.

The garden was well-tended. You could see
someone had given it a lot of care. This time of year the flowers
were in full bloom. The area was completely walled in by an
eight-foot high stockade fence. There was a double steel door to
the basement that was padlocked on the outside.

Someone had started to tidy up the apartment,
but the effort hadn’t helped much. Furniture was put where it
didn’t belong, clothing and papers covered the floor, and pots and
pans were all over the entrance hall. Whoever ransacked the place
was looking for more than just valuables.

I took a look in the kitchen. The room was so
cramped there was only enough space for a half-height refrigerator.
But there was every kind of cooking utensil imaginable. It put me
in mind of how much she loved to cook and how she’d make an
elaborate project of her meals, from getting up early and tramping
down to Chinatown or Little Italy or wherever she’d have to go for
the proper ingredients.

Dammit to hell. I shook off the thought.

I checked the contents of the refrigerator
and the freezer—opened every container, emptied the ice-cube trays,
unscrewed the refrigerator light, took apart the microwave and
emptied every container in the cupboard.

Nothing.

Then I did what I love best. Made an in-depth
survey of the garbage. It was well on its way to stinking to high
hell. What surprised me was the McDonald’s container next to the
yogurt cup and a couple of Twinkies wrappers. That wasn’t like
Alicia.

Next I checked out the bathroom. Under and
behind the sink and toilet, the shower stall, the light fixture.
Then the medicine cabinet. You can tell a lot about a person by
looking through the medicine cabinet. There were half a dozen
prescription vials—five of them from a Dr. Pasternak. She would
never have taken those medications before. The names were
familiar—Prozac, Nembutal. Grown-up candies.

There were also a lot of expensive cosmetics.
That was a departure too. She used to wear eye shadow and blush,
but that was the extent of it. She didn’t need much make-up. She
had a clear complexion and a healthy look about her.

After I’d searched the place for a couple of
hours, I took a break. There were five bottles of Michelob Dry in
the fridge. I took one. She wouldn’t have minded. The apartment was
sweltering and the beer was cold going down. I put the bottle
against my forehead to cool off. A drop of water ran down my cheek
and into my collar. I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

Then I did what I didn’t want to. I went back
into the living room and studied the chalk outline on the floor. I
stared at it for a good ten minutes. Then I knelt down and felt the
rug. It was a hand-woven Iranian in a pattern that looked like a
fruit tree with an intricate branch structure. Small fragments of
skull bone and brain tissue were splattered all over the weave,
disturbing the symmetry of the design.

The sofa, armchairs and coffee table were the
same ones we had in our place when we were married. The same sofa
we had sex on.

There was just one little oversight.

The police didn’t know it was a convertible
because they hadn’t opened it up.

Careless—or maybe they didn’t give a
damn.

I opened the sofa the same way I’d done so
many times before. A rumpled sheet was wedged inside. I unfolded it
slowly and spread it out. A small hard white pebble was caught in
one of the creases.

You didn’t have to be Marion Barry to know
what it was. Employee drug testing was a lucrative and growing
business. This was like spinach to Popeye.

It was a cocaine rock.

That didn’t mean too much. It was probably
just recreational use. Snorting cocaine on weekends. The fact that
it was in the sofabed meant they were screwing. Snorting and
screwing.

Well, it wasn’t surprising. Lab studies
always showed coke was the drug of choice among primates.

I was about to fold up the sheet when
something else caught my attention. It was the heavy sweet scent of
Shalimar. Alicia didn’t use Shalimar—at least not that I
remembered.

So I returned to the bathroom and checked out
the perfume bottles. There was Jess, Lauren and Je Reviens—but no
Shalimar.

Then I walked back into the living room,
folded up the sheet and closed the sofa. Next to the sofa was a
bookcase.

What was she reading now?

There were some books on metaphysics, a book
by Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, one by
Schopenhauer, some works on Eastern mysticism, some books of pop
psychology and a few psychiatry textbooks.

What caught my eye was a shelf of feminist
writings. That was unusual. When we were married, she never read
any feminist material—never paid it much attention. She seldom read
fiction. Her reading tastes ran to contemporary non-fiction, mostly
biographies, and some history. She didn’t read ephemeral subjects
like psychology, philosophy or mysticism, and never advocacy
literature.

Interesting how her reading tastes had
changed so radically. It was almost as if the library belonged to a
different person. I would never have known that these books were
hers.

A book was on the floor next to the side
table. The bookmark was on page 124. It was The Handmaid’s
Tale.

She never would have read that kind of book
before.

Alongside the bookcase was a computer on a
wooden stand against the wall. It was a Dell mini-tower with a
Pentium III processor. I switched it on.

An icon of a padlock appeared on the screen.
My stomach sank.

I typed, “FUCK YOU.”

A little x appeared next to the padlock.

After a couple more feeble attempts, and a
couple more little x’s, I gave up. At least I could take her
floppies and run them back at the office. I looked for them but
they weren’t in the stand and they weren’t in the bookcase either.
As far as I could tell, they weren’t anywhere in the apartment.

Did the cops take the floppies? Or did the
killer?

The bedroom was next. I opened the door and
looked in. It was a small room. Everything had been tossed about
like the aftermath of some berserk tornado. The contents of drawers
had been emptied on the bed and the floor. The bed was a single
against the far wall. A night table next to it had been knocked
over. The closet held a lot of dresses, but they had all been
shoved to one side. I inspected the dresses, one by one.

Most men don’t know the first thing about
women’s clothing and I was no exception. You approach the subject
the same way you consider some Eastern religion. It’s there, it has
its own mystique, its own rules, but you can’t even begin to
comprehend it.

Alicia wore only dresses. She wore soft
flowing dresses that emphasized her height and her femininity. She
never wore skirts and blouses. Occasionally she wore Levi jeans
with a sweatshirt or a T-shirt. And she never wore designer
jeans.

Jesus, I’d forgotten so much about her. But I
still remembered a lot. Like the way she cocked her head to one
side when she gave you her throaty laugh. And the way she could
look through you without saying a word when she thought you were
holding something back from her.

I knew I was going to miss her. And I didn’t
have even the faintest beginning of an idea of who killed her.

The traffic was moving freely as I drove
north up I-95. I was averaging seventy. It was ten AM. The skies
were a leaden overcast and threatening rain.

I used to think people never changed. Now I
had to allow for the possibility that maybe people could change.
Only not so radically. Like Hanoi Jane turning into a Conservative.
How did something like that happen? It was almost as if she’d
become a different person. Would I have married her if I’d known
her in this incarnation? That was a tough one to call.

It was when I hit Greenwich that the car
started to overheat again. I slowed down until the gauge came back
to the mid-point.

Chisolm’s company was located in Norwalk,
about an hour from the city. I pulled off I-95 at exit 15 and drove
north a mile and a half up route 7 past fast-food franchises and
sleek industrial buildings until I got there.

The place sat on two acres surrounded by a
chain link fence with rolled razor ribbon on top. The entrance had
a guard post with a swinging barricade. Next to the guard house was
a discreet sign that read INSIGNIA BIOTECHNOLOGY LTD. The guard had
some kind of comic opera uniform with a gold braid that made him
look like a character out of Gilbert and Sullivan. He shouted my
name through the intercom and got the OK to let me in. He pushed a
button and the barricade swung open while another guard looked at
me without much interest.

There were two small buildings in the
compound. Modern, gray and impersonal, with not a superfluous line
in sight. Cookie-cutter designs without an original architectural
thought, interchangeable with a thousand other nondescript
industrial structures.

I pulled into a visitor’s parking slot in
front of the administrative building. An electric eye opened the
front door for me and I stepped into the reception area. The dark
brown carpeting was deep and the lighting was subdued. The place
was decorated in earthy autumn colors. There was a young woman with
an absent look on her face at the console. She gave me her
visitor’s smile, asked me to sign the log and escorted me down a
featureless corridor to Chisolm’s secretary’s office.

Chisolm’s secretary was one of those lookers
who’d just passed her prime. She was a tad hefty around the middle
and had on too much make-up. Her hair was an artificial shade of
reddish-brown that came right out of a bottle. It was done up in a
style that strove for fashion but didn’t quite make it. She
reminded me of Melanie Griffith on a bad day. I wondered how long
she’d been with him. Some secretaries stayed with their bosses
longer than their wives did.

She led me into his office. Her gray knit
dress clung to her backside as it swayed. She was wearing sheer
stockings and high heels with straps.

“Have a seat, Mr. Rogan,” she purred. “Mr.
Chisolm is in the laboratory, but he told me he would be back
shortly.” She eyed me up and down. “Would you care for some
coffee?”

“Few things would please me more. I’ll take
it black.”

“Sugar?” she smiled.

I smiled back. “Yes, I’ll have some sugar,
sugar.”

The eyes with too much mascara glinted. “I
won’t be long.”

Was Chisolm her type? Or was I? Or was
Antonio Banderas?

She brought me the coffee in a Rosenthal cup
and saucer with little flowers. There was a little mahogany coffee
table in front of a couch across from Chisolm’s desk. She bent down
and placed the coffee gracefully on the table, together with a
linen napkin and a small silver spoon.

As she straightened up, she looked into my
eyes and said, “My name is Justine. If there’s anything…” She
didn’t finish the sentence.

If she’d been ten years younger, maybe…

“Thanks, sugar.” I gave her the sincere look
right back. “Your kindness warms my very soul.”

She left me alone in the room. I took a sip
of the coffee and felt like I was at a garden party. It was
lukewarm and watery. You could see the little flower at the bottom
of the cup through the light brown liquid. Blumschencafe.

Chisolm was no tightwad. It was obvious he
wanted to display every nickel he had. The furniture, the carpeting
and the paneling must have all set him back a pretty bob. There was
a picture window to my left that looked out onto the quadrangle
with an expanse of blue-green grass, trimmed hedges and a row of
fountains, each one higher than the one in front of it.

The door opened and Chisolm stepped in,
letting it close behind him with a muted click.

“Mr. Rogan,” he said, with what could have
passed for a genuine smile in a dark alley if you didn’t look too
closely. I stood and we shook hands.

“Have a seat,” he said and motioned me over
to the couch. He took a seat in an overstuffed leather chair that
gave him three inches in height over me. The guy had evidently
studied the literature on Power Placement.

He reached over and pressed a button on the
side of the coffee table. Inside of ten seconds Justine appeared.
She looked at him and asked, “Coffee?”

The corners of his mouth turned up
imperceptibly.

She nodded and turned on her heels.

Inside of fifteen seconds he had his coffee.
That’s what it’s like when two people have been together for a long
time. Non-verbal communication.

When we were alone, he said, “Frankly, Mr.
Rogan, I’m interested in you. I was curious to see what kind of a
man Alicia was married to. Obviously, a woman of that nature would
have married an exceptional man.”

Where was he going with this line of horse
hockey?

“I was surprised to learn you were a private
investigator. You don’t look like one. You look more like a
corporate executive, as if you just stepped off the cover of
Fortune.”

He gave me the once-over, only he did it
twice. “I know your background. Your credentials are
impeccable…”