JM03 - Red Cat (13 page)

“I should be annoyed that you don’t return my calls,” he said, “but at least when you finally show, you bring new business along. I guess we’ll call it even.”

“Give it time. A few more meetings with David, you may wish I was still MIA.”

“He is…intense.” Mike smiled. “And given what you’ve said about your family, he’s not a referral I would’ve predicted.”

“You and me both.”

“So this isn’t a rapprochement?”

“It’s a job.”

Mike peered into his glass and mostly hid a skeptical look. “You have a plan in mind?”

“I know where to start: looking at her place, talking to the neighbors, to the family, to Krug and anybody else I can find— all the usual stuff. After that, it’s read and react.”

“How about her friend— the actress?”

“Jill Nolan? That’s a tough call. I’m not sure how far I’d get with her on the phone— her hackles were raised pretty high when we spoke— and if she hasn’t seen the mermaid stories in Seattle, I don’t want to get her thinking more about Holly than she is already.”

Mike nodded and drank off the last of his seltzer. “I assume your brother’s hobby took you by surprise,” he said. I nodded. “You think he’s told us all there is to tell?”

“I know he hasn’t,” I said. “He won’t talk about Stephanie, for one thing.”

“You think that’s all there is?”

“If you’re asking me to vouch for the guy, I can’t. I know less about him every day.”

“I’m just wondering if there are shoes waiting to drop.”

“Clients lie.”

Mike frowned. “Your brother has a lot on the table here— his marriage, his job, potentially, not to mention the black eye all this would give Klein & Sons. His situation is shaky enough without keeping secrets.”

“You’re preaching to the choir,” I said. “If I was the cop who caught the case, and I had a choice of spending my valuable investigating time on a guy who’d already been strong-armed into being in one of Wren’s videos, or the guy she was in the process of strong-arming when she died, I know who I’d pick.”

Mike nodded gravely. “And the window we’re working in isn’t big. If Jane Doe really is Wren, the police could be coming around soon.”

I nodded. “A week or two, I figure. No more.”

14

The ice gave way to lashing sleet by afternoon, and the sidewalks were glazed and perilous in Brooklyn. Meltwater dripped from my parka and puddled at my feet as I stood in the vestibule of Holly Cade’s apartment building, which still smelled powerfully, though of bleach now rather than decay. The intercom speaker was still banged up, and if I wasn’t mistaken, a few more names were missing from the buttons.

I pressed the button for 3-G, Holly’s apartment, and got no response. No surprise. I tried her irate, curious neighbor, Mr. Arrua, in 3-F. Silence there too. I pushed another six buttons at random, but the three voices that replied— one in English and two in Spanish— wanted to know who the hell I was before they’d buzz me in. The inner door was firmly locked, and though I had vinyl gloves, a screwdriver, and a small pry bar in my pocket, I wasn’t sure I wanted to use them just yet. I went outside.

There was a short flight of metal stairs under the stoop, and a metal door at the bottom. It was heavy and imposing and accessorized with a fat deadbolt that would surely have secured the basement against all comers, were it not for the folded paper coffee cup that someone had used as a doorstop. I went in, and past the darkened laundry room to the elevator.

The door to 3-G was still locked, and no more scuffed than it had been last time; I was relieved to see no crime scene tape on it. I knocked, expecting nothing, and wasn’t disappointed. Then I turned to 3-F. I rapped twice and heard shuffling and a scrape of metal by the peephole.

“Yeah?” said the reedy voice from behind the door.

“Mr. Arrua? I was here last week, looking for your neighbor, and I—”

“I remember you. You gave me your card and I told you to leave me alone.”

“That was me,” I said. “I was wondering if we could talk.”

“I had nothing to say then and I got nothing to say now.”

“Have you seen Holly lately?”

“You remember that number: nine-one-one?”

“I don’t need a lot of your time, Mr. Arrua, and I can pay for what I use.”

“I guess you’re still hard of hearing,” he said, but he didn’t threaten to call the cops. “You’re what, a private detective or something?”

“Yes.”

Arrua chuckled behind his door. “So, what’s my time worth?”

“You tell me.”

It was quiet for a while and I thought I’d lost him, but I hadn’t. “What’s the weather like outside?” he asked.

“Crappy,” I said. “There’s sleet coming down and the sidewalk’s like an ice rink.”

“Wait,” Arrua said. He shuffled away from the door and shuffled back in under a minute, and a slip of notebook paper appeared by my foot.

“The market’s around the corner,” he said.

* * *

It came to two bags of groceries: coffee, condensed milk, eggs, a sack of rice, a jar of dulce de leche, two papayas, a loaf of bread, and paper napkins. Arrua opened the door to 3-F and took the bags from me, and I followed him down a short hallway to his living room.

He was a small man, worn but well-kempt in khakis, a gray cardigan, and a white shirt. His apartment was much the same. The living room was a narrow rectangle with white walls, beige trim, and a hardwood floor that had seen rough use, but also a recent waxing. There were two windows that looked onto a fire escape, and that were fortified by metal accordion gates. In front of them was a sofa covered in gray fabric, with arms that had frayed and been carefully mended. There was a bookshelf in the corner, stocked with Spanish titles, and some pictures hanging above it. A photo clipped from a newspaper and yellowing under glass: Argentine soccer players in white and sky blue, and Maradona’s infamous “hand of God” goal against England. Next to it, a plaque commemorating twenty-five years of service to the Metropolitan Transit Authority— hail and farewell, Car Maintenance Engineer Jorge Arrua. Next to that, another photo, black and white, of a pale, pretty, sick-looking woman in a high-necked dress. Wife, mother, sister, daughter— whoever she was, I got the impression that she hadn’t survived her illness, and that it had all happened long ago.

Arrua pointed at the sofa and went into an alcove kitchen. I sat and watched him put his groceries in the half-sized refrigerator, and fix a pot of coffee on the half-sized stove. While the smell of brewing coffee filled the room, he toasted thick slices of bread and opened the jar of dulce de leche. A tabby cat appeared from somewhere and threaded itself between his legs and looked at me sideways.

Arrua was seventysomething and thin, with a soldier’s posture but a faltering stride. His hair was metal gray, cut short and slicked against his head, and his sallow skin was like parchment. He was clean-shaven and there were deep grooves around his mouth and pale eyes that gave him a stubborn, argumentative look even as he poured coffee and set the mugs on a tray. He carried the tray to an oak coffee table and sat opposite me, in an armchair. He added condensed milk to his coffee and sipped at it and sighed.

“Breakfast’s all I like now,” he said, “so I eat it every meal.” He spread some dulce de leche on toast. “Help yourself.”

I poured condensed milk in my coffee and drank. It was thick and sweet and powerful. I sighed too.

“When’s the last time you saw Holly, Mr. Arrua?” I said.

“I guess you can call me George. I saw her in the hall, a couple weeks ago maybe. I don’t keep track.”

“Do you usually see her more often?”

He shrugged. “I see her three, four times in a month. I go to bed early and get up early, and she’s on a different schedule, I guess. It used to be I knew this whole building— all my neighbors— but not now.” He shrugged again.

“So you don’t really know Holly?”

“I know her to say hello.”

“Is she a good neighbor?”

Arrua looked at me and drank some coffee. “Sure.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Last time I was here, you were complaining about the noise.”

“You made a racket outside my door.”

“You made it sound like it wasn’t the first time.”

He tilted his head. “I got no problem with her,” he said. “She keeps to herself and mostly keeps quiet. It’s the people she has over who make trouble. Shouting, banging, slamming doors— it sounds like they’re coming through the walls sometimes.”

“Are they fighting or partying?”

“It’s no party,” he said. The tabby rubbed its head against his trouser cuff and purred loudly.

“Is it yelling-fighting or hitting-fighting?”

“It’s yelling and throwing things. As far as anything else, I don’t know.”

“Have there been a lot of fights?”

Arrua thought about it. “Maybe ten altogether.”

“Recently?”

He shrugged. “Last time was a couple weeks back, I think. Before that, not for a long time— not since summer or beginning of fall.”

“Who is she fighting with?”

He took a bite of toast and shook his head. “I’m too old to be in the middle of anything.”

“I’m not putting you in the middle, George— I wouldn’t do that to somebody who makes coffee this good.” A smile flickered above his skeptical look. “This goes nowhere besides me.”

Arrua nodded slowly, as if against his better judgment. “Her boyfriend mainly— her old boyfriend, I guess. They went at it pretty good.”

“Any idea what about?”

Arrua shook his head. “I’d hear him yelling and banging stuff around, but I don’t know what he was saying.”

I drank some coffee and thought about that for a while. “Did you complain?” Arrua nodded. “And?”

“I knock on the door and she says she’s sorry and things quiet down for a while— but sometimes not for long.”

“You never went to the super or anything?”

Arrua colored a little. “I’m seventy-nine years old, for God’s sake. I don’t want to get into that kind of thing.”

“What kind of thing, George?”

He shifted in his seat and ran a thin finger around the rim of his mug. “The last time I went over there, the boyfriend answered. He tells me to mind my own fucking business, and if I don’t he’ll…” Arrua colored more deeply and looked down at his cat, asleep on his foot. “I don’t know…he talked some trash about what he’d do to Diego here.” He shook his head. “She tried to stop him but he pushed her away. After that, I quit complaining. Like I said, I’m too old.”

I let out a long breath. “You know this guy’s name?” Arrua shook his head. “What does he look like?”

“White guy with dark hair, in his thirties, I guess. Tall— taller than you, I think.”

“When did he stop coming around?”

“I don’t know, maybe in July or August.”

I thought for a while. “You said the fighting was mainly with the old boyfriend,” I said. “Does that mean she has other noisy visitors?”

“A month back there was a guy banging at her door pretty loud.”

“What did he want?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if he ever got to see her.”

“You see him before, or since?”

Arrua chuckled and shook his head. “He wasn’t the type that hangs around here usually.”

“What type was he?”

“Looked like a banker to me, or maybe a lawyer— white hair, dark suit, white shirt, wore a tie. Not somebody I see at the community center.”

I nodded. “Anybody else come around?”

“There was a woman here a couple weeks ago, did her share of crying and yelling. Dark hair, thirty-five, forty maybe— I didn’t get a good look.”

“Anybody else?”

“There’s the new boyfriend.”

“How new?”

“A few months, maybe.”

“Do they fight too?”

“Not that I hear.”

“You know his name?” Arrua shook his head. “You know what he looks like?”

“Sure— and so do you.” I raised an eyebrow and he smiled. “He’s the guy who kicked your ass in the hall.”

I had no other questions for Jorge Arrua, so I finished my coffee and thanked him and listened to him lock his door behind me. Then I took the stairs up.

There was a sign on the metal door to the roof that warned of an alarm, but the wires dangling from the push bar made it less than convincing. It opened only to the brief creak of hinges. Outside, the sleet had turned to snow and the air was white with it.

“Great,” I whispered. I walked to the edge of the roof and looked down the narrow passage between Holly’s building and its neighbor.

The fire escape was crusted in ice and slush and decades of rust underneath. The little gate where it met the roofline shrieked like a subway when I pulled on it, but no windows opened below, and no heads peered out. I slipped and slid a half-dozen times on the way down, and I crouched by Holly’s windows with bruised elbows and sodden knees.

Her windows were locked tight and, like her neighbor’s, guarded by a metal gate. I peered through the lattice into the apartment beyond. It was even smaller than Arrua’s, a single square room with a pocket kitchen at one end, bath at the other, futon in the corner, and what looked like all of the apartment’s contents scattered across the floor. I put away my pry bar. Someone had beaten me to it.

15

“Burglary?” Mike Metz asked.

“I doubt it,” I said. I propped the phone on my shoulder and spooned some yogurt into a bowl. “At least, not the traditional kind. The windows were intact and so was the door, so whoever it was had a key— and no interest in the television or the iPod or three fairly expensive flat-screen monitors.”

“You saw all that?”

“The apartment’s not big. What I didn’t see, though, were her computers or any video equipment.”

“You think that stuff was there to begin with?”

“There was a table with a modem and a printer and all the monitors on it, and lots of loose cabling hanging off the side. And there were factory boxes on the floor— three of them— for digital video cameras. Two of them were opened and empty. I couldn’t see into the third one.”

Mike made a clicking sound. “Anything else not there?”

“There was a file cabinet tipped on its side. The drawers looked empty from where I was, but I didn’t see any file folders around. I didn’t see any disks around, either, or video cassettes.”