The Pandora Key (3 page)

After multiple wrong turns, U-turns, and several minutes craned over the steering wheel, squinting through the windshield, I found Rachel’s house. It was one in a row of tightly packed two-story boxes with painted siding, tiny yards, and concrete porches. Some had the side-by-side front doors that marked them as two-family homes. Some had front yards fenced with chain link. All had burglar bars on the windows. Rachel’s address, 134 Concord, was one of the doubles.

Parking was no easier to find. I ended up at a meter two blocks down on the busy street that crossed Rachel’s. I got out and walked past gas stations, liquor stores, pizza joints, and a White Hen Pantry, the local version of 7-Eleven. It was a long way from the large homes and tree-shaded boulevards of Brookline.

On the way to Rachel’s front door, out of habit, I looked closely at every parked car. I looked at all the windows in the facing houses. I looked for anyone or anything that didn’t belong. It was no comfort that I seemed to be the only one in that category.

No one answered the door at 134 Concord, which didn’t surprise me, given how dark that side of the house was. I walked around to the back. All of the windows on Rachel’s side had the blinds closed. I looped back to the front door. When no one answered another knock, I slotted the key Rachel had given me into the lock. It wouldn’t turn.

I pulled it out, pushed it back, and was trying again when the door at 136 swung open, and a blond teenage girl poked her head out. “Who are you?”

In spite of her droopy eyelids, she managed to look nervous. She had good reason to be wary, because it wasn’t even noon, and she was stoned. Her pupils were pinpoints, and the fragrance of the hemp floated out from behind her. I could hear the sound of more like her inside, chattering and laughing, their voices loud over the sound of some kind of reggae rap music.

“I’m not a cop,” I said.

“
What
?”

I looked down at the useless key in my hand. “Could I ask you some questions?”

Her eyes were less droopy now. “What about?”

“You can come out, or I’ll come in, but if you don’t close the door, the whole neighborhood’s going to get high. I’m not here to hassle you.”

She glanced behind her as she stepped out, pulling the door closed behind her.

“Thank you,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Kimberly.”

I told her who I was and showed her my license. She didn’t seem impressed. “Do you know where the Ruffielos are?”

“I had nothing to do with it. I didn’t see her. I didn’t hear her—”

“Who are you talking about?”

“Rachel.”

“What about her?”

“I went out to party, I came home, and she was gone, and all her stuff was gone, and on account of that I got grounded for a month. It wasn’t my job to watch her.”

“Are you saying she moved?”

“She snuck out in the middle of the night with three months’ rent due. My mom had a freaking attack when she got home and found out.”

I started to feel an I-told-you-so come on, which made me feel alternately smug about Rachel and sad for Harvey. “When did she leave?”

“I don’t know. Maybe a week?”

“What about her husband?”

“Gary?” A seductive smile crossed her face, and I got a whiff of something unseemly. “He left three days after school started.” Which would have been September, almost eight months ago. It was interesting that she remembered it to the day.

I checked the address on the door. I looked at my scribbled notes. I looked at Kimberly. “That means no one lives here?”

“It’s empty.”

“Any idea where Rachel moved to?”

“Don’t know. Don’t care.” She had fallen back into that state of mellow induced by the weed, and perhaps thoughts of Gary.

“Why not?”

“Because she was a stone-cold bitch, always pounding on the wall and yelling at me to be quiet. Before Gary left, they made more noise than I did.”

“Doing what?”

“Fighting. All the time.”

“She told me Gary abused her,” I said. “Does that sound right?”

She let out a harsh laugh, one that was much too knowing for someone her age. “The other way around, maybe. Gary’s a sweetheart. He was always doing for her, or trying to. She was the one always yelling at him and putting him down.” Kimberly had been slowly drifting toward the door. She wanted to get back to her party. “Can I—”

“Yeah, just one more second.” I held up the key Rachel had given me. “I would like to get inside to look around. Any ideas on how I can do that?”

“My mom had the locks changed.”

“You’re mom’s the land—”

“You can’t talk to her. You can’t.” It wasn’t up for discussion.

“I won’t tell her anything. I just need—”

“No, she’s working, and she doesn’t know any more than I do. But there’s—” She crossed her arms, rolled her head back, and went all teenager cagey. “If I give you something, will you go away and promise to leave us alone?”

“Yes.”

“Wait here.”

She went inside, reached up next to the door, and came out with a set of keys on a ring. She held up the one marked with a blue rubber rim. “These are the new keys. You can go in and look around, but you have to promise—”

“I won’t say anything.”

“Just leave them inside, and don’t lock the door.”

I reached for the ring and nearly had my arm severed by the force of the slamming door.

It was, indeed, the blue key that unlocked the front door. I flipped on the overhead light and beheld the empty space. It looked like a place that had been quickly abandoned, which was to say dirty. Dust bunnies floated around the empty hardwood floors, and something in the musty air made me sneeze. Bent nails and long gashes marked where pictures had hung on the walls—walls that throbbed from the pounding beat of the party next door. Rachel might have been a bitch, but she hadn’t been wrong about the noise.

A quick spin through the upstairs bedrooms turned up nothing but a couple of lonely wire coat hangers in one of the closets and an explanation for what was making me sneeze. There was a cat litter box in the bathroom. Also a used bar of soap in the shower and a bunch of balled-up tissues and used Q-tips, which might have been of interest if I were a forensic scientist with a lab. As it was, it pissed me off all the more to be looking at Rachel’s trash. Needless to say, there were no family photos or jewelry to retrieve. There was no abusive husband. There was nothing that even remotely resembled the story Rachel had told.

By the time I got downstairs and found all the kitchen cabinets standing open, there was no force on earth that could have kept me from going through and slamming every one of them. Childish but necessary. The same for kicking the large garbage bins in the alley that turned out to be empty as well.

I went back inside, through the house to the front room where the window looked out on the street. I split the blinds to peek through. There was a black sedan parked halfway down the block that hadn’t been there when I’d come in. It had two guys in it and was just nondescript enough to be cops. Maybe that’s what she was doing. Maybe I was supposed to be a decoy.

The small scope I carried on my key chain was about the size of a large pocketknife. I used it to find the sedan’s license plate and copied the number in my notebook.

I had to call Harvey, but first I had to think of a delicate way to explain to him that the woman he still cared about was, and probably always had been, a scheming bitch. I pulled out my phone, stood in the front room, and stared at it. I went and stood in the kitchen and stared at it some more. Then I sat on the stairs with my chin in my hand and thought some more. There just isn’t much to work with in an empty house when you’re trying to stall. I put the phone away. This was news better served up in person.

3

IT WAS LATE AFTERNOON WHEN I PULLED UP IN FRONT OF Harvey’s house. I went up the front steps juggling two cups of hot brew from Tealuxe and searching for the front door key. But I didn’t need a key. I didn’t even need to twist the knob, because the door was closed but not latched. I cursed Rachel for her careless indifference. She had to have been the one to leave it open, because Harvey never would.

Another thing he never did was listen to music, but when I pushed the door open, instead of the usual hospital-grade silence, I was greeted with a big, muscular blast of Motown. The music was loud but distant, echoing through the halls and around the corners of the old house. It was so jarring and unexpected I just stood in the foyer and listened. It was the Temptations singing “Since I Lost My Baby,” and it was coming from upstairs, the part of the house Harvey didn’t occupy. The part of the house no one occupied.

“Harvey?”

I pulled the door halfway closed and strained to hear his voice or his cough or the sound of his wheels rolling across hardwood. I got nothing but big horns, lush violins, and immaculate backup vocals. I didn’t like the feeling.

“Harvey, are you here?”

The last time Harvey had failed to answer my call was the day he fell down in the shower. I found him there, staring straight ahead, with blood and cold water dribbling down his face. He had hit his head in the fall. After being briefly unconscious, he had come to, but without the strength to get up, or even to turn off the water. It had run so long the hot water had run out. That was the day he quit flirting with the wheelchair and surrendered for good. This felt different.

I set the tea on the floor in the foyer, slipped the Glock out, and did a press check. I didn’t like pulling the thing out—ever—but nothing about the day had turned out the way I’d expected, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that Rachel had opened the door and let something bad blow into the house. The music was giving it voice. A house filled with dance music was such a departure from the way Harvey usually lived. It gave me the feeling he was already gone. I put the thought aside, left the door open, and moved in, staying close to the walls.

David Ruffin’s voice, silky and forlorn, drifted through the house as a bead of sweat squeezed out from between my palm and the gun’s grip. It ran straight down the inside of my forearm as I got ready to make the corner into the living room.

The birds are singing and the children are playing,

There’s plenty of work and the bosses are paying

You looked at Harvey and thought polka. Maybe Perry Como if you wanted to stretch it. Not James Brown or Marvin Gaye or Curtis Mayfield, and certainly not Isaac Hayes. But that’s what I had found the day I’d come to help him move his life downstairs. I had sat on the floor, cross-legged, flipping through his LPs until he’d called me on my cell phone from downstairs. When I’d told him what I was doing, he didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he told me to put them back, to leave the records as I had found them. As far as I knew, that’s where they had stayed, and that’s where the music was coming from now—what was supposed to be an empty room upstairs.

I turned into the doorway, trying to stay under control, and scanned the front room. It was a seldom-used space with blinds perpetually closed. Nothing was moving or out of place, so I kept going.

The kitchen gleamed in the bright light of the cheap old onion-shaped fixture that hung overhead. The frosted bowl had a couple of bug corpses lying inside. I’d never seen them because the single small bulb over the stove was what usually lit that room. Harvey wasn’t in there, either.

He wasn’t in the dining room or his office. I checked his downstairs bedroom suite last, hoping to find his bathroom door closed. It was open. The light was off.

I was coming down the hall toward the stairs when I spotted his wheelchair. It was at the bottom of the steps, and it was empty. The song finished, and the house went quiet. I stared up at the ceiling, listening for the sound of footsteps or voices, but everything I could hear was closer in: the dull, incessant drone of Harvey’s air purifier, the ticking of the old mantel clock, the one his great-grandfather had made in Poland. Harvey wound it every day. My own coils were wound pretty tight as I waited and listened.

The intro beat began, then the violins…and the voice again. I had no idea whether Harvey had a record player with automatic replay. If he didn’t, then someone had lifted the needle to start the song again, the same song, and it wasn’t Harvey. Harvey couldn’t make the stairs.

My heart felt massive. It was pumping hard, pushing me forward and back on alternate beats. The stairwell was empty as far as I could see, but that was only halfway up. I took the first step. My foot caught on the second, and I nearly pitched forward. The climb lacked grace, but it was fast as I made my way to the first landing. I stopped there. The music felt denser up there, and it was loud enough that I couldn’t hear anything else. All of my other senses went into overdrive, overcompensating for what the thick wall of sound took away. If someone came at me, I would have to see him or smell him. I wasn’t going to hear him.

I took the final flight two steps at a time. Once I started going again, I couldn’t stop. I reached the upstairs hallway and just kept moving. All the doors were closed except the one at the end. It was the room where I had left the boxes of albums.

I stopped short of the door and held with my back to the wall for maybe a second. Then I dropped into a low crouch and turned into the doorway. I was so wound up I almost hoped for a reason to fire, for something to empty the clip into. But there was nothing to shoot at in that bare space, just stacks of boxes along one beige wall and an empty canvas folding chair.

I took a couple of steps into the room. A few of the boxes had been pulled out into the middle of the floor. One had the lid off. The LPs inside were stacked neatly. Another served as a stand for the turntable. The needle was gliding across a 45. An extension cord snaked between two big speakers that, last I’d looked, had been gathering dust in a closet. Someone had obviously wired everything up. It could have been Harvey. Maybe Rachel had helped him up the stairs. She didn’t seem substantial enough to do it, but I was probably underestimating her.