“Thank you.”

  We both stood and she came around the blue plank as I opened the glass door. I extended a hand that she took with both of hers.

  “You have very strong hands, Mr. Tooms.”

  “Do you have a card?” I asked. “I might want to call you.”

  24

  The day was bright and chilly. It wasn’t yet noon but the sun, I knew, would set in less than five hours. The next step for me was to go down to Angie’s apartment. First, though, I had to visit my office to prepare myself for that leg of the investigation.

  When I didn’t see Aura and her beau making out on the street I recognized that I was nervous about going to the Tesla. This trepidation was deeply disturbing to me. My office is the center of my life. The seventy-second floor of that Art Deco building is the one place where I feel secure and almost happy. It was bad enough that Aura had taken love from my life, but now . . .

  JUST THE TOP LOCK of my outer door was engaged. The only thing I could imagine was that Aura was in there. She wanted to talk, and so did I.

  I pushed the door open eagerly but the excitement quickly faded. I’d forgotten about Mardi, my new receptionist. She stood up when I blundered in. She was wearing a rose-colored dress that seemed more appropriate for a girl her age.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Why?”

  I come from a long line of slavery, second-class citizenship, revolutionaries, orphans, and crooks. Put all that together in a man’s heart and you make ordinary circumspection look like careless abandon. My face rarely gave away anything that I felt.

  “I just thought,” Mardi said. “Nothing.”

  “That’s a nice dress,” I said to cover up the odd discomfort we both felt.

  “Thank you. I bought it yesterday when I saw that you thought my Mrs. Alexander’s dress was too old-fashioned.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “I could tell, though,” she said. “I’m pretty good at picking up on how people are feeling. Sometimes Twill brings me along when he wants to know if somebody is lying to him.”

  “Have you heard from Twill in the last twenty-four hours?”

  “He called last night to find out how the job was going.”

  “How did he sound?”

  Mardi’s smile could only be called knowing. She said, “Twill’s one of the only people that I can’t read very well. He’s always the same no matter what.”

  “And how was your day yesterday?” I asked.

  “Real good. A Detective Kitteridge called. He was nice, said he needed to speak to you. I organized all the files and phone numbers. I started going through your notes. I’m trying to figure out a good way to put them in your files.”

  “That’s great. You know, I think you’ll be a real asset to me, Mardi. We should set you up with a payroll company. You’ll start at five seventy-five a week. Then find out the best medical insurance coverage for you and your family.”

  Mardi’s smile was so wide I could almost see her teeth.

  BACK IN MY INNER sanctum I went through a closet at the opposite end of the hall from my office. There I kept all my various disguises. I decided on the drab workman’s overalls. A man in work clothes rarely needs ID. I put on some funked-up work boots and a cap that had ConEd stitched over the visor. I picked out a red metal toolbox and lumbered toward the front.

  “I’m going out for a while, Mardi,” I said as I moved toward the door.

  “Okay, boss,” she said, seemingly oblivious to my change of clothes.

  I stopped to smile at her.

  The attention made her beam.

  “LAWRENCE DOLAN,” I WAS saying to the super of Angelique Lear’s building on Twelfth Street, two blocks up from the northern border of Tompkins Square Park. Angie lived on a sedate block straddling the northwestern fringe of Alphabet City. The rickety edifice was six stories high and slender, with only one apartment on each floor.

  “How can I help you, Mr. Dolan?”

  “We got a call on a gas leak. I’m here to check it out.”

  “I haven’t made any report,” the hunched-over white man said in perfectly executed English.

  “I don’t know who made the call,” I said. “All I know is that they sent me paperwork on this address and I’m supposed to check it out.”

  “Where’s your truck?” the man asked. He would have been tall except for the slouch. His hair was gray and his white skin stained from many years of working with dust and dirt.

  “They got us two to a truck nowadays,” I said, pretending to harbor resentment. “Trying to cut costs. Merwin’s gone to a place down on Sixth Street.”

  “You have to understand, Mr. Dolan,” the man who had given me no name said. “I didn’t call, and so I’m hesitant to let you in.”

  “Hey,” I replied, hunching my shoulders with nonchalance. “It’s nuthin’ to me. I’m just gonna shut off the gas and electric and you can work it out with my supervisor when she wants to turn it back on.”

  “What? Turn off our power?”

  “There has been a gas leak reported,” I explained patiently. “If I can’t tell my boss yea or nay I have to shut you down. I mean, they could be sued for millions if there’s an explosion or a fire.”

  “But why the gas and electricity?”

  “When people refuse to let us in we shut ’em down. That way we got a reason to come back . . . one day.”

  I reached into my breast pocket and handed him an official-looking business card. It had my alias and a few phone numbers printed in dark-blue ink.

  “My boss is Janey Markus,” I said. “Her number’s at the bottom but you can get to her through any of these. She’ll tell you the same thing I’m saying.”

  The number actually went to a machine I kept at Zephyra Ximenez’s apartment. If he called he’d get one of a dozen specially designed recordings telling him that Ms. Markus was not in but that she would return the call as soon as possible.

  “This is crazy,” the nameless super said.

  “Are there any good Indian restaurants around here?” I replied.

  Anger flinched in the super’s face.

  “Go on up,” he said. “If the tenants let you in then I guess you can do what you want. But I will tell you right now that there isn’t any leak.”

  I smiled.

  He grimaced.

  I went up to the locked front door and pressed a buzzer at random.

  “Yes?” a tremulous woman’s voice inquired.

  “Con Ed.”

  25

  Regular as clockwork,” Isabella Katinski told me as I pretended to study the back of her stove.

  After a pleasant conversation concerning the history of the building, I had asked her about the absent upstairs neighbor, Miss Lear, on the pretext of needing to check out her gas line.

  I’d already cleaned the pilot lights on the stove.

  “. . . she’s out her door at eight-ten every morning and back at six on Mondays and Wednesdays, eight on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and nine on Fridays unless she doesn’t come home that night.”

  “Fridays are for the boyfriend, huh?”

  The diminutive septuagenarian smiled at me with pearl-gray teeth. Her dress was hippie vintage turquoise-and-plum-colored flannel that had her covered from shoulder to ankle.

  “She’s out late if there is no boyfriend,” Isabella told me. “When there is one, she’s on the clock there, too.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Can I get you some ice water, Mr. Dolan? I only have tap and cubes. If you’re one’a them that needs your water from a plastic bottle I can’t help you.”

  “WHAT WAS I TELLING you?” she asked when we were seated at the small triangular table that took up a good part of her Lilliputian kitchen.

  “You were saying how your neighbor’s got some kind of pattern with men.”

  The window we perched near looked down on the cavernous area between the buildings north of Twelfth and south of Thirteenth. There were fire escapes and tiny little sun-starved gardens, clotheslines strung between the buildings, and tatters from nameless things left outside too long.

  Angelique’s building was one of the smallest structures among its huge brick tenement brothers.

  “When she first meets a boy you can hear ’em from ten to about two every Friday for the first month,” Ms. Katinski said. “After that there’s a couple’a months of creaking from ten to midnight. Then there’s only footsteps for a month or so more. After that the boyfriend moves on and she stays out all night now and then again.”

  “She’s a wild one, huh?” I said.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Dolan,” Ms. Katinski proclaimed. “She’s a very nice girl. When I had trouble with the noise downstairs she took care of it for me.”

  “SHE COMPLAINED ABOUT MY music even though Mrs. Katinski’s apartment is between me and her,” Seth Martindale told me while I drained the rusty water from his decades-old radiator. “Said that the old lady was hard of hearing or something.”

  “I was just in Katinski’s apartment,” I said. “She seemed to hear me all right.”

  “You see?” the sixty-something retired insurance adjuster said. “And here she almost got me evicted from my apartment. I’ve been living in this place for thirty-eight years, longer than she’s been breathing.”

  “She almost got you evicted? How’d she do that?”

  “City marshal came over with papers. I didn’t even know we had a city marshal, but there they were, all dressed up in uniform. Told me that I had gone over the allowed decibel level and if they got another complaint the city was going to evict me.”

  “SHE’S A GODSEND,” NYLA Winetraub, on the second floor, told me.

  Nyla was Isabella’s age but a bit more shaky. Her eyesight was going, nearly gone, and she liked to be near a wall to grab on to if she started to fall. She wore dark clothes and only had a single lamp on in the living room. I didn’t know if she was trying to save money on utility bills or if maybe it was just that electric light no longer did much to illuminate her world.

  “She helps me fill out all of my forms and answer correspondences,” Nyla was saying. She was a dark-skinned white woman with lots of ageless character in her thin face. “She writes checks for me and even put in an answering machine so I can tell who’s calling. You know, there’s so many salesmen on the phones nowadays.”

  She paused and cocked her head, as if listening to faraway soft murmuring.

  “You aren’t really a Con Ed man, are you, Mr. Dolan?” she said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  I wasn’t surprised that it was the blind woman who saw through my disguise. Winetraub, I would have bet, was almost as perceptive as my new receptionist.

  “Why are you here?” the old woman asked.

  “I’m surprised that you don’t just ask me to leave,” I said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Well, I am a stranger in your house under false pretenses.”

  “If you were going to hurt me or steal from me I couldn’t stop you,” Nyla said reasonably. “And if I cried out you might hit me. Anyway, you’re here to find out about Angelique, and I’m worried about her. She’s been gone for over a week. Do you have any news?”

  “No, ma’am. But I am here looking for her . . . for a friend of hers.”

  “John Prince?”

  “No.”

  “John’s a nice boy. He called here looking for her a few days ago. But I couldn’t help him.”

  “Do you have his phone number?” I asked.

  “No. I forgot to ask,” she said. “Sorry.”

  “Do you have any idea of what happened to Angelique?” I asked.

  Nyla turned her gaze, such as it was, toward my voice. We were sitting across from each other in front of a window that was completely covered, ceiling to floor, by dark-brown drapes. It was clear to me that her nearly sightless eyes were struggling to make sure of my intentions. Her hands reached out toward me and so I took them gently in my paws.

  “You have strong hands,” she told me.

  “My father was a union organizer,” I said. “Before that he was a sharecropper’s son.”

  Nyla smiled. “You have your father’s hands.”

  For some reason my throat closed up a moment. Nyla seemed to intuit this physical response and squeezed.

  “Angelique came down to me just before she left,” the elderly woman said. “She told me that she was in trouble and would be gone for a while.”

  “Did she say what kind of trouble?”

  “There were men who wanted her to do something, but either she didn’t know or wouldn’t tell me what. She is in deep trouble, though. Angelique is a very responsible girl with both feet firmly planted. If she’s hiding, it’s from something real. I’m afraid for her welfare.”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “What would I tell the cops? She’s not my daughter. She’s an adult.”

  I was surprised at the word “cops” from the old woman’s mouth and reminded myself that I shouldn’t make assumptions.

  “Did she give you any other details?” I asked.

  “No. Nothing. Have you heard anything about her?”

  “She hasn’t been to work, and her most recent boyfriend, Shad Tandy, doesn’t know where she is. She might have been staying with her friend Wanda for a while there.”

  “Wanda Soa,” Nyla said with a smile. “One night, a few months ago, Wanda and Angelique came down and made dinner with me. Wanda is from South America somewhere. They once traveled down there together, for Carnival. Have you asked Wanda about Angelique?”

  “She isn’t answering her phone,” I said.

  “Oh.”

  “You think the super might know something?” I asked, to pass on from any suspicions I might have aroused.

  “Mr. Klott? He’s a piece of work, that one. He tried to get me put out, on the part of the landlord, when I went to visit my daughter in Florida—told the city that I had a residence out of state. It was Angelique who helped me get the right aid.”

  “Can I do anything for you, Ms. Winetraub?”

  “Find Angelique,” she said. “Make sure she doesn’t come to harm.”

  26

  Prominent in my red metal toolbox are three huge key chains that have the masters for ninety percent of the locks in New York. I update my stock every six months. For those locks that take a little more I have special lock-picking keys that were designed by my personal engineer and hacker, Bug Bateman.

  I used one such special key on Angelique Lear’s lock. It was a simple mechanical adjustment, and I made it into her top-floor apartment in under a minute. All I had to do was insert the key mechanism and rotate a bolt on the base until the tumblers fell into place.

  The first thing I did was go to the kitchen, blow out the pilot lights, and turn a couple of the burners up high for thirty seconds or so. Then I went through the place quickly, looking for immediate clues.

  I gathered all the mail I could see and secreted the envelopes in the false bottom of my red toolbox. Then I cruised through the apartment, scanning bureaus and tabletops, going through any drawers as I came across them.

  Two of Angelique’s bedroom walls were hung with many framed photographs. The wall to the left of her bed had photos of her with either a blond-haired, olive-skinned, blue-eyed woman or a slender and pale young man with black hair and piercing eyes. She was laughing with Blondie at Carnival in Rio, and arm-in-arm with the intent young man in Rome. My unaware, maybe even unwilling, client was smiling or laughing in every photograph. Not one picture looked posed or insincere.

  Across from the foot of her bed were her diplomas—from elementary school to her master’s from NYU. The bed was neat and made. The orange-and-yellow bedspread was frayed here and there from many years of use.

  The night table held some tissues, a box of condoms, and a fuzzy pink pair of handcuffs—no useful clues there.

  The floors were bare oak except in the bathroom, which was covered in off-white linoleum flecked with tiny squares of bright and shiny confetti colors.

  Her bookshelf was small and crowded with the classics, from the Brontë sisters to Melville, Shakespeare to Flannery O’Connor. The pockets of the clothes hanging in her closet had nothing in them. The purses and suitcases on the shelves above were likewise empty.

  I didn’t have the time for an in-depth search but after twenty minutes or so I was pretty sure that Angelique lived the uneventful life of most young women her age. She was just a happy-go-lucky girl with an education and a job, biannual vacations, and a healthy interest in men. There were no antidepressants or sleeping pills in her medicine cabinet, no secret stash of hashish, or any harder substance, that I could find.

  I wondered how such a normal young woman could be mixed up in murder—or, even worse, with Alphonse Rinaldo.

  “Hello?” came a voice from the front doorway.

  I pulled a shiny black plastic box from my pocket. It was half-again the length and three-quarters the width of a classic BlackBerry. I pressed a button on the side and a yellow light appeared at the front end of the little faux machine.

  I scooted into the hall, situated myself in front of the bathroom door, and said, “In here.”

  A few heavy, hurried footsteps and Klott was at the entrance of the short hallway.

  “What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

  “My job.” I was holding the little box out in front of me, taking readings.

  “How did you get in here?”

  “Door was unlocked and I smelled gas. Don’t you?”

  Klott sniffed the air and turned toward the kitchen. I followed him, holding the box out in front of me like a uranium prospector with a new-century Geiger counter.

 

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