Authors: Jeremiah Healy
“By ‘boytoy,’ I take it you mean—”
“Sex toy. Human dildo.” There was a trace of bitterness before the coyness kicked back in. “Oh, that got you a little, didn’t it? Darb once said to me, Trace, if Rush had a CB in that convertible, his handle’d be Wagon Tongue.’ Let me tell you, John, she has quite an appetite that way. Just another reason why it’s more fun to be with her than to live with her.”
As if Wickmire needed another reason beyond the dander allergy. “Tell me, Traci, if Teagle was seeing Darbra and lived in the building, why didn’t she ask him to feed her cat?”
“Why?”
“Yeah, you having the allergy to it and all.”
“Outside of bed, Rush isn’t what you’d call the most reliable guy in the world.”
I glanced through my notes. “Any other men?”
“Not that I know of, John, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any.”
“When did Darbra leave on vacation?”
“Let’s see … Week ago this past Saturday.”
“You’re sure?”
“Well, that’s when she said I was supposed to start feeding Tigger.”
“Her cat.”
“What else would you name ‘Tigger’?”
“Did you see her that day?”
“No, but she called me the night before, to make sure I was going to be able to do it.”
“Feed him, you mean?”
“Right.”
“So she called you before she left a week ago Saturday.”
A nod.
“How about when she got back?”
The coy smile. “Not a word.”
“When did you expect her back?”
“She was supposed to be gone a week, so Saturday or Sunday, I wasn’t sure.”
“When did she get back?”
“Saturday, four days ago.”
“How do you know that?”
“When I fed Tigger Friday night, her clothes and stuff weren’t on the bed. When I came in Saturday night, they were.”
“You feed him Saturday morning?”
“Yeah.”
“Did you check the bedroom?”
“In the morning, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you did at night.”
“Right.”
“Why?”
“It’s a small apartment, John, but you’re responsible for it, you like to make sure everything’s okay. Like nobody broke in through the win-dow?”
The sarcastic lift. “You know where Darbra stayed on her vacation?”
“No, but I think there’s a way we can find out.”
“How?”
“There might be something in her mail about it.”
“Her mail?”
“Yeah. I picked it up all week and put it on her table.”
“Which table?”
“The one outside her kitchen, like mine there, only she doesn’t have a gateleg. Hers is a—”
“You collected Darbra’s mail all week and left it on that table?”
“That’s what I said, John.”
“Was the mail still there Saturday morning?”
“Huh?”
“Was her mail still—”
“Oh. Oh, I get it. To see if she got back Friday. Hey, that’s pretty good, you know?”
“Was the mail still there?”
Wickmire closed her eyes, really squeezed them shut. “I don’t remember.” She opened her eyes. “Sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
“But I know where the mail is now.”
“Where?”
“On the bed, with her clothes and stuff.”
I folded my pad. “Maybe we’d better take a look.”
“That’s what you came here for, right?”
The sarcastic lift as she left her sectional piece and moved toward the kitchen.
“H
EY, YOU ALL RIGHT
back there, John?”
“Yes, fine.” My knee had buckled as I took the first step down the stairs behind Wickmire.
“Good. Last thing I need right now is medical bills.”
At the second-floor landing, we stopped in front of the door marked 21. Wickmire made a production of putting the key in the two locks and turning it with gusto each time. Pushing the door a crack, she kept her foot, now wearing sneaker and sock, in the opening.
“Keep back, Tigger. Stay inside, now.”
Looking down, I could see an orange tabby’s head and forepaw struggling against Wickmire’s foot before giving up and disappearing.
“Tigger always tries to get out, and it’s a pain to catch him on the stairs.”
Wickmire let me go inside first, the cat starting down the short corridor, then returning to blink curiously at me. Closing the door behind us, Wickmire said, “Believe me, seeing a strange man come into this apartment is not the trauma for Tigger that it might be.”
I walked down the oriental runner that covered most of the short corridor. At the end of it, the floor plan of Darbra Proft’s apartment seemed identical to Wickmire’s. I turned left first, into the living/dining area.
There was another oriental rug, a big one with a marble coffee table in the center of it and a hunter’s-print couch and love seat grouped around it. The drapes over the windows picked up a minor color of the rug and the print. On the walls were etchings, artist’s proofs. The small table outside the kitchen was antique cherry with one ladderback chair, a mate to the chair next to a Governor Windsor desk in the corner, the drop leaf closed. A television, in a big wooden cabinet like you don’t see anymore, but no stereo or …
“Darbra doesn’t have a VCR?”
“Uh-unh. Can’t work it.”
“Just the clock, or the whole thing?”
“Whole thing. She’s hopeless with remote control stuff, and she’s barely computer literate. I don’t know how she gets along at work.”
I tried to take in the living area as a whole. Lamps, end tables, miniature shelving with lots of figurines, like Hummels, jade elephants, and bronze tigers. Even the knick-knacks looked pricey.
“Nice furnishings.”
Wickmire looked around casually. “Darb got some big bucks when her mom died. My guess is this is all that’s left from it.”
I indicated the cherry table. “That where you piled the mail?”
“Yeah, but there wasn’t so much that you’d exactly call it a pile.”
The sarcastic lift. I walked from the living area past the table into the kitchen. Hard not to notice the table as I did.
“Tigger, beat it, willya?”
I looked back at Wickmire, who was trying to shoo the cat away with her sneaker.
She said, “They can always tell when you can’t stand them, you know?”
There was a strong smell of used cat litter in the air. “If it’s tough on your allergy, I can do this part without you.”
“No. I mean, I’m okay as long as I don’t try to cuddle with him. Besides, you’re in here because I let you in, and so I’m feeling kind of responsible.”
“Where’s the cat food?”
“You serious?”
“Yes.”
Wickmire went past me into the kitchen. Bending down, she opened a cupboard next to the sink and came out with a box of dry cereal and two cans as examples. “Cat food.”
I thought about Nancy’s Renfield. “Dry food in the morning, canned at night?”
“Right.”
“Are there as many cans as you saw Friday night?”
“Of course not. I’ve fed Tigger ever since Monday.”
“Monday?”
“When Wild Bill called me about Darbra not showing up at work.”
“What I meant was, are there any cans missing other than the ones you used?”
Wickmire stared at me for a moment, then looked down at the cans in her hand and back into the cupboard. “I don’t know. There’s six, seven, eight—eight left now. I couldn’t tell you if there used to be nine or ten, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“What I’m getting at is whether Darbra might have fed him since she got back.”
“Oh. Oh, I see what you mean. No. I mean, I can’t help you on that.”
I walked around the living room. Something was bothering me. After not being occupied for a week, a room should be a little musty, and this one was, but there was something else.
“Traci, any of the windows open when you came in on Saturday?”
“No, not morning or night.”
Odd, you’re away on vacation, come back to a musty apartment, then don’t air it out. But the room was different beyond that. Aside from the cat litter, it had no real smell, as sterile as a no-smoking room in a hotel.
I moved back through the place to the corridor that I assumed led to bedroom and bath. I tried the door on the right first. A small bathroom with a tub/shower unit, hopper, and sink installed with a sense for space that would have done a submarine designer proud. The only available floor was occupied by the litter box, pretty full.
I said, “Any spare kitty litter around?”
“Beats me. Why, you want to change it?”
No, but I’d have thought a person returning home from vacation and using this bathroom might have.
Above the little box were blue and white tiles, blue and white towels. I felt the towels and a face cloth hanging from a wire shelf on the shower head. Bone dry. Same for the soap. I took a deep breath through the nose. Same sterile sense. I picked up the soap. No scent at all.
Behind me, Wickmire said, “You’re getting warm,” with the teasing lift at the end.
I turned and looked at her, then put the soap back into its dish and crossed the hall to the other door. It led to a bedroom with a mahogany four-poster high enough to need a little two-tiered step stool next to it. The posts had carved pineapples at the top. The bed was covered with a quilted comforter, the sheets underneath soft and supple. At the center of the bed an old hard-sided suitcase was opened, envelopes scattered next to it.
I looked around the room. The bureaus, a highboy and a lowboy, were also mahogany and reminded me enough of Nancy’s new one that I felt it in my shoulder and knee. Wickmire used the stepstool to get up onto and sit at the edge of the bed.
I walked to the lowboy. A four-by-six photo in a stand-up frame showed a man in his early twenties and a woman in her early thirties. The man had dishwater-blond hair worn long and parted in the center, a lecherous grin on his rugged, tanned face, and a chain of what looked like human teeth around his neck. He was dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans, the butt of an elaborate guitar resting on his crotch. The woman had auburn hair, worn just past her shoulders. Leering at the lens, she was dressed only in a bikini bottom and midriff halter top without a bra, her body draped around his left arm and shoulder, her own left hand seeming to stroke the barrel of the guitar.
In a tired voice, Wickmire said, “The one and only.”
“Darbra and Rush Teagle?”
“In one of their family-entertainment moments.”
“How long ago was this taken?”
“She bought the bikini for the vacation, so just before she left.”
Only a few weeks ago, then. “He looks pretty young.”
“He is pretty young. Twenty-two, maybe.”
I focused on the woman in the shot. “Darbra looks older than twenty-eight.”
“It’s not the years, it’s the mileage. And by the way, that’s not exactly the first photo in that frame.”
I turned to her. “Who else was there?”
“Old Rog, for one.”
“That’s Roger Houle?”
“Right. Posed with Darbra, of course.”
“I don’t have a recent picture of her. Can I take this one?”
“I guess so.”
I slid the backing from the frame. It did come off rather easily. I put the photo in my jacket pocket and looked back at the top of the bureau. China ashtray that held coins and subway tokens, hair brush, hand mirror; woven Easter-egg basket with a pair of sunglasses, bracelets, earrings, a Swatch watch.
The taller bureau had on it just another photo in a stand-up frame. This one was eight-by-ten, though, and showed two women in the bathing suits and hairstyles of the early sixties. One was a little more stolid than the other, but there was a striking resemblance of one to the other and both to Darbra.
“Who are these people?”
Wickmire said, “Darbra’s mom and aunt.”
“Do you know which is the aunt?”
“The heavier one.”
“Darlene Nugent?”
“I think that’s her last name.”
Which confirmed what William Proft had told me. No photo of him, though. And as I took a breath, the rest of it hit me, too.
I looked back at the lowboy. “No perfume.”
“Bing-o.”
I looked at Wickmire. “That’s Darbra’s allergy?”
“To all kinds. She nearly sued this department store, one of their cosmetics whores tried to spray some on her in an aisle once.”
I moved to the suitcase on the bed. It had been jammed with clothes, because they rose up from both sides of the clamshell. Shorts, tops, blouses, swimsuits, underwear, all mixed together and wrinkled.
“Did Darbra usually pack like this?”
“Like what?”
“All jumbled.”
Wickmire looked at the opened suitcase and shrugged. “I don’t know. She wasn’t the world’s neatest person, and after all, she was coming back, you know?”
“Coming back?”
“From vacation. I mean, it’s not like she was packing to go
on
vacation.”
Made some sense. I crossed back to the lowboy and opened the top drawer. Underwear, jumbled. Next drawer, shirts and blouses neatly folded. Next drawer, cotton sweaters and one wool, neatly folded. The highboy had paperwork crammed into its top drawer, bundled in rubber bands. I pulled out a couple of bundles. Bank statements and rental receipts, but even the most recent was well over a year ago.
The next drawer had shorts and T-shirts, all jumbled. More clothes in the next three, alternatingly folded or jumbled, with the key seeming to be the more casual, the less neat.
I opened her closet door. Dresses and blazers and skirts neat, laundry in a heap at the bottom over a few dozen pairs of shoes, also helter-skelter, and three handbags.
I said, “Do you know how Darbra keeps her keys and money?”
“How she keeps them?”
“Yes. Key chain, wallet, what?”
“She’s got a key chain, and a wallet, sure.”
“You seen them around since she got back?”
Wickmire’s eyes roamed the room. “No.”
I came back to the bed. “You said you didn’t know where she was on vacation. You think the mail would help?”
She ticked a couple of envelopes with a fingernail. “That’s where I’d start.”
The mail wasn’t very much. Junk mail from contests telling her she may already have won, a couple of credit card solicitations. No charitable ones, though, and only one real bill.