The Baker Street Letters (16 page)

And immediately the light went out.

Reggie began walking rapidly toward the street at the opposite end of the alley, counting the windows as he went. There was no doorway from the alley to the warehouse building; to get inside and find the source of that light, he would have to get in through the street entrance.

He reached the street and then paused. A pair of headlights had appeared at the opposite end of the block. He waited until they had passed, and then he went quickly to the entrance of the old warehouse.

There was no longer any real door over the entrance, though clearly it had once been boarded up; but the accumulated debris would be enough to keep any but the most desperate from venturing inside. There was still a sign announcing the building was condemned and suggesting all sorts of legal remedies against anyone who should trespass, but the sign's rust, dirt, and .22-caliber bullet holes made it seem an empty threat.

Reggie stepped over the debris and into the building and immediately gagged at the stench of rotten food, stale alcohol, and urine. There was a narrow path through the rubbish and up a stairway. He leaned outside, took a deep breath of the marginally cleaner air, and then turned and began to walk up the stairs as quickly as he could in the near pitch darkness.

Reggie reached the second floor without having stepped on any obvious bodies. He wasn't quite certain that he had managed not to trod on anything of organic origin—but that seemed a bit much to ask in the circumstances.

He tried to move quietly as he reached the second floor. Whoever had been responsible for the light would still be there, unless he had taken a back way out.

The hallway was dark in both directions, and in both directions the doors had been either broken out completely or smashed.

Except for a door to Reggie's right. That door was relatively intact. And it was completely closed.

Reggie moved silently and cautiously to the side of the door, then paused. If his guess was right, the person watching from this window was likely the person who had killed Mara's neighbor.

It didn't seem wise to knock. Reggie put his hand tentatively on the doorknob.

“Go away,” said a muffled and vaguely inebriated-sounding voice from inside.

There was obviously no opportunity for surprise now. Reggie tried to open the door, but the latch didn't turn.

“I said get lost,” came the voice again, sounding even more sodden. Reggie stepped back and, not at all sure that it would work, kicked hard at the latch.

The door broke open.

“Bloody damn,” said the voice from the back of the darkened room, clearly recognizable now.

Reggie just stood there for a moment. He wasn't all that happy with this turn of events himself.

“Nigel,” he said. “Nigel. What in hell have you—”

That was as far as Reggie got. There was a sudden commotion from the stairs, and four police officers came charging down
the hallway and through the doorway Reggie had just kicked open; one held Reggie in place against the wall, and two others held guns on Nigel as the fourth handcuffed him. It was all complete in a matter of seconds.

“I wish,” said Nigel to Reggie, just before they were both ushered down the stairs, “you were as good at not being tracked as you are in tracking.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It was eight in the morning at the metropolitan jail.

Reggie had been released after another interrogation from Mendoza—who threatened charges of obstruction, although Reggie knew he didn't have enough to make it stick.

Nigel, however, was under arrest.

Reggie sat in the waiting area until the door from the inmates' quarters opened and a guard appeared.

And there was Nigel.

Except for the tangerine jailhouse jumpsuit, Nigel appeared quite normal. No, more than normal for Nigel—he looked composed. Focused.

He seated himself on the opposite side of the visitors' window from Reggie.

Reggie wasn't sure why, but he found it vaguely annoying that Nigel did not look even a bit haggard.

“What in bloody hell were you thinking?” said Reggie.

He was referring to the dead-of-night meeting at the overpass—but Nigel seemed to give the question a broader interpretation. He leaned in close to the window partition, to avoid the guard overhearing—and then he spoke almost eagerly.

“You were right,” said Nigel. “After you left my office the other evening, I thought it all through—and you were right. I don't mean just about the letters. I mean about everything. About how it came to be that I was sitting in a clerical office in my brother's firm at ten on a Friday evening with nothing better to do than respond to letters written to a character of fiction and obsess about what may or may not have been happening twenty years ago in the life of someone living five thousand miles way and whom I've never met.”

Nigel paused. He was making so much sense that Reggie did not even try to interrupt.

“I know I've been casting about in one direction and then another for years,” Nigel continued. “I know it, and it's long past time for me to focus. After all—as you know—one can get by on charm and good looks for just so long.

“So that night I resolved to just dispose of the letters and put them out of mind, no need to even read them, really. Just open-insert-seal, open-insert-seal. Then I dumped them all in the basket for the Monday pickup. It took no more than forty minutes when I did it like that; you were right, Ocher was right, it was nothing.

“On Monday morning I came in very early, to get myself into properly humble form for the tribunal. The whole floor was still dark, which felt odd, but . . . well, truth is, I've never been the first one in before, so how would I know?”

“Go on.”

“I opened my office door and flipped the light switch—but my desk lamp didn't come on. Figured I must have kicked the
plug the night before. I opened the door further to get a little more of what light there was—and that's when I saw.”

Nigel's demeanor as he said this was not what Reggie would have expected. “Saw what?” he asked.

“Someone had forced open the lowest drawer of the filing cabinet,” responded Nigel. “The other drawers were open, too, but I knew immediately what was taken. The lowest drawer—which I had locked, and where I kept the letter—was broken open; the hanging file had been removed and was lying there on the desk, but it was empty. Both the letter and the documents that came with it were gone.”

Nigel gave Reggie a look to make sure he understood the significance of that—and then he continued.

“There was no time to waste. The hearing was out of the question. I wrote you a note, and—”

“Wait a moment.”

“Yes?”

“That's all you saw that was unusual?”

“Isn't that enough?” Nigel looked puzzled.

“Just . . . continue,” said Reggie.

“As I said, I saw that the letter and the enclosures were gone,” said Nigel. “And I knew what that meant. It meant that as right as you are about everything else, about that one thing, that letter, you were wrong. It was real, it was not something that could be ignored. And it couldn't wait. I booked the next plane out. Sorry I couldn't call, but you wouldn't have understood, there was no helping the disciplinary hearing, I knew that, and if I'd told you, you would have just felt obligated to talk me out of it, or to do something about the hearing itself if you had to, and there was no point to it. I had to go, and that was all. So I went.”

“And you just left your office at that point?”

“Of course I left my office.”

“Did you ever get the light on? Walk around the desk, assess the damage, and perhaps—try to pick things up at all?”

“No, as a matter of fact,” said Nigel, getting a bit annoyed. “I know I'm not neat, but there are priorities. Why?”

Reggie nodded. “Just go on.”

Nigel looked at Reggie suspiciously, but he continued.

“When I arrived in Los Angeles, I did not get reckless. I remembered what you said about possible liabilities—and aside from that, there's this lease provision about not personally contacting—”

“Yes,” said Reggie. “I know.”

“So I didn't even try to go to her directly,” said Nigel. “I just went to the café across from her building. I ordered their sandwich-and-coffee special and waited. Then I saw what they call coffee, and I asked for tea instead. The tea was . . . well, you can imagine. But I stuck it out. After a bit I see this bloke come out and start loitering around the entrance to the building, where all the flats have their post boxes. Then a young woman comes walking down the street. I pay attention; she's the right age for our letter writer. And the neighbor is paying attention, too. When he sees her, he ducks up into the stairwell and then comes right back out again—as though he had just then decided to step out and check his correspondence. He tries to chat her up—but she's clearly having none of it; in fact, she just looks annoyed, and she goes up the stairs.

“He stays below, just standing there, deciding what to do. Then he walks over to the entrance for the side alley. First he looks about to see if anyone is watching—and then he goes into the alley. You understand? He just goes into the alley, for no good reason I can think of.”

“Yes.”

“I don't like it; I need a better angle to see what he's doing.
So I leave the café and cross the street, using the parked cars for cover, and just when I'm thinking I'll have to take the chance and go into the alley to see what's going on—he comes out.

“I duck down behind an SUV; I see him looking around like someone who doesn't want to be seen. And then he jumps into this car—a Porsche, mind you—nearest the alley and drives off.

“But I got a good look at his car, and I saw a parking sticker—something called Paradigm Pictures.

“Then I went into the alley. And it was just like I thought—she has a fire escape there, and he was casing it. I'm sure of it.”

“Why?”

“What else would he be doing?”

“Is there a rubbish bin? Could he have just been throwing something away?”

“There is, but he didn't have anything in his hands when he went in. And I saw something odd on the ground near the fire escape. Some sort of caked dirt.”

“You think it's odd to find dirt in an American alley?”

“This kind. It was clay, with flecks of something—gypsum? I'm not sure, but it wasn't what you normally see on top of the ground, it was something you see dug up. But nothing's being dug up in the alley.”

“So you figured he tracked it in from somewhere?”

“Someone did.”

“Was it still fresh?”

“Not sure,” said Nigel, looking a bit annoyed, as though Reggie had thought of something he had not. “Well, all right, then—it looked pretty dry. But it was odd for it to be there. And—”

“What did you do next?” Reggie interrupted

Nigel hesitated. Then he took a deep breath, looked Reggie directly in the eye, and said, “I went up to talk to the girl. I know I wasn't supposed to, I know it's a violation of your lease,
should anyone find out—but no one should find out. And it was looking urgent.”

“All right,” said Reggie, and there was not much more he could say. He himself had made the same decision. “What happened?”

“She wouldn't talk to me. Said she'd put the dog on me if I didn't leave.”

“Yes, I'm familiar with it. A huge hound.”

“It's not a hound. It's a Saint Bernard.”

“We're agreed that it's a very large dog, Nigel. Continue.”

“I went back to the café and stayed there, watching, until they closed and kicked me out. At that point, since she wouldn't talk to me, I thought the next best thing was to track her neighbor to see what he was about. I got his name from the flat he came out of—Lance Slaughter, if you can believe that. And I'd seen the Paradigm parking sticker. I went to the Roosevelt Arms, checked in, and got a cab to the Paradigm lot, thinking I'd look for his car. But they wouldn't let me in.”

“What about the excavation site? What were you doing there?”

“That was the clay I was telling you about. I'd already seen it in the alley behind Mara's flat. And when I left Paradigm, and the cabdriver took that last turn off of Lankershim, I saw it there, too—in the diggings from that huge excavation site. I got out and managed a look around before getting tossed by security—but the car wasn't there.

“So I went back to my hotel for the night. The next morning I rang every studio on the Paradigm lot, and asked about an actor named Lance Slaughter. Didn't learn anything; it doesn't work that way—they either wouldn't talk to me at all or just didn't keep that kind of information. So I figured out a plan to get onto the lot and search for his car.”