"Know anyone who would want to kill him?"
"Just about everyone," she said, and her answer surprised me. Then she looked down at her hands. "Except the customers, of course."
"Of course," I said.
"Look," she said. "He wasn't the nicest guy. I think he hung out with dolls because he didn't much like people. There was something in his past, in his childhood, he never talked about, and he said he could get the sweetness he was denied then when he looked at kids' faces. That's the part of Joel I like to remember."
"And what's the part you want to forget?"
She flinched, then smoothed the faded denim on her jeans. "He had a temper," she whispered, as if, even now, he could hear her.
"He ever inflict it on you?"
"On anyone who wasn't as good as he was. Or as quick." She glanced up, her dark eyes haunted. "I didn't like him much, and at first, I was glad he was dead."
I waited again. She would say more if I just gave her enough time.
"Then I learned how much I had come to depend on him. Closing the hospital was the toughest thing I've ever done."
I nodded. "Where were you the night he died?"
"You asked me that the first time," she said.
"Tell me again."
"Here." She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against her couch. "Unfortunately, I was here. Alone."
"And your other employees?"
"You'll have to ask them."
"Do you have a list of names?"
She nodded, seemingly grateful to get off that couch and be busy. I took the moment to scan the apartment more carefully. There were no photographs behind the spider plants, no signs that anyone except O'Dell had ever been in this apartment. After a moment, she handed me a carefully lettered piece of paper with six names on it.
"All but one are still in the city," she said.
"And where's the one?" I asked.
She shrugged. "She disappeared the day after Joel was killed."
* * *
News of the disappearance should have excited me, but it didn't. Not really. It was too easy, for one, and for another, it was too convenient. Not that murders ever go the way you want them to. But when I heard about the employee that got away, I didn't feel those stomach butterflies that usually told me things were going well. I felt a shiver travel down my spine, so strong that I wondered if O'Dell had seen me shake.
The disappeared was named Melanie Glisando, and she had been Dudich's on-again off-again lover, something none of the employees had bothered to tell me in the first investigation. I didn't yell at O'Dell for that. I also didn't yell at her for failing to tell me that Glisando hadn't shown up for work on the day of my investigation. I would save the rougher emotions for later, in case I needed them.
Instead, I had her tell me more about Glisando, and from what I heard, she was Dudich's perfect match— a woman who was interested in toys, a woman who could repair even the most stubborn of tears, a woman who didn't mind spending her days on a pursuit most considered frivolous. She had kept an apartment two buildings down from O'Dell, although she rarely used it. I stopped at the apartment after I left O'Dell's, and the super mentioned that he had thrown Glisando's things away just the week before.
"Hard to tell whether she was really gone or not. She had this lover, see, and she spent time there, and you know how it is. This place gets to be where she stores her stuff. Not that she had a lot of stuff."
"Did she take anything with her when she left?"
The super shrugged. "How'm I supposed to know? I don't case my people's places, you know? I don't compare before and after."
"Anything unusual in her apartment?"
The super wrinkled his nose. I braced myself. "Naw," he said. "Not unless you count all them toys."
"Toys?"
"Yeah." His grimace grew. "They was posed all over the place. Little scenes, like you'd find in store windows."
Scenes. I should have felt the butterflies then, but I didn't. Something was off with this case, something intangible.
"What did you do with the toys?" I asked.
"I was gonna toss 'em, but the missus, she said no, kids would want them. I gotta listen to her, you know how it is, so I take 'em to one of them specialty shops and they was glad to have 'em. Made a few bucks off 'em and put that against the rent."
He told me this last as if it would shock me. It didn't.
"What shop?" I asked.
He told me, and I made a note, although I wasn't sure I would go.
"How'd you know Glisando was gone?" I asked.
"No rent in the mail," he said. "That's the one thing she was good at, paying her rent."
"When did the payments stop?"
"Last month," he said.
* * *
I blamed my growing depression on the heat. The pieces of information I got were the kind a detective wanted to have, the bits of another person's life, the fragmented details that constituted part of a puzzle and led me to believe I could solve this. The House was even hotter than the street, and as I came in our sarge informed me that the air conditioning was out, and they already had someone upstairs working on the problem.
I wiped the sweat off the back of my neck with a handkerchief that had seen better days, and then I went up the stairs, expecting to be the only detective in that steamy place. Instead the entire crew had gathered, bottles of water in a bucket on the floor, like someone was holding a party without the booze.
Everyone looked as down as I felt.
I picked up one of the water bottles and held it to my forehead. It felt like a blast of frigid air. "Who do I have to thank for this?"
"Hawkins," Evelyn said.
I opened my eyes. Hawkins didn't even bring in donuts on his assigned day. The man was cheaper than any skate I'd ever seen.
He met my gaze, then looked away, as if he knew what I was thinking.
"What's the occasion?" I asked, thinking this was almost as strange as the damn Silence.
"No occasion," he said.
"He found one of the arms that matched that torso," Weisburg said.
"Got an ID?" I asked.
Hawkins took a swig of his water, making me think of booze yet again. Only in a heat wave could a man approach water like it was wine.
"That's the problem," he said. "I been wanting to talk to you guys. Any of you think that maybe we shouldn't solve these cases?"
I rolled my eyes. Evelyn sat down behind her desk so hard that the wheels on her chair moved and she spun. Bob shook his head ever so slightly. Only Weisburg didn't move.
"All right," I said. "I give. Why shouldn't we solve these cases?"
"Because," Hawkins said. "Maybe they're what's causing The Silence."
"So, lemme get this straight," Evelyn said. "If we solve these cases, The Silence ends and we got a new crime wave on our hands."
"Hell," I said. "That means we're directly responsible for all future homicides."
"You know," Bob said, "I knew you liked slacking off, Hawkins, but I didn't think you'd go to these lengths."
"I'm serious," he said. "These're all strange cases, and what if they're the key?"
"Yeah," I said. "Sure. It'd be our cases, not the ones at the hundred-and-sixth or the ones in Brooklyn or somewhere else. And out of all the unsolved we got, we just happened to pick the five that were the cause of The Silence, and if we solve them, then well, sorry New York, it's business as usual?"
Hawkins flushed. "Put that way, it sounds kinda funny."
"Yeah, it does," Bob said.
"So you think I should solve the jumper?"
"Isn't that what we're here for?" I asked. "Or are we really the waste of funds the tabloids been saying we are?"
"I was just thinking maybe—"
"That's the problem," Evelyn said. "You were thinking." She grabbed a water bottle. "Thanks for the refreshment," she said, and left the floor.
Bob closed his file and left too. After a moment, Hawkins shuffled off in the direction of the men's room. That left just me and Weisburg. Strangely, he had said nothing.
"You don't buy that argument, do you?" I asked.
He shrugged. "It's as good as any. I mean, we ain't never seen nothing like this. Anything could be causing it. I think maybe if Hawkins believes it's our unsolveds, then maybe he's right. If the tabloids think it's the heat, maybe they're right. If I believe maybe the city's hit its personal limit, maybe I'm right. You know, in unusual situations, you can't close your mind."
"It's not logical—"
"It's not logical for a man to choke to death on a woman's finger outside Port Authority in the presence of his very expensive dogs and not have identification on him or the animals."
"Unless it was a smuggling operation," I said.
"Shit," he said and sat up straight. I couldn't believe he hadn't thought of that.
"You see?" I said. "There's got to be a logical explanation for anything."
"The finger?" he asked. "He'd'a had to bite it off in the presence of witnesses."
"Maybe he didn't. He had dogs."
"And what, he picked it up like it was a sausage?"
"Was there bread around him, a bun maybe?" I was wondering how far I could yank him.
Apparently not that far. Weisburg winced. "You're disgusting, Spence."
"I'm just looking for logic."
"In all the wrong places," he said and stood. After grabbing his own water, he too left me alone.
For all my talk of logic, the conversation with Hawkins left me unnerved. Maybe there was something that we were missing, some tie, some reason that things had gotten so strange. Or maybe the ancients were right, and life revolves around the phases of the moon. I know my ex-wife's did. Why shouldn't a city be the same?
That morning's
Times
had some scholar saying things like this happen before every millennium. Some twerp in the
Daily News
was saying that New York had entered its own alternate timeline, a timeline parallel to the one in which Berlin had found itself more than ten years before when the Wall suddenly came down. And the guy on the street corner outside my building was yelling that we were all victims of some secret government experiment in behavior control.
Those ideas were as plausible as Weisburg's, certainly more plausible than Hawkins's, and I didn't buy any of them. We had just hit a statistical anomaly, that was all. The odds that no murders would take place couldn't be calculated accurately by looking at the entire city. Each murder was its own event, with its own probability. Or, if you wanted to look at it another way, each country had its own murder rate, and just because no one was dying by a human being's hands in New York, didn't mean it wasn't happening in L.A. or New Orleans or D.C. In fact, at that moment, I would have laid money on the idea that the national murder rate was the same as it had ever been. The murders just weren't happening here.
I didn't want to think about it. The Silence made me nervous enough as it was. Thinking about its causes made it worse.
I took a sip of that delicious cool water that Hawkins had tried to bribe us with, and then I realized what I had missed earlier. I picked up the phone and called the super for Glisando's building.
"You said that Glisando paid her rent up to last month," I reminded the super, "but that she was never in the building. Where'd the money come from?"
"I dunno where my tenants work," the super said.
"No," I said, clarifying. "Where did she send the checks from?"
"Upstate," the super said. "Her parents' farm."
* * *
Normally, I don't like to leave the city, but in that August's record heat wave, I was glad to leave the island of smog and tall buildings for the fresher and somewhat cooler air upstate.
Glisando's parents had what might once have been a working farm, but what was now called a farm only out of tradition. The house had been restored by some
Architectural Digest
wannabe, and the barn had been remade into a guesthouse more beautifully apportioned than most of Manhattan's hotels. I pulled up in the clearly regraveled driveway, probably kept that way for "authenticity," and headed straight for the barn, which was where some folks in the nearby town had told me I'd find Glisando.
They weren't lying. She came to the door barefoot, her hair gone and her face so skeletal and covered with melanoma that it was clear she was dying. Mom and Dad, apparently, had decided to take her in and give her what little comfort they could in her last year of life.