“And I told her, anything else you need, I provide it.” Cortez looks around the living room. “You want a muscular gentleman with a baseball bat sitting on this sofa all night long, you can have that. You want someone on the porch with a rocket launcher, we can make that happen.”
I raise an eyebrow—they do not sell rocket launchers at Office Depot—and Cortez grins, happy to explain, but I wave my hand for him to go on. I’m not in the mood.
“The woman is not interested in protection inside the house, but otherwise she is happy,” Cortez says. “Happy to have us around. As her husband had arranged.”
“Okay. And?”
“Okay, so same yesterday. But then today, I am here in the morning, just the same, and the woman is standing out on the porch, shaking her head and waving her hands.”
“She’s on the porch?”
“Yes, Policeman. With a suitcase.”
“A suitcase?”
“Yes. Suitcase. And she says, no thank you. Like I’m selling Girl Scout cookies. Like I’m a goddamn Jehovah’s Witness.” He puts on a mocking, feminine voice, says it again: “No thank you.”
Martha, oh Martha, what secrets had you hidden in your heart?
“It was like she was waiting for someone,” Cortez says, rubbing his chin. “Someone other than me.”
“Wait—” I say. I’m trying to capture all these details, arrange them in my head. “Wait one second.”
“What is it?” Cortez looks at me curiously. “You need me to repeat something?”
“Nothing,” I say, “No. Just—what day is it?”
“It’s Tuesday.” He grins. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just didn’t know what day it is. Please continue the story.”
What happened next is Cortez told her it wasn’t up to her, with all due respect he had been contracted to take care of her, and this wasn’t her arrangement to undo. If she didn’t want to see him, she could stay inside the house and he or his friend would drop off supplies and protect her from the outside. She insisted, no thank you, told him to leave her be, and then someone hit him on the side of the head.
“Someone hit you or her?”
“Me. I said me.”
“With what?”
“I do not know. Something hard and flat.” Cortez ducks his head, embarrassed. “I was hit very hard. I was knocked unconscious.” He steps back, raises his hands, looks at me wide eyed, like, Sounds impossible, I know, but that’s what happened. “I was out cold for I don’t know how long, not long I think, and when I woke up, she was gone. I went inside and ran up and down, three times I searched for her. But the house was as you see it. She is gone.”
“Holy moly,” I say.
“Yes,” says Cortez drily, and now it’s my voice he puts on, flat and solemn. “Holy moly.”
“So what are you doing here now, Mr. Cortez?”
“Waiting for her. A friend I have, Mr. Wells, is out looking while I wait—often the missing simply return. Ellen, meanwhile, minds the home front. Listen, I don’t care if that girl wants to be found or not. We’re going to find her. That cop comes back and finds her gone, I’m finished.”
“That contract, I think, has been abrogated.”
“Why? Oh—dead?” Cortez does not look saddened by this news. “Who killed him?”
“I’m working on it.”
He pauses, tilts his head. “Why?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I find the killer.”
“I don’t mean why was he killed. I mean, why are you working on it?”
I take one more turn around the small house, Houdini close at my heels. I check the locks on the window, look for fingerprints, footprints, anything. Did someone do this to her, or did she do it herself, slip out from under the protection that Brett had arranged? Was she kidnapped? The suitcase says she was waiting for someone, presumably the mysterious Mr. N. But the mysterious Mr. N. is dead, right?
For a long time I stare into Martha Milano’s empty closet, and then I go back downstairs, find Cortez lounging in the recliner, his cigarette raised like a scepter.
“I tell you, this whole thing, it’s a bad sign,” he says. “Me losing track of someone I’m supposed to look after? That is a bad fucking sign.”
“For what?”
“Oh, shit, you know. For all of mankind. The whole human race.”
Back on Albin Street I look up at the sun. The city is hotter than it was last week, and you can smell it on the air—the reek of untreated sewage water drifting up off the river, of garbage that’s been dumped in the streets and out of windows. Sweat and body odor and fear. I should go home and change clothes, see if any damage has been done while I was away. Make sure that nothing has been taken from my store of food and supplies, all that we left behind.
“We really should, buddy,” I say to Houdini. “We should go home.”
But we don’t. We go back the way we came, down Albin, down Rumford, up Pleasant Street.
What few people there are on the streets are moving quickly, no eye contact. As we get closer to Langley Boulevard a man rushes past in a windbreaker, head down, carrying two whole hams, one under each arm. Then a woman, running, pushing a stroller with a giant Deer Park bottle strapped into it instead of a child.
I realize suddenly I have not seen a police car or a police officer or evidence of police presence of any kind since I returned to Concord, and for some reason the observation floods my stomach with a churning dread.
My legs are getting tired; my busted arm joggles against my side, tight and uncomfortable and useless, like I’m lugging a ten-pound weight around, to prove a point or win a contest.
I find Dr. Fenton right where I left her, working her way down her towering pile of charts, leaning against the counter of the nurses’ station, her eyes blinking and red behind the round glasses.
“Hey,” I start, but then another doctor, short and bald and bleary eyed, stops and scowls. “Is that a fucking dog? You can’t have a fucking dog in here.”
“Sorry,” I say, but Fenton says, “Shut up, Gordon. That dog’s more hygienic than you are.”
“Clever,” he says, “you fucking hack.” He disappears into an adjacent exam room and slams the door. Fenton turns to me. “What happened, Detective Palace? You get shot again?”
We take the unlit stairwell down to the crowded first-floor cafeteria: dirty linoleum tables and a handful of stools, a big plastic bin filled with mismatched cutlery, boxes of supermarket teabags and a row of kettles lined up on camp stoves. Dr. Fenton and I take our tea out to the lobby and sit in the overstuffed chairs.
“When did you stop working in the morgue?”
“Two weeks ago,” she says. “Three, maybe. The last month or so, though, we weren’t doing autopsies. No call for it. Just intake, preparing bodies for burial.”
“But you were still down there when Independence Day happened?”
“I was.”
The front door of the hospital crashes open and a middle-aged man stumbles in carrying a woman in his arms like a newlywed, her bleeding profusely from the wrists, him just yelling, “God you idiot, you idiot, you’re such an idiot!” He kicks open the door of the stairwell and lugs his wife inside, and the door slams closed behind them. Fenton lifts her glasses to rub her eyes, looks at me expectantly.
“I’m trying to I.D. a corpse that came in that night.”