"For safety reasons, I guess."
"But why have it at all, if it's going to be that complicated to get to it? A locked drawer in his office."
"The office where he saw his patients?"
I heard him shuffling paper. "It doesn't say," he reported, "but it makes more sense that way, doesn't it? He's seeing patients all day long, and they're not coming to him to have their tonsils out. Some of them have got to be real nut jobs."
"That must be the technical term for it."
"He's got someone coming in that he's a little worried about, he takes out the key and unlocks the drawer. Any problem, he can get to the gun in a hurry."
"It must be comforting for the patient," I said, "to have a shrink who can pull a gun on you if you start acting out."
Schering laughed aloud. "You're on the verge of this major breakthrough," he said. "Really getting in touch with your anger, or remembering what really happened when your uncle came into your bedroom that night. And you look up from the couch, and there's Dr. Nadler, and he's pointing a gun at you."
Dr. Nadler wouldn't talk to me, and I couldn't really blame him. Doctor-patient confidentiality aside, what did I expect him to tell me? That he'd had Bierman or Ivanko as a patient, stretched out on his couch for an hour every Thursday, reliving childhood trauma and recounting dreams? That he knew who broke into his apartment and stole his gun, but hadn't seen fit to mention it to the police?
I put the phone down and decided it was just as well he'd brushed me off. If he'd welcomed me warmly I'd have had to think up some questions to ask him, and I wouldn't have known where to start.
I kept finding things out, but what I learned was barely worth knowing. That's not an uncommon feeling in an investigation. You knock on a thousand doors and ask ten thousand questions, and the scraps of information you amass just pile up until something fits with something else. You learn to keep going, and you try not to listen when a little voice says the whole enterprise is pointless.
But this time the voice was hard to ignore. I didn't see how I could keep working my way around the edges, picking at loose threads here and there. I knew what I had to do.
I reached for the phone, then changed my mind and left it where it was. Rain, the forecast had said, and the skies looked dark enough. I went outside, headed uptown, and decided I should have taken an umbrella. It felt like rain, all right.
Well, maybe it would clear the air.
TWELVE
The ground-floor antique shop looked to be open. The lights were on, the window gates drawn back. But I couldn't see anyone inside. The door was locked, and there was a button to push for entry. I pushed it, and after a moment a woman appeared at the rear of the shop and squinted at me, holding her hand to her brow as an eyeshade. She gave a little shrug, as if it didn't matter whether I was a customer or a holdup man, and buzzed me in.
Her stock ran to small rural landscapes in elaborately gilded frames, French bronzes, mostly of animals, Royal Doulton figurines, Art Deco lamps. One shelf of an étagère was given over to cameos.
She was a dumpling, her hair an unconvincing red, her cheeks heavily rouged, her billowy print dress flowing. Her smile was guarded, and something about her stance suggested she was keeping close to whatever device she could use to summon help.
I said I had a few questions about what had happened upstairs.
She said, "You're a cop?" and her face relaxed for a moment, then tightened. "You're not a cop," she said, with such certainty she had me convinced.
"I used to be," I said.
She nodded. "That I can believe. You look like you used to be, but not like you are now. I used to be a teenager. I used to be skinny. What do you want from me, Mr. Used to Be? I wasn't here, I don't know anything, and I already told the whole megillah twenty times."
"Not twenty times," I said.
"So maybe it was nineteen. What can you ask me that nobody asked me already?"
Nothing, as it turned out. I asked and she replied, and I can't say that either of us was enriched by the experience. After a few minutes of this she said, "My turn. Where did you come from?"
"Where did I come from?"
"You don't live in the building, so you came from someplace. I don't mean where were you born, I mean today. Where did you come from?"
"Fifty-seventh Street," I said.
"East? West? Where on Fifty-seventh Street?"
"Fifty-seventh and Ninth."
"What did you take, a cab? The bus?"
"I walked."
"You walked all the way from Fifty-seventh Street and Ninth Avenue to ask me these questions?"
"It's not that far."
"It's not next door. And you didn't call first. What if I didn't come in today? What if I got a headache and went home early?"
"Then I'd have missed this wonderful conversation."
She grinned, but she was not to be sidetracked. "You didn't come all this way," she said, "just to waste your time talking to me."
"Maybe I'm not the only one here who used to be a cop."
"I raised four boys. They wouldn't dare lie to me, but sometimes they would leave something out." She glanced toward the ceiling. "You talk to her yet?"
"No."
"And the longer you spend talking to me, the longer it is before you have to go talk to her."
"Your sons didn't get away with much, did they?"
"They turned out okay. I'd tell you all about them, but you already wasted enough time on me. Go see if she'll talk to you."
"She's living here now?"
"It's her home. Where else is she going to live?"
"After what happened- "
"Listen to me," she said. "One day my husband gives me a look. 'I got heartburn,' he said, 'and I bet anything you forgot to buy Gelusil.' And I stalked out of the room, very proud of myself, and I came back with a brand-new box of Gelusil in my hand, the economy size, and he was dead. It wasn't heartburn for a change, it was a massive coronary, and his last words to me were he bet I forgot to buy Gelusil."
"I'm sorry to hear that," I said.
"What sorry? You never knew him, you don't even know me. There's a point to this, Mr. Used to Be, and that's that I still live to this day in that apartment. I still have the chair he was in when he dropped dead. What am I going to do, move? Get rid of a perfectly good chair? What do you expect her to do, move out? Sell the house? And look around for a building that nobody ever died in?"
And was she home now?
"You think I keep tabs on her? You want to find out, go ring her bell. You weren't so shy about ringing mine."
Kristin Hollander didn't look as though she'd stepped out of a Kean painting, but then I hadn't expected her to. I'd seen her face in the papers and on television. She was tall, her figure athletic, her dark hair becomingly short. Her blue eyes weren't enormous, but they were large enough, and frank in their appraisal.
I hadn't been able to see them when she took her first look at me, through the peephole in the front door. I'd stood there while she looked me over, then showed her a business card, a driver's license, and a courtesy card from the Detectives' Endowment Association, the last a gift from Joe Durkin. It didn't mean anything, but civilians tend to find it impressive, or at least reassuring. It reassured Kristin enough to open the door.
She led me down a hallway past a darkened room. "The living room," she said, not glancing in that direction. "I don't go there. I'm not ready yet."
There were lights on in the tiled kitchen, where a radio played softly, tuned to an easy-listening station. Two red-painted ladderback chairs with caned seats were drawn up on either side of a pine table. One of them had a Snoopy mug in front of it, half full of coffee, along with a book that had been turned facedown to keep her place. She pointed to the other chair and I took it.