“Does what, ma’am?”
“He leaves the door unguarded.”
Sam Richards took out his notebook and turned past the page where he’d jotted the milk and eggs his wife wanted him to pick up from Shop-Rite. Write it down, his instructor at Police Academy had said. No matter how dumb, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, it could turn out to be evidence. “What time on Saturday?”
The princess was silent a moment. “The second time I went out for my cold pills. I’d say it was two o’clock or so.”
Detective Sam Richards stepped out of the elevator.
The thunk-thunk-thunk of a fender bass came at him through the door. He pushed the buzzer politely, and when the music showed no signs of abating he pushed it impolitely, leaning his full 220 pounds onto his thumb.
A woman’s voice screamed, “Who is it?” and he shouted, “Police!”
The music cut off. There was a scurrying silence.
The foyer boasted no lacquered table or little Oriental rug, none of the wealthy little amenities Richards had noticed on the other floors of the building. The door opened three inches. A young woman stared out. Her watery green eyes said she was nearsighted.
Sam Richards held his shield up above the safety chain. “Detective Richards, twenty-second precinct.”
“Far fuckin’ out.”
“Are you Deborah Hightower, the owner of this apartment?”
“Debbi.” She had the husky voice of a three-pack-a-day smoker. “No e on the Debbi.”
“Could I come in for a moment?”
“If it’s about my maintenance payment, talk to my lawyer.”
“It’s not about the maintenance.”
She undid the chain and stepped back from the door, letting him pass. She wore black nylon jogging shorts and a Coke is it! T-shirt, and her feet were bare.
The hallway opened into a livingroom furnished with two black beanbag chairs and two Techtronic stereo speakers. The amplifier and turntable sat on the shelf of a varnish-it-yourself bookcase that she hadn’t varnished. No window curtains softened the view of the high rise across the street. Black scuffmarks on the parquet floor told of heavy furniture that had been dragged in and dragged out again. The air smelled of freshly sprayed lemon deodorizer. The lemon didn’t quite mask the scent of marijuana.
Ms. Hightower offered coffee. “Instant. Sorry about that.”
“Fine by me.”
Sam Richards dropped onto a beanbag and stared at marks on the walls where six pictures had hung. The floor needed dusting.
She came back from the kitchen with two white plastic mugs and handed him one. He noticed that the long green fingernail on her third finger was a falsie, beginning to hang loose. She seated herself in the beanbag facing his and blew on her coffee.
“Do you know a man was murdered in the building?” he said. “We found him two hours ago in six. No ID.”
“That’s wild.”
“Were you home this weekend?”
“Home?” She looked confused. “You mean here? This isn’t home, honey, this is a crash pad. I have a share in a summer place out in the Hamptons.” She sipped quietly. “But sad to say, I’ve been here for the last three days. I’m in a show down at the World Trade Center.”
“Oh, yeah? What show’s that?”
“Toyota Presents.” She was searching him for a reaction.
“Oh, yeah. Toyota Presents.”
“A lot of stars got their starts in industrials. Shirley MacLaine danced for General Motors.”
“Right. I heard that somewhere.” Sam Richards opened his notebook. “Debbi, could you tell me when you were in the building yesterday, when you came in, when you went out, what hours you were in the lobby, the elevator, anywhere else on the premises?”
She said she’d worked late, come home around noon Saturday, slept till an hour before the show, left the building around seven, returned early this morning.
“Did you see or hear anything unusual in the building?” It occurred to him that if Debbi Hightower had been as stoned yesterday as she seemed today, she wouldn’t have noticed an elephant falling out of the sky.
She hoisted one leg up and placed a foot on the edge of the beanbag. Her toenails were pink, which didn’t go with the green fingernails. “Seemed a lot less busy than usual.”
“Any odd noises or people?”
She thought a moment. “Well, it’s all relative, isn’t it? I mean, what do you consider odd?”
“Strangers in the building?” William Benson, who owned the apartment on the twenty-eighth floor, shook his head. He was a small, lean man about eighty years of age. With elegant carelessness, his right hand twirled a pair of horn-rimmed bifocals. Gold cufflinks winked at the wrists of his burgundy smoking jacket. “No, none that I noticed.”
“Any strange noises?” Detective Monteleone asked.
“I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you that. Memorial Day’s a wonderful weekend for working. I turned off my hearing aid.”
For the first time, Detective Monteleone noticed the small beige plastic button in Benson’s left ear.
Behind the eighty-year-old architect the livingroom glowed like an art gallery, with track lighting that picked out abstract expressionist and pop art paintings on the walls.
“There was one thing,” Benson said, “but you could hardly call it unusual, it happens so often. I went out for the paper, and I had to use my key to let myself back into the building. Our Saturday doorman, Hector, wasn’t at the door. I have a hunch he sits down in the personnel room watching ballgames on TV.”
“Tell me that’s not a Gestapo tactic. Tell me it’s not.” Fred Lawrence, the owner of the apartment on floor 11, was explaining to Detective Sam Richards how he happened to be in New York on a holiday weekend when his wife and son were out romping at their summer rental in Ocean Beach. “To phone on a Friday—not even the courtesy of a letter—and call a field audit Tuesday—knowing Monday’s Memorial Day. It destroys my weekend, it terrifies my client, it wastes everybody’s time. I’ve never let a client overstate deductions. I don’t work that way.”
Sam Richards nodded, shaping his lips into a conciliatory smile. “We’ve all had our troubles with the IRS.”
“It’s harassment, plain and simple.” Fred Lawrence, his stomach pushing a breathless bulge into his pink Polo sports shirt, his face beet red and gaunt, was clearly a man under strain. His fringe of black hair glistened with sweat. Behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes darted, never once meeting Sam Richards’s. He paced the room, fingers skittering across the edges of hi-tech leather and chrome chairs and glass-topped tables.
“And then this outrage in six—how the hell did a thing like that happen? We’re supposed to have security in this building.”
“With your help, Mr. Lawrence, we hope to find out how it happened.”
Fred Lawrence threw a startled glance at the detective. “You seem to think I have some information—well, I don’t.”
“What time did you return to the building?”
“Around noon yesterday.”
“You parked in the garage?”
“Yes, I rent a space there.”
“Did you notice anything or anyone strange in the building over the weekend?”
“As I tried to explain, Officer, I’m under a great deal of pressure, I’m extremely preoccupied, and I apologize, but the answer is no, I noticed nothing until all you police came pouring in.”
Cardozo pulled his Honda Civic into the unlit alley beside the ninety-five-year-old precinct building. There was a parking space beneath the fire escape. He made sure to lock up. Unmarked police cars had been getting ripped off lately in the precinct parking lot.
He nearly tripped in the dark over a stack of A-frame barriers. They had been piled in reserve two years ago for crowd control. Crowds had come and gone, the barriers had stayed.
Above the green globes glowing on either side of the station house door the precinct flag fluttered limply from its pole, a rumpled seal of the City of New York and the number 22. The two two was one of the six precincts that used to make up the Seventh Division. Changing city administrations had moved the numbers around, but the sooty bricks and rusting iron and peeling paint were still there on Sixty-third Street, distinctly out of place in the heart of Manhattan’s Silk Stocking District.