The man vanished down the hallway.
“Who was that?” Cardozo asked.
“Claude? He’s the handyman. I have a leak.”
Cardozo’s and Richards’s glances met.
Sam Richards rapped on the open bathroom door. The handyman glanced up from his work, his forehead wrinkling when he saw the open wallet and shield.
“Detective Sam Richards, twenty-second precinct. Where were you Saturday, Claude?”
Loring crouched there, frowning, then pulled himself very slowly to his feet. He laid a wrench across the sink.
There was a silence while the two men stared into each other’s eyes, appraising each other.
Richards was looking at a broad-faced man in his early thirties, thick-bodied, with blond hair, sideburns, a moustache—a man who moved with all the ease of a stone wall learning how to walk.
Loring ran a soiled finger beneath his blond moustache. “Saturday I was crashing at a friend’s.”
“All day?”
Loring’s chest pushed against his T-shirt, showing ridges of gymnasium muscle. He nodded.
“Where were you Sunday? And yesterday?”
“Same place.”
“Can anyone vouch for that?”
Loring opened his mouth … and then clamped it shut. His eyes were red-rimmed, as though they hadn’t seen sleep in a long time.
“Claude, you’d better tell us—for your own sake.”
“What’s my sake got to do with it?”
“There was a killing here Saturday.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“You have a key to the apartment where the body was found.”
“Me and a few other people.”
“We’re talking to them.”
Loring shook a Camel from the crunched pack in his hip pocket.
“Who was this friend whose place you were at, Claude?”
“You going to pester her? Look, I just had a fight with my roommate, the turd threw me out. It’s hard enough finding a place to sleep in this crappy town without you guys barreling in and scaring the shit out of her. What’s she going to think, you bust down her door asking if I killed some poor bastard?”
Richards folded his arms across his vest, and the sleeve of his brown suit rode up, exposing a new Seiko on his wrist. “We’re just asking her were you there, Claude.”
Loring picked up his wrench and stood slapping it into his palm. “Does she need to know about the killing?”
“Damn,” Richards said, slamming down the brakes, “look at that.” A dark green van, sporting a huge logo of a blue jay, had parked by a fire hydrant. Richards regarded fire hydrants as a police parking preserve.
“Tennessee license,” Cardozo said. “Wouldn’t you know.”
Richards found a hydrant on the corner of Sixth and Thirty-third and parked with three expert twists of the wheel. They threaded their way through sidewalk jungles of potted palms and corn plants; the jungle was for sale at ridiculous prices—two hundred dollars a tree and up—and the green foliage was thick enough to give sanctuary to an entire Vietcong brigade. The pavement was steaming in the freak summer warmth. This was the wholesale flower district, and the real estate industry, ready to boom the walkups in the area, had christened these blocks FloHo.
Loring’s friend and alibi lived in a Civil War loft building with World War I paint peeling off the limestone-arched doorway. Cardozo found the button with part of a business card wedged into the name slot: FAYE DI STASIO ASSOCIATES. He pushed, and after a second push a buzzer screeched back and the glass door released with a click.
They began the climb up the rickety steps. The air in the stairwell pressed like a blanket soaked in hot water. A dark-haired young woman waited on the fourth-floor landing. It seemed to Cardozo there was something hurt and bitter in the way she was standing there, defending her door.
“Faye di Stasio?” he asked.
She smoked her cigarette and she just stared and let ashes drift down toward the floor. “Who’s looking for her?”
“Police.” Cardozo showed his shield, introduced Richards.
“The place is a mess.” She let them pass.
A television was going. The room was steeped in the aroma of negligence, and the air smelled like an old sofa.
“You had a guest over the weekend?” Cardozo put the question in a carefully natural voice, as though it would be the most normal thing in the world for this woman to tell Vince Cardozo all about the men who shared her sleeping space.
Her gaze came up level to his. “Who’s in trouble—him or me?”
“Not you. Maybe not him either.”
“I’m having some coffee—could I offer you some?”
Cardozo glanced at Richards. Richards nodded.
“Won’t you have a seat?” Her words were strangely ladylike coming from a woman with dirty bare feet.
Cardozo couldn’t believe the poverty of the space: stained, crumbling walls, laths poking through plaster like exposed bone; window curtains decaying in the city’s acid air; chairs with fractured legs bound in mover’s tape.
The two policemen picked chairs that looked safe.
Cardozo let his eyes prowl the apartment. A sewing machine had been set up in the kitchen; cloth toys spilled out of three-foot cartons stacked beside the bathroom; cat food in a bowl by the door was growing a two-day-old skin. An air-conditioning unit pumped noisily in a rear window. Beyond the burglar gates tips of scraggly sumac rose in the soot-blackened courtyard.
She brought three mugs of coffee.
“A man called Claude Loring stayed with me.”
“What times was he here this weekend?” Cardozo asked.
She lit a fresh cigarette and held it to one side, her elbow on the table and her wrist angled back. “Late Friday night till this morning.”
“What do you mean, late Friday night?”
“Well, maybe it was Saturday morning. The sun wasn’t up.”
“He was here straight through?”
“Right up there.” She pointed to a loft bed that had been amateurishly built over the kitchen.
“You were home all weekend?”
A silence went on too long. She nodded again.
“Never went out?”
“I was working. Maybe I went for coffee, cigarettes.”
“So how do you know he was here all the time?”
“The longest I was out was ten, fifteen minutes. He’s like a bear—sleeps two, three days in a row.”
“You’ve known him how long?”
“Oh, we go back a few years.”
“What kind of work do you do?”
“I run my own business—creative toys for pets.”
He picked up a stuffed mouse sitting on a table: the eyes opened like a doll’s and a squeal came out of it.
“You made this?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Pretty,” he said. He didn’t quite mean it.
Her face lit up like a hundred-watt bulb. “I’m really a cloth-sculptor. The business is temporary, till I get my exhibit.”
The phone rang and an answering machine cut in. “Hello. You have reached the office of Faye di Stasio Associates.” The voice was hers. “Please leave your name and phone number and a member of our staff will contact you.”
There was a beep and then a man’s voice, gruff. “Hey, Faye—it’s me. Pick up.”
She threw back her coffee and crossed the room and snatched up the receiver. “I’m sorry,” she said after listening a moment, “we had some trouble. It won’t happen again.”
“What sort of trouble?” Cardozo asked as she came back to her chair.
“The van broke down. Nothing could go out Saturday. Today everything’s ready and our dealers are claiming they lost the holiday trade, they want to cut back on their orders. What a business.”
“Claude must be a help to you.”
“Yeah. Claude’s great.”
12
“I SHOULD BE ANGRY AT you,” Dr. Eric Corey said.
“Why?” Babe was sitting in a smock on a table covered with paper roller in the doctor’s examination room.
“For one thing, you woke up while I was in Bermuda. Made me cut short my vacation. For another, you’re in such damned good shape you’re almost a false alarm. There’s not much I can do for you. Nature seems to be handling the hard stuff.”