“What? Why?”
“Which room is it, ma’am?
“Second floor. Front.”
The two cops maneuvered around her, dutifully wiped their shoes on the floor mat in the hall, and headed up the stairs.
“What’s going on?” Lucas said.
“Maybe you can tell me,” Farrell said, motioning for Lucas to step out onto the porch with him. Once he had taken him aside, he said, “It’s about your fellow boarder, Ray Taylor.”
“What about him?”
“He’s dead.”
Lucas was stunned into silence.
“His body was found a couple of hours ago. In the alley across the street. That part of town is getting to be mighty dangerous.”
Fallen leaves, driven by a chill wind, tumbled across the front yard.
“What happened to him?” Lucas asked, dreading the answer.
“You might as well ask what happened to that young prof Andy Brandt,” Farrell countered. “Or why some janitor, also from the university, would attack Einstein with a knife. All I know is this, my friend — anytime something bad happens, you’re connected to it somehow.”
Lucas’s mind was already churning. Why Taylor? Had he, too, presented some obstacle to the malevolent force Lucas had seen at work in Simone’s hotel room?
“So, for the record, where were you last night?”
“The Nassau Inn.”
“With that Rashid woman?”
There was no use in lying about it, and even less in telling him she was upstairs right now. “Yes.” There was something else, however, he wanted to know. “How did Taylor die?”
Farrell gave him a long, appraising look. “That’s a good question. Come and see.”
By the time Lucas had retrieved his coat — and found that Simone had fallen right back to sleep, curled up under the quilt — Farrell was already at the curb, jotting in a notepad. Together, they walked around the corner, then a short distance down the alley.
Taylor’s body hadn’t yet been moved any farther than the back of a morgue ambulance. It was parked in the alleyway, back doors open, in an area marked off by two black-and-yellow-striped sawhorses. The coroner pulled back the sheet and let Lucas see the mauled corpse.
“Whatever got Brandt, it got Taylor, too,” Farrell said.
The coroner started to replace the sheet, but Lucas stopped him to make a closer examination of Taylor’s neck and shoulders, where there were visible claw marks.
Farrell, taking note of his interest, said, “Yeah. It’s got talons, or teeth, or fangs. Whatever the hell it is. But last I checked, we don’t have a lot of lions and tigers in New Jersey.”
Lucas hated to think what they might have instead.
“We found a few bullet casings,” Farrell said, “but who knows if he hit the damn thing.”
Lucas looked down the alleyway, past the battered trashcans and potholes, noting their proximity to Einstein’s backyard. And his concern grew, as did his guilt — hadn’t he been the one who advised Taylor to keep a close eye on the place?
After a few more minutes of questioning, during which Farrell acted as if he smelled a rat but was at a loss to catch it, Lucas managed to excuse himself, and then headed down the alley, as if taking a shortcut home.
All along the way, he was on the lookout for any sign of Taylor’s having passed this direction. The chances of finding a footprint, or much else, were awfully slim, however, and Lucas got all the way to Einstein’s garage without spotting a single clue. Glancing back toward the crime scene, he made sure that the police chief was looking the other way when he ducked into the professor’s backyard.
The grass had long since gone brown, and he saw that a shiny new padlock had been affixed to the garage doors. In the upstairs study, he could see Einstein himself hunched over his desk, scribbling something down, and looking perfectly all right. At least, Lucas thought, his worst fears were assuaged, and he was just about to retreat from sight, when, as if pausing to ponder some problem, the professor raised his eyes from his work and saw him there in the yard.
For a moment, they both just looked at each other, then Einstein, cocking his head to one side, raised a hand and waved him toward the back door of the house.
Now it was too late to make a clean getaway.
Lucas went to the stoop and waited there until, a minute later, Helen Dukas, looking puzzled, opened the door.
“What are you doing out here?” she said, standing to one side to let him in.
How, Lucas wondered, should he answer that?
“Let the man come in first,” the professor said from the kitchen. “Then we can find out why he has come to visit.”
As Helen closed the door, Lucas shook hands with Einstein, who was wearing an old terrycloth bathrobe, pajamas, and below his bare ankles, a pair of moccasins embroidered with red and yellow beads. Einstein saw that he had noticed the footwear.
“A gift, from the Navajo tribe,” he said proudly, wiggling his toes. “The Navajo tribe.”
“And he won’t take them off,” Helen said, pulling a chair from the kitchen table and gesturing for Lucas to sit. “I think he sleeps in them now.”
“They are very comfortable.”
Einstein drew up a chair, too, and Helen poured them tea and put a plate of muffins on the table. “They’re poppy seed,” she said, “and only from yesterday.”
Out of courtesy, Lucas helped himself — the muffin was so dry, he washed it down quickly with a gulp of the hot tea — while Einstein looked on approvingly. Although Lucas had only seen him up close on a couple of occasions, Einstein appeared unusually animated and alert today. Perhaps he was happy to take a break, and perhaps he was hoping that Lucas was there to smuggle him some tobacco.
“He has been up all the night,” Helen said, “pacing up and down.” She blew out a sigh of resignation. “Maybe you can tell him that he must take a rest now and then. He is no spring chicken.”
“But when the ideas come, you must take hold of them,” Einstein said, clenching his fist. “Or sometimes they do not come again.”
“They can come after a good night’s sleep, too,” Helen replied.
They bickered, Lucas thought, like an old married couple.
“And last night,” he said, directly to their guest, “they were coming very well. Ja, this old brain of mine was young again.”
“What were you working on?” Lucas asked, though anything but the most cursory answer would probably make no sense to him.
“It was a problem that was practical, and not so much theoretical,” he said. “It was something I had promised I would do, but that I could not solve. Round and round I went. For weeks, I could not solve it.”
“I hope you have now,” Helen said, as she dried some dishes and put them in the rack.
“I have,” he said, almost gleefully. “I have written the answers down, and I have put them in an envelope, and now I may relax a bit. Maybe I will take the Tinef out on Lake Carnegie. To celebrate.”
“No sailing today,” Helen said. “The weather forecast is for rain.”
“The forecast in New Jersey is always for rain.”
“We are playing bridge at Kurt and Adele’s tonight.”
“I am taking a walk with him this afternoon. We can play the game later.”
Plainly, they liked going back and forth like this, and might have kept the volley going if the doorbell hadn’t rung.
“There they are already,” Helen said. “They don’t waste any time.”
Looking down the hallway, Lucas saw Helen take an envelope from the hall table and, opening the front door, hand it to a burly man in an army uniform. At the curb beyond, Lucas glimpsed a jeep idling at the curb, its exhaust fumes pluming in the autumn air.