I went out to the foyer again, and then into the kitchen. The cabinets under the counters contained pots and pans, detergents, soap pads, some brown-paper bags, and a plastic trash container loaded with garbage. One of the hanging wall cabinets was stocked with perhaps a three-day supply of canned goods and standard grocery items. Another wall cabinet held six cups and saucers, eight dinner dishes, and half a dozen glasses. In a drawer beside the sink, there was what appeared to be a complete set of stainless-steel utensils, some paring knives, a bread knife, a can opener, a bottle opener, and a pair of serving spoons. The refrigerator was almost empty—a half-full carton of milk, a stick of butter (to which toast crumbs clung), a head of lettuce, an unopened container of blueberry yogurt, three slices of ham wrapped in wax paper and sharing the meat tray with a shriveled frankfurter. On a butcher-block cutting board beside the refrigerator, I found a fifth of Scotch with about three inches of whiskey in it. There was no bulletin board or message pad near the wall phone on the other side of the refrigerator, nor were there any penciled numbers or messages on the wall itself. I lifted the phone from its hook and got a dial tone; it had not yet been disconnected.
I went back to the cabinet under the sink, took out the trash container, opened one of the large brown-paper bags, sat on the floor, and began sifting through Natalie Fletcher’s garbage, transferring it piece by sodden piece from plastic container to paper bag. Garbage cans are often treasure troves to the working policeman, but Natalie’s garbage at first seemed to consist mostly of orange rinds, coffee grounds, stale crusts of bread, empty soup cans, soggy paper napkins, greasy paper toweling, cucumber and potato peels, an envelope from the telephone company, an empty frozen-juice can, more coffee grounds, and the crumpled comics section of Sunday’s newspaper. I kept looking. Toward the bottom of the container, I found some bills marked Paid, a dozen cigarette butts undoubtedly emptied from an ashtray, an empty beer bottle, a bottle cap, and a piece of a page torn from a calendar. I dug a little further and found three other pieces of the same calendar page; she had obviously torn it in half, and then in half again. I spread them out on the floor, and then put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. September. This month’s calendar. Today was ...
Until dawn came, it was still today and not tomorrow in my mind—no matter how many hours past midnight it was. Today, then, was still Monday, September 9. Natalie had moved out of the apartment at nine this morning, but there was nothing on the calendar to indicate that a move would take place today. This seemed particularly strange, since the calendar page was a veritable appointment book for the month, with scribbles in most of the daily squares, penned or penciled reminders in what I assumed to be Natalie’s hand:
The night of September 8 was the night five funeral homes had been broken into, the night Anthony Gibson’s corpse had been stolen. September 9 was today; the square was blank. Beyond today:
These last jottings seemed strange, too. Or, to be more exact, it seemed strange that I’d found them in with the garbage. If Natalie had intended to keep these appointments, why had she thrown away the calendared reminders of them? But on the other hand, if she hadn’t intended to meet Susanna tomorrow at two o’clock, or go to church at midnight, why had she jotted them onto her calendar in the first place? I’d automatically concluded that Natalie was getting out of town; otherwise, why would she have left her furniture (such as it was) behind her, with instructions to sell it? But if she’d planned beforehand on leaving town, would she have made appointments in the city for tomorrow? Or had the move been a sudden decision? Or had she simply found a furnished apartment two blocks from here, moved her personal belongings into it, and left behind only the stuff Durski had accurately described as crap? I didn’t know.
I put the brown-paper bag into the plastic trash container, swept up whatever garbage had found its way onto the linoleum, and then turned out all the lights and quietly let myself out of the apartment.
Sixteen
As Durski had promised, there were two garages in the immediate vicinity of Natalie’s building. At the first one, the attendant had never heard of Natalie Fletcher or her blue Buick station wagon. I left and began walking up the street toward the second garage.
During the empty hours of the night, there are certain neighborhoods that take on the appearance of desolated, war-torn landscapes. The area in which Oberlin Crescent was located had once been a high-rent district, but that was back when you and I were young, Maggie. Even now, it had not yet succumbed entirely to urban blight, but it was well on the way, and all the signs of ultimate erosion were already there. The Crescent itself was perhaps one of a half-dozen oases in a desert of abandoned buildings, vacant and boarded-up stores, lots strewn with the rubble of torn-down buildings, unused vest-pocket parks with broken benches and graffiti-decorated walls and pavements, garages, a gasoline station, an all-night diner. In the empty lots, rats and wild dogs scavenged. In the abandoned buildings, derelicts squatted without water or electricity. The pavements were cluttered with empty wine bottles and newspaper scraps blown by the September wind. The river was only four blocks away, and I could hear the sound of a hooting tug, the rumble of trucks on the Harbor Highway. Up ahead, sitting on the front stoop of one of the abandoned buildings, three teenagers sat smoking. It was almost two o’clock in the morning.
They saw me approaching, and must have immediately sized me up as a cop. One of them got off the stoop. He stepped directly into my path, took a deep drag of the thin cigarette in his hand, and said, “You know what this is?”
“No, what is it?” I said.
“Grass,” he said. “Are you a cop?”
I didn’t answer him. He took another pull on the joint, and then giggled, and said, “Why don’t you bust me? This is grass.”
“We’re not allowed to bust potheads after midnight,” I said, and stepped around him and continued walking up the street.
“Hey, Officer!” he yelled after me. “Go fuck yourself!”
The second garage was on the comer of Dickens and Holt. The attendant was sitting in a small lighted office. He was reading a newspaper, his feet up on the desk, his transistor radio tuned to a rock station. Inside the garage proper, another man was hosing down an automobile. I hadn’t intended to startle the man in the office, but the radio was up very loud and he probably didn’t hear my approach.
“Excuse me,” I said, and he swung around in the battered swivel chair, his legs coming off the desk, his eyes widening, the newspaper dropping from his hands.
“There’s eighteen dollars in the cash drawer,” he said immediately. ‘Take it.”
“I’m a police officer,” I said, and showed him my shield.
“Phew,” he said. “You scared the shit out of me.” He was a dark-skinned man with a narrow face, brown eyes, a thin mustache over his lip. He was wearing a yellow windbreaker over a garishly printed sports shirt, brown corduroy trousers, brown high-topped workman’s shoes, white socks. He turned off the radio, and said, “What’s up?”