The Judge

CHAPTER 5

I have been calling Lenore’s apartment all evening with no success. Sarah is now asleep in her bedroom and I while away the time going over some files from the office. Ten minutes later I pick up the phone and have one of those extrasensory experiences that occur once in an eon. I go to dial and there is a voice on the other end. It is Lenore.

“Mental telepathy,” I tell her. I look at my watch. It’s after ten. “You must be burning the oil,” I add.

“Clearing the cobwebs from my life,” she tells me. Her voice is thick with a nasal quality. I’m wondering if she has a cold.

“I was calling to find out if you know where Tony Arguillo is. I’ve been leaving messages on his phone for two days. He isn’t returning my calls.” I don’t tell her about my meeting with Gus Lano, or the icy information from Leo Kerns, the reasons I have to talk with Tony.

“I haven’t a clue,” she says. “I haven’t seen him since our meeting in your office.”

There follows that awkward kind of silence on the line-the pause that might normally accompany news of a death in the family.

“Your turn,” I say.

“I need to talk to somebody,” she tells me. “If just a friendly voice.”

“Why? What’s the matter?”

“I’ve been fired.”

A half hour later there is a quiet knock on my door. When I open it, Lenore is standing on the porch, with hair as disheveled as I can ever imagine hers becoming. There is a slight odor of alcohol as she says, “Hello.” She looks like a smoldering Mount Saint Helens after the main explosion, a great deal of psychic smoke with the fire mostly out.

I usher her in and offer her coffee or a drink.

“What have you got?”

In her current state hydrochloric acid is probably too mild. I lead her to the kitchen and throw open the cabinet door so she can take her pick.

“You weren’t surprised?” she says. “By the news of my demise?”

“A little,” I tell her. “But then I figured you and Kline for different management styles.”

She laughs. “A graceful way to put it. Always the diplomat.”

“Now you’re going to tell me you didn’t see it coming,” I say.

“I saw it,” she says. “It’s just that you’re always most surprised by your own obituary.” It’s the kind of bravado that covers a lot of hurt. She has a few choice words for her former employer, but most of the invective seems gone, consumed, I suspect, in some earlier heat. I am wondering who among her cadre of friends got most of this, maybe over drinks after leaving the office.

She takes Johnnie Walker by the neck in one hand, and pours half a glass into a large tumbler, talking to me all the while, like “who’s measuring.” She uses no water or ice to cut this. Lenore doesn’t want to remember any of this tomorrow.

“So tell me what happened. Another argument?”

She shakes her head and sniffles just a little. “Uh-uh. He’s too calculating for that. He wanted to think about it, and plan it. Savor the moment,” she says.

“I get back from court in the afternoon, about four-thirty, and my office door is open.” She takes a long drink from the glass and coughs a little, like some kid after his first drag on a cigarette.

“This is awful.”

“You picked it.”

“Got any wine?” Lenore is not a serious drinker. She is looking for pain medication, something to add to the buzz she is already feeling.

“You can get just as drunk on that.”

“But wine takes longer, and I’ve got a ten-hanky story,” she says.

I rummage through my cupboard and come up with a couple of bottles.

“The Gewurtz,” she says.

“Remind me never to seduce you with liquor,” I tell her.

“If you can’t take the time to do it right, you shouldn’t do it at all,” she says.

“Anyway, you get back from court and your office door is open.” I pick up the point while I look for a corkscrew.

“Yeah. As I was saying. My office door is open. I remember closing it before I left. There’s a deputy sheriff parked in a chair outside, reading the paper. I thought maybe he was a witness in a case waiting to be interviewed.”

I give her a nod. Logical conclusion. I pop the cork and pour her a glass.

“Then before I can get there I hear noises in my office, somebody rummaging around. You know, I’m like, what the hell? Then he stops me.”

“Who?”

“The deputy,” she says. “He puts his hand out and grabs my arm like he’s going to tackle me if I try to enter my own office. He demands identification. So I show him my I.D. The little folder,” she says.

This is something that looks like a passport, and serves for that purpose at crime scenes, issued with a picture on it by the prosecutor’s office to each of its deputies, a ticket to the law enforcement fraternity.

“He looks at it, then puts it in his pocket,” she says.

I agree with her that there is a message in this.

“Yes, well. I tell him I want it back. He tells me to take a seat. I ask him what the hell’s going on, and he doesn’t answer.

“Mind you, while this is going on somebody’s inside my office going through my desk drawers. I can hear the rustle of papers, voices inside, so I’m arguing with the cop outside in the hallway. And I’m getting pretty pushy.”

Visions of Lenore, all one hundred twenty pounds, taking on some burly deputy.

“Three guesses,” I tell her, “and the first two don’t count. Kline’s inside with a flashlight and picks working the tumblers on your desk drawer?” I say.

She gives me a nod like “damn right.”

“He’s got that woman with him. Wendy. The pink slip dispenser. Someone he brought from the outside. They worked together at that association before he was elected.” She makes the word association sound like something dirty.

“Anyway, she’s standing there taking notes on a little pad, apparently taking inventory of everything in my office. I ask him what the hell’s going on.”

Lenore sips her wine. “This is good.”

“I’ll break out the cheese and we can do the wine tasting later,” I tell her.

She gives me a pain-in-the-ass expression.

“Anyway, he wants to know where all my notes are in the Acosta case. I tell him everything was in the file, that I gave it to him.”

She tells me that for some reason he doesn’t believe this.

“At that point I start getting really pissed. I guess I said some things,” she says.

She takes a drink, and I am left to use my own imagination to fill in the blanks, what part of her mind she no doubt gave to Kline at this point.

She swallows, then looks at me. “Then he tells me I’m fired.” The look on her face imparts only a small measure of the shock she says came with this news.

“I ask him why, and he tells me he’s been advised by the County Counsel’s office not to state the grounds, that I’ll be getting a letter, but that I’m terminated effective at five o’clock today. No explanation,” she says. “Can you believe it?”

The sorry fact is that I can. It is a measure of job security in the modern workplace. We discuss Lenore’s recourse, which takes all of a nanosecond. As part of management she is what is called a “pleasure appointment,” exempt from civil service protection. Hired and fired at the pleasure of the elected district attorney. Kline does not even require cause to fire her. Anything that is not grounded in discrimination will do. She tells me she has no intention of fighting it, that taking the long view, it is probably for the best. “Time to strike out on my own,” she says.

I ask her about prospects, clients or money. She has neither.

“I could give you Tony as a client,” I tell her.

“Yeah, right. Just what I need.”

I think perhaps this is a lot of booze talking, that when she considers the sum of her financial obligations around payday, she may have other thoughts.

“Did you ever figure out what Kline wanted from the Acosta file? What it was he thought was missing?” I am thinking maybe this has something to do with her firing.

“With that one, God only knows,” she says.

“You said he asked about your notes?”

She gives me a face that is a question mark. She doesn’t have a clue.

“What happened then?”

“High drama,” she says. “He has Wendy hand me a cardboard box filled with personal items they’ve taken from my office and Kline tells the deputy to escort me from the building. Like I’ve committed some crime,” she says.

Lenore is walking, pacing across my kitchen, straggly hair, drink in hand, steam seeming to rise from her body as she revisits the image in her mind.

“I never thought I’d end up pulling for some slime like Acosta,” she says.

“The enemy of my enemy,” I tell her.

“Exactly. Two days ago I wouldn’t have given him a second thought, or two cents for his chances.” She’s talking about Acosta.

“And now he’s a knight on a charging steed,” I tell her.

“I wouldn’t go so far as that. But I think he may kick some ass. At least his lawyers will.”

“You think Kline’s that bad in court?”

“That,” she says, “and the fact that his evidence has now suddenly turned to shit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Right after Kline grabbed the file off my desk and announced to the world that he was going to do this thing himself, the audio techs call. The wire. The one worn by Hall that night. It didn’t work.” This brings the only smile she has exhibited since arriving at my house, something sinister that does not rest well on Lenore’s face. “They don’t know if it simply malfunctioned, or if somebody turned it off.”

“Turned it off?”

She gives me a look that says “think about it.” “Acosta. Lano and the association. If you sandbagged the judge. .” She leaves me to finish the thought; that if the cops set the Coconut up, they would not produce the audiotape that might exonerate him.

“They’d be better off going one-on-one,” says Lenore. “Hall’s word against his.”

“There was nothing on the tape?” I ask.

“Nothing beyond Acosta’s husky voice and a somewhat salacious hello from Hall. Not exactly incriminating,” says Lenore. “After that it all goes buzzy.”

I can feel my heart sag in my chest. Twenty more years of the Coconut on the bench.

“So it’s his word against hers?” I say.

She nods.

“It may be enough. She seemed as if she would come across well on the stand.” A wishful thought on my part.

Lenore waffles one hand at the wrist, like it could go either way.

“Before I was escorted from the premises I heard rumors,” she says. “Talk of a deal.”

“God. Don’t tell me.”

“Some reduced infraction,” she says, “but only on condition that he resign from the bench.”

I sigh like a man before a firing squad that’s just shot blanks.

“He rejected the offer,” she says, “out of hand. Some story that he was visiting the witness on judicial business.”

“That’s his defense?” I say. “What was this business? A major mattress inspection? I can hear him on the stand. ‘I was merely lying on top of the woman to see if we could punch a hole in a Posturepedic.’”

Lenore does not laugh. “You have to admit, it’s a little strange. The judge is pressing for information of police misconduct and gets nailed in a Vice sting. Before they can get him to trial, the evidence turns sour.”

“So what are you thinking? A shot across his bow. They want to warn him off.”

“Who knows? All we know now is that it comes down to a credibility contest. Who the jury believes,” says Lenore. “With removal from the bench as the bottom line.”

She tells me that Kline is getting pressure from the Commission on Judicial Accountability, the judge’s answer to the Congressional Ethics Committee. I won’t tell what you’re doing under your robe if you don’t tell what I’m doing under mine.

“They want Acosta off the bench,” she says.

If there’s anything more sanctimonious than a reformed hooker, it’s a lawyer turned judge.

“Judicial hari kari,” I say.

“You got it. They don’t want a messy public hearing before the State Supreme Court,” says Lenore. “As they see it, it would be better if he fell on his own sword.”

“I can imagine.”

As we talk a beeper goes off in her purse. She puts the glass down and fishes around among hairbrushes and hankies until she finds the little black beast.

“The only thing they didn’t get,” she tells me. Her way of informing me this beeper belongs to the state.

She looks at the number displayed on the LED readout.

“The interest of all your affections,” she says.

I give her a quizzical look.

“Tony’s cellular number.”

“Tell him I want to talk to him.”

As I say this, Lenore makes it, somewhat unsteadily, to the wall-mounted phone by the kitchen door. I bring her a stool in the interest of safety, and she dials. She waits several seconds, and then: “It’s me.”

It is all she says. The voice on the other end takes over. I assume this is Tony. It is a one-sided conversation, and as I watch, Lenore’s face is transformed through a dozen aspects: from abject indifference to keen interest, like the phases of the moon.

“Where are you now?” she says.

“Tell him I want to talk to him.” I’m trying to get her attention, but she is riveted by whatever is being said at the other end.

Lenore ignores me, and makes a note on a pad hanging on the wall.

“How did it happen?”

“Who else is there?” A momentary pause.

“Anyone from the D.A.’s office?” She fires staccato questions without time for much reply, like whoever is at the other end doesn’t know much.

“Any idea when it happened?” There is a long pause here. The look on Lenore’s face is unadulterated bewilderment.

“Any witnesses?” There is some lengthy explanation here, but Lenore takes no notes.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” she says, and hangs up.

At this moment she is not looking at me as much as through me, to some distant point in another world.

“What’s wrong? Tony?” I ask.

She nods, but does not answer.

“What is it?”

“Brittany Hall,” she says. It is as if she were in a trance, mesmerized by whatever it is she has heard on the phone. She gazes in a blank stare at the wall and speaks.

“They found her body an hour ago in a Dumpster,” she says. “Behind the D.A.’s office.”

When we pull up to the curb there are a half dozen police cars parked in their usual fashion, which is any way they like to leave them, light bars blazing blue and red. A handful of vagrants stand outside the yellow tape that closes off the entrance to the alley behind Hamilton Street. In any other neighborhood in town, this activity, the commotion of cops, would draw a crowd of home owners and other residents. But here, across from the courthouse in the middle of the night, the only interested parties look like refugees from a soup kitchen, a few homeless bingers who have been evicted from the alley, who stand shivering in threadbare blankets and other discards from the Goodwill.

Inside the tape is a smaller throng of men and one woman in uniform. I recognize one of the Homicide dicks. They must have plucked him from his bed. He is wearing exercise pants and a gray sweatshirt that looks like something from a Knute Rockne movie.

“You better let me do the talking.” Lenore does sign language as she speaks to me, the kind of gestures you expect from someone who gets giddy with a couple of drinks. I am here for that very reason. In the moments after Tony’s phone call I seized her keys and made arrangements with a woman on my block, a friend and neighbor, to catch a few winks on my couch while Sarah sleeps upstairs. I was not about to let Lenore drive. Right now Kline would like nothing more than to see her arrested for drunk driving.

I can see Tony Arguillo milling a hundred feet down the alley. Well inside the familiar yellow ribbon, he is beyond earshot unless we want to make a scene.

“Stick close,” she says. And before I can move around the car, I hear the click of her heels on the street as she crosses over. I am trailing in her wake, trying to catch up so that she doesn’t get hit by a car. Without her prosecutor’s I.D., Lenore is banking on the fact that the cops won’t know she has been fired. That news may take at least a day to trickle down to the street.

Before I can catch her, she cozies up to one of the uniforms at the tape.

“Where’s Officer Arguillo?” Her best command voice under the circumstances, and not much slurring.

A familiar face, the guy doesn’t look too closely, or smell her breath. Instead she gets the perennial cop’s shrug. Lenore takes this as the signal of admission, and before the man in blue can say a word she is under the tape. For a moment he looks as though he might challenge her, then gives it up. Why screw with authority?

“He’s with me,” she says, and grabs me by the coat sleeve.

A second later I find myself tripping toward the crime scene, following a woman who, if not legally drunk, is at least staggering under false colors.

Thirty feet down the alley Tony is chewing the fat with another cop. Seeing us, he stops talking and separates himself from his buddy.

He seems a bundle of nervous gestures tonight, over-the-shoulder glances, anxious looks at the other cops down the alley closer to the garbage bin, as if he knows that if he is caught here talking to us his ass is grass. Though he shakes my hand and says hello, Arguillo seems put off seeing me here, his own lawyer.

“I thought you were coming alone.” He says this to Lenore, up close, but I can hear it.

“Paul wanted to drive,” she says. She asks him who’s heading up the investigation. He gives her a name I do not recognize, and motions down the alley to where some guys dressed in overalls are pawing through mounds of garbage by the handful.

“Has Kline been around?” says Lenore. Self-preservation. First things first.

“They have a call out. Ordinarily they wouldn’t bother,” says Tony. “But seeing as she was a witness in a case. They caught him somewhere on the road to San Francisco for a meeting tomorrow morning. Word is, he’s on his way back.”

“Then we don’t have much time,” says Lenore. “What happened?” she presses.

“Maybe we should talk over there.” He points to the other side of the tape.

“We’re not going to ogle the body,” says Lenore. “Just tell us what happened and we’ll get out of here. Who found the body?”

“Some vagrant, less than an hour ago. He flagged down a squad car driving by.”

Tony tells us that he wasted no time in calling Lenore, the first call he placed from his own squad car after picking up the computer signal that the body had been found. Squad cars now use computer transmissions to cut down on the number of eavesdroppers in delicate calls.

Two cops in overalls have drawn the less desirable duty. They are inside the Dumpster, passing items out as others sort through piles of trash they have assembled in the alley. Every few seconds I can see a flash of light from a strobe inside the bin, pictures being taken to preserve what might be evidence. There are two detectives huddled over a mass of bumps covered by a white sheet. There are no obvious signs of blood.

“Did he see anything? This vagrant?” Lenore asks.

“Like who dumped the body?” says Tony. He shakes his head. “Our man was too far into a paper bag and the bottle inside of it to notice. Cars come and go in the alley. He says he doesn’t pay any attention.”

“Maybe he’s afraid,” says Lenore.

“This guy’s too far gone for fear.”

“How did he find her?” says Lenore.

“You kiddin’?” Tony gives her a sideways glance. “A metal Dumpster, roof over your head, and four walls. Street of dreams. Half a dozen bums sleep in there on any given night. If a truck picks it up and dumps it that day, the place is Triple A approved.”

“Only today it wasn’t empty?” I say.

“No.” Tony eyes me warily. I think perhaps he has been counseled by Gus Lano so that I am now persona non grata, no longer to be trusted.

“He found the body just dumped in there? Must have been quite a shock,” I say.

“It was wrapped.” Tony says this as one would describe a tuna sandwich in a lunch box. “Rolled up in a blanket. They pore through the shit like rodents.” He’s talking about the homeless men who make this particular metal box home.

“He thought maybe he found some treasure when he saw the blanket,” says Tony. “We’re lucky he didn’t sleep with her for a couple of nights before he called us.” Tony does not think much of the underclass.

“How did she die?” asks Lenore.

“Could be strangulation. Some marks on the throat. The M.E. hasn’t made a call yet. She wasn’t exactly overdressed,” he says.

“What do you mean?”

“She was wearing a pair of panties and a cotton top. Had a small towel wrapped around her head like a turban.”

“Washing her hair, perhaps?” says Lenore. “Maybe she was going out, or getting ready for bed.”

Arguillo raises an eyebrow, a little tilt of the head, as if to say, “Read into this whatever you want.”

“Any evidence of sexual assault?” says Lenore.

“Your guess,” he says. “Half-naked woman, dumped in a trash bin, young, good-looking. I wouldn’t put it out of my mind,” he tells us. “But we’ll have to wait for the M.E.,” he says.

He motions for her to come a little closer, something private.

“If you have a second I wanna talk to you alone,” he tells Lenore. He motions her to one side of the alley, just out of earshot, where they talk. This exchange seems to take a while, and it is not a monologue by Tony. At one point there is a clear display of some surprise by Lenore. This, followed with more animated gestures by Tony and then raised voices that I can almost hear, until they both look in my direction. Finally Lenore seems to end this, walking away, leaving Tony standing there.

When Lenore comes back her face is more ashen. I am thinking that perhaps Tony has imparted a few more grisly details of death, the sort of particulars in a criminal case that you don’t want floating in the public pool of perceptions.

“There’s nothing more he can tell us right now.” For Lenore this is a little white lie. She tells me it’s time for us to go.

“I wanted to give you the heads-up,” says Tony, following.

“Right,” says Lenore.

“I thought maybe you’d be handling the case,” he says.

“I doubt it,” she says. Lenore hasn’t told him she’s been fired. More deception.

Tony starts to walk us toward the tape and my car.

“I knew you’d be interested,” he says. “You worked with her, in the Acosta thing. It’s too bad. She was a good kid.” Tony starts to turn a little teary. “We’ll get whoever did this. She knew a lotta guys on the force. They’ll be out for blood, turn over every stone.” This is becoming Tony’s mantra. One more reminder that cops take care of their own.

The details of Tony’s face are suddenly lost in the glare of headlights on high beam, a car nosing into the alley at the other end, large and dark.

“I’ll keep you posted,” he says, moving down the alley now, back toward the fold.

“Hey. We need to talk,” I tell him.

“Yeah. Later.”

“It’s time we should be getting along,” says Lenore. She’s at my sleeve again, retreating to the tape, as I see the tall, slender silhouette exit from the rear of the vehicle, with uniforms trailing behind, it as though on the tail of a comet: Coleman Kline.

“There’s something I have to see,” she says. “Turn here.”

I’m on my way home and Lenore wants to take a detour. It’s late and I have Sarah. I tell her this, but she insists that it will take only a minute. I follow directions down Harris, away from the downtown area toward the interstate.

I ask her what it was that she and Tony discussed.

“I can’t say right now,” she tells me.

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see. Make a left at the next intersection.”

I do as I’m told. She’s checking the painted addresses on the curb as I drive, and a few seconds later she has me pull over under an aging elm, massive and looming, home to a million crows. Their saturation bombing of the street gives it a dalmatian-like quality.

It is one of those older neighborhoods, with turn-of-the-century homes, most of which have seen better days, elevated for the floods that once inundated the city each year, pilings concealed behind a facade of rotting latticework. There are a few apartments and a four-plex or two mixed in, built during the late sixties and early seventies, when the city made a brief attempt at renaissance, before crime and white flight nailed a stake through the heart of urban America.

Three men or boys, I cannot tell which, are at the corner, hoods up, doing various renditions of the pimp roll, talking to someone in a car, engine running with parking lights, the commerce of the night.

Before I can say a word Lenore’s door is open.

“Where are you going?”

Her only response is a slammed car door, as she heads across the street. Left with the accomplished fact, there is nothing I can do but follow. By the time I lock the car, Lenore has disappeared into a dark passage up a narrow walkway, the ground floor of one of the four-plexes. If I hadn’t turned to look in time I would have lost her completely. As it is, I follow her across the street.

In the dark, deep in the bush of somebody’s front yard, I cannot see her, but I can hear her fumbling in her purse, the rattle of keys.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Shhh.”

“Who lives here?”

“Put a cork in it.”

Then, suddenly, a faint beam of light, like Tinkerbell in an inkwell. Lenore has found what she was looking for, a small penlight on her key ring. I approach down the walkway.

“I hope this is a good friend,” I tell her. I glance at my watch, with its luminous dials. It is nearly one A.M.

Lenore is working the handle of the front door. It is not until I see the handkerchief lining her hand that my apprehension runs to fear. The sobriety of the moment settles on me like white-hot phosphorus, and as the door latch clicks, dark intuition tells me who lives here.

In a neighborhood like this, that anyone would leave their door unlocked is a curiosity on the order of fire eating and sword swallowing.

“We’re in luck,” she says.

Not any kind that I would recognize.

Lenore slips through the door and pulls me in after her.

“We shouldn’t be here,” I tell her.

More shushing, a finger to her lips as she closes the door, à la handkerchief. I have visions of sirens and red lights.

“It can’t take them long to figure this out,” I tell her.

“We won’t be here long.”

“We shouldn’t be here at all.”

“Then go sit in the car,” she says. With this I am left in darkness as Lenore moves and takes the dim illumination of the penlight with her.

In an instant, in the dark, I am playing bumper cars with her behind.

“Keep your hands in your pockets,” she whispers.

“I wasn’t getting fresh. Honest.”

“I’m worried about fingerprints,” she says.

“Right.”

I am wondering about the cutting-edge frontiers of science, and whether they can get DNA footprints off the leather soles of my shoes. Though in this place I need not worry. There is so much shit on the floor that if I work it right, I will not have to step on it.

It is one of the immutable rules of dating, learned in pubescence: the better looking the woman, the messier her apartment. This is one of those places where you might eat off the floor, only because the dishes are dirtier.

There is a stream of light through windows off the street in the front.

In this I can see papers strewn across the kitchen floor and what looks like the remnants of someone’s meal, part of a yogurt container spilled across them waiting for a culture to take hold. The sink is filled with dishes, pots, and pans, more clutter than the average junkyard. One of the chairs is turned catawamptious, blocking the way through the kitchen, so we take the course of least resistance, down the hall toward what I assume is the living room.

Here there is not just mess, but destruction.

A picture in its frame is on the floor. This appears to have been pulled from the wall, its glass shattered, the scarred and bent hanger remaining. As I turn into the living room I see dirt on the carpet near a metal-and-glass coffee table, some potting soil from an indoor plant, the greenery on the floor near another, larger dark stain that has settled into the carpet like oil on sand.

I am thinking that clutter is one thing, this borders on the ridiculous, when it settles on me that what I am seeing is not the usual random chaos of life. There is some desperate design to all of this. Here, in Brittany Hall’s own home, is the place of her death.

It takes several seconds before Lenore can move. Then finally, she walks around the debris. Her flashlight catches the glint of metal, something gold, partially covered in potting soil on the floor. She takes her flashlight close for a better look. In the light I can see that the stain on the carpet is glistening moist, and red, matched by a similar flow that has not yet entirely congealed on the sharp metal corner of the coffee table. In an hour, maybe less, there will be evidence techs crawling over this place like locusts. I tell Lenore this.

“Right,” she says. “I had a hunch it happened here.”

“Clairvoyance is a wonderful thing,” I tell her. “Now let’s go.”

“See if there’s anything down the hallway,” she says.

“I think we should go.”

“Just take a look. Whoever did this is long gone,” she says.

It is easier to comply, and less likely to attract the attention of a neighbor, than to argue with her. So I do it.

The hall is dark, lit only by a small night-light plugged into an outlet near the floor. There are two open doors at the end, one on each side, with a bathroom in between through which some light shines. I step quickly but carefully down the hall.

Halfway down there’s a door open about an inch. I peer around and look inside through the open crack, just enough to light a shelf high on the wall. It’s a closet of some kind, dark and small. I leave it and move on.

The first room I look in faces on the street at the front of the apartment. It appears to be Hall’s bedroom. The bed is stripped to the sheets, but except for the tossed pillows and the missing blanket, everything here seems in its place. There’s a closet in the corner, the door closed.

I turn to look at the other room across the hall. This is a different story. There is another, smaller bed, the clutter of a little child. There are dolls and the plastic parts of toys, little snap-on things a child can build with, and a set of wooden blocks. A pink coverlet is on the bed. A little girl’s room. But there is no sign of her. I ease around to check the other side of the bed. No one.

I’m back down the hall. Lenore is still canvassing the living room, stepping carefully to avoid the evidence.

“I didn’t know she had a kid.”

“Little girl,” she says.

“Where is she?”

“Being baby-sat,” she says. “Grandparents.”

“How do you know?”

“Saw a note in the kitchen.”

She’s been nosing around while I’ve been down the hall.

“Fine. Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

“Back out the way we came,” she tells me. “Check to make sure we didn’t touch anything.”

As I start to go back suddenly I am without light. Lenore has gone the other way, toward the dining room and the kitchen beyond.

“Where are you going?”

“Meet you at the door,” she says.

Arguing with Lenore is fruitless. I figure anything that will get us to the front door and back to the car in a hurry is fine by me. I retrace my steps. This takes me all of three seconds. When I get to the kitchen I see Lenore, who has barely made it through the door at the opposite end. She is studying a large calendar hanging on the wall just inside the door, her back to me.

“Let’s go.” My voice jogs her from some reverie. In a moment such as this it is like Lenore to be checking the victim’s social calendar.

She does a delicate dance over the yogurt, avoiding the blitz of papers, and puts her hankied hand on the back of the chair that is blocking the way. She slides this gently out of the way and then repositions it as accurately as she can. With this, I’m to the door and out, Lenore right behind me. She closes it and we hoof it to the street and my car on the other side. Once inside, I waste no time putting two blocks behind us, before I utter a word.

“If any of the neighbors saw us I just hope to hell they have a good clock,” I tell her. Two people skulking about in the apartment of a murder victim while her body lies in an alley surrounded by the cops.

Then the question that is gnawing at my mind: “What the hell was that all about?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean going to her apartment like that?”

“Tony had a suspicion she might have been killed where she lived,” she says.

“Then Tony should have checked,” I tell her.

“They were searching records to see where she lived when he called me on the cellular. DMV showed an old address,” she says.

“How did you know where she lived?”

“It was in the file the day I interviewed her in the office.” Mind like a steel trap.

“And you didn’t tell them?”

“I don’t work for those people anymore.” As she says this she smiles, and we both laugh, just a little, a cathartic release.

She speculates a little about the manner of death, evidence of a struggle, whether Hall died as a result of a fall against the table or some other trauma.

“Why would anybody move the body?” I say.

“Who can say?”

If she was killed in her own apartment, and the evidence of death is left there, what purpose is served by moving her? It would seem that there is more risk involved than advantage.

“And why wasn’t the door locked?”

“Some people are trusting,” says Lenore.

“A woman living alone?”

She gives me a look that is filled with concession.

“I’ll do you one better,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“Why would she be meeting a man she was about to testify against in a criminal case?”

I give her a look, all question marks.

“On her calendar,” says Lenore, “there’s a note. She had a scheduled appointment, to meet Acosta at four o’clock this afternoon.”