Hades

26

Seeing Ellis St. John's apartment broke the roll that Justin thought he was on. It was nothing like he suspected it would be.

Justin had expected sleek and modern all the way: lots of shiny glass and black marble, something cold and impersonal and hard-edged. But the Rockworth and Williams employee lived in a prewar twelve-story building overlooking Gramercy Park. The building was elegant and not at all flashy. And St. John's apartment was equally elegant and subdued, filled with a combination of antiques-American painted furniture, mostly of the colonial era and in muted colonial colors-and well-crafted, comfortable, contemporary furniture. The four rooms-living room, master bedroom, a second bedroom that doubled as a den, and a small space off the living room used as a dining area-were furnished sparsely and tastefully. The kitchen was the only thing that broke with the rest of the decor-it was all new, top-of-the-line, stainless-steel appliances, with expensive knives and utilitarian tools displayed on hooks and magnetic holders. St. John was not a man who decorated for show or convenience. The apartment obviously was done to cater to his own taste; his own comfort; and, judging by the well-used chopping blocks on the kitchen counter and the oiled cast iron pans, to his own skill level. As Justin began to poke around, the setting struck a chord: it reminded him of somewhere else, another apartment, another house, but he couldn't put his finger on it. He stopped for a moment, closed his eyes to concentrate and focus. Then he realized what it was: Ellis St. John's apartment looked a lot like Abby and Evan Harmon's home. It was furnished in much the same style, although probably not as expensively. Yes, he thought, surveying the scene, there are definite similarities. Same style of antiques, same kinds of chairs and sofas, same color scheme.

Justin took his time going through the apartment. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for, he just wanted to look. The only thing he was certain of was that Ellis St. John was not off embroiled in a family emergency, as Belinda Lambert had been told. If St. John was involved in the murder of Evan Harmon, Justin was now convinced that so too were some of his superiors at Rockworth and Williams. At the very least, Daniel French and his bosses were involved in some sort of cover-up, protecting St. John. Or protecting the firm's good name.

It's all about self-preservation, he thought again. Survival and safety of the corporate structure.

Having surveyed the overall layout of the apartment, Justin headed into the master bedroom to poke and probe more closely. The closets there were meticulously organized. Ellis's shirts were perfectly and evenly spaced so no sleeve touched another sleeve, and they were organized by color, going from white to gray to black to blue to green. That was the extent of the color range. If it was a patterned shirt, the dominant color was what dictated its placement. Ellis St. John had eight sport jackets, all solid-four of them black, two gray, and two blue. His ten suits were all pin-striped except for one light-gray summer suit and a dark-gray flannel winter one. The most daring of the pinstripes had a touch of wine red running through the black-on-black stripes. All shoes were highly polished and perfectly aligned on metal shoe racks, wooden shoe trees firmly in place. Justin couldn't be sure, but he'd be willing to bet a lot of money that each pair of shoes was separated by exactly half an inch of space. The guy was definitely compulsive and obsessive. There was not a speck of dust to be found. And there wasn't one single thing in the room that was not put in an exact and orderly spot. Justin turned from the closet, then stopped. He turned back, frowning. Something in there, an image, had jarred his memory in some way. An image tried to fight its way into his brain, but the image was diffuse, fractured, not connected to anything that Justin could come up with. Then the brief flash was gone almost as instantly as it had come into his head. And it didn't come back. He shrugged. He knew he couldn't dredge it back up. That's not the way these things worked. It would either be there or it wouldn't.

He moved on. There was a rack with luggage on it, in the farthest closet to the right in the bedroom. Ellis, of course, had a matching set, all made of light-green canvas and brown leather. There was room for four bags. The largest-a normal suitcase size and shape-was on the left, then a medium-size duffel bag. Then there was an empty space-large enough for an overnight bag-and then there was a matching briefcase with a shoulder strap. Justin stared at the space for the missing overnight bag. Ellis had been gone for four days now. Why had he taken only such a small bag? Planning on coming back-but something had suddenly come up? Like murder? Or had he left in that much of a hurry, knowing he had to travel light and move quickly?

Justin exhaled deeply, moved on to an antique tiger maple chest of drawers. As Justin was going through the drawers, he came upon a photo album. It was clearly not meant for public viewing, tucked as it was under a slew of men's underwear-briefs that matched his suits and jackets. Justin pulled the album out and began flipping through the pages. Nothing but photographs of Evan Harmon. Some were candid shots, in and out of an office. Some were newspaper and magazine clippings covering the last decade. Some were prints of Evan in his Hamptons house-and studying the background of those photos, Justin could now see how closely this apartment really did mirror the way Evan had lived. It was a disturbing selection of shots. Ellis St. John was not just obsessed with neatness and order, he was obsessed with Evan Harmon. The question was: Was he obsessed enough to kill him? Justin was now more certain than ever that St. John was mixed up in all this. But he still didn't have a clue how or, more important, why.

Was it jealousy? He realized that there wasn't one photo of Abby in the book. As Justin looked through it again, he saw that in some instances she had to have been cut out of particular pictures. Deeply sick. It was as if Ellis couldn't stand the thought of Evan with another partner, having intimate contact with anyone else. But Evan had been married the entire time he'd known Ellis St. John. The jealousy couldn't have been anything new. But could it have reached new heights? Could Evan have possibly begun an affair with Ellis? If he had, Justin thought, well, that would certainly spark something.

He thought back to Abby denying that her husband had homosexual affairs. She had been convincing. But was she in denial? Was she humiliated by the thought?

What the hell was going on with these people, these connections? These dots?

Justin thought of the famous scene from The Third Man. Orson Welles's great speech to Joseph Cotten atop the Ferris wheel. Welles's character, Harry Lime, justifying his black market dealing in bad penicillin, telling Holly Martins to look down at the small dots below. The dots were people but barely identifiable from so high up. Welles saying, Tell me the truth, if someone offered you a ton of money for every dot that stopped moving forever, would you really care? Harry Lime didn't care. There were too many dots, too many insignificant specks walking around, meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Justin Westwood did care, however. He realized he didn't much care about the grand scheme of things. Didn't really even believe there was a grand scheme.

But he did care about those specks.

Those dots.

He shut the photo album and put it back where he'd found it.

This latest scenario he'd been envisioning didn't feel right to Justin. He couldn't rule it out-it was certainly possible and logical-but it didn't fit with everything he knew about Evan Harmon. Evan was a star. Evan did not live by ordinary rules or even ordinary passions. He wouldn't have looked twice at Ellis St. John unless there was some way Evan could have used him.

Evan was a user. It's what Vince Ellerbe had said. He'd always been a user.

Was that it?

Had Evan used Ellis in some way? And had Ellis finally taken enough abuse from his idol?

Justin shook his head.

Absolutely no way of knowing.

Shit.

He kept prowling through the apartment.

Justin checked St. John's bathroom and medicine cabinet. It was well stocked and as neatly arranged as everything else in the place. It didn't feel as though St. John had been planning on staying away for a long time. Everything was too full, too orderly.

Something was off, but Justin just couldn't put his finger on it.

There were several items he'd been hoping to find but didn't: an address book (electronic or otherwise), a calendar, a BlackBerry or cell phone, hastily scribbled notes, or even interesting garbage. Justin hadn't really expected otherwise. That sort of thing happened only on TV or in Hitchcock movies. The hero finds a notepad and realizes that the piece of paper that had been on top had had an important address written on it, and so he deciphers the address from the indented marks left on the clean sheet of paper. Yeah, right. Never happens.

He went into the second bedroom and eyed a notepad left on the desk. Couldn't help himself. He looked for some crucial markings. Nothing. Whatever had been written on the pad, its secrets weren't going to be revealed now. Sometimes Justin wished life were a little more like Hitchcock movies. And a little less like Bergman movies.

This bedroom. It had been set up as a home office in addition to being a guest room. St. John's desktop computer was there, a sleek silver Dell, and various office supplies. Justin went to turn on the computer but suddenly realized the hard drive was gone. All that was left was the screen and the keyboard.

Justin wondered if Ellis had taken it with him. Hard to know. If Ellis had preplanned this whole thing and had information on his computer he knew he'd want to hide, then it was possible. Unlikely, though, the more Justin thought about it. If he was going away for a weekend, it's much more likely he'd take a laptop. If he wanted to have information disappear from his desktop machine, he could just erase it before he left. It didn't make sense that he'd take a difficult-to-carry part that wasn't useful on its own. No, much more likely that someone had been in this apartment before Justin and had taken it.

Justin jumped, startled, as he felt something graze his leg. He looked down-it was one of the cats. This one was solid gray with a fat stomach. He wondered if she was Esther or Binky. Didn't really matter. The cat started rubbing up against him and meowing plaintively. Justin decided that what mattered right now was that he should feed them both as long as he was here.

He went into the kitchen and saw three cat bowls on the floor. One was for water, two were food. One of the food bowls was empty. The other was a quarter full. He opened the door to what he assumed was a pantry. It was. He saw a couple of dozen cans of cat food in several even stacks. He took one can, split it in half and put it in the two bowls. He didn't bother to clean out the bowl that already had food in it. Let them party hearty, he thought. He put fresh water in the third dish and, as the gray cat began to pick at the new food, Justin went back to Ellis's den.

He stared at the desk where the computer had been. Then he noticed a closet off to the side of the room. He opened it, saw that it had been professionally organized with built-in shelves on the top and a double rack for hanging clothes-shirts and pants-below that. The shelves were filled with office supplies and remnants of things that didn't seem to belong anywhere else-empty gift boxes and ribbons and wrapping paper, some DVDs, framed photographs that didn't merit public display any longer. And Justin now also saw the other cat. This one was black-and-white and was on the floor of the closet. She wasn't moving or meowing. She couldn't. Her neck had been broken.

Justin stepped back. The question of whether or not Ellis St. John had taken his hard drive with him seemed to be answered. And the answer was no.

Someone had come into the apartment. Someone had taken the computer. And someone had killed Ellis St. John's cat.

He took out his cell phone, called Reggie. She started to make some comment about his date, but he cut her off, asked if she could get a fingerprint guy over to Gramercy Park. She said she thought she could. He told her to do it, said he'd fill her in in the morning.

He waited in the apartment, and someone from the FBI showed up less than half an hour later. Justin told him he could concentrate on the desk where the computer had been and on the closet in that room. The FBI guy did a quick check of the dead cat, said there was no trace of prints or blood. Justin nodded, not surprised, then he went and found a black plastic garbage bag under the kitchen sink, picked up the cat, and put it inside the bag.

The FBI agent told Justin he knew what to do, no need for him to stick around. He said he'd get the results to Agent Bokkenheuser and Agent Fletcher as soon as he had any.

Justin thanked him and left. Out on the street, a quarter of a block away from Ellis's building, there were three trash cans left out for pickup in the morning. He opened the lid of one of them, put the cat inside.

All he had to do now, before catching his train home, was walk the few blocks back to Belinda Lambert's apartment. Earlier, he had decided he would leave her keys-and Ellis's-with her doorman. There was no reason she couldn't return to her routine now. She'd just be feeding one cat, but she probably wouldn't even realize that for a while. She said one of the cats never came out to see her. So she could do her duty, blissfully ignorant of what had transpired.

But the theft of Ellis St. John's computer made him realize there was something else he needed.

So when he got back to Belinda's building, he dangled her keys in front of the doorman and said he had to go upstairs to return them. The doorman wanted to call Belinda first, but Justin grabbed his arm, told him he was a cop, and said he'd prefer to do things a little differently. The doorman nodded, waved his hands to show that it was no problem whatsoever.

Upstairs, Justin opened Belinda's front door. She was still sacked out on the couch. It didn't look as if she'd budged so much as an inch. And he wasn't shocked to find out that she snored.

She didn't stir as he moved around her apartment, and it took him only a couple of minutes to find Belinda's BlackBerry and slip it into his jacket pocket. If he were a praying man, he would have thanked someone or something for giving Belinda Lambert a big mouth.

Before leaving, Justin looked at the note he'd left for her earlier. He picked it up, crumpled it in his hand. There was no need for her to know that anything had happened now. So he wrote a new one. This one just said, "Thanks."

Back on the street, as he began heading toward Penn Station, he thought about the cat that had been killed. It saddened him and, as always, he was surprised that he'd become inured to the death of human beings but not to the killing of an animal. He supposed it was because animals were, for the most part, innocent. And people were, for the most part, anything but innocent. And he thought about how the murder of a human being almost always had a purpose. A twisted purpose, but there was an underlying reason, whether it was jealousy or greed or power. Murder was always a distorted means to a desperate end. But killing an animal. There was no purpose, no means, no end. To hurt a little animal meant that all you had to be was one sick, mean son of a bitch.

He thought about how he'd tossed the cat into the garbage can on the street.

Not much of a burial, Justin decided, not for something that only gave pleasure to people.

On the other hand, he thought, it served its purpose as well as most.