Night kills

51

A white van with the peel-off magnetic sign of a painting company was parked in front of the building the new Madeline had lived in. Peel-off signs. Sometimes Quinn thought they'd been invented especially for the convenience of criminals.

Quinn and Fedderman decided not to bother with the super. They entered the building, pushed the elevator's "up" button, and didn't see a soul on their ascent to Madeline's floor.

They'd guessed right. The door down the hall that was propped open was to the new Madeline's unit. Quinn went in first. A rug-sized canvas drop cloth covered most of the living room floor. A guy in paint-splattered white coveralls was perched on the next-to-top step of an aluminum stepladder, using a brush to apply paint where ceiling and wall met. There was a pleasant but nose-tingling smell emanating from whatever kind of paint he was using. The new color was peach. Quinn would have preferred the previous white.

"Help you?" a woman's voice asked.

A young woman wearing white coveralls and a painter's cap stuck on top of a lot of carrot-colored hair came in from the kitchen. She was carrying a plastic bucket of spackling compound and a small trowel that looked as if it'd had a lot of use.

Quinn and Fedderman showed both painters their shields. They seemed satisfied. The one on the ladder set back to work. The woman was probably the boss.

"We want to take another look around the apartment," Quinn said.

"For clues?" Carrot top couldn't say it without smiling.

"Before you paint over them," Fedderman said.

She raised red eyebrows. "Was a crime committed here?"

"We don't know for sure where the murder took place," Quinn said. "That's what the clues would be about." There was no point in telling her the crime didn't occur in the apartment. Let her be impressed.

She didn't seem impressed.

"Did somebody say murder?" the painter on the ladder asked. Apparently he wasn't up on the news.

"We're from Homicide," Fedderman said. "Murder it is."

"Oh, great!" the man said. "I hope we didn't paint over any fingerprints."

"Not to worry," Quinn told him. "That part of the investigation's already been done."

"By the crime scene unit?"

"You must watch TV," Fedderman said.

"Law amp; Order," the man said.

"We're for that," Quinn said.

"Well, you're in luck," the woman said. "We just got started. This is the only room we've worked in. That shouldn't matter much, should it? I mean, aren't most murders committed in the bedroom or kitchen? Nobody ever gets killed in the living room."

"Depends on what's on TV," Fedderman said.

"Football," the woman said. "Football on TV brings out the violence in men."

"Oprah, too, sometimes," Fedderman said.

The woman laughed. "You gotta be jesting. Everybody likes Oprah. Like with Raymond."

"You must sniff a lotta paint fumes," Fedderman said.

"We'll take a look around," Quinn said. "Thanks." He thought the redheaded woman might be about to get genuinely angry at Fedderman. He'd seen it before with Oprah.

The apartment was small, so there wasn't much to look at, especially considering they'd been there before. Quinn took the bathroom, while Fedderman began in the bedroom.

The medicine chest had been cleaned out, as had the small closet built into the wall, where towels and other bathroom supplies had been stored. Even the old tub looked as if it had been cleaned. The plastic plates were removed from the switches and sockets. The painters had been there, preparing. A clear plastic shower curtain lay neatly folded beneath the washbasin. Quinn used it to pad his knee as he knelt down and craned his neck so he could look at the underside of the porcelain basin.

Nothing there but plumbing.

He took a last look around, then went into the bedroom to join Fedderman.

It had been cleaned out, like the bathroom. Whatever the new Madeline had left behind had been either sold, stolen, or hauled away. The bed had been stripped down to the mattress and box springs.

"Look under the bed, Feds?"

"I always peek under the bed," Fedderman said. "Even at home."

Fedderman walked over to the closet and opened the door. It was as empty as they'd seen it last time. The two or three tangled wire hangers seemed to be dangling in the same pattern as before, like a wire mobile. Cops remembered things like that. Patterns.

Fedderman started to close the closet door.

"Wait a minute," Quinn said, staring into the empty closet.

The painted, thin piece of plywood on the closet's back wall, maybe eighteen inches square, that allowed access to the bathroom plumbing behind the tub didn't look quite the same. Something…

"Was that access panel slightly crooked like that?" Quinn asked.

Fedderman stared at it. "No." An ancient line of paint was even visible halfway along one edge. "Somebody's been in there and didn't put the panel back quite straight. Maybe because they were in a hurry."

"Or maybe we got us a careless plumber," Quinn said.

He bent down, listening to the cartilage in his knees crackle. There was a fine dusting of white powder on the closet's bare wood floor near the access panel. Some of the powder had gone down into the cracks between the boards.

Fedderman leaned close and looked over Quinn's shoulder.

"Wanna bet what that is?" he said. Plumbing access panels were a common place for drug addicts to conceal their stash. They didn't seem to know that's where narcs looked immediately after examining the inside of the toilet tank.

Quinn traced his fingertip through the film of powder, then touched his finger to his tongue, ran it across his gums beneath his lower front teeth.

"Coke," he said. "High quality."

Fedderman straightened up. "So the new Madeline is a user. She must have left her stash when she moved out, then came back for it."

"Maybe because she had help moving," Quinn said.

"And vacated the place in a hurry. When she got feeling needy, she had to come back for her stash. Got careless, somehow punctured a Baggie or dropped some of the product while she was snorting."

"In a hurry and shaky," Quinn said, picturing it.

"Or maybe we've got it wrong," Fedderman said. "Maybe she came back to hide something behind the panel."

Quinn didn't think that was likely, but it was possible. Most of these old access panels stayed just as they were for years.

While he was kneeling, he took a closer look at the wooden access panel. It was fastened to the wall by large screws at each corner. There was no paint in the slots, and the screws looked loose. A few flakes of paint lay on the floor beneath them. Obviously somebody had been at the panel recently.

"Go see if you can borrow a screwdriver from the painters, Feds."

"On my way."

When Fedderman had left the bedroom, Quinn gathered his strength and stood up on his noisy, wobbly knees. The leg that had taken a bullet didn't feel any more unsteady than the other leg. Time had healed. He felt light-headed for a moment. Feeling my age. Nothing good about that.

"Regular or Phillips?" Fedderman called from the living room.

"Bring both," Quinn called back.

He didn't feel like kneeling again to reexamine the screws.

The new Madeline hadn't hidden anything behind the access panel in the back closet wall. When Quinn removed the plywood panel he found only the bathtub plumbing, and some more white powder on the floor. The spaces between the floorboards were wider there, and quite a bit of the powder had fallen down into them.

It was easy to see what had happened. There was a bent nail sticking out of the right side of the access opening. It was sharply pointed and had traces of white powder on it. Quinn pointed it out to Fedderman.

"She must have snagged the plastic pouch her coke was in and spilled some of it."

"You can see where she tried to scoop it up and put it back in the bag. A lot of it went down into the floor."

"Better than up her nose," Quinn said.

Quinn held the panel flat against the wall and began replacing the screws.

When he straightened up and backed awkwardly out of the closet, he said, "We know she's a user. And since she lost a lot of her stash here, she'll probably need more soon."

"Narcotics is liable to pick her up."

"We don't want that," Quinn said.

"So we gotta make sure she doesn't get nailed on a drug charge." Fedderman shook his head. "Some police work. The new Madeline is a pain in the ass."

"If we think she is," Quinn said, "imagine what a pain in the ass she must be to E-Bliss. It can't have been part of their plan to supply one of their new identities to a cocaine addict."

"Maybe they don't know she's a user."

"Maybe not yet," Quinn said.

"But we know it," Fedderman said. "Now we gotta figure out some way to use what we know."

"Or avoid getting hurt by it," Quinn said, closing the closet door.

They returned the painters' screwdrivers, pointed out where they'd missed a spot, and left the apartment.