Pulse

23

S ince it was the last door, they were together.

In Ann Spellman’s apartment building, Sal and Harold had knocked on all the doors but this one, 6-F. It didn’t promise to open on any new or pertinent knowledge of Spellman’s murder.

The slot in the mailbox down in the foyer had simply said A. Ackenheimer. The woman who opened the door said nothing. She simply stood and stared at them through rheumy, faded blue eyes. Her mousy brown hair was a mess, as was the baggy flannel nightgown or robe she wore even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon.

A close look at her suggested she was in her forties, but she was like a woman trying to appear older. An even closer look revealed a certain glint in her eye. Harold thought that if she really got it together, with makeup and a hairdo, she might be attractive. No, probably not.

Sal leaned toward her slightly, sniffing for alcohol. Found something like smoked salmon. It could have been fish for lunch, but she looked as if she could be high on some other substance. He smelled nothing potentially incriminating.

“Miz Ackenheimer?” Harold said, as if attempting to wake her.

“Right on the first try,” she said in a throaty, fishy voice.

“A for Alice?” Harold said.

She smiled widely. “Amazing.”

Harold grinned beneath his bushy mustache and shrugged. “I’m kind of psychic sometimes, Audrey.”

She shook her head. “You, too? Amazing. Some people call me Amazing Ackenheimer. My given name is actually Audrey, but I’ve used the name Alice.”

“Are you in show business?” Harold asked.

Sal had had about enough of this. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about Ann Spellman’s murder,” he told her in his rasp of a voice that was even deeper than hers.

“It sounds like you might juggle or something,” Harold said, “with a name like that.”

Sal glowered. Harold was being Harold here, with the last potential witness. It irked Sal.

“No,” Audrey Ackenheimer said. “I’m not in show business, though I can juggle. And I know nothing about Ann Spellman’s murder. She’s not-wasn’t-even on this floor. And wasn’t she killed someplace else altogether?”

“Not necessarily altogether,” Sal said. “Her apartment, her neighbors, might have something useful to tell us.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” Audrey Ackenheimer said.

“Did you know her at all?”

“Only to nod to on the elevator about every two weeks.” Suddenly she paused and looked off to the side.

“Something?” Sal asked.

“I was just remembering… last week I accidentally pushed the wrong button in the elevator and the door opened on her floor. Ann Spellman’s. Well, there’s a straight look down the hall to her apartment, and I saw a woman standing in front of Spellman’s door. Then I looked again and she wasn’t there. I suppose Ann Spellman let the woman in.”

“This was when?

“Wednesday, I think.”

“The day before Spellman’s murder.”

“Evening before,” Audrey said. “About seven o’clock. I was on my way to meet someone for dinner.”

“Could you describe the woman?”

“I was meeting a man.”

Sal said nothing, looking at her hard.

Audrey Ackenheimer shrugged beneath her tent-like robe or night gown. “The woman was average height and weight, I suppose. Had on a light raincoat because it had been drizzling all evening. As she was entering she turned slightly, and I would have gotten a good look at her face, except…” She shrugged again in her noncommittal way.

“The elevator door closed,” Harold said.

She looked at him and grinned. “Amazing!”

“That’s you,” Harold said. “I’m psychic.”

“Hair?” Sal asked.

“Yes,” she and Harold said simultaneously. They both laughed.

“Jesus!” Sal said.

“I think brown, light colored like mine, but I’m not sure. The lighting isn’t great in the halls here. We keep telling the super about it, but nothing’s ever done.”

Sal rummaged through his notes. Harold had already talked to the super, a guy named Drucker who’d spent the murder evening with his wife in front of a blaring flat-panel TV that took up half his apartment wall. Sal had discussed him with Harold and read Harold’s notes. Drucker knew nothing.

“Little guy with blond hair and a mole near the tip of his nose?” Harold asked.

“Yes. You’ve talked to him?”

“Never saw him or even heard of him before just now,” Harold lied.

Audrey’s eyes widened. “That’s amazing!”

“No. You’re ama-”

“Stop it!” Sal said. Harold could turn any interrogation into a shit storm.

“I wouldn’t recognize the woman if I saw her again,” Audrey Ackenheimer said, thinking it was time to get serious before Sal blew his cork. Harold, the nice one, looked at her and kind of rolled his eyes, letting her know he understood. “I have seen her around the building before. Once from a distance, coming out. Another time from the back as she got in the elevator.”

“On her way to see Ann Spellman,” Sal said. “If she was home.”

“Might have paid her a visit, anyway,” Harold said. “If she was sure she wasn’t home.”

“What about men?” Audrey said.

Sal looked at her. “What about them?”

“I did see a storybook-handsome guy, kind of stocky, with wavy dark hair, come and go a few times. Saw him and Spellman leave together once holding hands.”

“I think we know who that is,” Sal said.

“Any other male callers?” Harold asked.

Audrey gave them her shrug again. “Couldn’t say yes or no.”

It was the woman who interested Sal. He wanted to know if she actually existed outside Audrey Ackenheimer’s and Fernandez the super’s imaginations. No one else seemed to have seen this woman, except maybe Theo the cat. And cats were notoriously uncooperative witnesses.

“I don’t spy on people’s personal lives,” Audrey said. “Poor Ann Spellman could have been chaste as a nun, or led a life of wild debauchery. It’s something we’ll never know.”

Sal didn’t agree with her, but didn’t say so.