Red Cat

33

It was gray and raw on Thursday morning, and the clouds scudding above the midtown skyline were full of ice or sleet or stone. In Mike Metz’s office, it didn’t feel much warmer. I’d told him what Jamie Coyle had said, and that I’d basically believed it, and Mike was silent on the other side of his wide ebony desk. Behind his steepled fingers, his narrow face was blank, but his eyes were skeptical and irritated.

“Grief isn’t innocence,” he said finally. “Plenty of killers grieve for their victims; they love feeling sorry for themselves, and that’s another way to do it. This guy has a history of violence”- Mike pointed to my bruised face, and my taped and splinted fingers-“and he all but admitted he’d been worried that Holly was seeing Werner again.”

“He didn’t quite admit to that,” I said, “and he has an alibi. I spoke to the uncle, and it seems to hold water.”

“This would be the same uncle who’s been lying to you and the cops about Coyle’s whereabouts? How long do you think his corroboration will last?”

“There were apparently other people who saw him that Tuesday night.” Mike scowled and shook his head. “Besides which, the guy had my gun, and plenty of time to use it, and instead he gave it back.”

“Which means that with you he had time to think, and with Holly the passions ran higher.”

“You’re reaching.”

“And you’re not, and you should be. It’s your brother on the line, and his wife.”

“If Coyle is no good for Holly’s killing, then I don’t think I’m doing David or Stephanie any favors by making it easier for the cops to find him. If it takes them a couple of days longer to sit him down and figure out he’s clean, then that’s a couple of days more I have to find a viable alternative.”

“That’s assuming you’re right about Coyle, and assuming the cops didn’t already hear about his great alibi from the uncle.”

“According to Kenny, they didn’t ask and he didn’t tell,” I said, and drank some water. My aluminum splint made a bright sound on the glass. “Coyle loved her and he’s grieving, and he hasn’t hotfooted it out of town, though he’s had ample opportunity. On top of which, he’s got a better alibi than either David or Stephanie has.”

Mike’s skepticism was undiminished. “He was our best bet. I think he still is.”

“He’s not going anywhere, Mike, and if I-”

“How do you know he’s not going anywhere?”

I shook my head. “He would’ve gone by now. Look, if I found him, the cops will too, and if they haven’t in a couple of days, we’ll call and give them a hint. In the mean time, Coyle gave me some things to chase.”

“Werner?”

“Coyle says Holly saw him sometime in December. That would’ve been right around the time Vickers came to see her.”

“You’re thinking he had something to do with the blackmail scheme?”

“The timing could work, and apparently Holly was upset about something then.”

“If you believe Coyle,” Mike said.

I shrugged. “Besides Werner, there’s the storage locker.”

He held up a hand. “And I already know more than I want to about that.”

I smiled. “Coward.”

He didn’t smile back, but pointed across the desk. “Just keep the word ‘tampering’ in mind, and be fucking careful.”

“Always,” I said. “You talk to David lately?”

Mike nodded. “I call; he doesn’t say much. I gather he’s sticking close to home.”

“Was he sober?”

Mike shrugged. “He doesn’t say much,” he repeated.

“And Stephanie?”

“She’s agreed to see me this afternoon.”

“That’s progress.”

“Not enough,” Mike said, “and I’m hoping it’s not too late.”

“What happened?”

“Only the inevitable. McCue called; they want her down at Pitt Street tomorrow morning, to talk.”

“Still informally?”

“That’s what they say.”

I walked from Mike’s office down to Grand Central, and caught a 7 train into Queens. I changed to the G in Long Island City, took it south into Brooklyn, and got off at Greenpoint Avenue. I walked east on Greenpoint, north on McGuinness Boulevard, and east again on Freeman.

Creek Self-Store was on Freeman Street, in half of an old brick factory building, on a block that, perhaps because of its proximity to Newtown Creek and to an enormous sewage treatment plant, bore not the slightest gentrifying trace. The cold air made my fingers ache, but it kept the odor down.

I pushed through wired-glass doors into a small lobby. There was a wooden bench, well polished by the seats of many pants, and wall posters with tables of container sizes and prices, and lists of rules and restrictions, most of which amounted to “No Nuclear Waste” and “No Livestock.” There was another pair of wired-glass doors straight ahead and a teller’s window to the left.

Behind the bars was a twentysomething Latina with a gold stud in her nose. She was working on an early lunch or a late breakfast and the lobby smelled of eggs and fried onions. She handed me a clipboard and some forms, and pointed me at the bench. I sat, and fished a pen from my backpack. I took my time on the forms- with my fingers, I had no choice- and I had a good look around the lobby and behind the counter. There was a little office to the right behind the counter, with a fat, bald guy in it. He was busying himself with what looked like a Bud tallboy in a paper bag, and what looked like celebrity poker on the television. On a table beside the girl there were three small video monitors. One showed an oddly angled view of the front doors and another showed a flickering image of a loading dock; the third was gray static. Wholly satisfactory security arrangements, as far as I was concerned. I took out my wallet and brought the forms to the counter.

I followed the bald guy’s slow shuffle onto a freight elevator. We went up two floors, and I followed him some more, through a dimly lit maze of numbered metal overhead doors. We stopped at unit 137, a lovely ten-by-ten affair with walls of corrugated orange plastic and fluorescent lights in a wire cage on the ceiling. He departed; I waited until I heard the freight elevator close, and then I waited some more. The air was cold- about sixty degrees- and it smelled of plaster dust and plastic. In the silence after the elevator, I heard faint music, hip-hop, but I couldn’t tell from where.

I closed unit 137, found the stairway, and walked down one flight. Holly’s unit was number 58, and I wandered for a while before I located it. I passed a few people along the way: a bickering couple hauling boxes in; another, better-humored couple, hauling boxes out; a painter standing in the open doorway of his unit, mixing greens and whites on a palette; a middle-aged woman with tears in her eyes, pushing a dolly. None of them paid me any mind. Unit 58 was at the dead end of a silent corridor, and I was relieved to see no police seals or crime scene tape anywhere nearby. The hasp was set into the floor and there was a medium-sized lock on it. It was more tarnished than the replacement I’d brought in my backpack, but I doubted anyone around here would notice. I put my backpack down and looked up the corridor. No one. I reached inside and pulled out my bolt cutters.

They were hard to maneuver with broken fingers, and I was noisier than I wanted to be, but in five minutes the lock was scrap. I put the pieces in my backpack, along with the cutters, and rolled up the door. I went inside and rolled it shut behind me.

The fluorescents blinked light onto a fifteen-by-ten-foot space, with yellow plastic walls and a bare concrete floor. There was a workbench along one wall, with vises mounted on either end, a rolling stool underneath, and tools stacked neatly on shelves in the back: hammers, handsaws, chisels, planes, clamps, T-squares, bottles of wood glue, small cans of varnish and shellac. A place for everything. There were metal shelves against the back wall, with a router, a sander, and electric drills and drill bits on them; in the far corner, next to a shop-vac, was a small table saw. Opposite the workbench was a large cardboard box full of wood. I took some slow breaths, to drive my heart rate down, and I took a pair of vinyl gloves from my pocket. I worked them carefully over my splints and started with the box.

It was big- the dimensions of a refrigerator lying on its sidebut it held only wood: maple burl, walnut, ebony, and teak boards, in three- and five-foot lengths, and smaller bits and pieces at the bottom. I moved on to the metal shelves, where I found spotless and quite pricey power tools and nothing else. The table saw was well oiled but held no secrets, and the shop vac was ignorant of everything but some wood shavings in the can. There was a layer of dust over things, and nothing seemed to have been disturbed recently. By the time I’d finished with the workbench, I’d concluded only that Holly had had expensive taste in her equipment, and that she’d taken excellent care of it. I pushed the rolling stool back under the workbench and heard a bump. I rolled it out again, knelt down, and looked underneath. I needed my penlight to see them: two cardboard filing boxes, side by side and up against the corrugated plastic wall. I pulled them out and opened one.

It was filled with plastic bags. They were the self-sealing variety, like evidence bags, and in them were souvenirs from Holly’s video encounters- items of the sort I’d seen in her reliquaries, though these were going nowhere now. Used condoms, stockings, soiled underwear- his and hers- neckties, cigar butts, washcloths, a pillowcase, some matchbooks, six inches of rubber tubing: a sordid lost-and-found. Each bag was labeled in black marker with a date and a location, in a firm, precise hand. I read the labels and realized that the items on top must have come from her sessions with David. While it was comforting to know that he’d practiced safe sex, the trophies made me uneasy, and my eyes skidded away. I picked through the box delicately, enough to see that it was bags of mementoes, top to bottom, and nothing more. I closed it. My heart was pounding, and I waited a moment and took a deep breath before I opened the second one.

It held memories of a different sort. There was a zippered black nylon case inside, filled with plastic sleeves. Each sleeve held several DVDs and was labeled in Holly’s neat print: “Interview #1”; “Interview #2”; “Interview #3,” all the way up to 12. Nestled next to the binder were twelve external computer disk drives, each one the size of a thin paperback. Like the DVDs, each was labeled: “January 31 backup”; “February 28 backup,” all the way up to last December 31.

I sat on the stool and looked down at the locker. Mike Metz’s voice sounded in my head: “Just keep the word ‘tampering’ in mind, and be fucking careful.” He was accompanied by Detective Vines: “And God knows what you did to the evidence.” I tapped my foot on the concrete floor.

“Shit,” I whispered.