Telling Lies

Chapter Fifteen

Little arrangements of flowers had made a reappearance on the stoop. There were a few votive candles among them, and some burning incense. Mrs. Lim had scrubbed at the spray-painted message on the wall until the beige stucco had lost nearly all of its texture bumps. For all of her effort, she had only managed to fade the heavy black lines: DIE FAST, BITCH was still easily readable from the street.

“I called someone to take care of that,” Flint said. “Mrs. Lim shouldn’t have to deal with it.”

“Nice of you,” I said. I unlocked the front door and held it for him. “I was going to get some paint in the morning.”

“Good idea, if that filth is still there.” We were walking past Mrs. Lim’s door, so he whispered, “How are you getting along with Mrs. Lim?”

“Fine, I think. I never see her. When I’m out, she comes in and cleans up, leaves food for me. She’s a rare treasure. I’m sure she was indispensable to Emily. Maybe Em could solve health problems of global significance. But sometimes she had trouble crossing the street in heavy traffic all by herself.”

“I know.” He smiled. “Like the absent-minded professor. People were always watching out for her, making sure she didn’t get herself lost.”

The building was quiet. I found myself walking on tiptoes up the carpeted stairs to the third-floor landing. Sneaking in past the landlady, trying not to wake the other tenants.

Mike held onto my arm.

I turned to him at the top of the stairs. “What’s a dummy bump?”

“A lump left on your head after a good thumping. Why?”

“So that was a threat, when you offered Caesar some dummy bumps.”

“It was not,” he said, quick, sharp denial. He could get his back up in a hurry. “He was trying to hold us up. I let him know we weren’t going for it. That’s all.”

“I see.” I liked having him on the defensive, for a change. In the downdraft, Flint still smelled of Latonya and I still felt the bile in the back of my throat. I wasn’t about to let up on him. “How many people in town have to comb their hair around dummy bumps you administered?”

“You trying to get me to cop to something?” He pulled at my jacket. “You have a wire in there?”

“No wires. Just me. It’s very interesting, this whole police culture of thumping and leaving scars. Tell me, what was the most satisfying beating you ever administered?”

He looked down at me through narrowed eyes. “I do not go around beating people.”

“Maybe not now that you’re a detective. What about when you were patrolling the mean streets?” I spoke softly to spare the sleeping tenants. “Go ahead, tell me about the best.”

“The best?” He smiled and wrapped his arm around me. “I can’t answer that. My career isn’t over yet.”

I snuggled against him, trying to ignore the cheap, secondhand cologne.

“These tapes we’re going to see,” he said, “what are you looking for?”

“Answers to some questions, like, who was the man with the skinny nose? Who was the woman who walked the walk?”

“Good questions,” he said.

I stopped under the chandelier at the head of the stairs to sort Emily’s door key from the collection on her ring. Flint was looking around, as he always does, ever observant, waiting for me.

Mrs. Lim’s building is long, with narrow frontage on the street. Emily’s apartment was at the far end of the hall, the only flat that overlooked the street. From the stairs, the area around her door seemed very dark and a long way down. Some of the ceiling lights were out.

At nearly the same moment that I realized there was too much light escaping past Emily’s doorjamb, I heard the crunch of glass underfoot. The thin, frosted glass of smashed lightbulbs.

Flint took out his automatic and pressed me against the wall with his free arm the way my mother, in the car, used to shoot out her arm whenever she had to brake real fast.

We slithered along toward Emily’s apartment with our backs brushing against the bamboo-print wallpaper. I could see that Emily’s door hung ajar. The building is old and hardly high-security. I kept thinking about the hate in the spray-painted scrawl on the wall outside, and how close below us that was. And how close we were to the alley on Gin Ling Way where Emily had been shot.

When we were a few feet from the door, Flint put his finger to his lips and motioned for me to stay put. I didn’t argue he had the gun.

Standing like statues in the hall, listening for noises inside the apartment, I imagined a wild variety of possibilities for what had happened, for what still might be happening in there. It was a full range, from Mrs. Lim wiping out the shower to the revivified Symbionese Liberation Army lying in wait with cocked grenade launchers. Quickly, I eliminated the most unlikely scenario; Mrs. Lim would never leave the door open.

I could only see the back of Flint’s gray head as he listened. I put my hand on his shoulder, and he motioned again for me to stay back. He gave the silence a full minute before he booted the door. The door flew inward, banged against a table or some-thing. Then there was silence again.

Motioning for me to wait, Flint slipped inside behind his automatic. No grenades burst through the gap, but the scene I imagined became more involved and more gruesome with each quiet second that passed. I waited, truly breathless, ready to flee down the stairs as soon as Flint cued me. Or to call for reinforcements if he didn’t come out soon. I was worried about him alone in there. I could have followed him. I didn’t want to get in his way.

All was stillness from Em’s apartment for several minutes. I had just decided to give him until the count of ten before I banged on the neighbor’s door to call for help, when I heard Mike’s footsteps on the hardwood floor, walking, not running. And only one set of steps. I began to relax.

When Flint came back out, he had his gun holstered. The expression on his face was befuddlement.

“What happened?” I asked.

“Did you say Mrs. Lim tidied up today?”

“Yes.”

“Better come in and have a look.

Staying close, I followed him inside. The hinges on the front door had been sprung, so it wouldn’t shut all the way.

Most of the mayhem had occurred in Emily’s office, though mayhem is an exaggeration. This burglar had been fairly tidy. And quite directed in his search.

Every one of Em’s file drawers hung open. The floor around the cabinets was piled with hastily made stacks of manila folders. Some of the files looked as if someone had fanned through them. A few had spilled across the rug.

Em’s desk had been similarly, systematically, rifled. Her computer, Grandmother Duchamps’s heirloom inkwell, and Em’s pretty-good wristwatch were all on the desk and undisturbed.

“Wonder if he found what he was looking for,” Flint said.

“Is it all right to go in?” I asked.

“No. Let the fingerprint people do their thing first.”

“You’re going to report this?”

“I already have.” He was looking around. “What was he after?”

“I don’t know.” I went on to the sitting room door and peered in. The room was so spare, so barren of ornamentation, that there was nothing for a burglar to take. But he had been there. The sofa cushions were just a little bit askew. The lamp in the corner cast its shadow at a slightly different angle than before.

At my feet was the box of videotapes that Garth had left. I hadn’t had a chance to go through them. They might have been rearranged. Some might have been missing. I couldn’t tell.

The bathroom was as I had left it-makeup on the sink, hairdryer on the back of the toilet, damp towels on the single rack.

The contents of the medicine cabinet were at least tidy. I had never looked inside; I had no idea what should have been there. Flint had been following me while I made this circuit. “What do you think?” he asked.

“Too weird,” I said.

“How so?”

“I don’t know whether he found what he was looking for in the files or in the desk. But I can only see one thing that’s missing.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s too strange,” I said.

“So, tell me what it is.”

“A framed photograph of my brother, Marc.”