Twice Buried

25

The little car was gone this time. The rest of the litter in front of the apartments was unchanged. “Maybe Ms. Perna had to run some errands,” I said.

Estelle looked at her watch again.

“Why don’t you stay here. I’ll go check,” I said. As I walked toward 104, the sounds of a squalling infant floated down from another apartment. Francis Carlos must cry sometimes but it was hard to imagine.

The blue door of the Perna apartment needed more than paint. The wood was split in half a dozen places, with a three-foot-long piece of the jamb molding missing just above the bottom hinge. Where the doorbell had once been was a ragged hole with two stubs of wire taped and pushed back into the wood. “Terrific,” I muttered, and knocked on the door.

I knocked four times with no response. Between the third and fourth knocks, I turned to look back toward Estelle. At first it was difficult to see what she was doing through the tinted glass of the truck, but then I realized she was using my binoculars. I kept them in the truck out of habit, hanging them by their strap over the barrel of the shotgun, which was secured with electric locks against the dashboard.

Estelle was looking at something down the apartment complex. I knocked one final time, avoiding the temptation to stare in the direction Estelle was scanning.

Satisfied that either no one was home in 104 or that I was being ignored, I trudged back to the Blazer. By the time I was settled in the seat, she had hung the binoculars back over the shotgun.

“What gives?” I asked. “You bird-watching now?” I gestured at the two ravens that were sitting on a telephone cross-tree at the end of the parking lot.

“You were being watched, sir. Look at the back of the school and count four basement windows.”

“What are you talking about?” I squinted and leaned forward. The gymnasium back wall was solid red brick, decorated here and there with graffiti dating back to Ruby’s first date with Howard in 1959. In another fifty years, the place would be a historical landmark like the National Park Service’s Inscription Rock up north.

The only windows in the wall were a row of six small, rectangular openings that extended below ground level. A small well around each one provided access and drainage.

I looked at the fourth window. “You’re kidding,” I said. I couldn’t tell if the window even had glass, much less see a face. “They’re all barred, aren’t they?”

I reached for the binoculars and had to monkey with the adjustment before the wall jumped into focus. “You certainly messed these up,” I said as I squeezed the tubes together to fit my tired eyes.

Estelle ignored the barb. “I don’t think you can see anything when the window is closed,” she said. “I saw motion earlier. That’s when I looked.”

I looked over at her with skepticism. “You saw motion, Estelle?”

“Yes, sir. When the window swings open from the bottom, the line of the window breaks the sharp shadow line created by the well around the window. It was really obvious.”

“Right.”

“The whole time you were at the doorway, the window was held open. When you turned around to come back to the truck, it closed.”

“Must be Quasimodo,” I said. “One of the janitors is poking around. Either that or you’re imagining things.”

“A janitor down in the back of the basement, behind the boilers? During Christmas recess?”

“Maybe the janitors work during vacations. I don’t know what’s down there. And I didn’t know you spent your early years down there, either.”

Estelle smiled. “I didn’t. But I do remember that the locker rooms and all the offices in that building are at the west end…this end. And that means all the plumbing. The only things at the other end are the foyer, the concession stand, and all the trophy cases.”

I turned in my seat and looked hard at Estelle. I squinted my eyes, trying to see into her brain. She grinned and shrugged. “Sorry. I saw it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Claro.”

“This is ridiculous,” I said and started the Blazer. I backed out onto the street, drove a quarter block and turned into the high school’s circular driveway. “If we don’t check, neither one of us will get any sleep,” I said.

Estelle grinned. “When did you start sleeping, sir?”

“Heh, heh.”

I parked next to a late model Caravan with a bumper sticker on the back that read MY SON IS AN HONOR STUDENT AT POSADAS MIDDLE SCHOOL. It was the only vehicle in the lot, parked in the slot nearest the cafeteria wing between the gymnasium and the office.

“Let’s save some steps,” I said and picked up the mike. I called in the license plate of the van, and in four minutes we knew that it was registered to Elwood Kessel. Kessel was one of the assistant football and basketball coaches. He taught science and civics on occasion. Not surprisingly, no one had filed a want or warrant for him through the National Crime Information Center.

I reached down and slid my heavy flashlight out from under the seat. “You might want to grab the one in the glove box. Basements are dark places, assuming we get in. The door to the coaches’ office is over on the west side of the gym,” I said. “Best bet.” And it was. We rounded the corner of the gym just as Kessel was in the process of turning the deadbolt behind him.

“Jesus, you startled me,” he said. He pulled his key out of the lock and shook the handle. He was young, twenty times fitter than I ever was, with brown hair that he probably had to work on for an hour to make it look so casually unruly. “Who can I help you find?” He might have found it odd to meet two people holding flashlights in the bright sunshine of afternoon.

“Well, you, for starters,” I said. And even though I said it as casually as I could, I saw the flicker of uneasiness that most civilians feel when they have to talk with uniforms. I introduced us, although that was hardly necessary since my name tag on the uniform shirt was clearly visible, and Kessel’s eyes had strayed there first.

“What can I do for you?”

“Is there any one else in the building besides yourself, coach?”

He had thrust his hands in the back pockets of his jeans and he leaned forward as if he hadn’t heard my question. “Excuse me?”

“Is there any one else in the building?”

“No sir. Not that I know of. There shouldn’t be. Why?”

“Are this and the front door the only two means of entry?”

The coach frowned. “What’s this all about, anyway?”

“We’re not sure. Probably nothing. But it would help if you’d answer my question.”

He blushed. “Sure. There’s another door on the east side. It exits out of the back of the snack bar.”

“That’s it? The three doors?”

“Yes.”

“Were you downstairs just a few minutes ago?”

“Downstairs? No. Why would I go downstairs?” He tried for a chuckle. “The boiler is the janitor’s problem, not mine. But they all went home at four.”

I moved toward the door. It was heavy steel. “Would you mind?”

He hesitated. “Uh-”

“Coach Kessel, we’re not executing a warrant or anything like that. Let me tell you what happened.” I put a hand on his shoulder, father to son. “Detective Reyes-Guzman and I were in the parking lot of the Casa Del Sol apartments just now.” I waved a hand. “Other business. She said she saw one of the basement windows open. Someone was looking out.”

Kessel turned and looked at Estelle. He couldn’t think of anything to say, so he shrugged and held out his hands, palms up.

“We’d like to take a look. And I’ll be honest with you. We’ve got a couple reasons other than being concerned that someone’s in your building after hours. But I really don’t want to go into that now.”

I took my hand off his shoulder and put it on the door handle. “Would you?”

“Sure.” He pulled the wad of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the door. The effluvia was instantaneous, even though the nearest locker room was fifty feet down a hallway and through two more doors. Maybe coaches got used to the continuous smell of socks, uniforms, mildewed towels, and decaying sneakers. “Through here,” he said and I started to follow him. Then I remembered the person behind me.

“You want to stay with the truck? In case someone needs to reach us on the radio?”

“No.” Estelle had the courtesy not to tack “foolish old man” to the end of her remark.

I nodded. We wound through first the boys’ locker room and then the girls’; neither was a pretty sight. I wondered what microbiologists would find if they took cultures of the things growing on the shower stall walls.

“Right here,” Kessel said. “This is one of two doors downstairs.” He hesitated. “At least I think there’s two. Obviously I don’t go down there much.” He didn’t look like he wanted to go down this time, either.

He snapped on the light switch to illuminate the concrete stairway. I could hear a steady humming and presumed it came from the snarl of wires and transformers that began at the foot of the stairs and continued along the wall for a dozen feet. Light streamed in through a twenty-four-inch-wide window that was heavily barred.

“This is the west corner?” I said, keeping my voice low.

“I guess,” Kessel said.

“So this is the sixth window,” I said for Estelle’s benefit. She nodded, looking off into the musty darkness behind the boiler with what seemed to me idle curiosity.

I squeezed past what might have been a fuel oil tank and the first boiler. I nodded at the steel door that faced me.

“I don’t know,” Kessel said. The door was locked. “Maybe my master key fits,” he said without much enthusiasm. It did, and the door yawned inward. A question that had kept me awake for many nights was answered as the door opened and the lights were switched on. The room was filled with hundreds of old desks… hundreds. They were stacked neatly to the ceiling girders, their legs interlocked like strange, metallic spiders.

“So this is where they go,” I whispered. I looked at Kessel, who was plainly nervous. “Old desks…you gotta wonder,” I said.

“And that’s number four,” Estelle said. We made our way down an aisle between Type A-2 desks from the fifties and a collection of rare C-24s from the early sixties…the kind with the folding writing wing that hits you squarely in the shins, every time.

Sure enough, the window wasn’t latched. Estelle reached up and pushed it open. It swung on hinges from the top, and its travel was limited to about six inches.

“Well, well,” I said. The lights from the overheads didn’t reach the musty corners and I turned on my flashlight. “Hold still a second,” I said, and Estelle froze near the wall. Coach Kessel didn’t need to be told. I bent down with a grunt.

“What is it?”

“A nacho chip,” I said, holding up the yellow corn chip. I sniffed it and snapped off a corner. “Fresh.” I looked at Estelle. “Congratulations, sharp eyes.”

I swept my flashlight around the room. The next door heading eastward was padlocked. “What’s in there?”

“I don’t know,” Kessel said.

“My guess would be the main electrical service,” Estelle said. “That’s about where the wires hit the building on the outside.”

I swept my light around the room, probing. “So if someone was down here, they’d have to leave the way we came in,” I said. “Unless there’s another hallway or something. Which there might well be.” I was making my way up the aisle with my pulse hammering in my ears. The corner of my flashlight beam had found itself a tennis shoe…just the toe at first.

But as the light touched it, the shoe moved ever so slightly, drawing back like an earthworm from the fisherman’s flashlight. “Someone would have to have a hell of a lot of keys to turn this place into a hotel,” I said, keeping my light away from the shoe.

During some other epoch, several dozen desks had lost their grip and tumbled into a welter of chrome and imitation oak plywood. It created a perfect warren, home to the sneakers and the legs attached to them. With my right hand resting loosely on the butt of my service revolver I swept the light quickly to the left, stabbing the beam full into the cowering youngster’s face.

“Hello, Richard,” I said.