Walking Shadow

CHAPTER 27

There was a bathroom directly opposite the front door, a two stride hallway to the right that led into a bed-sitting room with a huge black-and-white theater poster filling the far wall, and some gray light coming in wearily from the single dormer window. The poster was of Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire. The bed was one of those oak platform deals with storage drawers underneath. There was a green Naugahyde arm chair, and a gray metal desk and chair.

At the foot of the bed was a gray metal foot locker. The walls were white, but an old white and one that hadn't been washed very often.

I could hear the rain on the roof. I looked out of the one window for a moment and watched the rain fall gently past me and down three stories and onto the roof of my convertible. The rain had hurried the fall of leaves along the street. They plastered the roadway with limp, green-tinged yellow spatters, and collected in the storm culverts and backed up the water. A gray and white municipal bus moved past, sending spray up from the puddles onto the sidewalk. I turned back to the room. Everything was neat. Ms.

Rebello had probably stepped in after the cops had tossed it. Funny they should have left it messy. Usually they don't.

I started at the bathroom and went through the room slowly.

Even in a bath-and-bed apartment there are lots of places to look when you don't know what you're looking for. I looked under the rug and in the toilet tank. I felt inside the water spout in the tub.

I used the plier part of my combination tool to take off the shower head. I pulled the stopper from the drain and shined my flashlight in. I shook out the towels, and felt carefully over the shower curtain. I checked the tiles in the shower to make sure there wasn't a loose one with something hidden behind it. I did the same with the baseboard, and the ceiling molding. I removed the nut from the tap in the sink drain and found a wet soap-and-hair ball. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I knew that wasn't it. I shined my light into the sink drain. I emptied the wastebasket and put the stuff back in. I smelled the shaving lotion and looked at the bottle against the light. I tasted the baby powder and then emptied the container into the toilet. There was nothing in there but talc. I flushed the toilet and threw the container in the wastebasket. I held the shampoo bottle up to the light. I examined the toothpaste tube, and the deodorant stick and the shaving cream can. All of them were what they appeared to be. I took the toilet paper off the roll and looked at it carefully from each end. There was nothing rolled into it. I shined my light between each vane on the radiator. I checked the medicine cabinet. When I was satisfied that there was nothing that would do me any good in the bathroom, I moved to the big room. And in about ten minutes I found it.

Taped to the bottom of one of the storage drawers in the platform bed was a white envelope and in the envelope were eight Polaroid pictures, seven of a woman with no clothes on, one, taken in a mirror, of a man and woman with no clothes on. The man was Craig Sampson. The woman was holding a towel in front of her face.

I took the pictures over to the desk and sat down and spread them out on the desk and turned on the gooseneck lamp that sat on the back corner of the desk. I studied them in an entirely professional way. She was lying on, or standing beside, a bed in what was probably a hotel room. She was either stark naked (five pictures, including the one with Sampson) or wearing the kind of garter belt and stockings get-up that has so successfully weathered the test of time in Playboy (three pictures). I was comforted by the garter belt poses. I'd begun to think only of and I still cared for that sort of thing.

The room was very still while I looked at the pictures. There was the white sound of the rain on the roof, the occasional settling creak of an old house responding to the steady weight of gravity, and an occasional sound of steam heat knocking tentatively in the pipes.

The woman looked as if she exercised often. Her body was firm, and her stomach was flat. With the towel always concealing her features, there was nothing to tell me who she was. Well, not quite nothing. Though it was hard to be sure in a Polaroid, she appeared to have no body hair. Theoretically this oddity would be an excellent identity clue. But it was of limited practical value.

The pictures didn't have to mean much. Lots of people liked to take nude pictures of themselves and their partners. Some of them even concealed their face. Still it told me that Sampson had a relationship which he concealed. No one knew of it. Everyone said he had no girlfriends. And the fact that this girlfriend concealed her identity was at least mildly interesting. What was more interesting was that the cops had missed it. It wasn't that hard to find, and any cop would know to look under a drawer when searching a place.

These cops had searched it so thoroughly that they'd made a mess, and they hadn't found these pictures?

It gave one pause. But here was not the place for pausing. I put the pictures back in the envelope and put the envelope in my inside jacket pocket, and went through the rest of the room. I unmade the bed and remade it. I felt under every drawer, behind the poster, all the usual moves, and didn't find anything else that mattered. I put everything back carefully. I was neat and polite and generally swell, for a gumshoe. But it is also easier to search a place if you don't make a mess. You're not pawing through the jumble you just created.

I left Sampson's room, pulled the door shut and heard it latch behind me. Then I went down the two dark flights of narrow stairs and knocked on Ms. Rebello's door. She must have been making late breakfast or early lunch. I could smell bacon cooking in there.

I did not think it cooked for me.

The door opened on the safety chain.

"Yuh?"

"I wish to take action on this," I said.

"Just how messy were the police who searched that room earlier?"

"Messy," she said.

"A couple goddamn pigs, excuse my French."

"Emptied out drawers, that sort of thing?"

"Clothes all over the floor. Papers, bedclothes. Pigs."

"Well, they're going to regret it," I said.

"That all?" she said.

"Can I pack the place up and rent it?"

"Absolutely," I said.

"And please accept my apologies for the mess and the delay as well."

"Yeah," she said, "sure," and closed the door.

I smiled to myself in the ugly little hall. Got to take fun where you find it. I went out the front door and pulled it carefully shut behind me and heard the latch click. I glanced up and down the street.

There was no one in sight. In front of the house my car started with a small puff of smoke from the exhaust and the window washers began to move. I turned the collar up on my leather jacket, and went down the four front steps into the rain, and across the sidewalk and into my car.

"Any luck?" Hawk said.

"I don't know," I said.

I took out the nude pictures and passed them around.

"The guy Sampson?" Vinnie said.

"Yeah."

"Know the woman?"

"No."

"She's got no pussy," Vinnie said.

"Observant," I said.

"And eloquent," Hawk said.

Neither Vinnie nor Hawk had anything meaningful to contribute to the absent body hair question. There was a lively discussion of nude women we had known. The consensus was that, while body hair varied considerably, none of us had ever known anyone with none. Vinnie handed me back the pictures, and I put them back in my pocket.

"Better count them," Hawk said, and put the car in drive and eased away from the curb.