Where There's Smoke

Fifteen

I unlocked Natalie’s door without disturbing Amos Wakefield across the hall, eased the door shut behind me, and only then groped on the wall for a light switch. I found one to the left of the door.

A beaded curtain hung in the door frame of the small entrance foyer, separating it from the room beyond. The wallpaper in the foyer was white, with a boldly repeated palm-frond design in a green so dark it appeared black. I went through the curtain, found another light switch just inside the door frame, flicked it on, and was immediately transported back to a rather shabby ancient Egypt.

The palm-frond wallpaper continued into the room, its design less overpowering than it had been in the tiny foyer. Two real palms, both on the edge of imminent death, were against the wall opposite the beaded curtain. They flanked a huge wicker armchair sprayed with gold paint, undoubtedly Cleopatra’s throne. A purple cushion was on the seat of the throne. Two cushions identical in size and shape, one blue, the other white, were on the floor before the throne. The wall behind the throne was hung with framed prints of the Pyramids, the Sphinx, a river I assumed to be the Nile, a frieze that looked as if it had been lifted from a dead Pharaoh’s tomb, and a very lifelike drawing of a cobra. Two unfaded rectangles on the palm-frond wallpaper indicated where a pair of pic­tures had once been hanging. On the wall to the left of the throne, and at right angles to it, there was a closed door papered over with the palm-frond design, and sitting di­rectly on the floor, either a mattress or a foam-rubber slab covered with a purple spread tucked in all around. I went to the door and opened it.

Unlike the shabby opulence of the royal chamber, the bedroom was spartanly furnished and looked almost se­verely modern in contrast. The walls were painted white, and there were no pictures on them, and no indication that any had been removed. A double bed was against the wall opposite the entrance door, beside a window over­looking an airshaft. There was a white shade on the win­dow, flanked by hanging sheer curtains, also white. The bed was made up with sheets, pillowcases and a blanket, but no bedspread. A dresser finished in white enamel was opposite the bed, a cheap record player on top of it, a mir­ror over it. I went to the dresser. The drawers in it were empty except for the debris of packing—some bobby pins, an empty tube of lipstick, two pennies, and a ball­point pen that must have cost twenty-nine cents when new. The single closet in the room was empty, too, except for some wire hangers on the pole and on the floor.

I went out to the foyer again, and then into the kitchen. The cabinets under the counters contained pots and pans, detergents, soap pads, some brown-paper bags, and a plastic trash container loaded with garbage. One of the hanging wall cabinets was stocked with perhaps a three-day supply of canned goods and standard grocery items. Another wall cabinet held six cups and saucers, eight din­ner dishes, and half a dozen glasses. In a drawer beside the sink, there was what appeared to be a complete set of stainless-steel utensils, some paring knives, a bread knife, a can opener, a bottle opener, and a pair of serving spoons. The refrigerator was almost empty—a half-full carton of milk, a stick of butter (to which toast crumbs clung), a head of lettuce, an unopened container of blue­berry yogurt, three slices of ham wrapped in wax paper and sharing the meat tray with a shriveled frankfurter. On a butcher-block cutting board beside the refrigerator, I found a fifth of Scotch with about three inches of whiskey in it. There was no bulletin board or message pad near the wall phone on the other side of the refriger­ator, nor were there any penciled numbers or messages on the wall itself. I lifted the phone from its hook and got a dial tone; it had not yet been disconnected.

I went back to the cabinet under the sink, took out the trash container, opened one of the large brown-paper bags, sat on the floor, and began sifting through Natalie Fletcher’s garbage, transferring it piece by sodden piece from plastic container to paper bag. Garbage cans are often treasure troves to the working policeman, but Na­talie’s garbage at first seemed to consist mostly of orange rinds, coffee grounds, stale crusts of bread, empty soup cans, soggy paper napkins, greasy paper toweling, cu­cumber and potato peels, an envelope from the telephone company, an empty frozen-juice can, more coffee grounds, and the crumpled comics section of Sunday’s newspaper. I kept looking. Toward the bottom of the con­tainer, I found some bills marked Paid, a dozen cigarette butts undoubtedly emptied from an ashtray, an empty beer bottle, a bottle cap, and a piece of a page torn from a calendar. I dug a little further and found three other pieces of the same calendar page; she had obviously torn it in half, and then in half again. I spread them out on the floor, and then put them together like a jigsaw puzzle. September. This month’s calendar. Today was ...

Until dawn came, it was still today and not tomorrow in my mind—no matter how many hours past midnight it was. Today, then, was still Monday, September 9. Natalie had moved out of the apartment at nine this morning, but there was nothing on the calendar to indicate that a move would take place today. This seemed particularly strange, since the calendar page was a veritable appointment book for the month, with scribbles in most of the daily squares, penned or penciled reminders in what I assumed to be Natalie’s hand:

The night of September 8 was the night five funeral homes had been broken into, the night Anthony Gibson’s corpse had been stolen. September 9 was today; the square was blank. Beyond today:

These last jottings seemed strange, too. Or, to be more exact, it seemed strange that I’d found them in with the garbage. If Natalie had intended to keep these appoint­ments, why had she thrown away the calendared re­minders of them? But on the other hand, if she hadn’t intended to meet Susanna tomorrow at two o’clock, or go to church at midnight, why had she jotted them onto her calendar in the first place? I’d automatically concluded that Natalie was getting out of town; otherwise, why would she have left her furniture (such as it was) behind her, with instructions to sell it? But if she’d planned beforehand on leaving town, would she have made appoint­ments in the city for tomorrow? Or had the move been a sudden decision? Or had she simply found a furnished apartment two blocks from here, moved her personal belongings into it, and left behind only the stuff Durski had accurately described as crap? I didn’t know.

I put the brown-paper bag into the plastic trash con­tainer, swept up whatever garbage had found its way onto the linoleum, and then turned out all the lights and quietly let myself out of the apartment.