Gerald Davis: A Murder Too Personal

Laura turned to look at me. “You know, you’re going to get into trouble. The police sealed up her apartment. Nobody is allowed inside.”

“Don’t you fret,” I told her. “It’s just a minor inconvenience.”

The yellow police tape covered the front door in an X-pattern, like an emblem to ward off evil spirits. I peeled it off and unlocked the door. The apartment was just the way I imagined it. It was on the ground floor of an old brownstone and it was furnished in a traditional style with muted colors. There was a vestibule as you entered, a small kitchen and bathroom on the left, a living room straight ahead and the bedroom to the right of the living room. Both the living room and the bedroom had doors that opened out onto a tiny garden.

The garden was well-tended. You could see someone had given it a lot of care. This time of year the flowers were in full bloom. The area was completely walled in by an eight-foot high stockade fence. There was a double steel door to the basement that was padlocked on the outside.

Someone had started to tidy up the apartment, but the effort hadn’t helped much. Furniture was put where it didn’t belong, clothing and papers covered the floor, and pots and pans were all over the entrance hall. Whoever ransacked the place was looking for more than just valuables.

I took a look in the kitchen. The room was so cramped there was only enough space for a half-height refrigerator. But there was every kind of cooking utensil imaginable. It put me in mind of how much she loved to cook and how she’d make an elaborate project of her meals, from getting up early and tramping down to Chinatown or Little Italy or wherever she’d have to go for the proper ingredients.

Dammit to hell. I shook off the thought.

I checked the contents of the refrigerator and the freezer-opened every container, emptied the ice-cube trays, unscrewed the refrigerator light, took apart the microwave and emptied every container in the cupboard.

Nothing.

Then I did what I love best. Made an in-depth survey of the garbage. It was well on its way to stinking to high hell. What surprised me was the McDonald’s container next to the yogurt cup and a couple of Twinkies wrappers. That wasn’t like Alicia.

Next I checked out the bathroom. Under and behind the sink and toilet, the shower stall, the light fixture. Then the medicine cabinet. You can tell a lot about a person by looking through the medicine cabinet. There were half a dozen prescription vials-five of them from a Dr. Pasternak. She would never have taken those medications before. The names were familiar-Prozac, Nembutal. Grown-up candies.

There were also a lot of expensive cosmetics. That was a departure too. She used to wear eye shadow and blush, but that was the extent of it. She didn’t need much make-up. She had a clear complexion and a healthy look about her.

After I’d searched the place for a couple of hours, I took a break. There were five bottles of Michelob Dry in the fridge. I took one. She wouldn’t have minded. The apartment was sweltering and the beer was cold going down. I put the bottle against my forehead to cool off. A drop of water ran down my cheek and into my collar. I wiped it off with the back of my hand.

Then I did what I didn’t want to. I went back into the living room and studied the chalk outline on the floor. I stared at it for a good ten minutes. Then I knelt down and felt the rug. It was a hand-woven Iranian in a pattern that looked like a fruit tree with an intricate branch structure. Small fragments of skull bone and brain tissue were splattered all over the weave, disturbing the symmetry of the design.

The sofa, armchairs and coffee table were the same ones we had in our place when we were married. The same sofa we had sex on.

There was just one little oversight.

The police didn’t know it was a convertible because they hadn’t opened it up.

Careless-or maybe they didn’t give a damn.

I opened the sofa the same way I’d done so many times before. A rumpled sheet was wedged inside. I unfolded it slowly and spread it out. A small hard white pebble was caught in one of the creases.

You didn’t have to be Marion Barry to know what it was. Employee drug testing was a lucrative and growing business. This was like spinach to Popeye.

It was a cocaine rock.

That didn’t mean too much. It was probably just recreational use. Snorting cocaine on weekends. The fact that it was in the sofabed meant they were screwing. Snorting and screwing.

Well, it wasn’t surprising. Lab studies always showed coke was the drug of choice among primates.

I was about to fold up the sheet when something else caught my attention. It was the heavy sweet scent of Shalimar. Alicia didn’t use Shalimar-at least not that I remembered.

So I returned to the bathroom and checked out the perfume bottles. There was Jess, Lauren and Je Reviens-but no Shalimar.

Then I walked back into the living room, folded up the sheet and closed the sofa. Next to the sofa was a bookcase.

What was she reading now?

There were some books on metaphysics, a book by Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing, one by Schopenhauer, some works on Eastern mysticism, some books of pop psychology and a few psychiatry textbooks.

What caught my eye was a shelf of feminist writings. That was unusual. When we were married, she never read any feminist material-never paid it much attention. She seldom read fiction. Her reading tastes ran to contemporary non-fiction, mostly biographies, and some history. She didn’t read ephemeral subjects like psychology, philosophy or mysticism, and never advocacy literature.

Interesting how her reading tastes had changed so radically. It was almost as if the library belonged to a different person. I would never have known that these books were hers.

A book was on the floor next to the side table. The bookmark was on page 124. It was The Handmaid’s Tale.

She never would have read that kind of book before.

Alongside the bookcase was a computer on a wooden stand against the wall. It was a Dell mini-tower with a Pentium III processor. I switched it on.

An icon of a padlock appeared on the screen. My stomach sank.

I typed, “FUCK YOU.”

A little x appeared next to the padlock.

After a couple more feeble attempts, and a couple more little x’s, I gave up. At least I could take her floppies and run them back at the office. I looked for them but they weren’t in the stand and they weren’t in the bookcase either. As far as I could tell, they weren’t anywhere in the apartment.

Did the cops take the floppies? Or did the killer?

The bedroom was next. I opened the door and looked in. It was a small room. Everything had been tossed about like the aftermath of some berserk tornado. The contents of drawers had been emptied on the bed and the floor. The bed was a single against the far wall. A night table next to it had been knocked over. The closet held a lot of dresses, but they had all been shoved to one side. I inspected the dresses, one by one.

Most men don’t know the first thing about women’s clothing and I was no exception. You approach the subject the same way you consider some Eastern religion. It’s there, it has its own mystique, its own rules, but you can’t even begin to comprehend it.

Alicia wore only dresses. She wore soft flowing dresses that emphasized her height and her femininity. She never wore skirts and blouses. Occasionally she wore Levi jeans with a sweatshirt or a T-shirt. And she never wore designer jeans.

Jesus, I’d forgotten so much about her. But I still remembered a lot. Like the way she cocked her head to one side when she gave you her throaty laugh. And the way she could look through you without saying a word when she thought you were holding something back from her.