T. Parker: Red Light

Good luck, she thought. She had tried it herself, twice.

Zamorra spoke occasionally into a tiny tape recorder. Merci, as always, wrote her observations into a small notebook with a blue cover.

She wrote: Aubrey Whittaker, what did you do?

But between the contents of Aubrey’s closet — provocative clothes and lots of them — and the contents of a leather-bound calendar in her purse — a blizzard of dates with a blizzard of people listed only by initials, coded notes in the margins, phone numbers all over it — Merci came to suspect that Aubrey’s profession was one of the oldest. The 240-count box of condoms Zamorra found beside a pair of thigh-high leather boots in the bottom of the closet seemed to confirm it.

Nineteen and a real pro.

The bed was neatly made. There was a Bible open on the stand beside it. A crucifix hung on one of the bedroom walls. And the damned evangelist on TV.

Zamorra stared at Merci. It hurt. Zamorra’s newlywed bride had been diagnosed with a brain tumor just two months ago; since that day his sharp face, once sly and charming, had taken on an expression of increasingly resigned menace. She was worried about him but didn’t think she knew him well enough to question or intrude. Good fences made good neighbors and Zamorra’s fence seemed excellent: He said almost nothing about anything. She was going to talk to a doctor about him.

“I saw her yesterday,” Zamorra said.

Merci felt her heart rise, settle. “Yesterday. Where?”

“Some of the vices were huddling with her at Pedro’s. I took it she was a call girl they were going to chum with. I sat at the counter, got a number four and didn’t ask.”

“Who in vice?”

“Kathy Hulet and your tall blond friend.”

“Mike?”

“Yeah. Mike McNally.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“We all are.”

“It’s a matter of timing. Let’s go see the neighbor.”

On her way out of number 23 Merci asked Lynda Coiner if they’d found any brass.

“None yet,” she said. “But if it’s here, we will.”

The neighbor was Alexander Coates. He lived downstairs, three units over, in number 2. He wore baggy black nylon pants with elastic at the ankles, a scoop-neck T-shirt and a red silk robe. Athletic shoes, new. Short gray hair in a widow’s peak, neat gray beard, wide gray eyes. He asked them to sit. In the fireplace, gas flames huffed over ceramic logs. Wooden letters on the mantle spelled NOEL. Merci smelled a familiar green aroma, masked by a floral spray.

“I’m devastated by this,” he said. “Aubrey was such a sweet girl. So young and good and... oh, I guess you could say mixed-up.”

“Let’s start with what you saw and heard,” Merci suggested.

Coates looked at Zamorra. “Can I get you coffee, cocoa, anything?”

“No.”

Coates exhaled, looked into the fire, began. He was home alone tonight. Around eight-thirty he heard footsteps on the wooden walkway above. He heard a knock upstairs — Aubrey Whittaker’s place, number 23. A moment later he heard the door shut. Nothing of consequence, then, until a little after ten o’clock, when he heard Aubrey Whittaker’s door shut again, and footsteps going back down the upper walkway in the direction from which they had come earlier.

“How could you tell her door from number twenty-four or twenty-two?” asked Merci.

“From living here eighteen years. I’ve listened to lots of people come and go. You know.”

Yes, she did know. Because she could imagine Alexander Coates. You’ve waited for lots of dates, she thought. You’ve waited and listened to their footsteps and wondered how they’d turn out. You can tell a lot about a man by the way he walks.

“All right. Next.”

“Next, at approximately ten-fifteen, I heard footsteps coming down the walkway again, in the same direction. I heard them stop at Aubrey’s. I heard the door open. Then, immediately after the door opened, or almost immediately, I heard a loud thump, like something heavy hitting the floor. Then the door closed. Not a slam, but... forcefully. Nothing for a minute or two. Then, thumping on the floor again. It was like the first thump, but continuous, like moving furniture or a fight or a struggle of some kind. It lasted for maybe a minute. Then quiet again. Then footsteps going back down the walkway toward the stairs.”

“Did you look?” asked Merci.

“No. I was in the bath.”

“Did you hear a gunshot, a car backfiring?”

“Nothing like that.”

“Did you think of calling the police?” asked Zamorra.

Coates looked at Zamorra with his wide gray eyes, then back into the fire. “No. None of the noises I heard were alarming. None were loud or seemed to indicate trouble. They were just noises. My policy, Detectives, my personal belief on such matters is that privacy should be honored. Unless disaster is... well, you know, happening right in front of you.”

“But when you got out of the bath, you decided to go to her door?”

“Correct. When I got there — this would have been around ten forty-five, I saw her door was open.”

Coates sat forward, set his elbows on his knees, rested his head in his hands. “I thought it was blood on the door. The door was open maybe... six inches. I did not touch it or look past it. I literally raced back to my home and dialed nine-one-one immediately. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I went back upstairs and looked at the door again. I said her name, foolishly perhaps. I came back down here. I paced the floor for what seemed like hours. The young officers arrived at exactly ten fifty-six.”

Merci watched Alexander Coates weep into his hands. Experience had taught her to keep a witness talking and thinking instead of crying. Tears cleanse the memory as well as the eyes.

“You did all right, Mr. Coates.”

“Did I really?”

“Absolutely. Now, when you went up to number twenty-three the first time, was Aubrey Whittaker’s porch light on or off?”

The sniffling stopped. “On.”

“And the second time?”

“On as well.”

“Did you hear cars coming or going from the parking lot during this time?”

“Yes. But there’s the Coast Highway traffic, so the sounds get mixed up. I can’t really help you there. You learn not to hear cars, after eighteen years on Coast Highway.”

Half an hour later they were almost finished with Alexander Coates. He said that Aubrey Whittaker rarely had visitors that he noticed. He said that he and Aubrey sometimes talked in the laundry room by the office, because neither worked days, so they washed their clothes in the slow hours. She had gorgeous sad eyes and a sharp sense of humor. She never mentioned irate boyfriends, stalking ex-husbands or enemies of any kind. She was not, in his opinion, hard or mean-spirited. However, in his opinion, she was alone and on a journey, searching for something in her life she had not found yet. It was Coates’s impression that Aubrey was an escort of some kind. She drove a dark red, late-model Cadillac.

Merci nodded at this summation, again wondering her way into Alexander Coates. Years ago, a wise old mentor had told her that putting herself in another’s shoes would make her a better detective and a better person. She had absolutely no knack for it, and she didn’t believe him then. She’d never seen a reason to try to understand people she didn’t like in the first place, which was almost everyone. But the old guy, Hess, had been right: In the two years, three months and twenty-two days he’d been dead, Merci had worked hard at this, and she’d learned a few things she might not have learned otherwise.

Such as, if you spent eighteen years in the same apartment, listening to your neighbors and their lovers come and go, you got good at it.