Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

“You give me ten dollars if I get you inside?”

“Not by breaking in,” Mercer said. “You live here?”

“Down the street.” The kid smiled and tsked at the suggestion he might do something illegal. “Naw. Hit four-C. Ms. Jenkins.”

I pressed the buzzer.

It must have taken almost a minute for her to get to the intercom. “Hello?”

“Give me the ten,” the kid said to Mercer, who took a bill out of his pocket.

“Yo, Ms. Jenkins? It’s Shalik. You need anything from the store?”

“Milk. I need milk and a loaf of bread, dear.”

“Let me in so’s I can get the money.”

The buzzer sounded and Shalik opened the door for us. He pointed to a door behind the stairwell. “That his,” he said, starting the climb to the fourth floor.

Mike went ahead of me and pounded on Travis Forbes’s door. The three of us waited in the hallway, and Shalik stopped in place.

“Police,” Mike said, banging again.

“Do you have a warrant?” the voice inside responded.

“You watch too much television, Travis. Open up. I just need some information about Eddy.”

“He’s not here.”

“That’s a good start. Now open the door.”

“You can’t come in. I’ve just got a robe on. I’m dressing to go out.”

“As long as you’re not gonna expose yourself to me, crack the door.”

I heard the lock disengage and the door opened several inches, coming to a sharp stop as it strained against the small chain that secured it. I could see a shock of brown hair, but the man’s face was shadowed.

“We want to talk to you, and I’m not gonna do it in the hallway,” Mike said.

“How many of you are there?”

“Three of us.”

Travis Forbes paused. “There isn’t room for you. It’s a very small apartment.”

“I’ll send in my thinnest partner. She’d fit in a closet,” Mike said. “Put some clothes on. I’m not moving till you do.”

“Give me a few minutes then,” Forbes said. He closed the door and walked away from it.

Mercer backed up and turned around. “Let me check out the building. Wouldn’t want to spook him out the window. There a fire escape?” he asked Shalik.

“Yeah. Go through the back alley. You could climb up it, see all the crazy shit he got piled in there.”

Mercer left as the kid came down the steps and approached Forbes’s door, squeezing his wiry frame between Mike and me.

“Whoa, Shalik. Where’re you going?” Mike asked.

The kid turned the knob and gently pushed on the door till it caught against the chain. He slipped his skinny arm through the space-just several inches wide-twisting his body as he slid the metal catch out of place.

“Future perps of America,” Mike said. “You can’t do that, Shalik.”

“I be done,” he said, standing back from the door, which swung open. “You look, Mr. Detective.”

From the floor to the ceiling of the entryway, with only enough room for a single individual to pass through, were stacks upon stacks of books, magazines, and yellowed newspapers, piled on top of one another and towering over my head. They were so densely packed together that although they gave the illusion of being about to tumble over, there wasn’t anywhere for them to fall.

“Get on your way, Shalik. Scram,” Mike said. He had one foot in the hallway and one over the threshold. “You call the lieutenant, Coop. Tell him to stand by. Tell him we’ve got a Collyer situation.”

I knew Mike well enough to do as he directed before I asked why. He was on his cell to Mercer, asking if he’d seen any sign of Travis Forbes from the alley behind the building.

“Well, he hasn’t come back out yet. Call if you spot him.”

“What’s a Collyer?” I asked as we waited in the quiet hallway, the door still ajar.

“Cops, firemen-all 911 responders-that’s the designated expression for a house so full of junk it’s treacherous to get inside, or back out,” Mike said, reaching up to pull newspapers off the top of the nearest pile. “Look at this. Dated three years ago. You never heard of the Collyer brothers?”

“No.”

“Two very rich guys who lived in Harlem in the 1930s. Well educated, from a prominent family, but really eccentric. They saved every piece of junk they could find on the street. Hoarders, they were. Hermit hoarders,” he said, reaching up to the second pile. “Here you go, catalogs from rare book auctions in London.”

Still no sign of Travis. Mike handed two of the catalogs to me. “ 2002,” I said. “A little late to put a bid in.”

“Homer Collyer, the older brother, went blind. So the younger one began to save newspapers,” Mike said, sweeping his arm across the piles of Forbes’s out-of-date dailies.

“Why?”

“In case Homer ever regained his sight, Coop. Then he’d have all the news that he’d missed to read. They even booby-trapped the whole place against thieves. So the younger one got stuck in one of his own traps and buried in the rubble, while Homer starved to death. Rats took care of the rest of him.”

“I get the point.”

“You get a call to a Collyer, you don’t know what to expect to find under the debris. Junk? Stolen books? Maybe a body or two?”

Mike’s phone rang. He listened and then repeated to me what Mercer told him. “Travis just peeped out the back. Made eye contact with Mercer. Maybe now he’ll move our way.”

“Hey!” Forbes called out from the far end of the hallway. “You can’t come in here. You can’t just break the lock.”

“I swear I didn’t,” Mike said. “I guess it just-just fell. What have you got here, Travis? You know how dangerous it is to keep paper jammed in here like this? A regular fire hazard.”

Travis Forbes was either embarrassed by Mike’s discovery or simply didn’t like to make eye contact. I guessed him to be in his late twenties, about my height, with a sad expression lingering within the intense gaze of his dark, bespectacled eyes.

“I understand,” he said.

“What’s with yesterday’s news?” Mike asked.

“I started saving things for Eddy. Things I didn’t think he could get in prison. It’s-it’s just a habit.”

“Somewhere along the way, I guess Eddy told you the federal can is like summer camp, no? The Times , the Journal -that’s all those swindlers and crooks read.”

“I told you, it’s a habit. It’s what I do.”

“You into rare books, too?” Mike asked, taking the catalog from my hand.

“No. No, I’m not. I-I was keeping that for Eddy.”

“This auction took place years before your brother’s arrest, years before he went to prison,” I said.

“Then he must have given it to me to hold for him,” Travis said, shrugging. “I’ve got lots of Eddy’s stuff.”

“The feds ever been here?” Mike asked.

“These things were released to me after Eddy got in trouble. He had to give up his apartment and had nowhere to store them. The FBI went through everything he owns. They know all about it.”

It was as obvious to Travis Forbes as it was to me that Mike wanted to get inside and ferret through every piece of paper, looking for stolen books and maps, or anything else of value. It was also obvious he didn’t have a leg to stand on, other than the one that was planted inside the door.

“Who lives here with you?” Mike asked.

There was a wooden board on a slice of the wall beside the door, with several jackets hanging on pegs.

“Nobody.”

“You collect clothes, too?” There were windbreakers in different colors and weights on top of one another, and a workman’s denim jacket with the label of a Maine utility company on the sleeve, covering the upper part of a white lab coat.