John Abbott - Scimitar

She was the first to blink her way out of the silence.

“Jesus,” she said, “what are you doing here?”

“I... Martin is a friend of mine.”

He was shaking his head in wonder now. How the hell had she found him?

“Mr. Hackett?” she asked, still astonished.

“Yes. But... what... how...?”

“My mother has the house next door,” she said, and nodded in the direction of the house where first he’d seen Carolyn Fre...

Her mother ?

His heart was suddenly beating very fast.

She was thinking how gorgeous he looked barefooted, in blue jeans and a T-shirt.

He was thinking her mother was in black plastic bags in the basement.

“This is... I just can’t... I just came over to ask Mr. Hackett if he’d seen her. And here I find... God, this is...”

“It is amazing,” he said, and smiled.

He was thinking she was trouble.

She was thinking she’d never let him out of her sight again. Now that she’d found him again, she’d...

“Was that you at the Plaza?” she asked.

He had still not moved out of the doorframe.

He was thinking he could not let her into this house.

“The Plaza?” he said.

Trouble, he thought. She’s trouble.

“Wasn’t that you? In a blue suit? With a walkie-talkie in your hand?”

“No.”

“I was sure it was you.”

“No.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?”

“Well, I...”

“God, I’m so glad to see you again,” she said, and threw herself into his arms, virtually knocking him out of the doorframe and back into the living room. “Listen,” she said, her arms around his neck, “you’d better not run out on me ever again, you hear?” She kissed him on the mouth, a light little peck. “Have you got that?” she said.

“I’ve got it,” he said.

“Gee, I’ve never been inside this house,” she said, taking his hand and leading him deeper into the living room. “It’s really very nice, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it’s lovely,” he said.

Sunlight was streaming in through the French doors. Sunlight glowed like molten gold on the water beyond.

“How do you happen to know Mr. Hackett?”

“A friend of my parents,” he said.

Careful, he thought.

“I called you in Los Angeles, you know,” she said.

“Called me? Where?”

“At your apartment...”

“How’d...?”

“And also at the hospital. I spoke to a doctor named BJ something, he said you’d better have a good story for Hokie. What’s in here? The kitchen?” she said, and was about to push open the swinging door when he shouted, “Don’t!”

The plastic bottle of sarin was in the refrigerator. He didn’t want anyone going anywhere near that bottle.

“It’s a mess in there,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, “let’s try the bedroom instead,” and looked at him, head cocked, one eyebrow raised in faint inquiry. “Must be a bedroom, no?” she said, and smiled in invitation, her eyes narrowing smokily. “No?” she said again.

He shook his head.

“I have work to do,” he said.

“Okay, later,” she said airily, but her heart was pounding. “I’ve got to make some calls, anyway, find out if any of her friends... hey, you didn’t see her, did you?”

“No,” he said.

“Blond, blue-eyed? People say we look alike?”

“No, I didn’t see anyone like that.”

She came to where he was standing. Stood very close to him.

“I’ll be back,” she said. “Don’t go away.”

“I won’t,” he said.

The place smelled as if a tiger had been let loose in it. Hogan folded his handkerchief into a triangular-shaped mask, and tied it over his nose and mouth. He knew that the Nineteenth had already been through the apartment and had probably bagged and tagged anything there’d been to find. He was guessing, too, that Santorini had been through both apartments with a fine comb, this one here on the east side and the one further uptown on the west side. What he didn’t know was whether or not he’d found anything that had led him to Albert Gomez, whoever the hell he turned out to be; with race relations bubbling close to the boiling point in this city, all the police needed was some crazy Latino fuck running around sticking icepicks in cops’ eyes.

My God , the lady must’ve let her pet tiger piss all over everything in the place.

Hogan wondered if Santorini had gone through the garbage.

He did not want to go through the garbage.

He went into the lady’s bedroom instead. Same stink in here, how could anyone have lived in this joint? He checked out the closet and the dresser drawers. Didn’t find anything but a lot of frumpy clothes. He sure as hell didn’t want to go through that garbage. There was a small desk in one corner of the room, gooseneck lamp on it, some envelopes sitting on the desktop, right where the lady had left them. The detectives from the One-Nine had probably gone through them, figured they weren’t going to be of any help to anybody, left them sitting there. A bill from Con Ed, another bill from a dry cleaning establishment named Madame Claudette’s, a third one from Citibank, that was it. He reached into the Citibank envelope, removed from it what turned out to be a MasterCard bill. Scanned the bill, nothing of any importance he could see on it, restaurants, shops, the usual... well, wait a minute...

No.

Saw the word United, thought it might be United Airlines, which would’ve meant the lady had taken a trip someplace. But it was only a charge to something called United Neighbors, which he guessed was some kind of Upper East Side Do-Gooder association to which she’d contributed twenty-five bucks which she should’ve spent on a cleaning lady instead, get rid of the tiger piss. He gave the bill another run-through, and then put it back into its envelope.

There was a drawer over the kneehole.

He opened it.

One of those Month At A Glance calendars. He guessed the One-Nine had gone through that, too, and found nothing significant in it, otherwise it wouldn’t be sitting here like a lox. He looked through it, anyway, comparing the month of June to the month of May to see if the lady had done anything special or unusual that might have led to her murder on the twenty-sixth. He found nothing extraordinary. Well, two calendar entries for appointments at a place called SeaCoast, which he guessed was a restaurant, one for twelve-thirty on the twenty-third of June and the other for the same time the following day. Eating in the same restaurant on two successive days seemed a bit odd to him, especially since the lady didn’t seem to dine out all that often. He found a Yellow Pages directory in the bottom drawer to the right of the kneehole, and looked up SeaCoast under restaurants. There was no restaurant named SeaCoast in the city of New York.

He looked in the lady’s personal telephone directory, which the One-Nine again had left behind, or perhaps brought back after they were done with it, such courtesies were not unknown in the NYPD, although exceedingly rare in cases where the owner of the property was no longer alive to complain. Either way, the directory was here to be studied, but there was no SeaCoast listed in it, so Hogan figured the hell with it. His eyes were beginning to smart from the stink of tiger piss in here.

In the middle drawer on the right-hand side of the desk, he found three little books with green covers.

He lifted the topmost book from the drawer, and opened it.

There was some kind of funny squiggly writing in it.

“Federal Bureau of Investigation,” a woman’s voice said.

“Agent Grant, please,” Hogan said.