Chapter 32
THEY FOUND NUMBER eight on the second floor on the other side of a surprisingly well-tended garden where flowers were still blooming. Somewhere a cat was meowing, long and loud, as if in heat.
Cruz knocked on the oak door. “Se?ora Casa Madre?” he called. “Leona?”
After a minute of no response, Justine said, “I think the lady said pounding was in order.”
Cruz shrugged, pounded with his fist, and they waited another minute. “That should have woken the dead,” he said in frustration. “Maybe there’s a back door. Or a window or something.”
Justine was about to agree when something told her to try the doorknob. It twisted. She heard a click. The door sagged on its hinges and swung slightly inward. She pushed it open with her fingers, calling, “Se?ora?”
The cat was louder now and Justine realized it was inside the blogger’s apartment. She took a step into the doorway, finding a room dimly lit by the sun sneaking through the slats of closed blinds to reveal slices of a pack rat’s nest. The apartment smelled of cat urine, rotting food, and the hint of things fouler.
Newspapers, magazines, and books were stacked on every inch of every piece of furniture save a simple, largely bare wooden desk, which displayed the greatest sense of order in the place. The cat meowed again, louder this time.
“Leona?” Cruz called.
Justine pointed beyond a kitchen that looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned thoroughly in months. Dishes were stacked in the sink. There had to have been at least ten empty bottles of tequila, rotgut stuff, sitting amid other trash on the counters. The garbage reeked so badly she stopped breathing through her nose.
It was the lair of an alcoholic, one well down the road in the disease, far beyond caring about personal hygiene. Justine had been in these kinds of hovels before as part of interventions by concerned relatives. She’d never had the heart to explain to them that this sort of existence pointed to little or no hope.
“Se?ora?” she called, then continued in Spanish. “We’re with Private Investigations Worldwide. We wanted to talk about the story you put up on your blog, about the Harlows?”
But there was no reply.
“Let’s check the bedroom and get out of here,” Cruz said. “Place makes me want to take a shower. Make that several showers.”
Justine nodded, went to the hallway beyond the kitchen, turned on the light. The hallway had been turned into a pantry of sorts, with canned food, human and feline, stacked on shelves beside several full bottles of tequila.
The bedroom was a shambles—clothes commingled with books and paper and trash—and Justine found herself wondering about the bizarre reaches of the human mind, how it could drift into a realm where living in a garbage dump felt like the exact right thing to do.
The cat meowed even more loudly and then hissed as if it were facing off with a dog. The noises came from behind a closed door in the corner.
“Se?ora?” Justine called, and knocked gently at the door.
When she got no answer, she looked at Cruz, who nodded. She twisted the knob and pushed the door open. The cat, an orange tabby with mangy fur, leaped off a counter and blew by Justine before she could fully digest what she was seeing inside the bathroom.
Leona Casa Madre was naked, bloated, sprawled between the toilet and the bath, a broken bottle of tequila beside her. Her head was turned toward the door as if she’d been listening for something or someone before she died.
Whether or not she’d seen Death come for her, or had talked to Death, was unclear. Her eyes were gone, eaten out of their sockets. Her lips were chewed off as well.
“Now do you think we should contact the cops?” Cruz asked.
But Justine was rushing from the room, wanting to throw up everything she’d eaten in the last five days.