The line went dead in my ear. I spent the next hour or so moving restlessly around Lotty’s sitting room. She tried at first to talk me into going to sleep in her spare bed, preparing hot milk with brandy for me, but she finally left me to myself
“I need my sleep even if you don’t, Victoria. I’m not going to lecture you on rest after your physical ordeal—if by now you don’t know you should, no words of mine will have any effect. Just remember—your body is an aging organism. It will repair itself more and more slowly as time goes by, and the less help you give it, the less you will be able to rely on it.”
I knew by the tone as much as the words that Lotty was truly angry, but I was too fragmented still to make any kind of response. She loves me; she was afraid I would put myself at such risk I would die and abandon her. I understood that; I just couldn’t fix it tonight.
It was only when she’d shut her door with an angry snap that I remembered the Chigwell notebooks. Not the time to knock at her bedroom and ask for help in deciphering his medical shorthand. I drank some of the milk and lay down on the daybed with my boots off, but I couldn’t relax. All I could think was that I had run scared from my problems, had turned to the police, and now I was waiting like some good old-fashioned damsel in distress for rescue.
It was too much. A little after midnight I pulled my boots back on. Leaving a note on the kitchen table for Lotty, I crept out of the apartment, quietly closing the door behind me. I started walking south, keeping to the main streets, hoping to find a cab. My restless energy held my fatigue at bay; when I got to Belmont I stopped looking for taxis and covered the last half mile at a brisk walk.
I’d been imagining the street filled with flashing blue-and-whites and uniformed men racing around. By the time I got home, however, any police activity had disappeared without a trace. I went cautiously into the lobby, crouching a little, hugging the walls out of range of the stairwell.
The upper-landing lights were on again. As I climbed the first half flight, going sideways with my back sliding along the wall, Mr. Contreras’s apartment door opened. Peppy bounded out, followed by the old man.
When he saw me tears started streaming down his cheeks. “Oh, doll, thank God you’re all right. The cops was here, they wouldn’t tell me nothing, wouldn’t let me into your place or tell me if they knew where you was. What happened to you? Where you been?”
After a few disjointed minutes we got our stories out. Around ten-thirty someone had called him, telling him I was down in my office and in bad shape. It didn’t occur to him to summon help or ask himself who the strange phone caller was. Instead he bundled Peppy up, bullied a passing cab into taking both of them, and hurled himself downtown. He’d never been to my office, so he’d wasted some time finding the place. When he saw that the door was locked and the lights out, he’d been too impatient to find the night watchman: he’d used his trusty pipe wrench to break the lock.
“I’m sorry, doll,” he said dolefully. “I’ll fix it for you in the morning. If I’d been using my head, I guess I would’ve known it was someone trying to get me and the dog out of the way.”
I nodded abstractedly. Someone was keeping close enough tabs on me to know that my downstairs neighbor would be watching if they set up an ambush. Ron Kappelman. Who else had seen Mr. Contreras at such close quarters?
“Did the police find anyone here?” I asked abruptly.
“They took a couple of guys away in a paddy wagon, but I didn’t get any kind of look at them. I couldn’t even do that for you. They came gunning for you and they got me out of the way with a cheap trick that wouldn’t of fooled a six-year-old. And then me not knowing where’d you’d gone off to or nothing. I knew it couldn’t be your aunt, not after what you told me about her and your ma, but I just didn’t have any idea where you could be.”
It took me awhile to get him calmed down enough that he would let me spend the night alone. After a few more rehearsals of worry and self-reproach, he finally saw me up the stairs to my apartment. Someone had tried breaking into my apartment, but the steel-lined door I’d had installed after my last home invasion had held. They couldn’t cut through it, and they hadn’t been able to get by my third dead bolt. Even so, I made a thorough tour of the premises with Mr. Contreras and the dog. He left her with me, waiting outside until he heard the last bolt slide home before going downstairs to his own bed.
I tried calling Bobby at the Central District, but he’d disappeared—or didn’t want to take my call. None of the other officers I knew were in and the ones I didn’t know wouldn’t tell me anything about the men they’d picked up at my place. I had to give it a rest until morning.
30
Fence Mending