A tech came along with shoe covers and gloves for Downey, his two acolytes, and me. There were six apartments in the building, but no signs of any inhabitants, unless you counted the bicycle in the lobby that Virus-Erwin and I both had fought with.
The drugstore was open on the third floor. A TV was on: Sox up by three in the eighth. The feed from the camera watching the street showed only streaky lines: no one had taken off the strip of duct tape. A grinding rap beat came from a room somewhere in the back. It grated on my ear, but I was pleased that I could hear it. The ringing from the gun battle was beginning to fade.
Downey told his sergeant to try the apartment across the landing. The door wasn’t locked, another sign, if one needed it, that Freddie controlled the whole building.
“You go in there,” Downey told me. “We’ll get to you when we get to you.”
The sergeant pushed me into the room. I stumbled again and couldn’t avoid landing on his left foot.
“Sorry, Sarge,” I said. “Gunfight and standing cuffed for so long, my coordination isn’t too good right now.”
He eyed me measuringly, fingering his revolver. “You want me to stay in here with her, Looey?” he asked Downey.
“She won’t go anywhere as long as we’re holding her gun,” Downey said.
Sad, but true. The sergeant shut the door and left me alone with a dirty beige armchair and a portable TV on a metal TV table. My legs were genuinely unsteady as I lurched over to look at the chair. It was filled with cigarette burns and ash and had stains whose origin I didn’t want to contemplate. Discarded butts and roaches had fallen into the crevice between cushion and armrest.
I would have welcomed a rest, but not in an armchair that held an arsenal of lethal bacteria. I wandered into the back of the apartment and found a room with a narrow bed, the sheets smelling sweet-and-sour, a faint smear of blood on the pillow. On the floor, a bra, once white, now gray and stretched out of shape; some wadded-up tissues with dried blood on them. Under the bed, a thick layer of dust that made me sneeze.
I squatted on my haunches, unwilling to sit on floor or bed. The bra belonged to some woman who had no money or no interest in her appearance. A junkie most likely. Judy Binder, for instance. The motto on the T-shirt Jari Liu had been wearing yesterday at Metargon popped into my mind: In God We Trust, All Others Show Data.
I had limited data: just Vire’s asking Freddie if he should kill the “bitch” now or later, but I guessed Judy had been sleeping here.
I got to my feet and went into the kitchen. A couple of used dishes stood in the sink, where a bunch of cockroaches was enjoying a pre-dinner snack. Another party scurried away when I opened a cupboard. All it held were high-sugar cereals, a box of microwavable popcorn, and a couple of greasy glasses.
There were two doors, a new one that must have been put in to connect this place with the temple of doom, another that stood ajar. I pulled it all the way open and saw a back staircase. I tried the temple of doom door, but it was locked.
I picked up one of the glasses to use as a crude amplifier. When I put my ear to it, I gagged, imagining what was on the hands of the last person to touch it.
Real detectives do not suffer from germ phobia, I lectured myself. Think of Mickey Spillane. Think of Amelia Butterworth. Neither of them ever shied away from a dirty job. With the glass pressed against the keyhole, I could hear the cops in the other apartment, but couldn’t make out individual words. Judging by the commotion, more units had arrived.
If Judy Binder had been here, she would have heard the shoot-out between Vire and Freddie and me. She would have scampered, just as she did when someone shot Derrick Schlafly in the cornfield two days ago.
I handed the greasy glass over to the cockroaches in the sink and went to the back staircase. There was a light switch on the wall, but no bulbs in the overhead fitting. I pulled out my phone and tapped the flashlight app.
Halfway down, I found a beat-up loafer, probably a size six. Someone had been racing so fast, with so much fear, that she couldn’t stop for a shoe. At the bottom, a door opened onto a weed-filled yard. The door didn’t have a handle or a lock on the outside. I shone my phone around the area floor and found a broken chair to use as a doorstop.
The yard seemed to be where Freddie dumped his old beer cans and tequila bottles. The nettles and sow thistle were tall enough that I kept tripping on bottles on my way to the high metal fence that surrounded the yard. A gate was heavily crossed with chains. I worked my way around the perimeter. At the south edge, soil had eroded enough that a slim or desperate person could slide underneath. The second worn-out loafer was here. Judy, or whoever had been in the fetid bed upstairs, had gone out this way. Barefoot across the broken rocks and glass.