“Yes,” I said. “It’s a tragedy. That’s why I’d like to talk to you.”
“Talk to me?” He seemed surprised. “Why? What for?”
“I want to ask you some questions.”
His eyes narrowed. “What about?”
“About Alicia…her work…her co-workers…about who might have had a reason to kill her.”
“I’ve already been interviewed extensively by the police.” He was speaking rapidly. “I don’t believe there’s any reason for me to talk to you as well. You don’t have any official capacity in this matter.”
“Listen, Stallings. I’m a private investigator. My job is to ask questions. Only this time the case is a little closer to home.” I tried to calm him down. “I’m not saying her killing had anything to do with her work. I’m just looking for information that can help me find her killer.”
“Help you? Listen to me, Mr. Rogan. That’s the work of the police. I have no interest in helping you.” He tried to straighten his posture but the effort didn’t help much. “You’re just a private citizen. You’ve no right to interrogate me.”
I wasn’t in a mood to argue with this turkey. “You’ll talk to me, Stallings. You can make book on it.”
I gave him my back and walked away.
CHAPTER V
I drove Laura home from the cemetery. As we cruised along the Southern State, she didn’t say much, but neither did I. We both stared at the highway ahead and the neatly-trimmed grassy shoulders. Lost in the dim mists of our memories and our own private guilt.
The temperature gauge was starting to rise again. When you have a ten-year-old BMW, it’s one damn thing after another. I shut off the air-conditioning and opened all the windows. The wind felt good on my face.
The needle stayed on the hot side of the gauge, but at least it wasn’t rising any more.
There wasn’t much traffic heading back to the city at three in the afternoon, so we made good time. Laura and I hadn’t exchanged more than ten words the whole ride.
I drove her back to her apartment in a high-rise on Seventy-sixth between Third and Lex and waited in the car while she went up to get Alicia’s key.
It took her fifteen minutes to come back down. She gave me a quiet smile and said, “I’m sorry I made you wait so long.” She’d changed from the black dress she’d worn at the cemetery to a sleeveless one that was just as somber but not as dark. “I have Alicia’s key for you,” she said. She handed me a soft black leather Coach keycase.
I didn’t want to leave her alone just yet. “Let’s take a walk,” I said.
She nodded agreement. I could sense she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts.
We walked a few blocks without speaking. A few puffy clouds had appeared in the sky but the day was still sunny and dry. After a while she fixed me with a sideways glance and asked, “Why did you leave Alicia?” Her voice was soft but the tone had an edge to it.
The question caught me off guard. I didn’t answer for a minute. “I thought you knew. She left me-I didn’t leave her. It was…you know…the guy…” I let it trail off.
She shook her head urgently. “No, she told me you left her a long time before that. Not physically, I mean. It’s just that you weren’t there emotionally.”
Christ, I was there. What the hell did women mean? How could you communicate with them?
“Laura,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was there. Same as always.”
“No, that wasn’t it. She kind of felt you withdrew from her. You seldom spoke to her. She said you weren’t concerned about her needs.”
This wasn’t where I wanted the conversation to go. I took another tack.
“Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill her?”
She shook her head and said quietly, “No. That’s why it’s so strange. It’s so unreal-like a fairy tale I used to hear when I was a child. I’ve never known anyone who was murdered before. And now, my big sister…”
“Did you notice any changes in her recently?”
She thought for a while. “Well, she did seem sort of edgy…tense the last few weeks, but I thought it was just pressure from her job.”
“You were the closest person to her,” I said. “If she had a problem, she would’ve told you.”
She shook her head and ran her fingers through her hair. “I used to be. But when she started taking some evening classes she began to drift away from me…she really became involved with the teacher and the other students.”
“What kind of classes?”
“Well, she enrolled at the New School and started becoming interested in metaphysics and things like that.”
“Why did she do that?” I asked. “Once she finished grad school she said she’d never set foot in a classroom again.”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I think it was like something to do with the current atmosphere-liberalism, new age thinking, the environment, that sort of thing.”
“She was never like that. You knew how she thought. She hated fuzzy thinking. She liked things to be hard, clear and precise.”
Laura gave me a little smile. “Yes, she did. But that was then…”
“What do you mean?”
She considered for a minute. “Well, she really seemed to take to this Eastern mysticism. The teacher was almost like a master and the students were his disciples. They…” She seemed reluctant to continue.
I waited. Finally I prodded her. “Go ahead.”
She still didn’t speak. Then she said, “Well, they all had…sex…”
I raised my eyebrows. “Yes?” I had a notion this was going to be a good one.
“I mean sexual relations.”
“Yes. So what?”
She blushed. “As part of the…religious practices.”
“And the teacher encouraged this?”
Her face turned redder. “Not only encouraged it-he demanded it. Alicia said he told them it was the only way they could get in touch with their true natures. She said it didn’t matter which sex or sexual orientation.”
I nodded. “Sure. I know these cults. Polymorphous perversity. Any orifice in a storm. And did Alicia join in the fun and games?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me. That hurt because it was the first time in our lives that she kept a secret from me. She started to keep other things from me, too. I think it was because she became close to one person in particular. A woman in the class. They started spending a lot of time together.”
She stopped walking, breathed a sigh that came from some place deep inside her anguish, and looked up at the street sign as if she were trying to get her bearings.
We were standing in front of a Korean greengrocer with its orderly rows of produce. The place was immaculate. On the sidewalk in front of the store, the Korean work ethic was getting a severe workout. The women and children were working the counter inside, but in front of us the father and the grandfather were wasting time playing a board game. The board was a piece of corrugated cardboard from some fruit carton, crudely hand-drawn, and the moving pieces were hand-made. Had they finally become that Americanized? Were they getting soft and lazy? No longer so hungry?
Laura turned to look at me. “You know, you’re going to get into trouble. The police sealed up her apartment. Nobody is allowed inside.”
“Don’t you fret,” I told her. “It’s just a minor inconvenience.”
CHAPTER VI
The yellow police tape covered the front door in an X-pattern, like an emblem to ward off evil spirits. I peeled it off and unlocked the door. The apartment was just the way I imagined it. It was on the ground floor of an old brownstone and it was furnished in a traditional style with muted colors. There was a vestibule as you entered, a small kitchen and bathroom on the left, a living room straight ahead and the bedroom to the right of the living room. Both the living room and the bedroom had doors that opened out onto a tiny garden.
The garden was well-tended. You could see someone had given it a lot of care. This time of year the flowers were in full bloom. The area was completely walled in by an eight-foot high stockade fence. There was a double steel door to the basement that was padlocked on the outside.