A beep from the intercom silenced her. They sat there wide-eyed a moment, then Betty-Anne got up and pressed the button.
“Who... who is it?”
The voice was official-sounding. “It’s Chief Robideau, Mrs. Bretton. I’d like to talk with you, if I may.”
Close up, he seemed very large. One didn’t notice that so much in the queue at the grocery store, or in the Legion on a Saturday night. But he seemed pleased at finding them all together and wasted no time asking whether they were all of one opinion about the new tenant, top floor, corner suite.
“She’s missing, all right,” confirmed Mrs. Hundt. “I took her some cheese pirogies — I give everybody cheese pirogies — but I didn’t get no answer even after I knocked at her door for fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes?” The chief raised his eyebrows.
“Well, it seemed like fifteen minutes, though maybe it wasn’t quite that long. Anyways, no answer, so I went back and put the pirogies in the fridge. Someone’ll eat them. They’re the best ones going.”
“Mine are dam good,” asserted Mrs. Remillard with a snippy lift of her chin.
“Your cabbage rolls are, dear, but—”
“Yes, yes,” Chief Robideau said. “What else can you tell me? Who saw the young lady last?”
“That was me,” admitted Mrs. Remillard. “I’d just got home from the bakery, set my bags down to fish out my key, and I hear this sniffling. I look, and there’s Miss Lemay sitting in the stairwell, head down, crying her eyes out. She scurried off without one word. I never did know what she was weeping about.”
“You’d weep,” Mrs. Hundt reminded her, “if you were about to be killed!”
“Only if I seen it coming.”
A chill silence descended as the ramifications of that thought gripped them.
“This happened...” Robideau urged Mrs. Remillard.
“Two and a half, three weeks ago. On a Monday — that’s when I shop. Must of been — let’s see — the twenty-eighth of last month.”
“And you live...”
“Top floor, same as she does — did.”
The chief frowned. “I’m trying to picture it. There must be a fire door on your stairwell — there’s a bylaw about that — so how could you see her? And with the steps leading down, her face would be turned away...”
“Nope, there’s one more flight. There’s a storage room up there where they keep old furniture, things like that. And the fire door don’t close properly.”
Another infraction. The chief made a mental note. “Anything else?” Robideau turned to the uncommunicative Mrs. Pashniak. “What about you? You’re awful quiet.”
Mrs. Pashniak flushed red. “I... I don’t know anything. Except that she’s a nice, quiet girl.”
“Well behaved, was she?”
“Quiet as a clam,” confirmed Mrs. Remillard. “All the racket in this place comes from the super and his friends. Inner-moanious bunch.”
“Excuse me?”
“She means inharmonious,” said Mrs. Hundt, who did crosswords; she added, “Or something.” Then with concern: “Are you going to get to the bottom of this, Chief Robideau?”
The chief’s reply was a noncommittal flown.
“Look,” Leonard Boski argued, fingers spread in the air as if to fend off blame, “I don’t know nothing about bylaws. If you say the chute’s illegal, I’ll believe it. I just work here. Don’t shoot the piano player.”
The chief stood by patiently as Boski went on clinking with deliberation through a gigantic ring of keys. “Funny, this is a different lock from the others. But I got something that’ll open it, something I keep for emergencies.”
The chief noted the new lock on the door of the apartment, brass-colored and shiny, unlike the dull gray locks on the other doors along the hall. “It’s not standard practice here then, I take it, to change locks when the suite changes hands?”
Leonard shrugged. “Couldn’t say. I ain’t been here a month. I only took the job ’cause my pogie ran out.” To the chief’s dismay he lost his place in the ring and started over again. “I doubt it, though. Normally you just re-key ’em.” Finally he displayed a small instrument that looked like a short, bent pick. “Here’s the puppy.” He fitted it, jiggled it, and amazingly the door opened. He seemed suddenly troubled. “You don’t suppose she’s lying in here dead of a heart attack, do you?”
Robideau nudged him aside.
The suite was disordered. Rumpled clothes, scattered magazines, soiled dishes. A lot of plants. Despite the untidiness, the furniture appeared new and expensive, a colossal TV ogling blankly at them from one corner, faced by a sofa and armchair in white leather. The air smelled faintly skunky.
Boski wrinkled his nose. “Pooh. I hope that ain’t her!”
Robideau moved slowly about the room, glancing left and right, and stopped at the kitchen, a small ell off the main room. Cold pots on a stove. Congealed fat in a pan. A smell of bacon. He moved on to the bedroom and found the same innocuous disorder: an open closet, more scattered clothes, an unmade bed — the biggest he’d ever seen in his life. Boski brightened, realizing there was no decomposing body to deal with. “The bed’s been slept in. That’s a good thing, right?”
“Not especially. We don’t know when it was slept in.”
Robideau noted with misgiving that the clock on the bedside table was exactly one hour slow.
The small bathroom yielded no insights, except that it was spotlessly clean and tidy compared with the rest of the suite.
Nowhere was there a picture of the girl herself, which was disappointing; it was always nice to know what somebody looked like when you were searching for them.
“All right,” said the chief. “That’ll do.” He hadn’t learned much, certainly nothing from which to draw inferences as to the tenant’s whereabouts, but he was here investigating a suspicious circumstance, a woman’s disappearance, and after ascertaining that she was not in the suite, possibly sick or in trouble, he could not intrude further. He paused by a dieffenbachia plant, poked into its depths, and gently extracted a small plastic gnome pinioned to the soil on a long peg. He examined it, then replaced it.
“What next?” asked Leonard.
“The mailbox.”
Entering the lobby, where mail slots lined the wall in three flat, brass-faced tiers, Leonard Boski suddenly advanced a complaint of his own. “Chief,” he groused, “when are you goin’ to stop the little beggars in this town from scribbling gerfeedy over hell’s half-acre? They done a number on the back of this place, and the owner’s all over me about it. ‘Clean it off,’ he says, but he don’t say how.” In a narrow room behind the mailboxes, he opened a steel panel that exposed the backs of one whole tier. The slot labeled 623 was empty except for a standard record dub offer. “Those came this morning,” he commented. “I got one, too.”
Robideau glanced at the envelope with little interest. “About that lock,” he said, disarmingly returning to the earlier discussion, “if you didn’t install it, who did? The previous caretaker?”
“I doubt it. Not Dal Reeves. Only thing Dal could install was his butt into a chair. And anyways, he’d been gone three, four months already before I arrived, and she got here after that. She must of done it herself.”
“Why would she if the management would re-key it?”
“Maybe she didn’t know any better. Or maybe the management wouldn’t help her. Ask the owner when you spring it on him about the illegal garbage chute.” He chuckled. “He’s gonna love that. Anyways, the girl’s bed was slept in, and you can see she’s been clearing her mail, so she must be coming around here sometimes, right?”