She stood up and headed for the room which she had said was her office/library.
"Come," she said. "I'll sign a book for your police officer friend. The new one, Courting Death. It comes out in about a month."
Mac rose to follow her and said, "Did you hear any noise this morning?"
"No," she said, opening the door to the office/ library. "No, but I probably wouldn't even if someone were shot right outside my front door. I was in my office here from six till eight with the door closed, working on a new book, and then I went out."
"You took the elevator?" asked Mac.
"You mean did I see a dead man on the elevator?" she asked. "No I did not. I didn't use the elevator. I walked down."
"Twenty-one flights," Mac said flatly.
"Twenty," she said, "we have no thirteenth floor. I walk down the stairs every morning and after my walk, I climb the stairs. Those stairs and my walk are really the only physical exercise I get."
The library/office was big, not as expansive as the rest of the apartment, but big enough for an ornate ebony desk with curved legs and inlaid ivory strips with a matching chair and two walls covered with shelves of books, not as many as Lutnikov had in his smaller apartment, but a sizeable number. Against another wall was a floor-to-ceiling glass-enclosed case with wooden shelves. Neatly stacked on the shelves was an odd assortment of objects.
"My collection," Louisa Cormier said with a smile. "Things I've used for research for my books. I try to use or at least handle crucial objects so I know what I'm talking about."
Mac looked over the collection which included an old Arvin radio from the 1940s, a Boy Scout axe, a large crystal ashtray, an enormous bound book with a red cloth cover, an Ertй art deco statue of a sleekly dressed and coiffed woman about a foot high, a claw hammer with a dark wooden handle, a blue decorative pillow with yellow tassels and the words NEW YORK WORLD'S FAIR printed on the front, a two-foot scimitar with a gold handle, a Coke bottle from the 1940s, and dozens of other odd pieces.
"I've been told," Louisa said, "that if I signed them and put them on eBay the collection would be worth close to a million dollars from loyal fans."
"No guns," observed Mac.
"I go to gun shops and firing ranges when I write about guns," she said. "I don't collect them."
There was a set of six file drawers, also ebony, against the wall behind the desk. On the wall above the file cabinets were fourteen framed awards and an eleven-by-fourteen-inch black-and-white photograph of a pretty young girl standing in front of a cleaning store.
"That was me," she said. "My father was the clerk in the store. I worked there after school and on Saturdays. That was back in Buffalo. We were far from well-to-do which turned out to be a blessing since I enjoy and appreciate having and spending money. Here it is."
She was at an eye-level shelf in the right-hand corner of the room. She pulled out a book, opened it to the title page, and asked, "Who is it for?"
"Sheldon Hawkes," Mac said.
She wrote with a slight flourish, closed the book, and handed it to Mac.
"Thanks," he said taking the book.
There was a computer, a Macintosh, on the desk and a printer, no scanner, no state-of-the-art accessories.
"Anything else?" she asked folding her hands, her smile broad, warm.
"Nothing now," said Mac. "Thanks for your time."
She ushered him to the front door and opened it. Aiden stood in the hallway, metal case in one hand.
"If I can be of any further help…" said Louisa Cormier.
"Do you have any hired help?" Mac asked.
"No," she said. "A cleaning crew comes in and cleans every three days."
"Secretary?" he asked.
Louisa cocked her head slightly to the left like a frail curious bird and said, "Ann Chen. She keeps my social and business calendar, protects me from reporters, fans, and the idly curious, and handles my correspondence and Web page."
"She work here?" asked Mac.
"Not usually. Normally she works out of her apartment in the Village. My phone number is unlisted but somehow people get hold of it. The calls go to Ann who with a simple touch of a button forwards them to me after she screens them."
Both Aiden and Mac could see that Louisa was definitely considering a question, but decided not to ask it.
"Is that it?" she said instead.
Aiden opened the stairway door. The crime-scene elevator was still on the first floor.
"For now," said Mac with a smile. "I'm sure Sheldon will appreciate the book."
Mac held the book up. He followed Aiden through the door, and they stepped out, leaving Louisa smiling behind them.
When the door closed, Aiden said, "Hawkes reads mysteries?"
"Don't know," said Mac, starting down the narrow stairs. "Give me a large bag. I want to check our famous author's fingerprints. You got blood samples from the carpet?"
Aiden nodded.
"Now," said Mac, "let's see if they match Charles Lutnikov's."
"She know something?" asked Aiden, her voice echoing as they moved slowly downward.
Mac shrugged and said, "She knows something. She was very bubbly, talked too much, kept changing the subject. She was working hard to be a thoughtful hostess with nothing to hide."
"But she lied," said Aiden. Mac had a sense about falsehood. Those who worked with him had learned, sometimes the hard way, not to lie to Mac.
"Everyone lies when they talk to the police," Mac had once told her.
"You find anything?" he asked her now.
As they entered the lobby, Aiden removed a small plastic container from her jacket pocket and handed it to Mac. He held it up to the light to look at the contents.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Six small pieces of paper," she said. "White, like confetti. Found them in the carpeting outside Louisa Cormier's door."
5
ON THE TABLE in front of Stella and Flack lay the pill bottle, the bathroom window, and the drinking glass taken from the hotel bedroom where Alberta Spanio was murdered.
Stella had checked for fingerprints. There were clear ones on the glass and the pill container, all belonging to the dead woman. There were no prints on the bathroom window, but Stella hadn't had the window removed with any real hope of getting reasonable prints. What she wanted was reasonable answers.
"That's the outside of the window. See that hole?" she said to Flack.
She pointed at something on the window. It was hard to miss. The inch-long gash was shaped like a comet and was the color of untreated wood.
"I checked the inside of the hole," she said. "Screw grooves. Something had been screwed into that window and ripped out, leaving that tail-like mark in the wood." Using an extruder gun, Stella had taken a casting that showed even, minute grooves.
At that point, Danny Messer, wearing a white lab coat, came in with two microscope slides and handed them to Stella saying, "The scraping I took out of the screw hole in the window."
Stella inserted the first slide into the microscope and examined it as Danny said, "Iron oxide. Whatever was screwed in there was iron, almost new."
Stella moved to the side to let Flack look at the slide. He did and saw little dark chips in no particular arrangement. When he moved away from the microscope, she inserted the second slide, the one from the room above Alberta Spanio's. She looked for a few seconds and made room for Flack. More chips, but these looked different from the ones on the other slide.
"Steel," said Danny. "Taken from the particles Detective Flack took from the groove in the window above Alberta Spanio's bathroom. They don't match the iron in whatever was screwed into the window."
"And what do you make of that," asked Flack.
"Nothing more than whoever dangled that steel object out the window," Danny said, "had to have something heavy pulling at him on the other end to make a groove like that in the sill."
"A kid?" asked Flack.
"A kid was lowered to the window, went through, and stabbed Alberta Spanio in the neck?" asked Stella.