I took my sling off and worked my shoulder around. It was sore, but less so. I opened some windows and powered up my laptop. Then I sat at my table and spent the next half hour reading again through Danes’s phone records and through my own notes. When I was done I pushed my chair back and ran my hands through my hair.
“Shit.”
I called Nina Sachs’s apartment again, and again got no answer. Then I tried the Jersey number that Billy had left. It was busy and stayed that way for half an hour, and finally I gave up. I tried the I-2 Galeria de Arte in Brooklyn next. The phone rang for a long while before an irritated-sounding woman with a high-pitched voice picked up. She claimed not to know Nina Sachs and told me Ines was out. When I pressed, she suggested I try the gallery in SoHo. I called the SoHo number and someone picked up on the first ring, but whoever it was kept silent and hung up when I asked for Ines. After that the line was busy.
I went to the window and looked out at the street. The news crew was gone. The sun was fading and a wind had picked up. I pulled on my field jacket before I left, and clipped the Glock behind my back.
The I-2 gallery in SoHo was on Greene Street, near Canal. It was smaller than its Brooklyn cousin, a narrow space in a narrow brick building flanked by pricey shoe stores. It had a glass front and a glass door, and all the glass was covered by fabric shades. The door was locked and I pressed the bell. Nothing happened for a while and then a corner of a window shade was pulled back. It was Ines. She looked at me for a long moment and then she went away. I rang again and after minutes of nothing happening I rapped on the glass with my fist. The door buzzed. My pulse quickened and I went in.
The gallery was dim inside, lit only by the gray haze that filtered through the shades in front and by the chrome gooseneck lamp on the big black desk in back. The walls were empty and the bleached wood floors were bare; the ceiling was hung with shadows. The whole place smelled of cigarettes and plaster dust, and the air felt ten degrees colder than out on the street. My footsteps were loud and hollow.
Ines sat behind the desk, at the edge of a black wooden chair. She wore a green jersey dress, and her hair fell around her face. There was a wineglass on the desk, nearly empty, and a bottle of merlot, mostly gone. There was a round glass ashtray beside the bottle, with a cigarette burning in it. And beside the ashtray there was a small chromed semiautomatic.
I took a deep breath.
Ines leaned forward and her face came into the cone of light from the desk lamp. She was gaunt and sallow, and her huge almond eyes were painted with ash. Her straight strong nose was red at the end, and pinched-looking, and the creases on her forehead were dark and deep. And there were three parallel lines- angry red scratches- that ran from the bottom of her left ear to the left corner of her mouth. She looked up at me and made a wry face.
“You do not look well, detective,” she said. She was hoarse and tired-sounding.
“You and me both.”
“Yes. It has been a difficult few weeks.”
“I can imagine.”
Ines laughed bitterly. “Can you, detective?” She rested her long fingers on the edge of the desk. She stretched out one and nudged the butt of the gun.
“Where is Nina?” I asked.
“She took Guillermo…” Her breath deserted her and she stumbled over his name. “She took him to New Jersey, to her parents’ home. It was… too much in Brooklyn.” She took a hit off her cigarette, and the ember hissed.
“Is she coming back?”
Ines shrugged. Her shoulders were stiff and brittle-looking beneath the jersey. “I do not know her plans, detective.”
“What happened to your face?”
Ines shook her head. Her black hair was dull and heavy. “A household accident,” she said, and drained her wineglass. She stubbed out her cigarette and lit a fresh one.
“Was Nina part of it?”
She looked at me through a cloud of smoke. “Was Nina part of what?”
I shook my head. “Now is not the time, Ines. I know your taste in wine and your choice of smokes. The cop who’s running this case doesn’t, but he’ll know other things. He’ll pull prints off the wine bottle and DNA from the cigarette butts, and it won’t take him long. And the first comparisons he’s going to make are with you and Nina. So now is not the time to play around. Now we have to think about Billy, and it’s a whole different story if Nina knew about this.”
Ines sighed and her shoulders sagged. A look that might have been relief rolled across her face like cigarette smoke and vanished. “Dios mAo,” she whispered. “He is all I think of: what will become of him, what he will think of me. He is what this is all about.” She made her long fingers into a fist and slammed it on the desk. “A„Mierda!”
“Did she know, Ines?”
She shook her head, and her eyes roamed the shadows over my shoulder. “I did not tell her, if that is what you mean; we have never spoken of it. She did not know what happened- otherwise she would not have hired you. Later on, after you began your work, when you told her about Gregory calling for his phone messages, and that he had suddenly stopped calling, and the date that he stopped- then I think she began to know something. Then I think she remembered that I had been away, and when. I think she knew then what I had done, but she did not want to know. You understand?” I let out a deep breath and nodded. “That is why she fired you, I think.”
“But you never discussed it with her?”
“When we got the news… that his body had been found… I tried. But she was so frightened and… angry.” Ines touched the scratches on her face. “She would not hear it, and she would not let me speak of it.”
Ines shook her head and clasped her hands in front of her, as if in prayer.
“But how can I not, detective? When I look at Guillermo- when he asks about his father- how can I not speak of it? It is like a weight on my chest. It squeezes the breath from me and breaks my ribs. How can I bear this thing any longer?” Ines rested her forehead on her clasped hands, and her shoulders shook. Her cigarette fell to the desktop and began to smolder. I reached down and put it in the ashtray. Ines put her hand over the gun.
“How did you know where to find him?” I asked softly.
“We spoke, and he told me where he was,” Ines said. She ran her hands over her eyes. “He gave me directions.”
“You spoke when he called for Billy?”
She nodded. “He called to leave a message for Guillermo, and I was at home. I picked up the phone.” She looked up at me. “How did you know?”
“His phone bill. There isn’t much activity on it, but there is a call to Nina’s number, made about two weeks after Danes left town. At first I thought it was one of the calls Billy told me about, one of the times his father had left a message. Billy told me those calls had come in the first ten days or so after Danes left, but I thought maybe he’d gotten the dates wrong. Then I checked the bill again, and the length of the call, and I realized Billy wasn’t mistaken. Danes called a third time.”
A look of disgust crossed Ines’s face. “Yes, he called and I picked up the phone and spoke to him.”
“About what?”
“About Guillermo… about the schools and the custody.”
“You were involved in those discussions?”
Her bitter smile returned. “No, detective, those were between Nina and Gregory only. I merely had to live with the consequences, with Nina’s upset… and Guillermo’s. It has been very bad for him, especially in the last months, since his father started again with lawyers.”