A tall, rail-thin young man appeared, wearing a black T-shirt and faded, paint-spattered overalls. His long brown hair was stringy and dirty; the scraggly King Tut beard hanging from his chin was decorated with blue plastic rings. He clutched a paintbrush in one soiled hand, a dirty rag in the other. His ears were pierced and decorated with tiny silver earrings that looked like skulls. When he spoke, I noticed his tongue was pierced, too.
“You knocked?”
“Are you Toby De Longe?” Mike asked.
The youth shook his head. “I’m Saul Maxwell. Haven’t seen Tobe in a couple of days. I reckon he’s upstairs, sleeping it off.”
“Sleeping what off?”
Maxwell shrugged.
“Do you reckon he’s alone?” Mike asked.
The kid’s eyes flashed. “You ask a lot of questions for some asshole who came knocking on my door.”
Mike displayed his shield. “Let’s talk, you and me. Asshole to asshole.”
“Frenchy’s with him,” Saul Maxwell said, frowning.
“Who’s Frenchy?”
“Toby’s girlfriend, Brigitte. She’s French Canadian, so we call her—”
“Step aside,” Mike said, muscling past the man. I followed him through the door.
The layout of the first floor was still one large industrial space, illuminated by fluorescent ceiling lights, half of them burned out. There were visible holes in the concrete floor where factory machines had once been bolted. I noticed another steel door in the corner, beside a concrete staircase with steel tube railings.
The walls were gray and unpainted, except for one massive section that had been turned into an impressive mural depicting the Manhattan skyline as seen from the middle of the George Washington Bridge. The central image was the figure of a man clutching his head and wailing in despair—an impressive pastiche of The Scream, Edvard Munch’s most famous painting.
In a corner I saw an ancient, avocado-hued refrigerator, beside it a card table with a hot plate, a roll of paper towels, plastic plates, and a Mr. Coffee machine with a badly stained carafe. A six-foot folding ladder, several easels, all of them covered, and another card table laden with bottles and jars of paint dominated the space under the mural.
I smelled something like burning roses and a perfumed tobacco before I noticed there was another person in the room. A diminutive Asian woman with short, bottle-bleached hair was sunk so deep into a beanbag chair that all I could see were her head and her legs. She wore bell-bottom Levi’s decorated with embroidered flowers, boots, and a black sweater.
The young woman was attached to an iPod, head bobbing to the beat pounding in her brain. She clutched a thin black cigarette between two ebony-manicured fingers. Sitting next to her on the floor was a mason jar with three long sticks of incense burned halfway down. Her eyes seemed glazed, and she didn’t appear to even register our presence.
“Where can I find De Longe?” Mike asked the young man.
Maxwell pointed to the stairs. “Second floor. Last door at the end of the hall.”
The kid dipped his brush in a cup filled with vermilion paint, faced the mural again. Mike took my arm and led me to the staircase.
“Be a gentleman and knock first, Officer Asshole,” Saul Maxwell called over his shoulder.
I felt Mike tense. I tugged his arm. “Forget it,” I whispered. “Let’s find Brigitte.”
The stairway was cracked concrete and lit by what little sunlight penetrated an insulated glass wall streaked with soot. The second-floor hallway was dark, and musty, too. Mike found a light switch and another bank of fluorescent lights sprang to life. Two rooms flanked the main corridor, one filled with art supplies, the other with a pile of assorted junk, which I realized after a moment’s viewing was meant to be a sculpture.
The door we wanted was at the end of the hall. The aromas of burning incense and tobacco, which had been so strong downstairs, were now dissipating, and I began to pick up another smell, a vague putrid odor.
“Mike, be careful,” I warned. “I don’t know a thing about this Toby person. But I know Brigitte has knife skills.”
Mike stepped up to the door and listened for a moment, then knocked gently. “Toby De Longe? My name’s Quinn. I need to have a few words with you.”
Silence.
Mike knocked again, harder. Then again, hard enough to shake the wooden door in its frame. Finally he grabbed the doorknob and twisted it. The door opened a few inches then caught on the security chain.
“Damn…” Mike muttered. He leaned close to the door, peered through it.
That putrid odor was a lot stronger now. “Can you see anything?”
Mike shook his head.
“What do we do?”
“This.” Mike reared back a foot and slammed his broad shoulder against the wood. The chain broke loose from the frame with a splintered crack. The momentum sent him across the threshold, and he quickly caught his balance.
I hurried into the room after him, but he’d already turned around on me. Before I could see anything, he was pushing me back into the hall.
“Back, Clare. Get back!”
“What? Why?!”
As he continued to dance me backward, I struggled to peer around his tall body. We’d come this far; I wasn’t giving up now!
The room looked stark and miserable from what I could glimpse around Mike’s stubborn form. There were frayed beach towels on the floor in lieu of furniture, cardboard boxes for dressers and drawers, a futon against the wall. The rumpled bed was occupied—and that’s when it hit me. The person lying on that mattress wasn’t sleeping.
“Mike, stop it! Let me go in!”
“She’s dead, Clare. They’re both dead.”
Hands on hips, I stared up at the man. “Are you forgetting I found two stabbing victims in two days? I can handle this. Now let me go!”
Mike released me abruptly, showing me his palms. “Fine, Clare. Go in, if that’s what you want.”
“Yes. That’s what I want. I may not have a gun or a license, Mike, but I’ve brought more than one murderer to justice, and you know it.”
Mike held my gaze for a long moment. He nodded. “You’re right, Clare. You are.” His tone was respectful if not apologetic. “Okay then. If you say you can handle it, then you can.”
“I can.”
I stepped through the doorway and began to cross the small room. The smell was pretty bad as I moved toward the futon. I tried my best to cut off air to my nose, breathe only through my mouth.
“Don’t disturb the scene,” he reminded me.
Toby De Longe and Brigitte Rouille were side by side on the floor mattress. Tongue lolling and black, face greenish red, Toby De Longe had obviously died first. A rubber ribbon had been tied around his biceps, and his forearm was black below the compressed flesh. A hypodermic needle was still sticking out of his arm; a singed spoon and a melted candle lay next to the bed. There were several small squares of creased blue paper, too.
“Some very bad heroin has come to town,” I heard Mike say, rubbing a hand over his face. “It comes in those blue wrappers. We’ve been trying to get the word out, but…”
His voice trailed off.
I shifted my gaze to Brigitte. Compared to her boyfriend, she looked positively placid. One arm was thrown over her head, the other stretched out on the bed. Her long, black hair was loose now and splayed all over the sheets. She could have been asleep, except for the greenish cast to her face and neck and the purple marks where gravity pulled her blood toward the floor. I leaned close to see her face, trying not to inhale, but a whiff of something sharply sour passed the receptor cells in my mouth. I gagged, and the odors of the room rushed into my nose.
“What’s that sour smell?”
“You mean other than the putrid rot of the decaying bodies? Looks like Brigitte vomited while unconscious. See how blue her lips are? She suffocated before the pills she ingested killed her.”