She pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the refrigerator. Inside was a loaf of moldy bread, a pizza box, two six-packs of Amstel light beer, five packages of film, and a little girl’s jewelry box of pale blue leather with faded gold tooling around the top. Carefully, she removed the jewelry box from the second shelf of the fridge, reminding herself where to return it later.
“What’s that?” Mike was peering over her shoulder.
She could feel him breathing on her neck again. She shivered.
The little box wasn’t locked. It swung open.
“What is it?”
There were only a few things inside. A broken necklace of American Indian beading, some crudely made enamel earrings with screwbacks. A cheap gold filigree bracelet with a cameo in the middle, and a gold pin of some sort with Greek letters on it. She picked up the gold pin and held it to the light.
“What is it?”
Mike shook his head.
“It’s a sorority pin,” Roberts said scornfully. He had pushed in behind Mike. “You two know what a sorority is?”
“Sure,” Mike said pleasantly. April could see the word Dickhead hanging there behind his smile. Sanchez moved out of the kitchen.
April put the jewelry box back in the fridge, then joined him in the back room. It was empty, looked as if it had been cleared for a renovation that never happened.
Braun looked around and had nothing to say. He cocked his head toward the stairs. Once again the four of them trooped up a flight of stairs in a line.
This time Braun had something to say. “Jesus H. Christ. Get a load of this.”
“Isn’t this fun.” Mike let April go in first.
She stopped suddenly, stunned. Nothing downstairs prepared them for what was up there. Unlike the mess on the floor below, this level had been very carefully decorated. The floor in the bedroom was pickled white, stenciled in a colorful pattern around the edges. An Oriental rug filled in the center. The walls were covered with fabric. April could tell it was high-quality silk, had a pattern of stripes and tiny flowers in pink and gold and green. The fabric was gathered at the ceiling and pulled up to a point at the top to look like a tent. From the center point hung an ornate chandelier with cherubs of painted porcelain.
A king-size four-poster against one wall was made up with a rich red brocade bedspread and topped with dozens of tapestry pillows, tassled and velvet-trimmed. The head- and baseboards were ornately carved, gilded wood.
There were only two other pieces of furniture in the room. A dressing table with a mirror attached, completely inlaid with ebony and mother-of-pearl, and a chair in the corner with faded and threadbare upholstery the same color as the jewelry box in the refrigerator.
Speechless, the four detectives studied the room. Then they moved to the bathroom, which had a Jacuzzi bathtub and black walls. In the closet they found only men’s clothes, and several shoe racks filled with cowboy boots of different colored leather—ostrich, alligator, snakeskin.
Up on the third floor they found a stark white room which held an old-fashioned cot and a painted chest of drawers. There were some rumpled sheets, an old quilt and one pillow on the bed, bars on the windows. The floor was bare except for a bowl of water with a dead cockroach floating in it, and a small white bathroom rug that was badly stained with a lot of little yellow circles of what April guessed was puppy urine.
“What’s that?”
Braun pointed to some soiled laundry in the corner. Roberts leaned over and picked it up. His forehead furrowed with alarm as he displayed the straitjacket, the straps showing quite a bit of wear.
April glanced at Mike. What did this picture tell?
Braun shook his head as if one ear were filled with water.
“Looks like he kept her up here in more ways than one.”
April took out her notebook and made a quick note. She wondered how Jason Frank was doing with the suspect.
55
After they saw the restraint on the third floor, Braun called in one of his detectives from the street to help search the house. A few minutes later he found April in the other bedroom on the third floor. She was leaning over a table, studying Camille’s hairbrush and the tangle of long reddish-gold hair in its bristles. Arrayed around her were a number of rolling racks hung with women’s clothes. All kind of clothes. Up there, there seemed to be a warehouse of blouses and dresses and jackets and skirts the way the downstairs was a warehouse of furniture. Some items still had price tags on them. It looked like Camille did a lot of shopping.
Braun gestured at April. “Go check out the basement. See what you can come up with.”
Basement! Immediately her heart began to pound. Why the basement, when there was a treasure trove right here? She struggled to swallow the protest that jumped onto her tongue. What was wrong with this guy? Didn’t he know she was the first one in on this case and knew what she was looking for?
“You got a problem?” Braun said nastily.
She turned away for a second, lowering her eyes so the hot rage didn’t spill out there either. She didn’t have a problem. She didn’t love dark places like basements, but cops weren’t supposed to admit to little weaknesses like terror, repulsion, nausea, or rage at incompetent supervisors.
“No, sir, no problem.”
She had wanted to see if the missing items from Mrs. Manganaro’s store inventory were in this room. And he was a jerk.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
“I’m gone.” She headed for the door, leaving the gold mine of information in all those clothes. Braun didn’t know about the missing white blouse from The Last Mango. Elsbeth Manganaro had just told her. Braun would pass it by if it was there. She’d have to come back and look for it later.
Downstairs, she turned the thumb latch on the basement door and stood outside it, cursing herself in Chinese for being afraid of opening a door and entering a cave that might have ghosts in it. Only people like Skinny Dragon Mother, born in China, believed in ghosts. American-born Asians like herself knew better. Ghosts didn’t cross the oceans. They stayed on the other side. She switched on the light.
After she had the light on and the door at the top of the stairs open, it wasn’t so bad going down there. She could tell there wasn’t anything either alive or dead in the basement. It felt damp and cold, and the smell of ammonia made her eyes tear, but it wasn’t frightening. It felt the way she had described Camille to Jason—weird and upsetting, off-kilter in every way, but not frightening. Creepy.
April had a powerful sense of Camille’s presence in there. Wherever Camille spent time with her dog, there was the smell of urine. Either the dog was not trained to go outside, or Camille neglected to take it out as often as it needed to go.
She tried to visualize the dog and Camille in this place. What did they do in there? The room was nearly empty. There were three smallish cardboard boxes half filled with junk that April recognized as chandelier parts, ceiling caps, chains of various thicknesses and lengths, pieces of crystal with wires through them, brass arms. April spent several fruitless minutes raking through them.
An oil-burning furnace and a rusting water heater sat off to one side. There was no furniture. No tables or chairs. As in the front entry, the ceiling light was just a weak bulb, this one set in among the maze of exposed plumbing pipes. An odd-looking bundle sat in the corner behind the furnace. April had to circle the furnace to see it. Immediately she knew this was Camille’s corner. There was a piece of fraying blue carpet under the bundle. April shivered when she saw the way the carpet was positioned. From here Camille would be partially hidden behind the furnace, but able to see the barred window above. April had no idea why she could see Camille sitting there.