She hopped past me and bounded out the door and across the back porch. “I don’t see why not. Knocking never hurt anybody, did it?”
She lifted the rubber-banded stack of mail from the basket, led me around to the alley, ran up the stairs, and knocked on Bob’s door. Two sharp raps. She cooed, “Knock, knock,” for good measure.
While we were giving Bob much too much time to make his way to the door, Jenifer seemed to be examining my face. She finally scrunched up her nose a little bit and asked, “You really are worried, aren’t you?”
I said, “Yes, I am.”
“That’s so sweet. Wait here.” In one fluid motion she jumped down the stairs, and disappeared around the corner. She returned seconds later with a fistful of keys, popped back up the stairs, unlocked the lock, turned the knob, and threw open the door.
“Go have a quick look,” she said. “I’m sure he wouldn’t mind. I’ll just toss this mail in here so nobody-”
Jenifer took a half step into Bob’s apartment and immediately screamed, hitting a note that-despite a volume that would have made a siren engineer envious-was so high in pitch that it almost disappeared into the range undetectable by human ears.
I hurdled up the steps three at a time, “What-”
31
“Detective Sam Purdy, this is Jenifer Donald. She’s visiting her grandparents from South Carolina.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Sam said.
I was tempted to tell Sam that Jenifer was as sweet as an August melon, and warn him that she was older than she looked, but I didn’t. He’d figure it all out himself before too long.
He flipped open his badge wallet for her benefit. Jenifer hopped back from it as though it were cocked and loaded.
“So you don’t actually live here, Jenifer? This isn’t your house?”
“No, sir. Should I call you ‘officer’?”
“Detective. Dr. Gregory told me that you’re here visiting your grandparents. They are due home when?”
Sam was dressed in new clothes, or at least clothes I’d never seen him wear before. Two factors were at play: One, he’d lost a lot of weight over the last year and his old stuff didn’t fit. Two, he actually seemed to have started caring how he looked. The ensemble he was wearing was composed of a pair of jeans from the Gap and a striped wool v-neck sweater over a white T-shirt that hadn’t even considered turning yellow. For Sam, the outfit constituted styling.
Jenifer’s acute anxiety that she had done something to lure a police detective to her grandparents’ door was making me nervous. She said, “Soon. They’re due back soon. Any minute I bet. But I’m not sure. They’re out doing that pill… thing. Exercise, you know? With those machines?”
Sam sighed. He knew. Eating a healthy diet was something Sam had embraced. Exercise? That had become cool with him, too. But Pilates and yoga? For Sam, they were still on an astral plane with tats and piercings. He wasn’t quite there yet. At his partner Lucy’s insistence, he’d accompanied her to a solitary session of Bikram yoga-the kind that’s basically done in a sauna-and was astonished, and dismayed, to learn that people were physiologically capable of sweating out of their noses.
Profusely.
And that they would pay dearly for the privilege.
I thought it would take him a while to come around to being open-minded about yoga and Pilates.
“And this guy, Bob, is your grandparents’ tenant?” he asked Jenifer. “He rents a room?”
“Two rooms. Yes, sir. And he has his own bathroom, of course. Hot plate, microwave. You know. I used to stay up there when I was visiting. It’s nice. You can see the mountains real well when the leaves are off the trees. Or is it ‘real good’? No, no-it’s real well.”
We were all standing out near the alley at the foot of the stairs that led up to Bob’s rented rooms. Sam looked at me before he asked Jenifer the next question. “And which one of you actually entered Bob’s rooms?”
Jenifer swallowed and her eyes got as big and bright as table grapes. “I did. That’s when I saw-I shouldn’t have done that, should I? Oh my Lord. Am I in trouble? The doctor was worried and I thought that he… oh my Lord! Oh my Lord. I’m so sorry. Back home, we’d-but, oh, I really am sorry. I’ll never do it again. I promise. Please don’t…”
She couldn’t even bring herself to say “arrest me.”
“ ‘The doctor’ ”-Sam glared at me-“said you saw some blood when you were inside? And a mess?”
“I did. I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking. I really don’t know what I was thinking. Going into a stranger’s place like that? We might do it back home, but I’m not-Y’all-” She sighed. “I screamed. The blood, the mess. I’m so, so sorry.”
“It’s nothing,” Sam said, in his best fatherly voice. “Don’t you worry; you did what you thought was best.” Sam climbed the staircase toward Bob’s rooms. He stopped near the top, turned to Jenifer and me, and said, “What I’m going to do is something that law enforcement calls a ‘welfare check.’ All that means is that I’m going to make a quick walk through his place, make certain that there isn’t someone inside needing assistance, then I’m going to come right back out.” He focused his eyes on me before he continued. “Just in case anyone’s ever curious about exactly what I did in there. Understand?”
“Yes,” Jenifer replied, although it hadn’t been her understanding Sam had been seeking.
He edged into the flat without touching a single surface and was back out of Bob’s rented rooms in a little over a minute. Because of the way the door was situated I wasn’t able to follow his progress. Once he was back on the landing at the top of the stairs, he looked at me and shook his head, “Nobody in there. Some blood, not too much. Just what you saw near the door. And it’s a mess in there, too, Jenifer, just like you said.”
“There they are. Finally,” Jenifer said, pointing down the driveway that led out to Pine Street.
A huge dark GMC pickup with a camper shell was pulling into the driveway. We all waited.
The second her grandparents made it out of the truck, Jenifer announced, “The police are here about the tenant. There’s blood. I looked inside. I’m so sorry. I am.”
32
“Get in,” Sam said. He pointed at his Cherokee.
I got in. The consequences of being obstreperous at that moment were too much for me to contemplate.
“There’s not that much blood,” he said.
“It’s relative,” I argued. “If it was yours, I think you might consider it a reasonable quantity. Anyway, isn’t that exactly what you said about Mallory’s blood on the day after Christmas?”
“And it turns out I was right about Mallory’s blood on the day after Christmas. Kid got nosebleeds. The splatter in the house was consistent with a sudden nosebleed.”
I could have argued the point, but it was clear that Sam was holding trump cards. “What about the mess?”
“You really didn’t go in?”
“I peeked, Sam. I was worried.”
“Being messy isn’t a crime. I see teenagers’ rooms that are worse all the time. There’s no visible evidence that a crime was committed in the guy’s flat. The kid’s grandparents heard nothing. There’re a few drops of blood on a wall and some bad housekeeping. Hell, he could be over at Community right now getting his finger stitched up. ER doc told me once they see people all the time who slice their hands up while they’re cutting bagels. I hadn’t known that. Bagels.”
“There was blood on the carpet, too,” I argued.
“You said you didn’t go in.”
“You can see it from the door.”
“There wasn’t that much blood on the carpet.”
“Was it fresh?”
“I didn’t stop to test it.”
I opened my mouth to ask another question, but Sam stopped me. “We have rules, Alan. Bill of Rights ring a bell? I did a welfare check. I didn’t find anyone in need of assistance or see any other reason to stay in the man’s home uninvited, so I left. Done.”