There is a homeless man sitting a few yards from the doorway into the parking building. He’s wearing a dark-blue tracksuit jacket that you only see in TV shows that came out of the ’80s. He’s got on a pair of plastic sunglasses with green arms, and a baseball cap with so much paint splashed on it she can’t read the team. He has a few days worth of stubble, which means somehow he’s still finding a way to shave. It makes Sally happy to know he still thinks appearances are important. She smiles at him and he smiles back, and she hands him a small plastic bag jammed full with sandwiches.
“How are you feeling today, Henry?”
“Better now, Sally,” he says, standing up and tucking his T-shirt into too large, too worn jeans. “Better now. How’s your dad doing?”
“He’s doing okay,” she answers, but of course he isn’t. He’s doing badly. That’s what happens with Parkinson’s disease. You never get any better. It gets into your body and sets up a home and has no intention of ever leaving. Doing okay is the best anybody can hope for. “It’s his birthday this week. We’re going to take him out to dinner,” she says, but it won’t be fun. His birthday never is, not since Martin died. Maybe it would be if it had been a month before or a month after, but having it the same week. .
“Well, you have a good time,” Henry says, interrupting her thoughts. “And say hi to him for me. And remember, Sally, that Jesus loves you.”
She smiles at Henry. She knows that Jesus loves her, and that Jesus loves Henry too, and at the end of the day that makes everything okay. When she first started to make Henry sandwiches (she would never give him money, which would surely go toward substances that would make him sin) she used to be the one telling him that Jesus loved him, and his reply was never positive. He used to tell her that God and Jesus hated him. God had made him unemployed. God had made him homeless. She pointed out it was more likely that Henry himself had been the cause of that. He had replied by telling her that God had given him his gambling habit-or at the very least hadn’t taken it away. She asked if Henry still gambled now, to which Henry said no, to which Sally pointed out that God had indeed helped him.
“Then God has a bad sense of timing,” Henry had said, and even though Sally didn’t like it, she certainly recognized there was an element of truth to that. Henry then went on to point out that if man was made in God’s image and man was doing nothing to help him, then God would be doing nothing too. If God came down to walk about the earth, Henry said, and saw him sitting there outside the parking building, begging for change and food, then God would look right through him and just walk on by. The same way everybody else did.
Sally could almost see his point, but at the same time found it easy to dismiss, mainly because Sally never walked past Henry without helping him. After months of bringing him sandwiches, he finally allowed her to teach him more about God’s will. She knows it’s possible he only says these things to her so she will continue to bring him food, but she likes hearing it.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Henry. Take care now.”
Henry sits back down and goes about taking care of himself the way she suggested, starting by reaching into the plastic bag. She walks inside and takes the elevator up to her car.
A moment later her car is mingling with the town traffic. It really is a beautiful city, she thinks. Voted friendliest in the world. It’s obvious why. So many good people. Caring people. She just wishes that sometimes they could show it a little more.
By the time she climbs three flights of stairs, she’s puffing. She could take the elevator, but she’s been taking the elevator all day at work and this is her best chance for exercise. Lord knows she would be thankful to lose a pound or two. She reaches her car-a twenty-year-old sedan that doesn’t have much in the way of features but has plenty in the way of rust, but every day the engine keeps on ticking over and Lord knows she’s thankful for that too.
The building exits on a different street from which she came in. Traffic is thickening, and in an hour, some of these streets will almost grind to a halt. She smiles as she strikes a string of green traffic lights. The sun is still out, there’s a warm breeze, and everywhere around her people are happy. She winds down the passenger window, but the one on her side doesn’t work, but that’s okay because enough of a breeze still makes it inside. She keeps smiling as she drives. There are so many flower beds, so many trees, a river flowing through the center of town-who would want to live anywhere else?
CHAPTER TEN
The first thing I notice is how stuffy the house is. It’s like the inside of a dryer. The summer heat has built up. I wish I could leave the door open. The second thing is that miracles do sometimes happen-no genitalia have been painted on the walls, there are no indications anything has been stolen. A quick flick of a light switch shows even the power is still on.
Time for a casual stroll. I find a few bottles of beer in the fridge. I also find several foods that have gone past their expiration date, chunks of furry mold growing from wet-looking surfaces. It’s almost enough to put me off the beer-but only almost. It doesn’t have a twist-top cap, but there’s a bottle opener in one of the drawers. The beer is refreshing as I sit down and glance back through Daniela’s file. When I finish, I put the bottle in my briefcase, along with the cap and the bottle opener, and head upstairs.
Up here it’s even hotter. It’s as if the heat from last summer and the one before that is being stored up here too. I take off my jacket and lay it on a small upstairs table, knocking the vase onto the floor to make room for it. It breaks. Oh well. The body was found in the master bedroom. Rather than wasting any more time, I head directly there.
The windows face west, and the lowering sun is coming right in. The bedroom is around the same size as any other I’ve broken into. The dark carpet looks both blue and green, but probably looks gray to anybody colorblind. Spread across the floor are more than a dozen plastic markers, each of them numbered. They’re bigger versions of ones some restaurants and cafés hand out to keep track of who ordered the salmon or the latte. In the file, the numbers represent things that were found on those points, things like hair, blood, and underwear. Spare evidence bags are littered here and there. No wonder the police can’t stick to a budget. Each time I kill somebody, that’s more money they have to come up with. Hopefully this doesn’t end up affecting my wages.
The walls are covered in red textured wallpaper that’s slightly too bright for this room, making it feel, if you can believe it, even hotter. The smell of death hasn’t left. It’s soaked into the carpet pile and will probably always be there. The windows take up most of the opposite wall, and beside me is a walk-in closet. A print of some foreign landscape that could be African or Australian hangs above the bed, and I think about taking it home for Mom. A bedside table has the usual ensemble of crap resting on it: a packet of painkillers; a small, smooth jar of night cream, whatever that is; an alarm clock; and a box of tissues. The alarm clock is still keeping accurate time. There’s a similar table on the other side of the bed. Scattered across the room, as it’s been scattered everywhere else in the house, is white fingerprinting powder. It looks like Detective Schroder and his pals had a cocaine party.
I take a look at the sketch map of the bedroom that was in the file. There’s also one of the entire floor. Can’t get lost in here. The purpose of the map is to show in an even perspective where everything was found. It tells me that on the far side of the bed is a door leading to a bathroom. I follow the map and see it speaks the truth.
The body was found on the bed. There’s no tape or chalk outline of where her body was, because that’s only a TV thing. It’s a shame, because that would be a pretty sweet job to have. I can imagine the interview: Well, if you can trace an outline around this orange, the job is yours.