At seven thirty, the larger door rolled up and the Ford Econoline backed out. The van was driven by Aslan and there were five women inside, the same women I’d seen at Blessed Virgin. They were gone a moment later, undoubtedly on their way to work. For the next three hours, until Aslan returned, all was quiet at Domestic Solutions. Aslan parked the van on the street and entered the warehouse through the smaller door without unlocking it. Domestic Solutions was open for business.
I could hear the wheels of industry turning in the other warehouses on Eagle Street, but my limited view was so unchanging, I might have been staring at a picture on a wall. My back hurt, of course, from leaning into the narrow opening in the glass wall, and both my eyes were red and itchy because I kept switching them in a useless effort to prevent fatigue. But my mind kept rolling along, faster and faster as the minutes ticked by, ignoring, even laughing at, my discomfort. It was now possible, I told myself, to collapse the entire house of cards, to bring all the guilty parties to justice. The entire process would take no longer than a few days and it could begin as soon as I determined that the fat man with the narrow eyes was in the Domestic Solutions warehouse.
Needless to say, the sequence of events, as I finally imagined them, didn’t pop into my brain fully formed. But once I’d identified the various elements and set them in place, I couldn’t find a hole in the logic.
Fabricate a reason to bring the fat man into the precinct, then dig up Clyde Kelly and have him make an identification. Arrest the fat man on the basis of that identification and use the arrest to obtain a search warrant for the van and the warehouse. Domestic Solutions was a business and businesses generate paperwork. An examination of that paperwork would certainly reveal the names and addresses of its customers. If Jane wasn’t killed in the warehouse, then she was necessarily killed at her place of work, since she had no other life. And if she was killed where she worked, given the nature of her various injuries, trace evidence would be found.
And then there was the fat man and the charge of second-degree murder I would level against him. Would he cut a deal? If he hadn’t killed Jane? If he’d only been involved in the cover-up? Though I couldn’t be absolutely sure, I was looking forward to presenting the argument in favor of cooperation.
I didn’t forget Sister Kassia’s plea or Adele’s admonition as I put my strategy together. The women were now at work and wouldn’t return until the weekend. Aslan could not round them up in the short time between the fat man’s arrest and my obtaining a search warrant for the premises. Once I knew where they were, of course, I’d be after them myself. And I’d give Sister Kassia a heads-up along the way. If Blessed Virgin wanted to hire a lawyer to represent the women, that was fine by me.
I riffled through my notebook until I found Clyde Kelly’s information, then dialed the phone number of the Karyn Porter-Mannberg Senior Residence. The woman who answered told me that Clyde was still a client, though he wasn’t in the building.
‘Most of the time,’ she volunteered, ‘he comes back in time for dinner. If not, he always returns for the ten o’clock curfew.’
By three thirty, my lower back nearly in spasm, I was ready to call it a day. I was expected at the Nine-Two and I was in desperate need of a quick shower, not to mention a change of clothes. I hurriedly packed my kit, then stole a last peek through the broken window just as the fat man emerged, carrying a bag of garbage in each hand.
I watched him walk to the curb, his gait quick and graceful despite an extra fifty pounds, watched him look, very deliberately, up and down the block. For just a second, as his head swept from right to left, his narrow eyes crossed mine. No more than slits, they were as disfiguring as a birthmark or a tattoo. Kelly’s identification would be quick and sure, and beyond challenge in a courtroom.
The fat man nodded once after completing his sweep, then crossed the street, disappearing from view. A moment later, he returned with his hands empty. The garbage, apparently, had gone over the fence.
FOURTEEN
I was up and moving before the door closed behind the fat man. Down the corridor, through the lot, across the street. I tried to compose myself as I went. A pure waste of time. I entered the small office as though I owned it.
On the far side of the room, Aslan and the fat man sat behind large desks placed at right angles to each other. The woman with the red hair was standing to my right, at the foot of a stairway leading to the second floor. She had a toddler by the hand, a boy wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt. Aslan said something to the woman in a language I didn’t understand. Without answering, she picked the child up and climbed the stairs. I let her go, not because I wouldn’t have relished a conversation with her, but because I was much more interested in the joint Aslan held between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand.
Aslan stared at my badge, then into my eyes. I expected him to make some effort to conceal the joint, even to swallow it whole. Instead, he laid it on the edge of a glass ashtray in a gesture of pure defiance that I would later make him regret.
‘Okay,’ he said, his tone echoing his earlier gesture, ‘you are big-deal cop. Now can put tin badge in pocket and show me search warrant.’
‘Hey,’ I said, looking directly into the narrow eyes of Aslan’s companion, ‘what’s with your buddy’s attitude? He doesn’t even know what I’m here for and already he’s asking for a warrant. Gimme a break.’
When neither man replied, I inventoried the room, taking my time about it. Perhaps twenty feet square, the office was paneled with sheets of some material halfway between wood and wallpaper. Dark blue tiles, shot with irregular veins of silver, covered the floor.
The tiles were bright and shiny, as they should have been, given the number of servants who lived there.
Above my head, an air conditioner blasted away. A pair of three-drawer filing cabinets to my left were arranged along the front wall. I registered these items quickly, suppressing an urge to open those cabinets and examine their contents, until my attention finally settled on a flag mounted behind Aslan’s desk. The flag was bright green, with three stripes — white, red, white — about two-thirds of the way down. At the flag’s center, in stark black and white, a large disc contained a semicircle of nine stars. The stars supported a pedestal on which an animal lay with its legs dangling and its head facing outward, so that it stared at me through a pair of ghost-white eyes.
‘That a cat or a dog?’ I asked Aslan, pointing to the flag.
He stared at me for a moment, then blinked twice before swiveling his chair in a half-circle to face the flag. ‘This is wolf of Chechnya,’ he told me. ‘All Chechen peoples are coming from wolfs. This is in our national song. This is what we believe.’
‘Yeah? It must be a pretty wild place then. You do a lot of hunting?’
He broke into song at that point, singing to the flag in a language I assumed to be Chechen. I stepped forward, took the half-smoked joint from the ashtray and put it in my shirt pocket. Then I winked at Aslan’s companion, who stared back at me, so unmoving he might have been carved from clay. Dimitri had been right about the man’s gaze. He was, indeed, looking at me like I was shit on the sidewalk.
I came forward to sit on the edge of his desk, leaning down to study an open checkbook. I barely had time to register a signature on the top check, Konstantine Barsakov, before Aslan challenged me.
‘I have ask you before. In America, man’s home is castle. Where is search warrant for castle?’