“You’re the detectives,” she said.
* * *
When morning came, Julia sucked down a coffee and two jelly doughnuts. She picked up the black nylon messenger bag that contained the Defonte case file, stalked over to the fire escape, and started climbing down.
“Where are you going?” I said. “You just made a breakfast run.”
“Fuck this motherfucker,” Julia said, her hands gripping the ladder.
I followed her down the fire escape. She didn’t check for cars before crossing the street. When I caught up with her, she was looking for the blond woman’s name on the row of silver mailboxes in the lobby.
“There she is.” Julia pointed at box 703. Belinda Singer. Flecks of icing were stuck to her finger.
“This isn’t what we do,” I said. Private investigators were watchers, waiters. We waited for people to do whatever it was they were going to do, recorded it, and then handed over the evidence. We didn’t jump into the middle of situations. We didn’t intervene.
“We went to detective school, am I right?”
“I went to detective school,” I said. “I did all the work. Everything is in my name.”
“Well, we call ourselves detectives, don’t we?”
I gave her a little shrug. The lack of sleep had made everything bleary.
“I’m ready to do some detecting.” Julia held me in a hard stare. She had bright hazel eyes, more green than brown, and could be very convincing.
We rode the elevator to the seventh floor and knocked on the blond woman’s door. She looked older up close, her tanned skin creased lightly around the eyes and forehead, her lips thin and dry. She wore a white sleeveless tennis dress and white sneakers with ankle socks. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail.
“Are you Belinda Singer?” Julia flipped open her wallet and flashed the heavy brass badge issued to licensed PIs; if you didn’t look closely, it could pass for the real thing. “Let us in. We’re detectives. Police.”
The woman didn’t move from the doorway. I peered over her shoulder, but didn’t see anyone inside.
“Ms. Singer? Did you hear me?” My sister’s voice was forceful. I would have believed anything she said. The blond woman opened the door a little wider. Julia edged into the apartment.
“You’re a detective too?” she asked as I entered.
I glared at her in a way I hoped was intimidating.
My sister moved into the blond woman’s living room. She stood on a leopard-print rug, next to a glass coffee table piled high with issues of South Florida Living. I hung out closer to the front door. The floor was cream tile; large cockleshells, each the color of a sunset, had been arranged on the pale pink walls.
“Where is Peter Defonte?” Julia asked.
The woman cocked her head. “Who is Peter Defonte?”
Julia told the woman that she knew exactly who Peter Defonte was, that he had been in this apartment for the last two nights and was probably still here.
“I wish,” the blond woman said.
“Do you think this is a joke, Ms. Singer?” Julia replied.
“No one’s been here. Look around.”
We checked the two bedrooms, the closets, the bathrooms. We looked under the beds and behind the shower curtains. When we were finished, Julia pulled a head shot of Mr. Defonte from her messenger bag and handed it to the blond woman.
“This man, we know that you know him.” Julia’s voice was softer. She touched the woman’s forearm. “Go on, take a look.”
The woman pinched the sides of the photo and frowned. “I don’t know him at all.” She handed the photo back to Julia and surveyed us for a moment, her nose wrinkling like she’d just smelled something unpleasant, which was entirely possible, seeing as we’d been baking on the roof, unshowered, for two days.
“I think your detecting skills need some work,” she told us.
“This is the law you’re talking to,” Julia said. And then we got out of the apartment as quickly as we could. We went back down to the ground floor and showed the photo to the building manager, the superintendent, and a few maintenance men. If anyone asked, Julia did the badge flash and said we were police. No one recognized Mr. Defonte. The maintenance men showed us the side entrance, which had been visible from the roof. Besides the front door, that was the only way out; there was nothing that went through the back.
“Not unless you’re Spider-Man,” one of the men said, moving a mop across the floor.
In our time with Mr. Defonte, he had never seemed wily or agile, like some kind of escape artist. To me he had always looked weak, with his sluggish gait and doughy face and ridiculous hat. Outside I sat on the sidewalk and slumped against the building. The heat was as strong as ever. I felt like my skin was melting.
“What the fucking fuck?” Julia paced in front of me.
I pressed my face against my knees and groaned.
Later we had to call Mrs. Defonte and tell her we’d lost her husband. She’d phoned his office in Boca Raton and the firm he was supposed to be meeting in Memphis; no one had seen or heard from him. He had simply vanished. Since it had been forty-eight hours, Mrs. Defonte called 911 and then the real police got involved.
* * *
We had seen him go into that building. We had seen him open the door and walk inside. Our stakeout had just started; we were sharp and rested and hydrated. We had taken photos. Could he have slipped out when we were on the seventh floor, even though no one saw anything? Can buildings eat people? At a certain point that seemed as likely as anything.
We were required to turn our camera and film over to the police. They had examined every inch of the building, impounded his car and searched it for clues, and were as flummoxed as we were. Me and Julia and Mrs. Defonte met with an officer at the Boca Raton police station, a Detective Gregerson. He was an older man dressed in black slacks, sweat-stained shirtsleeves, and orthopedic shoes. He didn’t look capable of much, but then neither had Mr. Defonte. He slid the photos we had taken across the metal table and asked Mrs. Defonte if she could identify her husband. She gazed at the photos of him standing on the sidewalk, staring at his feet; reaching for the door; pulling it open and stepping inside. She wore a quarter-sleeve dress patterned with red and pink flowers and leather sandals. Her black hair was pulled into a tight bun. She looked tired and confused, as though she’d just woken up in a place she didn’t recognize.
“It’s him,” she said.
“Are you certain?” Detective Gregerson said.
She nodded and pushed the pictures away.
“What about the blond woman?” I asked.
“Belinda Singer.” Julia cracked her knuckles, her go-to move when she was nervous.
“We questioned her,” Detective Gregerson said. “She doesn’t know anything.”
“What about all those pictures of her and Mr. Defonte?”
“Did you ever see them talk to each other? Hold hands?”
“No,” Julia and I said.
“Did you ever see them interact in any way? Any contact at all?”
We glanced at each other.
“No,” Julia answered for us.
“There you go.” He swept his hand to the side, like he’d solved something.
“There you go what?” I said. “It’s an excessive amount of coincidences.”
He sighed. “Fucking PIs.”
“What did we do?” Julia slapped her hand against the table.
Detective Gregerson said that, in his experience, if you wanted to go looking for trouble, all you had to do was spend ten minutes with a few PIs.
“It’s your aura,” he said.
“We never stopped watching that building,” I said. We hadn’t. Not for a minute, save for when we searched for him inside. That was the one thing I was sure of.