Amanda had not started that baby without a man. Although it was the Christmas season, Riker required a few thousand years of distance from miracles. The old lady was keeping something back.
‘Well, the neighbors wouldn’t know,’ said Mrs Farrow. ‘They’re all working-class people in this neighborhood. They’re out of the building during the day, and all in bed at a reasonable hour. So they wouldn’t know.’
‘And you never heard the guy downstairs on a weekend, I bet.’
‘Well, no.’
She hunched her thin shoulders, and her chin dropped to her chest. She fixed her startled eyes on the carpet at her feet, understanding now what she had given away.
Riker smiled, and regarded the old woman as though she were made of precious stuff.
‘You know,’ said Riker, ‘I don’t like to speak ill of the dead either, but I don’t think Amanda would mind. And I know you want to help us find the killer, don’t you? So, you figure the boyfriend is married, right?’
‘Amanda never talked about him, and he only came in the afternoon when no one was at home.’
‘But you heard them downstairs. You heard them together.’
And oh, what she had heard, said the nervous fidgeting of her fingers about the cookie tin. She would not meet his eyes.
Mallory scrolled through the lines of the novel, looking for anything out of place, any sign of a damaged file. The fire escape window was at her left. Beyond the glass pane, she heard a baby crying, and then the soft thudding on the glass. She turned to the window. Not a baby.
She was staring into a pair of slanted eyes as green as her own. The cat’s fur had been white, but now it was grayed with dust and dirt, and one ear was torn and bloody. Amanda Bosch must have been in the habit of feeding the stray.
‘Tough luck, cat, you’re on your own.’ She turned back to the computer and continued the scrolling, scanning the lines for gaps and odd characters, gleaning a little from the plot. One of the main characters lived in an expensive condo on the Upper West Side. Now that fit nicely with the missing file card bearing the address of Betty Hyde’s condo. The fictional man was a married cheat. Better and better. The cat would not shut up.
Mallory looked back to the window and tried to convey, by narrowing eyes, that the cat must stop, and right now, or she would dispatch it to kitty heaven. The animal misunderstood, its own eyes narrowing to the slits of I love you, too. Then the cat was on its hind legs, pawing at the glass with mewls of, Let me in, now, now, now.
Mallory raised the sash. But, before she could terrorize the small animal, it slipped under her arm and into the room, depositing cat hair on the sleeve of her blazer in passing. It ran through the galley kitchen and into the front room.
She shrugged. What the hell. Bosch was dead, the apartment was tossed, let the cat steal what it could. It was nothing to her.
It began the mewling again. Mallory looked at the cat with a new idea for making it shut up. A rare change of heart caused her to abandon that solution. The cat would have enough problems out on the street without a fresh injury.
She watched it hook a paw in the closet door and open it. After a brief search, it was out again and sniffing the floor. It came back to the bedroom to rub up against her leg. The plaintive meowing ceased, and the soft roar of purring began. Mallory repressed the urge to kick it. She pushed it off with her leg. And now the cat went to the bookshelf and knocked out the bottom cartons of computer ribbon to pull out the catnip toy.
Not a stray.
Mallory got up and walked into the galley kitchen. She looked in the cupboard. All the dishes were neatly stacked, but one seemed out of place, a bowl sitting on the dinner plates. Over the blue ceramic glaze, the word Nose was printed in gold letters. The cat was staring up at her, and now she noticed the long gray marking around the muzzle, a shading she had taken for dirt. It had the comic illusion of making the cat’s nose seem long and bulbous. Nose was well named.
It was mewling again. Mallory put one hand on her hip, drawing back the blazer to expose the bolstered gun, forgetting momentarily that this gesture would have no effect on a cat.
The cat stood up on its hind legs and twirled in a circle, dancing with delicate, practiced steps. Done with dancing, it sat quietly staring at the bowl in Mallory’s hand. And now the small animal had been further reduced in her eyes. The only thing a cat had going for it was the refusal to do stupid pet tricks. This one had copped out.
She opened a can of tuna, guessing food would keep it quiet. The cat ate as though it had been starved.
She went back into the bedroom and set the printer to spit out the cued-up files. And now she checked the closet and looked down at the cradle on the floor.
A cradle for an abortion!
She walked into the bathroom. In the closet under the sink was a long plastic box, the kind used for Kitty Litter. It was dusted with black powder, but there were no prints. The killer had cleaned the litter box.
This apartment was not the crime site; she knew that after a careful inspection of the other closets. She sniffed the insides of the closet doors for the familiar odor of the recent cleaning. He wasn’t cleaning up after a break-and-enter. This was a place where he had spent a lot of time. He was the one Amanda Bosch had locked out of her subfiles, her novel. She might have done that if he figured prominently in the book.
But he had left the card file behind. How convoluted was he?
Of course.
He had to leave the addresses of the clients for the police, so they wouldn’t have to go looking on their own, maybe asking for public assistance on the evening news. It fit. The park site where the body was found was only a few minutes’ walk from Hyde’s condo. It was the address he was hiding.
Now she went over the rooms of the apartment with greater care.
Details, said Markowitz from the room inside her brain which she had outfitted with his favorite chair, a rack of pipes and a pouch of cherry-blend tobacco. Details.
She went through the canned goods in the kitchen pantry. Two cans of fish, but no pet food. Well, some people were a little strange about animals. Now she found the vacuum in the living room closet and pulled it open. The bag was gone. Heller would have taken it. Around the insides of the vacuum cleaner she found cat hair.
The cat was rubbing up against her leg again, depositing more hair. It stood up on hind legs, soft paws on her jeans. Mallory bent down and picked up the cat’s paws.
No claws. Not an outside cat.
And that would explain the torn ear and the rest of the blood. Such a cat could not survive on the street. The animal had escaped when the killer returned. Or did he throw it out for a reason?
The cat had eaten its food with ravenous hunger, and now the bowl was licked clean. It must have gone without food for a long time. That would fit if the killer had returned to the apartment the day of the murder, the last date on the computer log.
Riker had never expected to see Mallory with a cat in her arms. Cats were the natural enemies of the compulsively neat. It had already deposited a mess of white hairs on her gray blazer. And most surprising, the cat was still alive. She set it down on the carpet beside her. The cat rubbed up against her leg, shedding more fur, and yet, she didn’t kill it.
‘Who’s your friend?’
‘The cat’s name is Nose. He lives here.’
‘Oh, yeah?’ He bent down to pet the cat. It shied around to the other side of Mallory’s legs. ‘So, what else have you got?’
‘This isn’t the crime scene,’ she said, pushing the cat off with one leg and uncharacteristic restraint. ‘The original crime scene is in the park. The perp lives in that neighborhood. Not likely he’d drag a dead body home to dump it. That’s where she had a meeting with him,’