Despite his surprise, however, he was certain of three things: He was once again a free man, he was in immediate need of his wallet, badge, and gun, and he wanted to finish his conversation with Nathan Lee.
He began looking around for a subway station. "It was over here," Mrs. Goldblum said, gesturing to them to follow her.
Ogden, Gunther, and Sammie Martens crossed the modest room to where the elderly woman was now standing by the window.
"I was watering this plant when I saw the man working on the fire escape. He was right there, where the ladder swings down from that platform to the ground."
They were across the alley from Mary Kunkle's building, looking at its wall and her living room window on the third floor. There, they could clearly see the crime scene unit, or CSU, gathering what evidence they could. The CSU leader had made his unhappiness with his assignment crystal clear to Ogden, describing the apartment as "sloppy fourths" after EMS, the first police search, and finally Willy Kunkle had all raised havoc with it. But his was not to argue in the long run-he functioned at the investigator's pleasure. And he had confirmed that the shavings they'd found on the kitchen counter were consistent with a key cutter's.
Now Ogden, temporarily using his two unofficial tagalongs instead of an assigned partner, was conducting a canvass that would have been done long ago had Mary's death been deemed suspicious. They had just met their first ray of hope in Mrs. Goldblum, after two hours of knocking on doors and meeting with blank looks.
"That's great," Ward Ogden said soothingly. "Could you tell what he was doing?"
But the old lady shook her head. "I thought it must have been some maintenance work. They do that sometimes. I didn't think anything of it because he was wearing a uniform and had tools. What did he do?"
Ogden answered blandly, "As far as we know, he was working on the fire escape, like you said. We're just asking people if they saw anything at all. It doesn't mean it was anything bad, necessarily. Did you happen to get a look at him, by the way?"
Again, she disappointed them. "He was wearing one of those caps with the bill pulled down. All I could see was the top of his head."
Joe Gunther was still looking out the window, and softly asked, "Did the maintenance man ever go up the fire escape, or did he just stay by the ladder?"
"He just stayed there, moving it up and down." Ten minutes later, the three of them were standing at the bottom of the alleyway, looking up. They'd come in from the street, through a gate with a broken lock that Ogden noted with interest, and now Joe Gunther reached out and pulled the chain hanging down from the ladder suspended below the fire escape's second-floor platform. It swung down to meet them without so much as a squeak.
The silence was telling. Without a word, Ogden led the way up the ladder until they were clustered around the hinge at the top. He touched it with his fingertip and examined the fresh, thick, greasy results. Then he cast his gaze farther up the escape, obviously visualizing the route one could take to Mary's window once this standardly noisy and attention-getting obstacle had been bypassed.
Sammie Martens voiced a counterargument to what was clearly going through Ogden's mind. "But her window was locked from the inside."
"Worse than that," Ogden replied. "I checked the lock earlier. It's old and stiff. You can't jimmy it from the outside without either leaving traces or waking up the neighborhood."
There was a long pause as they each digested that point.
Ogden finally straightened and prepared to return to ground level. "Well, let's see how the CSU people are faring. I'm afraid that so far things aren't looking too good."
Sammie flared at that. "What do you mean? What about the key shavings?" She pointed at the hinge. "And that?"
But both older detectives knew they needed more. And they knew a little patience and some more time might give it to them. Gunther laid his hand on her shoulder as she reluctantly started down. "Don't get worked up yet, Sam. We're just beginning."
Back on the ground, Gunther paused as they began heading back toward the street. "What's the weather been like the last few nights?"
Ogden stopped. "On the cool side."
"So no reason for Mary to have her window open?"
"No. Cooler than that. Besides, that would call on coincidence. Unless the guy lived within sight of her window, he'd want to be sure the window was open before he set out to visit her."
Gunther wandered the length of the alley, his eyes running along where the wall met the pavement. He found behind a Dumpster a basement window with a metal grate before it. He crouched down and gave it a shake. It was loose enough that he tried again with more force, and found that a greaseand dirt-covered wire was all that was keeping it closed. The padlock supposedly doing the same thing had been surgically bypassed with a pair of cutters.
Ogden had joined him and was looking over his shoulder as he discovered this. "You ever hear of a CUPPI?" he asked.
Gunther glanced up at him over his shoulder. "A CUPPI?"
"Yeah-stands for Circumstances Undetermined Pending Police Investigation. It basically means any dead body we get where we're not sure of the manner of death. Guy's found stone cold in the park. Did he fall and hit his head, or did someone hit his head with a rock and make him fall? That's a CUPPI until we find out he was a drunk prone to falling and was last seen stepping on a banana peel."
Gunther understood where Ogden was heading. "Mary Kunkle's become a CUPPI?"
Ogden straightened from where he'd been studying the grate over the basement window. "Officially, not yet." He tapped the side of his head. "But up here, absolutely. Let's take a tour of the basement."
They located Jose Rivera for this, who with growing irritation took them downstairs to near his own subterranean apartment, and there unlocked a door to the basement and utilities area.
Ogden asked him to lead them to the window off the alleyway, and Rivera took them to a long, dark room cluttered with an assortment of junk and discarded equipment, smelling dank and faintly evil. There was a general skittering sound when he hit the lights which made both Sammie and Gunther think about the safety of their ankles. Sammie let out a small, spontaneous, "Gross."
"Rats," Rivera explained simply. "They love this place. Was that the window? There're four of 'em."
Not needing to approach it, both Gunther and Ogden immediately agreed. It was the only one overlooking a crude staircase of piled wooden boxes.
"What's down here?" Ogden asked the super.
"Besides all this shit? Nuthin'. There's the usual service stuff-heating, water, electrical panels. There used to be a laundry, but that got messed up a long time ago."
"Where are the utilities?" Gunther asked.
Rivera picked his way down the middle of the room, turned left, and took them through an opening into a slightly less cluttered, windowless cavern whose walls and ceiling were interlaced with pipes, conduits, and a supporting trellis keeping it all in place.
The light was a dim glow from a couple of encrusted bare bulbs, so walking around inside the room felt like being surrounded by a black-and-white hologram. Ogden crossed to the wall housing most of the controls and tried deciphering its contents.
"Each apartment has its own panel?"
Rivera stayed rooted in the middle of the room. "Yeah. That way, one of them shits the bed, no one else loses out."
Ogden pointed at an assemblage of boxes, switches, and levers, all of which, like everything else in the place, looked like it had been built around the time of the Titantic and was now resting on the same sea bottom, complete with mysterious growths. "So, this is how you would control everything in Mary Kunkle's apartment on the third floor?"