I went in and out of other rooms on the second floor. In what I suppose was the upstairs sitting room, photos in silver frames were grouped on top of a mahogany radio-phonograph console. There was a formal wedding picture, Tommy in a tuxedo, the bride in white with her bouquet all pink and white. Tommy was lean in the photo, and impossibly young. He was sporting a crew cut, which looked outlandish in 1975, especially in counterpoint to the formal clothes.
MargaretTillary – she might still have been Margaret Wayland when the photo was taken- had been a tall woman, with strong features even then. I looked at her and tried to imagine her with years added. She'd probably put on a few pounds over the years. Most people did.
Most of the other photos showed people I didn't recognize. Relatives, I suppose. I didn't notice any of thesonTommy'd told me about.
One door led to a linen closet, another to a bathroom. A third opened on a flight of stairs leading to the third floor. There was a bedroom up there, its window affording a good view of the park. I drew up an armchair, its seat and back worked in needlepoint, and watched the traffic onColonial Road and a baseball game in the park.
I imagined the aunt sitting as I was sitting, watching the world through her window. If I'd heard her name I didn't remember it, and when I thought of her the image that came to mind was some sort of generic aunt, some combination of the various unidentifiable female faces in the photographs downstairs mixed, I suppose, with elements of some aunts of my own. She was gone now, this unnamed composite aunt, and her niece was gone, and before long the house would be sold and other people living in it.
And it would be a piece of work, too, removing the traces of theTillary occupancy. The aunt's bedroom and bathroom took up the front third of the top floor; the rest was a large open space given over to storage, with trunks and cardboard cartons fitted in under the pitched roof along with pieces of furniture that had been removed from service. Some were covered with cloths. Others were not. Everything was lightly coated with dust, and you could smell the dust in the air.
I went back to the aunt's bedroom. Her clothes were still in the dresser and closet, her toilet articles in the bathroom medicine chest.Easy enough to leave everything, if they didn't need the room.
I wondered what Herrera had hauled away. That was how he'd first come to the house, carting off jetsam after the aunt's death.
I sat in the chair again. I smelled the dust of the storage room, and the scent of the old woman's clothes, but I still held the lily-of-the-valley perfume in my nostrils and itoverscored all of the other aromas. It cloyed now, and I wished I could stop smelling it. It seemed to me that Iwas smelling the memory of the scent more than the scent itself.
In the park across the street, two boys were playing a game of keep-away, with a third boy running vainly back and forth between them, trying to get the striped ball they tossed back and forth. I leaned forward, propping my elbows on the radiator to watch them. I tired of the game before they did. I left the chair facing the window and walked through the open area and down both flights of stairs.
I was in the living room, wondering what Tommy had around the house to drink and where he kept it, when someone cleared his throat a couple of yards behind me.
I froze.
Chapter 11
"Yeah," a voice said. "I sort of figured it was you.Whyntchasit down, Matt. You look white as a ghost. You look like you seen one."
I knew but couldn't place the voice. I turned, my breath still stuck in my chest, and I knew the man. He was sitting in an overstuffed armchair, deep in the room's long shadows. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt open at the throat. His suit jacket was draped over the chair's arm, and the end of his tie peeped out of a pocket.
"Jack Diebold," I said.
"The same," he said."How youdoin ', Matt? I got to tell you you'd make the world's worst cat burglar. You wereclompin ' around up there like the horse cavalry."
"You scared the shit out of me, Jack."
He laughed softly. "Well, what was Igonna do, Matt? A neighbor called in, lights on in the house, blahblahblah, and since I was handy and it was my case I took the squeal myself and came on over. I figured it was probably you. Guy from the Six-eight called me the other day, mentioned you weredoin ' something for thisTillary asshole."
"Neumann called you? You're at Brooklyn Homicide now?"
"Oh, a while now.I made DetectiveFirst, shit, it's been almost two years."
"Congratulations."
"Thanks. Anyway, I came over, but I don't know it's you and I don't want to charge the stairs and I thought, shit, we'll let Mohammad come to the mountain for a change. I didn't mean to scare you."
"The hell you didn't."
"Well, you walked right past me, for God's sake, and you looked so funnygoin ' about it. What were youlookin ' for just now?"
"Just now?I was trying to guess where he keeps his liquor."
"Well, don't let me stop you. Find a couple of glasses too, while you're at it."
A pair of cut-glass decanters stood on a sideboard in the dining room. Little silver nameplates around their necks identified them as Scotch andRye. You needed a key to remove them from their silver caddy. The sideboard itself held linen in its center drawers, glassware on the right-hand side, bottles of whiskey and cordials on the left. I found a fifth of Wild Turkey and a couple of glasses, showed the bottle to Diebold. He nodded and I poured drinks for both of us.
He was a big man a couple of years my senior. He'd lost some hair since I'd seen him last, and he was heavy, but then he'd always been heavy. He looked at his glass for a moment, raised it to me,took a sip.
"Good stuff," he said.
"Not bad."
"What were youdoin ' up there, Matt?Lookin ' for clues?" He stretched the last word.
I shook my head."Just getting the feel of it."
"You're working forTillary."
I nodded. "He gave me the key."
"Shit, I don't care if you came down the chimney likeSanty Claus. What's he want you to do for him?"
"Clear him."
"Clear him? The cocksucker's already clear enough to see through. No way we'regonna tag him for it."
"But you think he did it."
He gave me a sour look. "I don't think he did it," he said, "ifdoin ' it meansstickin ' a knife in her. I'd lovethinkin ' he did but he'salibied better than afuckin ' Mafia don. He was out in public with this broad, a million people saw him,he's got charge-card receipts from a restaurant, for Christ's sake." He drank the rest of his whiskey. "I think he set her up."
"Hired them to kill her?"
"Somethinglike that."
"They're not hired killers by trade, are they?"
"Shit, of course they're not. Cruz and Herrera, button men for theSunsetPark syndicate.Ruboutsa specialty."
"But you think he hired them."
He came over and took the bottle from me, poured his glass half full. "He set them up," he said.
"How?"
He shook his head, impatient with the question. "I wish I was the first person to question them," he said. "The guys from the Six-eight went over with a burglary warrant, they didn't know when they went in where the stuff was from. So they already talked to thePRs before I got a crack at 'em."
"And?"
"First time out, they denied everything. 'I bought the stuff on the street.' You know how it goes."
"Of course."
"Then they didn't know anything about a woman who got killed. Now that was horseshit. They ran that story and then they changed it, or it died a natural death, because of course they knew, it was in the papers and on the television. Then the story was that there was no woman around when they did the job, and on top of that they were never upstairs of the first floor. Well, that's nice, but their fucking fingerprints were on the bedroom mirror and the dresser top and a couple of other places."