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Time moved slowly on Friday. I was still unsettled from my visit to the FBI the day before, and there was little to do at Friar Lake to take my mind away.
It was early afternoon when Rick called. “Can you do me a huge favor? I just heard from Tiffany and she’s completely freaked out. She went out on a job interview this morning and while she was gone, somebody broke into her apartment. She called the local cops right away and they came and took fingerprints, but she needs somebody to hold her hand and help her clean up. I have to give a deposition in Doylestown this afternoon so I can’t go up there. You think you could?”
I agreed, and he said he’d text me the address. “But I have Rochester with me,” I said. “Will she be all right with him?”
“She’ll have to be.”
After we hung up, I stared out the window and wondered what kind of trouble Tiffany had gotten herself into now. She didn’t seem to have a lot of money, so why would someone break into her apartment—especially during the light of day? Because of the kind of guy he was, I was sure Rick had been generous with her when they were married, so she might own some expensive jewelry or electronics. With the price of gold so high, even small earrings or pinky rings could be enough motivation for a junkie or other low-life to break in.
Rochester and I left Friar Lake a few minutes later. Instead of driving all the way back downriver to Yardley to get onto I-95, I took route 611 north through the Pennsylvania countryside. Cliffs butted up against the tight curves of the winding roads and I was surprised there could be so much wilderness right in the middle of one of the most populated parts of the United States.
As I navigated the interchange for I-95, I ran into a sun shower, that weird combination of sun glaring at my windshield through a screen of rain. A few minutes later I passed through it and into brilliant sunshine, and a fuzzy rainbow stretched over the industrial landscape. It reminded me of the line from Springsteen’s “Glory Days” about the gas fires of the refineries. Something kind of trouble was clearly brewing in Tiffany’s life, and I hoped Rick and I would be able to figure it out before it exploded.
When I got close to Tiffany’s address I snagged an on-street parking space. Rochester was loving the urban smells and I had to keep tugging him forward, past a mattress outlet, a carpet shop called Sav-on-a-Roll-A, and a convenience store selling international phone calling cards, the front window a hodgepodge of flags from Latin American countries.
Tiffany’s apartment was over a frozen yogurt store on a cross street a few blocks from downtown Union City. The lock on the exterior door to her building was rusty and looked like it hadn’t worked in years. No need to buzz her to let us in.
The entrance lobby was dim and Rochester balked at having to walk up the narrow staircase to the second floor, but I tugged him along. When we got to apartment 2-C I stopped and looked at the knob and the jamb. There were no scrapes or pry marks around the lock, though I could see smudges of what looked like fingerprint powder.
Rochester sat on his haunches as I knocked. When Tiffany opened the door, her hair was a mess and she looked like she’d been crying. She was wearing a low-cut blouse that showed off her impressive bust and a pair of Capri pants. She was barefoot and without her heels on I was surprised at how short she was.
“Rick couldn’t make it, huh?” she asked, as she stepped back to let me in. “The dog isn’t going to take a dump in here, is he?”
I wanted to say that it wouldn’t matter, but I said, “He’ll be fine. What happened?”
“Eddy arranged a job interview for me this morning so I was out for a couple of hours.” She was shaking, and her voice quavered.
An interview? In what she was wearing? Then I remembered Rick had told me she’d worked as a cocktail waitress before getting the job at The Center for Infusion Therapy.
“When I got home from the bar it was like this.” She sniffed once, then waved her arm to encompass the apartment. It looked like a whirlwind had struck, tossing sofa cushions, fashion magazines and kitschy knickknacks into random piles on the floor.
From the hallway, I pointed at the door. “Do you know how they got in? It doesn’t look like they broke anything here.”
“That’s a cheap lock,” Tiffany said. “Alex showed me once how you could get it open by sliding a credit card alongside it. He’s been after the landlord to replace it for me.”
“Could it have been Alex?” I asked as I followed her inside. “Looking for something you have?”
“Why wouldn’t he just ask me? It isn’t like we got any big secrets from each other.”
Not like the one she was keeping from him, that she was dating Eduardo de la Fe on the side. “You know about his drug arrest?”
Rochester walked beside me and began sniffing around.
“That was a frame job,” Tiffany said. “He told me all about it.”
“He still hanging out with those people? Maybe he’s holding something out on them, and they think you have it.”
Tiffany didn’t have an answer for that. She closed the door behind me and pressed the button on the knob to lock it.
“Anybody else have a key to that lock?” I asked. “Old boyfriends, somebody to water your plants or take care of your cat?”
“I don’t have any plants and I don’t have a cat. And even Alex doesn’t have a key to my place.” She rubbed her upper arms. “I’m scared. What if I’d gotten home early and he was still here? What if someone wants to hurt me?”
She started to cry, and I put my arm around her shoulders. Ordinarily when someone was upset, Rochester would try to comfort them, but he seemed to recognize she wasn’t a dog person, and he found a place to lie down on the floor.
“It’s okay,” I said. Her perfume was strong and reminded me of bug spray, though I was sure it was something well-advertised and expensive. “We’ll figure things out.” I looked around the mess. “Can you tell what was stolen?”
“My jewelry is all here, and the only stuff I have worth any money is my TV and my laptop. The TV’s still here, and I had the laptop with me.”
Interesting. So the intruder hadn’t been after something to sell. What else did Tiffany have?
She sniffled, and wiped her eyes with the back of her arm. “What am I going to do?”
I thought the best thing would be to get Tiffany working, take her mind off what had happened until she could think more calmly. I looked around the room and realized that once again, I couldn’t help snooping. I was curious not only to see what the intruder had done, but how Tiffany had lived.
A couch sat in front of two double-hung windows that looked out at the street, with a scarred wooden coffee table in front of it. The cushions had been tossed aside, and all the knickknacks from a wire stand had been thrown to the floor.
No books, I thought.
A galley kitchen was along one wall, with a Formica-topped table and two chairs, which had been knocked over. The intruder had sliced open a bag of flour and spilled it on the table along with a plastic container of rice. A couple of jars of jam and hot sauce had been smashed in the sink and I could already see tiny ants climbing around.
“Let’s clean up,” I said. “You have a broom and a dustpan? Some big garbage bags?”
I put the cushions back on her couch, picked up the chairs and set them by the table. I hung up a couple of pictures the burglar had taken down from the wall, including the same photo of her and Rick at the Grand Canyon that I’d seen at his place.
Rochester kept getting underfoot as I swept the floor and filled a garbage bag. As I worked, my brain kept ticking. Why open all those jars and boxes? That implied the guy was looking for something small. What could it be?”
While Tiffany was rinsing the plastic containers, I asked, “This guy, whoever he was, he was looking for something. Something small enough to hide in a box of rice or under a sofa cushion. What do you think it could be?”
“No idea.” Her hands were full of dish soap and she used the back of her arm to wipe her forehead.
When the dishes were done she joined me in the living room. “Ricky gave me this,” she said, picking up a miniature cuckoo clock that had been smashed in half. “He said it reminded me of him.”
She tossed it into a half-full trash bag. “He probably tells you he can’t get rid of me,” she said. “Like today. I did call Alex, you know. First. It’s just that he couldn’t leave work.”
“Yeah. A car wash manager’s job is more important than a cop’s.”
“It’s not like that,” she protested. “Rick doesn’t have to clock in or out like Alex does. And all my girlfriends have to work, too. But you know something? I don’t need him, or anybody else.”
She glared at me, then her whole body sagged. “I appreciate your help, though. I mean, look at me? My life gets wrecked and I’m stuck depending on some guy I hardly know. What’s wrong with this picture?”
“I know what it’s like to start from nothing,” I said. “I had exactly one friend who stood by me when I was in prison. My wife divorced me and threw out most of my stuff. By the time I got out my dad had died and I had no family left besides some cousins. I was lucky he left me his townhouse or I’d have been living in a homeless shelter.”
“But you picked yourself up.”
“I did. I was lucky that people helped me but I had to do the work myself.”
“I can see why Ricky likes you,” she said. “He’s got this thing, he wants to fix the world. All the time we were married, he kept trying to get me to take college classes, to be like the other cops’ wives. But I didn’t fit in there and eventually we both knew it.”
That was a different story than the one I’d heard from Rick. He had said Tiffany was an adrenaline junkie, that she got off on the idea that he might get shot on patrol. When he moved up to detective, she’d left him for a fireman. Now, she was dating a felon and cheating on him with a guy under investigation by the FBI.
Which was the real story?
Tiffany dusted her hands off. “I’d better get into the bedroom. I don’t need any more strangers looking through my undies today.”
I took a quick look from the doorway and saw the same kind of turmoil there. The mattress on the queen-sized bed had been turned on its side, and her clothes were strewn across the box spring. A couple of handbags had been turned out as well, leaving a detritus of lipsticks, makeup and tissues.
I left her to clean up and returned to the living room. I called a locksmith to replace the cheap lock, and while I waited for him to show up I ran the vacuum and finished tidying up. By the time Tiffany joined me there, Rochester was sitting on her couch, sniffing for something between the cushions.
“Hey, make him get down. I don’t need dog hair everywhere on top of everything else.”
“Rochester! Down, boy.”
He wouldn’t obey, and I had to walk over to him and tug on his collar. When he lifted his head I saw that he had Tiffany’s keychain in his mouth. He let me take it from him, and then he scrambled back down to the floor.
“Is there anything on this jump drive?” I asked her. “It’s small enough to hide in a box of rice. Where did you say you got it anyway?”
“I found it at work. I wanted to put some of my pictures on it but it’s full of junk and I don’t know how to clean it up.”
What Tiffany thought was junk might have been worth breaking into her apartment for. “Can I use your laptop? I’ll see what’s on it and free up some space for you.”
I pulled the llama off her key chain as she turned on her laptop. She didn’t have any virus protection software on it, so I quickly downloaded a free version and ran a scan before I did anything else. Nothing harmful on the laptop, or on the jump drive either.
When I was able to look at the contents of the drive, I saw that a huge zipped file took up most of the available space. Fortunately I had the little jump drive I’d taken to Philly with me with the information I’d passed on to the FBI, and I was able to move everything on her llama drive to mine.
“The drive is empty now,” I said. “So you can put whatever you want onto it.”
“Can you help me download some pictures from Facebook onto it?” she asked. “I always seem to screw that kind of thing up.”
We still had a while before the locksmith was due, so I showed her what to do. She had made a Facebook post the day before about the little llama, how she’d found it at work but hadn’t realized until then that it was a drive for her computer. She clearly had a lot of time on her hands.
Along the left side of the screen, I saw her list of friends. Had whoever broke into her place also tried to get into the homes of her co-workers? “Any of these the people you worked with?” I asked.
“Yeah. That’s Maria Jose there, she’s my boss.”
“Can you call and ask her if anyone broke into her place?”
She picked up her cell phone and dialed. I leaned down and scratched Rochester’s belly.
After a moment Tiffany said, “Voice mail.”
“Can you message her through Facebook?” I asked.
“I guess.” She clicked on the head shot of a pretty Latina, and Maria Jose Rodriguez’s page popped up.
“That’s weird,” she said, leaning forward to the screen. She pointed at Maria Jose’s latest message, from almost a week before.
Mama huevos, America. Voy a volver a Colombia.
My command of Spanish was pretty basic, limited to ordering food and beer. “Mother eggs?” I asked Tiffany.
“It doesn’t make sense.” She pointed. “See this? Mama huevos? That’s Cuban slang for suck my balls. Maria Jose is a real lady. She would never talk that way.”
“Not even if she was mad?”
Tiffany shook her head. “She would say something in Colombian Spanish if she was. And it wouldn’t be crude, like this.”
The locksmith arrived, and I had a good, strong lock put on the door and paid the bill myself. I knew Rick would reimburse me, if only for the peace of mind it would bring him.
“You think you’ll be okay now?” I asked Tiffany as he was finishing.
“Yeah, I’m going to stay over at Alex’s for a few days. Who knows, maybe I’ll move in there for good.”
Didn’t sound like the greatest idea to me, but it wasn’t my business what she did.
Rochester and I walked back to my car, stopping every few feet so he could sniff and pee. I called Rick and got his voice mail. I figured he was still at that deposition in Doylestown so I left him a message that Tiffany was fixed up and he could call me for more details.
As I drove home, I thought back to something Tiffany had said – that Rick liked to fix people. Sure, I’d seen that he was a caretaker, the way he looked after Tiffany, the way he was so good with Tamsen and her son. But me? Was that why he was my friend, because he thought he could fix me?
I’d never thought of our friendship that way. We had initially bonded over our divorces. Then after he got Rascal, we were both dog guys. Sure, he had scolded me about my hacking tendencies, encouraged me to get help, to stay within the lines of the law. But I’d just thought that was the cop in him.
Did I still need to be repaired in some way? Would Rick stop being my friend if I didn’t?
