21

I waited until near dark, which was coming sooner each day—7:40 by the clock on my dashboard—and drove over to the Lower Highlands again. Like most cities, Lowell was a collection of neighborhoods, and “lower” was literal, suggestive of a district where downhill was the directional flow of most things, from wealth to municipal services and, too often, to trouble. I’d dug up a telephone number for the property owner, a Boston attorney, and had asked her if it would be possible to have a look at an apartment recently occupied by Flora Nuñez. I told her I was working for a lawyer, thinking she might be sympathetic. She cut me short. “Let me put it to you this way. No.” I was left to supply my own reasons. Possibly she was hypersensitive to litigation and wanted to avoid even the remotest possibility that the fact that her tenant had been a crime victim might come back to haunt her. Maybe she just didn’t want the address to become notorious, a stop on the Mill City Gore Tour: “Y’see that apartment up there? That was where …” She probably just didn’t want to return the security deposit.

I parked on Westford near Dover Square and sat in the car. The block was an amalgam of multiunit apartment houses and small shops. Branch Street ran down toward Little Phnom Penh, a half mile away, and lighted billboards saturated area traffic with ads for cable TV shows, cheap liquor, and the names of personal injury lawyers. As I’d hoped, there was little activity on the street. The only place open was a quick mart-liquor store combo. Streetlamps mounted on every third or fourth telephone pole cast just enough light to read a scratch ticket by.

I locked the Cougar and walked briskly down the block, like a man on a mission, which I was. I reconned the block and circled around, and when I came back along the original stretch, I was moving more slowly and alertly. I went up to the building where Flora Nuñez had lived.

NO TRESPASSING, warned a sign on one corner of the house. No one had taken off the asbestos siding in favor of vinyl, and the trim had not been painted since they took the lead out of paint. I suppose just being there constituted a health hazard, but I had no plan to make the stay a lengthy one. I didn’t envision a security door, either, and wasn’t disappointed. In the foyer, a strip of Astroturf that had been worn to the nub scratched at the soles of my shoes. If the single weak bulb in the ceiling fixture threw twenty watts, I was Tom Edison. I used a small flashlight on the names below the mailboxes. They were the names you’d expect in a melting pot. Some aspirant for school committee trolling for votes had delivered a hopeful stack of campaign fliers delineating her position on key educational issues, but no one had bothered to take off the elastic band. In that precinct I think some of the voting machines were still steam powered. F. NUÑEZ was the name on mailbox number five.

The stairwell smelled of roach spray and last Friday’s fish, even three flights up, at the end of a short hallway I knocked softly, more for form than from expectation, and waited, listening for sounds. There was a key plate for a dead bolt, though if I understood right, it wouldn’t be locked because there was no one inside. The lower lock was a basic spring catch. It offered as much resistance as a building inspector did to palm grease. I clicked it shut behind me.

There were no lights on in the unit, which could confirm that Flora Nuñez had left during the day on Sunday or could mean nothing at all. I left it that way and switched on my flashlight. I got an impression of scuffed linoleum and worn furnishings, lots of colors in the wall coverings and drapes. In the short inside hallway someone, presumably Flora Nuñez since she lived alone, had set up a small tabletop shrine, with a statuette of the Blessed Virgin, ringed with candles, prayer cards, and other religious trappings. I offered it a quick glance and moved on. Somewhere in the building, a water pipe coughed.

Barring total randomness, murder usually led you to the life of the victim: patterns of behavior, known associates, finances, love life, habits, affiliations, predilections, perversions, and possessions. What might Flora Nuñez’s have been?

I didn’t spend a lot of time on the obvious; it was unlikely there’d be anyplace the police hadn’t laid trail ahead of me. Still, I had to wonder: Because they were so sure they already had their man, was it possible they had overlooked something? In the kitchen there were several shelves in front of a window, holding potted herbs. I thought of Pepper’s idea of marrying the woman and taking her on the road. Would she cook big meals for him? The plants were beginning to wilt. Someone dies and other things die with her.

I opened cupboards, counter drawers, the refrigerator. I looked under the sink and in the wastebasket. There was a calendar tacked to the wall, Diego Rivera murals, and I paged forward and back, looking at the scarce notes she’d jotted there: a dentist appointment for early September, three days of last July inked in as vacation … nothing I needed to know. In the bathroom I checked the medicine cabinet and the linen closet. I even lifted the toilet tank cover—other people weren’t that imaginative, why should I be? The living room didn’t take long. I saved the bedroom for last.

I was hoping there’d be a hidden diary with entries up to the time she’d been killed and it would all be laid out in a neat hand—a dangerous liaison gone wrong—and you could stamp another case “solved” and add it to the Rasmussen files. There wasn’t. She kept a neat house: bed made, no clothes lying around. I found some CDs, a few back issues of Latina, some college textbooks on paralegal studies. In a bureau drawer, among neatly folded panties and nylons, I came across a Polaroid snapshot. I held it close to the light. Taken at a table in what appeared to be a nightclub, it showed a group of four women and two men. Two of the women were Flora Nuñez and Lucy Colon. A third looked vaguely familiar, though she was holding a drink up in a toast, so that part of her face was hidden. The other woman and the two men were strangers. To have a working photograph of Flora Nuñez, I slipped the Polaroid into my jacket pocket.

In the hallway the statue of the Virgin watched from its shrine. I examined it more closely than I had before. There was a strand of rosary beads wound around the base, along with several votives and a book of matches. The matches were from Viva!, a strip club out by the city limits, and I had a sudden recognition. I took out the Polaroid and tentatively identified the third woman as Danielle Frampton, who danced at the club, and whom I had helped out of a jam once. So? No bolt of lightning hit me. But a thought did.

I picked up the statuette, which was twelve inches high, made of ceramic, painted blue with a white shawl and headscarf and halo. I turned it over and saw a small hole in the base. I gave the figure a shake. Something made a papery movement inside.

I hesitated, then banged the statuette against the front edge of the altar and broke the head off. With my forefinger, I did a body cavity search and felt a curl of stiff paper, but I couldn’t get another finger in to tweeze it out. I banged the headless figure, and the torso shattered. I picked up the curled paper from among the shards and discovered that it was an index card. I straightened it out and held it to the flashlight. It was actually a ballot card, the kind they pass out to prospective jurors at the district courthouse. On the blank side, handwritten in ballpoint, was a list of letters and numbers.

None of it made any particular sense to me, though there was also a row of what looked to be dates: 4/18; 6/7; 7/14; 7/26; 8/26. Alongside several of them was the letter T. I looked at them a moment, feeling a sudden tingly paranoia. T for Troy?

For “Trouble,” I knew, if I got caught there. I put the juror card in my pocket. I picked up the bigger shards of broken statue with my handkerchief and dropped them into the kitchen trash bag. On an impulse I filled a glass from the sink tap and poured water on the potted herbs. I was at the door when I heard footsteps climbing the stairs.

One person? Two? I listened for voices but heard none. Then the steps started along the landing, coming toward the door. I slipped into the bedroom and got down and crawled under the bed. A key scratched at the lock. The door opened, and someone came into the apartment and shut the door. I heard footsteps move along the hall. My heart was drumming hard. Peering out past a dust ruffle, I looked for light but didn’t see any. Then I heard a sound that prickled the hairs on my nape: the soft crackle of a belt radio, with the gain turned low. Police?

I lay on my stomach in the dark, hoping that whoever was out there wasn’t responding to a report of someone seen entering the apartment. The person went down the hall to the kitchen. I heard more walking, and the belt radio again. The person retraced a route along the hallway and left. I waited until the descending tread of footsteps faded before I crawled out. From the living room, I peered past curtains and after a moment saw a man move along the street to a patrol car and get in behind the wheel. I saw him for only a moment, but I recognized him. Duross.