I broke in the next morning because I figured enough time had passed for the cops to quit watching her apartment.
Marilyn Paul had lived in a beige brick, two-story, four-flat apartment building three blocks from the Eisenhower Expressway. I parked a block away and walked up the alley, slowly. I saw no one who looked like Sergeant Bohler, or any other cop.
The building was old and didn’t have electronic locks. I couldn’t see any security cameras.
It had a center hall. I came in from the back. Twenty feet ahead, yellow police tape crisscrossed the door on the right. There’d been no follow-ups in the newspaper on the case; certainly there’d been no mention that she’d been murdered in her apartment.
I probed the lock with a credit card. The door was locked tight.
I went out to the back. She’d had a small, low-walled patio. A dozen red clay pots were lined on the cement along one wall. Some held curled flowers that had been dead a long time. Others just held dirt. She hadn’t been a gardener.
One green webbed chair and one small metal table were set in the center. She hadn’t entertained, either.
There were deep gouges and dents on the aluminum sliding door. They looked fresh, made by someone who’d been in a hurry. The bent metal prevented the door from locking. I slid the door open and walked in.
The small living room was a mess of dumped drawers and scattered papers. Until she’d gotten her head bashed and throat slit, Marilyn Paul had prized an ordered life. The only picture on the wall was of President John F. Kennedy. She’d been a reader, but of nothing fanciful. A tall bookcase contained books of history and of fact, biographies of great men and accounts of great wars.
The bedroom was at the end of a short hall. The bed was rumpled, the rust-colored stain on the carpet beside it dry. It wasn’t hard to imagine her last couple of minutes. She’d been jerked from her bed and cut right there, defenseless in her nightclothes. I hoped she hadn’t had time to fully wake up.
The drawer on the night table had been spilled. A nail file, a sleeping mask, a tube of hand cream and a pair of reading glasses lay on the floor next to a thick volume of Winston Churchill’s memoirs.
The clothes in the closet had been yanked from their hangers and tossed on the floor. She hadn’t had many clothes, and most of them were beige and black. A gray wig also lay on the floor. The sun at the day rental office had bleached the color out of everything, but I’d have bet she’d worn that wig the day we met.
I went back into the living room and poked my toe at everything that had been tossed on the floor. They were ordinary papers, though I suspected she’d had a file of some sort on the four musketeers. If the cops had discovered it, they would have paid me a visit before Bohler got tipped that something was in the Jeep. Chances were, Marilyn’s killer found the file. It was how he’d known where to leave her body, and the blame.
Everything in the kitchen had also been dumped on the floor. Even the smallest boxes of her dry food had been spilled out. Her milk and orange juice containers had been emptied in the sink. Somewhere in that mess, or the messes in the bedroom and living room, her killer had found her burner phone. He’d done me a favor by taking it away before the cops could check its incoming call history.
The door to the front closet was ajar. Likely her killer had paid no mind to the contents of the box on the shelf. I guessed the cops ignored that box, too.
It was black, with a ghoulish white skeleton pictured on it, dancing in front of a jack-o’-lantern face on a blood-orange moon. The description said the whole thing could be easily assembled in minutes with the wire clips provided.
Marilyn Paul hadn’t been interested in assembling the whole thing. She just wanted the few bones of a forearm, wrist and hand to put in a silo. I looked inside to make sure. Those plastic parts were missing.
I went back out the patio door and slid it shut behind me. I headed down the alley toward the Jeep sure of only one thing.
Marilyn Paul should have left those plastic bones in the box.