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The floor tilted under me and I felt my knees buckle. Out of little more than reflex, I caught my attacker around the waist and brought him down with me.
I managed to hit him pretty hard in the snoot. We rolled, with me trying to get a good grip on the front of his shirt. His knee drove into my breast so hard I flinched. It gave him the opening he needed. I made a grab for him as he started to stand.
Something hard smashed down on my head and everything around me dissolved.
* * *
When I woke up, somebody was holding a cold wash cloth against the side of my head. I heard voices. Ones I recognized.
One of them grated. The stench of cigarettes made my head ache worse than it already did.
“She’s coming around,” someone said.
I forced my eyes open. A grizzled cop with an inch of burning tobacco hanging out of his mouth was bending over me. His name was Freeze.
“You mind telling me how it happens I bump into you so often at homicide scenes?” he asked, sitting back on his heels.
“Gee, I guess we must move in the same social circles,” I said thickly. “And yeah, I’m okay. Thanks for asking, lieutenant.”
I wondered why my mouth was shooting itself off when the rest of me couldn’t even see straight. Maybe because Freeze and I rubbed each other the wrong way. He headed the homicide unit, the only detectives on Dayton’s force that specialized. He was a good cop, but he had trouble listening to any ideas that weren’t his own. It galled him that mine had been right a few times when we were getting in each other’s way.
“Lie still for a while,” said the cop with the washcloth, holding me back as I tried to sit. He was a blocky blond junior detective named Boike.
Like Freeze’s other boys, he didn’t normally speak unless his boss told him to. He got a frown for his efforts, but I’d seen Freeze give a lot worse.
Accumulating evidence, most notably my pounding head, suggested I wasn’t yet dead. That meant Freeze and Boike and the several men I could hear in the front room must have come here over other matters.
“The room was dark when I came in. Did I miss a stiff somewhere?” I asked.
It was full of light now. Uncomfortable as it was to move my eyeballs, I could see the room had served Gil Tremain as both bedroom and work area. I lay next to a desk and could see the end of a bed.
“Not up here, you didn’t. Just the one downstairs.” The homicide chief got up and rubbed out the end of his cigarette just before it burned his fingers.
“There’s a body downstairs?” Maybe the knock on the head had knocked me goofy and I wasn’t understanding.
“Boike here started up to knock on doors, see if anyone else was around who might have seen something, heard something. Noticed some drips of blood on the stairs. They led back here.”
“I punched the guy. Guess I gave him a nosebleed. Can I sit up, Boike?”
“Stay put til I’m done asking questions.”
I started to get the strong impression I’d understood fine.
“Come on. You don’t think I had anything to do with whatever you found downstairs.”
“I want to find out what you know before you sit up. In case your brain busts or something.”
Swell bedside manner. He was watching me closely.
“I thought I heard somebody in here. I came in. He jumped me and we traded some punches. Then he clobbered me.”
“Yeah, with that.”
Following his gaze, I saw broken chunks of brightly colored plaster. Judging by the remains, it had depicted old King Tut in his casket.
“So let’s get back to the first question I asked you. How’s it happen we find you at a homicide scene?”
It wasn’t exactly what he’d asked, but I didn’t feel like quibbling. I gave him a highly edited version: Hired by a company to find an employee who hadn’t come in. Said employee was working on an important project. I gave them Gil Tremain’s name and my client’s name. Collingswood could tell them more if he wanted. The shape I was in just now, the less I said the better.
“Any idea what the guy who jumped you was hunting?”
“Something to do with the project Gilbert Tremain was working on, maybe? Or some hint to Tremain’s whereabouts if whoever came here thought he was hiding.”
“Why would he hide?”
“How should I know? I’m a simple private detective, remember?”
I thought such modesty would please him. He narrowed his eyes.
“Hey, can I take a couple of aspirin at least? I’ve got some in my purse.”
Freeze jerked his head at Boike.
“Go get her some water. I’ll see she doesn’t get up.”
He came to my side and stood looking down, prepared to put a foot on me if I stirred.
“How come you didn’t stick your nose in downstairs?”
“Into what?”
“The door that was standing ajar.”
“There wasn’t one standing ajar when I came in.”
Freeze lighted a cigarette.
“You claim you thought something was off with this place because the door wasn’t quite latched. The one downstairs where we found the stiff was open a foot or more and you didn’t notice? It standing open’s what made the woman dropping off ironing for one of the tenants peek in.”
That woman, I gathered, had called the police. Boike returned with a glass of water. Freeze had the decency to let me sit up. I took the aspirin and kept on sitting. As far as I could tell, it didn’t feel any worse than lying down. Neither choice was a picnic.
“If the man who attacked me had already killed the woman downstairs, I’d have noticed her door open,” I processed. “He’d have had no qualms about killing me too. But if he panicked that someone might have heard the two of us thrashing around in here, and raced down and the woman downstairs opened her door — she was the manager, after all—”
“So?”
He hadn’t exactly confirmed my guess, but since the apartment was one I’d passed, and the manager typically had one at the front, it was logical.
“So she opened her door to see what was happening and he knew the game was up since she’d seen him. Maybe he thought he’d killed me. He was worked up, and willing to kill now to cover his tracks, and he did. On the way out.”
“Yeah, that’s the way we see it too.”
“How? Did he kill her?”
The detective’s mouth clamped tightly closed.
“You know anyone at this place that hired you?” he answered.
“No.”
“Never dated someone who worked there, say?”
It was one of the stranger questions he’d ever asked me.
“No. Why?”
He knocked some ash into a saucer he’d found to use as an ashtray.
“Just seems strange that a place that works on engineering things would hunt for a woman detective.”
“You telling me you’re more of a whiz at physics than I am, Freeze?” I didn’t really know what that was, other than high-powered math, but I was willing to bet he didn’t either. “They wouldn’t have to hunt very hard, since I’m in the phone book. Can I go now? I want to go home and nurse my head.”
An irritated breath escaped Freeze.
“Yeah, go on. We know where to find you.”
I got up slowly and made my way toward the door. I was almost there, when he spoke again.
“You got your car here? You’d better let Boike drive you. See if she remembers anything else on the way, Boike. Then go on back to the office and build a fire under the evidence boys. I’ll meet you there.”
My instinct was to argue, but it wouldn’t remove the thought I knew was stuck in Freeze’s mind that a male detective wouldn’t have let an intruder get the best of him.
“What’s he up to?” I asked Boike when the two of us were in the hall outside Tremain’s apartment.
“The boss is okay,” Boike defended. “When we first walked into that room and saw you stretched out bleeding, he thought you were dead.”
“Bleeding?” I touched the sorest part of my head. My fingers came away with the stickiness of mostly dried blood.
At the foot of the stairs, the door to the first apartment on the right stood halfway open. I wanted to get a look. It might not help at all, but again, it might.
“Jeez, I’m wobblier than I realized. Need to rest for a minute.” Wavering toward the wall, I sagged against it.
From where I stood, I could see inside the apartment where another detective and some uniforms were working. The view wasn’t great. A chair and one of the cops were in the way.
“Uh...” Boike possibly suspected I was up to something.
I put a hand to my forehead as if to ward off dizziness. It shielded my eyes so Boike couldn’t see their direction.
The apartment showed traces of being searched. Sofa cushions tossed on the floor, the drawer of a writing table pulled open. But it didn’t begin to compare to how things had been torn apart upstairs.
The cop who was blocking my view stepped away and I saw what I needed to. A woman lay on her back with one leg splayed. The front of her dress was stained. She’d been shot in the chest.