In a wife-beater undershirt, Serge the Spitter hacked up a spitball. Sent it flying off the balcony.
‘I hope you looked down first,’ Cinq-Mars commented.
‘Look out below. Or buy an umbrella.’
‘Only on a rainy day. Nobody takes it up with you?’
‘Never mind. Find my wallet yet?’
‘The thieves neglected to mail it back.’
‘If they do, you’ll take your cut. Help yourself like a mangy mutt on a bone.’
‘Maybe I will. Thanks for the idea.’
‘Oh sure. It don’t matter anyhow. I’m smarter than these dumbbells here.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Insurance. I bought it. I keep up my premiums.’
‘A poor man with insurance. That’s suspicious to a cop.’
‘Use a toilet. Don’t hand me your shit on a plate.’
‘Don’t give me a shower on the way down. Or when I’m on the ground.’
The man spat over the side before answering. ‘If you get hit, wasn’t me.’
‘Then I won’t get hit.’ One of those times when he had to have the parting word.
Down below, he found Detective Geoffrion in conversation with three tenants and a pair of uniforms. His partner split from the group to provide an update.
‘Definitely talk to the kid. His name is Mikhail. Goes by Mick. He’s Russian. Speaks French and English. We should bring him in, maybe? He resisted talking to me. Trouble is, he’s not all there. The father’s protecting him. I thought I’d leave him alone for now.’
‘What do you mean, not all there?’
‘Either a screw loose or he’s missing a link upstairs.’
‘I see.’ He didn’t, nor did he know what the difference could be. ‘Anything from the dad?’
‘Same as the other tenants. Nothing, not even with twenty-twenty hindsight.’
‘Nord, the doors were marked in chalk. Two quick vertical lines. Apartments marked that way were spared.’
‘No lines, they were robbed? Somebody cased the building.’
‘Make sure none of ours did it for some reason. If not, mention the lines as you go around. Might twig a memory.’
‘One odd thing, boss,’ Geoffrion intimated. Cinq-Mars waited to hear it. The detective wet his lips, concentrating on the mathematics of his response. ‘Twenty-eight apartments above ground level. Seventeen broken into. Eleven were not. Except, the storage sheds for those eleven got hit. One way or the other, everybody got hit except for anyone who lives in the basement. They were left alone. Of course, down below, they don’t own sheds.’
Cinq-Mars appeared to fade away again and did not initially respond.
Geoffrion prompted him. ‘Sir?’
He returned. ‘Remarkable. Nobody hit twice, nobody spared.’
‘One apartment we can’t say for sure. But yeah, that’s what it looks like.’
‘What’s different about one apartment?’
‘Broken into, for sure. The tenant’s been gone a few days, neighbors tell me. We don’t know what’s been taken, if anything.’
‘Which apartment?’
‘Top floor. Middle unit. I have to check which one exactly.’
‘That’s OK.’ He was looking up to the fifth, where Serge the Spitter and Youssef the Bombardier surveyed the scene below. ‘The neighbors can tell me.’
They did.
Cinq-Mars entered the apartment where the occupant was absent – a convenience of it being broken into and no longer locked – and shut the door behind him. He appreciated the opportunity. To be on the premises when the last person to spend time inside was the crook satisfied an interest. He felt closer to the perpetrator, as though an impression of him lingered. In other apartments, the tenants held sway. Their agitation obliterated any residual trace of the crook. Cinq-Mars did not mean to add a spooky sense to his investigative process, only that he’d learned to be quiet and contemplative at the scene of a crime. He functioned more effectively when the scene wasn’t contaminated by the busyness of officers and forensic analysts, or a victim’s shattered nerves. Stillness served him better than any fuss.
Daylight had been long-standing, yet he could close his eyes and feel the kitchen as had the thief in the dead of night. The faint buzz of an appliance, the mixture of scents of a life lived there. The slumber of the place. Opening his eyes, he walked through the other rooms by going down the hall and starting over in the living room at the front, a bedroom alongside it, then working his way back. The bed looked slept in. Perhaps not lately. Next to a Westinghouse TV, a few tubes lay at rest, most likely changed recently. These old units were starting to disappear; if the tenant continued to have trouble, it would not be long for the scrap heap.
Not many books. A selection of magazines on various topics, tidily arranged. Everything from dream vacation rentals to GQ. Tool catalogs jostled for position alongside car magazines, baseball and hockey magazines, Time and National Geographic.
The dining room extended the living room and offered a separate exit to the hallway. Across the hall was the bathroom. Tidy, brightened by a skylight shaft. In the rear, a second bedroom lay opposite the kitchen, an interior design typical of the neighborhood. Cinq-Mars went in. The blinds were drawn. He was wondering if the tenant was a businessman who traveled frequently. He’d left a straight row of black shoes under a shelving unit – more shoes than most men bothered to own, with little variation in style – and he opened the closet to see if he possessed as many suits to match. That appeared to be the case. Before he could count them Cinq-Mars noticed more footwear. He pushed the suits aside to the right and left, and discovered that feet, without socks, remained standing in a pair of slippers. He stepped back, startled, looked up. A man stood there, impaled through the neck with what looked like a machete, the blade entering the wall behind him deeply enough to pin him upright.
The neighbors had reported the tenant absent for days. A quick check revealed that this body remained somewhat supple. Rigor mortis had not had a significant head start. The victim was dead less than four hours in his estimation, more likely three. Possibly as few as two.
This changed everything once again.
Cinq-Mars stepped out to the balcony. Not wanting to create a scene with an avid public observing him, he signaled below for Detective Geoffrion to come up. Already he was thinking that this was his first case as a Sergeant-Detective, yet he would have to turn over the most intriguing aspect to homicide. Or turn over the whole kit-and-caboodle to homicide. The multitude of burglaries might keep him in the game, but that remained to be negotiated.
Returning to the apartment, he did another appraisal, different now that the crime was infinitely more serious. Perhaps that’s why he noticed something obvious he’d neglected previously. On the dining room table, next to a buffet where dishes were stored, stood a toaster. Had it come from another apartment? Or did this one belong in the kitchen? Odd that it had made it only this far when so many had been stolen throughout the complex.
‘Yeah, what’s up?’ Geoffrion asked. An inexplicable smile on his face.
‘Back bedroom closet,’ Cinq-Mars said.
He waited. Perused the premises again. A broken elastic band on a hall table near the entrance held his attention. Long, the band; the sort mailmen used to bundle letters. That struck him as peculiar as mail was delivered only to the boxes in the entrance-level foyer. The fact that it was lying around, broken, on a surface in an apartment where nothing else was out of place or untidy, was filed away.
He heard the bedroom closet door open.
Geoffrion exclaimed, ‘Holy shit!’
Cinq-Mars returned to the bedroom to join him. ‘Odd juxtaposition of words, don’t you think?’
Geoffrion couldn’t fathom what the hell he was talking about.
‘Nord, use this guy’s telephone. If you don’t have gloves, use Kleenex. I don’t want this on the airwaves. Keep it quiet around the building. No one should suspect a thing until the morgue shows up. Meantime, buzz homicide.’
‘Yeah,’ Geoffrion concurred. Then repeated, ‘Holy shit,’ as though he wanted that edict confirmed.
Émile Cinq-Mars continued to dwell upon the apartment’s peacefulness. Nothing in the air signaled what had occurred, or how or why. The man’s end was horrific and violent, yet his bedroom appeared undisturbed. His suits had been pushed back across to cover him up. Dust marks in the kitchen indicated that a radio, probably, had been removed, and a toaster relocated, but under the circumstances that didn’t add up to a hill of beans. All he had to go on was the toaster in the dining room. Out of place. He’d want it checked for prints. Perhaps the eerie sense he was experiencing had been presaged by the woman whose ghost attacker, a fantasy attacker more likely, had simply appeared, then was gone. Unlike her, the dead man possessed no mystical protection, no Virgin Mary, to thwart an assault.
Departing, Cinq-Mars noticed the absence of chalk marks by the doorjamb, indicative that the apartment had been designated to be robbed. No further marking foreshadowed a murder. Down a door, the purported rape victim had had her door marked: no forced entry assigned. The marks, or their lack, surely indicated what was meant to transpire. He’d love to speak to whoever had etched them onto the bricks.