“I think the power is on,” Sabina said, clicking a switch. A sconce in the wall flickered on and then died. “Maybe we don’t need the light,” she said hastily and clicked the switch off again. She stepped over a small drift of fast-food bags, candy wrappers, paper napkins, and several coffee cups swept into a neat pile. I thought I caught a glint of gold and bent down to look.
Sabina looked back. “Have you found something?”
I sifted through the pile with my toe. “I thought maybe someone had dropped a gold charm, but it’s just a shiny logo printed on a napkin.” I pointed it out. “Have you ever been to the Venus de Milo Club?”
“God, Theo, why would I want to go there? It’s all naked women and bachelor parties.”
“Really? Huh. Never mind, then.”
“Come on up. I’ll show you where the buildings will be thrown together upstairs.” She wrinkled her nose. “I see what they mean about that smell. Sorry, Theo, I didn’t realize it was this bad. It should be better upstairs.”
Within minutes we were opening doors onto closets and bathrooms, trying to find the source of the stench and calling back and forth, stifling giggles and trying to come up with the most ridiculous ideas of what could be causing it, when Sabina suddenly went silent.
“Sabina? Have you found the pile of dead fish?” I turned a corner, and she was staring into a closet with one hand holding the door and the other hand over her mouth. She looked up at me, and tears spilled onto her cheeks.
I took a cautious look inside the closet, at the body partly wrapped in a padded blanket and duct tape. He’d been dead a while. His scarred face was gray-green and horribly distorted, his eyes distended behind his glasses. His swollen tongue was erupting from his mouth, forcing his lips away from his teeth. One of the teeth was gold, otherwise I might not have recognized him. Built-up gases had bloated his body so that his clothes were stretched and looked much too small for him. His scarf was digging into the flesh of his neck, covering his Roman collar, if he was still wearing it.
Feeling as if I knew far too much about what to do next, I took hold of Sabrina’s arm and guided her downstairs as I pulled out my phone. In the few minutes before the police arrived, I telephoned Grandfather and left an unsatisfactory message along the lines of our mutual friend has turned up dead—I couldn’t think of any creative, spy-like obfuscating language to disguise the news of Sergei’s death and the fact that I was freaking out.
“Tell me again, Ms.… Bogart, how you came to be in the empty building.” Inspector Lichlyter had looked resigned when she’d arrived to find me with Sabina, who was still weeping quietly under the care of an EMT.
“My friends Sabina and Kurt Talbot have been renovating the buildings, and Sabina brought me over to look at the work they’d done. We could smell something bad, and we were looking around to see if we could find the source of the smell, and we found … him.”
I looked over to where people in bunny suits and masks were photographing the corpse in situ. I envied them their masks. With the closet door open, the smell was indescribable.
“Do you recognize this, Ms.… Bogart?” Lichlyter held up a see-through plastic evidence bag, the inside smeared with blood.
I didn’t realize until that moment that hair actually did stand up on end. In fact, my hair seemed to be trying to crawl off my head. Recognize it? I’ve been familiar with that hoof pick since I was eleven years old and gave it to Grandfather for his birthday. He used it to hold his keys, which were still attached. It was a ring of heavy brass, a bit more than two inches across, with a sharp hook attached to one side with a hinge. The hook folded into the center and turned it into something that could be safely carried in the pocket of, say, a pair of jodhpurs, but easily extended to clean a horse’s hoof of hard-packed sand, or to remove a stone. The hook was extended and bloody.
“I don’t think so,” I lied. “What is it?” That struck the right note of polite curiosity, although she gave me a sharp look, and I reminded myself to be careful, that she was far from stupid.
“We think it’s the murder weapon.” As if the blood hadn’t given me my first clue. “The victim had it in stuck in his jugular.”
Which was sickening for more than one reason.
“His wallet has a driver’s license and some credit cards in the name of Sergei Wolf. Is the name familiar at all?”
“No,” I said, lying again automatically, and then, prompted by God knows what, blurted, “Did Father Martin from up at St. Christopher’s get in touch with you?”
“You think this is related to the hands in the coffee shop?” she said sharply.
“I don’t know,” I said hurriedly. “I just wondered.” I nodded toward the crime scene. “Are his hands … intact?”
Her face closed down. “We’ll know more after the autopsy. What else can you tell me?”
“Nothing. No, really, nothing,” I said, and carefully didn’t look at the hoof pick in the plastic bag.
“Your friends Dr. and Mrs. Talbot, they own the building?
I shook my head. “The owner is another local; her name is Angela Lacerda.”
She wrote that down in her notebook, but within minutes Angela had arrived, flustered and appalled and disinclined to be helpful. “I’m not answering any questions,” she said brusquely when Lichlyter approached. “You can talk to my lawyers. What is going on here?” When she got her first whiff of the body, she gagged and covered her mouth and nose with her hand. “God! Let me out of here.” She turned and stumbled back outside. When I followed her out, she turned on me, her face red and tear-streaked. “What on earth is happening—are you involved in this?”
“No, of course not. I just found him.”
“It’s the second body you’ve found”—incredibly, she made air quotes with both hands—“I guess he who hides can find, right?”
“No, that’s not what—”
But she spun and strode away from me down the street, sobbing angrily. What she hadn’t done, I realized as she marched away, was ask anything about the murdered man.