Sleep-deprived and unshaven, Reggie left the police station.
There were now two murders to account for. The police on both affected continents apparently were not in communication yet—but Mendoza might at this moment be checking with Scotland Yard.
Whether the authorities would eventually try to distribute the culpability evenly—like Mum distributing biscuits, one for Nigel and one for Reggie—or just gang up both murders on one or the other was still to be determined, but neither prospect was appealing.
Reggie could see one thing in common between the two events, though, and that was the young woman who both wrote the letters and—apparently—knew the second victim.
He took a taxi back to Mara’s flat. If he was to get any information from her at all, he would have to reach her before the police did.
He went up the stairs and knocked on the same door he had the day before.
No response.
He knocked again, and still no response.
That had to mean she was out walking that dog. He would have heard it rushing the door otherwise. She would be back. After all, how many places could she go with a 150-pound Saint Bernard?
Reggie came back downstairs and crossed the street, to wait at the desperately open Joe’s Deli.
He walked across the plywood excavation covering and stepped over bags of tunnel grouting. When he entered the café, he brought with him a little swirl of gray dust.
Inside were mustard-colored vinyl booths, a tan-flecked linoleum floor, and fans circulating overhead slowly and unsuccessfully against the heat.
The near wall was covered with signed photographs of would-be actors, directors, producers, and other celebrities of types that Reggie could only imagine. Judging from the ties they wore, some of them had been hanging there for many years. One or two of the photographs actually looked just vaguely familiar, though Reggie could not place from where. He guessed that even the locals would not recognize most of them.
The waitress, a plump woman of about fifty in a dress of tiny red and white checks, hurried over from behind the counter.
“You can sit anywhere you like,” she said, trying to convey, despite evidence to the contrary, that this was a rare privilege.
“Should I know them?” said Reggie.
“What? Who? Oh, on the wall?” She shook her head with a sort of knowing smile. “I have no idea at all who any of those people are. Most of them have been hanging there since the day we opened.”
“Actors?”
“All of them movie biz of one kind or another, I guess.” She shrugged. “They could be anything by now. Sit wherever you like,” she said again.
The establishment had been built to handle fifty or so at rush hour, and from the apparent age of the place, it had survived for some years at that capacity. But at the moment, though it was prime time on a weekday, it was empty.
This was a bad sign for breakfast, but good for Reggie’s other purposes, and he took a booth by the window, with a clear view of the entrance to Mara’s building.
The woman came over with a glass pot of some sort of thick black fluid and began to pour a cup of it for Reggie.
Reggie preferred coffee, even American coffee, to badly made tea, but this stuff looked dangerous.
“I don’t suppose,” he began, “you would have any Earl Grey—” And then he stopped. The woman was suddenly staring, and now she took a step back, and he immediately knew why.
“It’s you!”
“No, it isn’t,” said Reggie. “I’ve never been here before in my life.”
“From the police station!”
“Yes, but—”
“I’ll call them right now if you make another move.”
“I’m not moving,” said Reggie, “and just think about it. Yes, I was in the lineup, but you did not pick me. And that’s why they let me go. And that makes us friends. Doesn’t it?”
“But I told them you sound the same,” she said.
“Do I look the same?”
She was calmer now, and she took a step closer to study him.
“You had the same jawline, but you weren’t quite so tall, and—”
That would be Nigel, but Reggie said nothing.
“—your hair wasn’t so thin.”
Reggie wanted to object to that, but he decided to let it go.
“When did you see me—I mean, this shorter but thicker-haired version of me?”
She said that he had sat at that same table the day before in the afternoon, and the day before that as well, and she remembered him clearly, because he had tipped very generously, even though they had no Earl Grey tea.
And then Reggie abruptly asked for the check—through the café window he could see the Saint Bernard coming around the corner, dragging its attractive young owner at the other end of the leash.
Reggie overpaid his bill and quickly crossed the street.
Mara was just starting up the stairs as he reached the curb. The Saint Bernard turned around to face him, straining the leash and causing Mara to turn as well.
“Please,” said Reggie, “I mean no harm. If you don’t trust me, come across to the café and talk with me where others are present. Well, some, anyway. Bring Cujo with you if you want.”
She looked at Reggie, and then in both directions of the empty street, and then at Reggie again. There was doubt in those burnt sienna eyes, but she was considering it.
“What do you want?” she said.
“I must find my brother. He came here believing you were in some sort of trouble. And now . . .”
“And now—what?”
“Now he is.”
She hesitated, pulling back on the dog’s leash. “What kind of trouble?”
“Well, I’m not sure the exact details are all that important,” said Reggie.
“Give me a ballpark,” she said. “Are we talking life and death, parking tickets, or what?”
“He’s gone missing,” said Reggie. And that part was true enough; it wouldn’t do to tell her all of it.
Mara studied him closely. The dog stood solidly with its weight against her legs and studied him, too.
“They have lousy coffee,” she said after a moment. “You can come upstairs.”
She turned abruptly and started up the steps, pulled along rapidly by the dog, leaving Reggie flat-footed at the base. He took the stairs several steps at a time to catch up.
She opened the door to the flat, and Reggie immediately identified scents of turpentine, paint, and canvas. She had set easels along the largest window. Her paintings depicted a bright yellow wood-frame house; a child alone on a swing at dusk; and a huge backyard pepper tree with fallen clusters of tiny red berries and small green leaves.
“I work at an art gallery,” said the young woman as Reggie noticed the paintings. “But the owner doesn’t show my work, she says I need to get out of my domestic period. That one’s the house I lived in when I was a kid. But this is the last of the domestic series, so you better buy it now before I get famous and expensive.”
“The house or the painting?” said Reggie.
“I meant the painting, of course—my mom and I had to sell the house years ago. But if you’re actually interested, I drove by it last week. It’s vacant and up for sale again. I almost wanted to go in and take a look.”
“Revisit happy childhood memories?” said Reggie.
“Yes,” she said, “mostly. You can sit if you like.”
There was a multicolored braided rug on a hardwood floor, a small table with cane-backed chairs, and a comfortable-looking couch. But the Saint Bernard jumped onto the couch, and Reggie was obliged to accept one of the less comfortable-looking chairs.
Reggie looked about the room for some hint of bereavement. He hadn’t seen it in her face. So either she didn’t know yet or the dead man meant nothing to her.
“He was a complete stranger,” she said.
“Who?” said Reggie.
She gave Reggie a puzzled look. “The man you said is your brother. He was a complete stranger, and I had no idea what he was talking about, so I sent him away. That was about it. Do you want some water?”
Reggie said yes, and though he knew she expected him to remain seated, he followed her into the kitchen. Mookie followed also, keeping his substantial girth between Reggie and the young woman and effectively sandwiching Reggie against the kitchen counter as Mara opened the refrigerator door.
The kitchen was narrow, but it was immaculate.
There was a wooden sash window at the opposite end of the room. It was closed, but Mara opened it now, revealing the rusted iron railing of the fire escape. Beyond the iron railing was a narrow alley and, across that, what looked to be an abandoned warehouse.
Mookie stopped staring at Reggie for the moment and began to nose his supper dish about on the floor.
“Just what was it my brother said to you?” said Reggie.
She studied Reggie’s face uncertainly for a moment. “He asked about some letters,” she said finally as she handed him a bottled water. “Seemed like a decent guy, actually. But he asked if I wrote a letter to Sherlock Holmes last month.” She stopped with that and glared defensively. “I’m not stupid. I don’t wait up for Santa Claus, and I don’t write letters to characters of fiction.”
“Perhaps you waited up for Santa Claus when you were a child?”
She looked at Reggie for a moment, then nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “When I was only eight and didn’t know any better. I mean, I read a lot, but—you know, it’s not like I knew about the world. And I was desperate. So I wrote a letter to Sherlock Holmes.”
“Just the one letter when you were eight? You didn’t write again recently?”
“Of course not. Why would I?”
“No reason,” said Reggie. “What else did my brother say to you?”
“I really didn’t give him the chance to say much of anything,” she said.
“You’re sure there was nothing else? You’ve told me nothing that can help me find him.”
“Well, you guys weren’t much help finding my father!” she blurted, and then she quickly recovered. “I mean—whoever got my letter wasn’t. And the police didn’t do jack.”
“It must have seemed that way when you were eight,” said Reggie. “I’m sure the locals did the best they—”
“I’m sure you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mara said heatedly. “First they said they had to wait awhile, then they said he must be on a bender and sleeping it off, then they said he must have run away because he lost at Santa Anita.”
“Sorry,” said Reggie, “I didn’t mean to—”
“Well, all right, he drank a little. And he went to the track once in a while. I drink wine with my lunch—well, sometimes—and I bought a lotto ticket once. Does that mean if I disappear, nobody should come find me?”
“Someone would certainly come find you,” said Reggie, and then he immediately wished he hadn’t—or at least not with the inflection he had given it.
Her eyes narrowed, and her chin tilted up.
“But the point now is,” Reggie said quickly, “Nigel came here in response to your letter. If I knew exactly what you sent—it might help me find him.”
“Why do you need me for that? Don’t you have the letter?”
“It’s gone, actually. And whatever you sent with it. There was an enclosure, wasn’t there?”
“There was something I sent with it, yes,” Mara said after a moment.
“I think if I had that—I’d be able to figure out where my brother is—or at least what he’s trying to do.”
Reggie moved closer and made eye contact to say that. Mara looked directly back at him.
“Can you be trusted?” she said.
“Yes,” said Reggie.
She was still studying him closely.
“I can sort of see the family resemblance,” she said, “though you don’t have your brother’s eyes, exactly.”
She got up and crossed to the mantel above a gas fireplace. She moved aside framed photographs and several old books that hid a tin box. Then she came back and sat on the couch with one leg tucked underneath her, the Saint Bernard lying comfortably with its head at her knees.
She put the box between herself and Reggie and opened it.
Reggie leaned forward and caught a glimpse of the contents as she sorted through them. There was a vehicle ownership certificate, some ticket stubs, a small gold butterfly pin, and—
Suddenly she stopped. Then she started from the top again. She thumbed carefully through, past greeting cards and ticket stubs, handwritten notes that might have been poems—until she had reached the bottom.
She looked at Reggie with what he took to be genuine surprise.
“It’s gone,” she said.
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, annoyed. She withdrew the box protectively to her lap; she stared at the contents with a puzzled expression, then at Reggie with an accusatory one.
“I just got here,” said Reggie. “Just what is it that’s missing?”
“The thing you’re asking about,” she said.
She got up and walked to the window near her paintings. “My father was in his study,” she said. “I came in, and he had these sheets of really thin paper that he was looking at. They were on the desk, on the floor, all over the place. I wanted him to play. I sat down and started drawing on one with a crayon. He got really angry, he said the papers were very, very important, and he picked them up and put them in the bottom drawer of his desk.”
“You seem to remember it very clearly.”
“I should; I thought it was the reason he went away.”
She paused when she said that, then continued. “After he went missing, I made copies of all of it. I walked all the way to the stationery store and made them. It took a ton of dimes. And then I came back, and—you have to understand, I was barely eight, and I read a lot, but mostly just novels, and—”
“I understand,” said Reggie.
“I sent one copy in my letter to Sherlock Holmes. And I kept the other copy in this box; you couldn’t miss it if it was here.”
“Does anyone else have access to your apartment? A boyfriend, or—”
“None of your business,” she said. Then she added, “No. No one else has access.”
“Have you had a break-in?”
“No. I mean, I don’t think so.”
Reggie considered it for a moment. He wanted to be careful about this, but there seemed only one possible connection to make.
“This neighbor of yours—the one I saw on the steps the other day—”
“What about him?”
“Has he had access?”
Mara looked at Reggie, then out the window as if to express her amazement to the world, and then back at Reggie again, and Reggie realized he might have phrased it better.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said with precise emphasis.
“I don’t mean access to—you—that is, I only meant, could he have had the opportunity to—”
“Look, it’s like this,” she said. “The guy moved into the building a month or so ago—and right away he’s hanging around the mailbox when I come home, every single day. And playing that ‘I really want to get to know the real you’ shtick to the hilt.”
“Always at the mailbox?”
“Well, yes. But he pretty much never has any mail. I can tell he’s just waiting there for me.”
“To chat you up.”
“Exactly. And he had a shtick.”
“Good shtick?”
“Not that good. But I did make the mistake once—just once—of letting him come up for coffee. And he laid it on real thick about getting to know the real me. Asking about my family—and we’re talking about how I grew up, and how tough it was when my dad left, and did I ever hear from him again, did I get to have a quinceañera, what kind of stuff did I keep from when I was a kid, and—”
She stopped abruptly when she said that and stared down with realization at her box of keepsakes.
“Did you show any of this to him?” said Reggie.
She nodded. “I showed him my maternal grandmother’s recipe for Irish burritos—and next thing I know, he’s got his hand on my knee. And then—”
Now there was a sharp, authoritative knock at the door.
“And then I threw him out,” said Mara, and she might have continued—but now the knock at the door was even more commanding. She got up quickly and started toward the door, Mookie trotting alongside.
She left the box behind, and Reggie looked in closely. In a bottom corner, a scrap of thin photostat paper was wedged into the crease of the box. As if someone had pulled something out hastily, and this piece, caught in the crease, had torn off and been left behind.
The dog stuck its head between Mara and the door and emitted that now familiar rumble from its throat. From his vantage point, Reggie could not see who it was, but he could hear the voice. It was Lieutenant Mendoza, introducing himself to Mara.
Reggie extracted the bit of paper from the joint of the box and stuffed it in his jacket pocket. Then he got up and went quickly into the kitchen, out of the line of sight should Mendoza step in.
Mercifully, Mendoza did not step in. Not yet. But he was still within earshot.
Reggie heard Mendoza ask if Mara knew her neighbor well—a man named Howard Fallon.
Mara replied that she didn’t know any Howard. Her neighbor’s name was Lance—Lance Slaughter.
That was the name on the man’s Screen Actors Guild card, Reggie heard the detective say. But the name on his driver’s license was Howard Fallon.
So Mara’s neighbor had been using a stage name.
Mendoza then said something in a softer voice that Reggie did not quite catch. For a moment, as near as he could tell, neither Mara nor Mendoza said a word. But the dog started a low growl.
“I . . . really didn’t know him very well,” Reggie heard Mara say.
Reggie held his breath. He supposed Mendoza would ask now if Mara had noticed anyone of British extraction hanging about.
But Mookie was getting louder, and Mara told him to hush. Reggie strained to hear. Mendoza was giving her his card. He was going away.
Reggie waited until he heard the receding footsteps; then he stepped out from behind the kitchen door.
Mara, still standing at the open doorway, stared at Reggie. Mookie was pressed protectively against her legs.
“You knew this?” she said; then she demanded, “Did you know about this?”
“About what . . . exactly?” Reggie said in his closest approximation of an innocent voice.
“Get out,” she said. “Now.” The dog was not growling; it was looking at Reggie as though it had sighted a rabbit.
Reggie found as much space as he could and edged out the doorway.
Then the door slammed shut, and the young woman turned the locks behind him.