She was in that tan coat Marshall liked, the one she’d worn yesterday when he met her on the street up in Jackson Heights. Jeans and knee-length boots and a turtleneck sweater. Hair a little messy in the breeze.
She said, ‘Have you looked inside?’
‘No. I should’ve brought a claw hammer …’
And he should tell her right now what had happened yesterday, his run-in with D’Anton, and the denizens of the bagel shop. It might make her re-think her association. He checked the street, saw people in activewear, people pushing strollers, people enjoying their Saturday in non-threatening fashion. He’d be OK for now.
She said, ‘What?’
Light and amused, like she sensed some kind of punchline coming.
Marshall shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘All right.’
She moved past him and knocked at the door of the jewelry place. The window displays were empty. Black felt shelves with nothing on show. But the lights were still on, and beyond the counter, a door was open to a back room.
Jordan knocked again, and a woman came out of the backroom. She unlocked the front door, opened it wide enough to put an apologetic face in the gap.
‘Hey. Sorry, we’re actually closed.’
‘Oh, sure. We just wanted to ask you about the fire next door …’
‘I, ah … OK.’ She leaned out for a better angle on Vialoux’s office, as if confirming its burnt status. ‘Are you police?’
Jordan said, ‘No. Friends of the owner. Did you happen to see anything?’
The woman shook her head. She was fiftyish and heavyset, densely freckled. Curly red hair in a ponytail that didn’t quite achieve total anchorage. A few errant strands were springing forward, antennae-like. ‘No, this is my dad’s place, I just came to pick up a couple things.’ She allowed herself an eyeroll. ‘If I can find anything.’
The expression seemed to invite complicity. Jordan smiled.
She said, ‘Look, sorry to hold you up—’
‘No, no. It’s fine. It looks terrible, what happened. Lucky they managed to control it when they did, it could’ve been … yeah. Could’ve been something else.’
The door was closing slowly, the woman’s smile growing as the gap in turn narrowed: defense against a charge of rudeness.
Jordan said, ‘It’s just – they need a couple photos for the insurance and I said I could do it, but obviously we can’t get in the front with it all boarded up. I have a key, I thought maybe we could go through the back?’
The woman had to think about it for a second, but Jordan was hitting her with a broadening smile of her own, and the woman said, ‘I guess if you’re quick …’
‘Thank you so much.’
They stepped inside, and the woman locked the door behind them. ‘I was trying to find a couple of his prescriptions. God knows why he buries them at work. You should see the paperwork in that office, honestly. Here, come through …’
She led them into the back office. There was a scarred old wooden bench with lamps and magnifying lenses on articulated arms, and a set of tiered wooden shelves holding ranks of miniature tools – tiny saws, and picks and pliers made from blackened metal.
They went out into a rear courtyard shared between the jeweler and Vialoux’s office next door. It was part of a long stretch of outdoor space, concealed from the street and formed from the adjoining rear yards of the town houses fronting Fifth and Sixth. There was a metal chair outside Vialoux’s rear door, and a beer bottle crammed with cigarette butts. The chair was warped and rusted through in a couple places, as if showing the strain of holding up Vialoux and his problems.
The glass in the rear door had either melted or shattered, but it hadn’t been boarded up: no public access, no need. Jordan reached through to free the lock and then stepped back as she pulled open the door. She turned to the woman and gave a smile that Marshall read as intending to convey finality.
‘Thank you so much. We’ll only be a minute.’
The woman looked hesitant now, as if she sensed that having granted frictionless access to a private business, she had some kind of duty of continued stewardship.
‘I’ll umm … I haven’t seen a burned building before. Might as well take a look …’
Marshall followed the two of them inside. It reeked of smoke. The floor was covered with a soggy black pastry of ash and charred debris, maybe half an inch thick, perceptibly elastic underfoot. Jordan led the way through a narrow rear hallway, bathroom to one side and a kitchenette to the other, and then on into the main office space. Faint illumination from the white shards of glow between the plywood panels on the windows.
The jeweler’s daughter said, ‘Gosh. It’s something, isn’t it?’
Jordan played her phone light over the room. By the front door were the remains of a small reception counter, wood panels gone and just the steel frame extant. Vialoux’s desk was in a similar state. Narrow metal skeleton presiding over a shallow pile of ashes, and the L-shape ruins of what would’ve once been a laptop computer. Against the wall was a file cabinet, matt-black with soot, drawers hanging open. Marshall checked each in turn. Whatever paperwork had been stored was now a modest pile of ash in each drawer. The file dividers had been reduced to feeble strips of metal. He toed about under the desk. The sprung bracket of a stapler. Long horsehair splays of denuded copper wire. A small picture frame, four-by-six, nothing left but a narrow metal edge. He wondered who or what Vialoux had kept there on his desk with him, whether it gave him any help or comfort in the last few weeks, or if its value had been lost before the fire. He moved closer to the door, heard glass crunching under his boots.
He asked Jordan for the phone light, and she handed it over. Marshall shone it at the floor. The slurry at his feet purplish in the glare, a whorled sheen of oil on the water. He toed around carefully, found the edge of a piece of glass and levered it up with the lip of his boot sole. He brought the light in closer, studying the composition of the mess, saw a half-inch of charred detritus covering the glass. He dug around some more, widening the hole, keeping the light on his work, and for a brief moment saw blue industrial carpet before the soot-black water seeped in.
He said, ‘I think I’ve seen what I need to see.’
When they got outside to the courtyard, the jeweler’s daughter was suddenly talkative again, perhaps conversationally repressed by the vibe of the office, and now making up for lost observations. She told Jordan it was a good reminder of the importance of smoke alarms, and she was going to check her father’s system was working, and her friend Heather had been doing up a place in Prospect Park, and a blowtorch had been left briefly unattended, and that was almost a tragedy too, and everyone was just one idle mistake from something you can regret, big time. Then something occurred to her, and it made her stop. ‘All of this stuff, it’s replaceable, but …’ She shook her head, frowning, closing in on pithy insight, bedrock truth: ‘You can buy another office, but you can’t buy another life. You know?’
Jordan reiterated her appreciation, and they went out through the jeweler’s shop, and the red-haired woman told them to be safe, and saw them off with a smile and a click of the lock.
Marshall said, ‘Do you think she noticed we didn’t take any photos?’
‘Yeah. That’s a point.’ She stood looking at him. ‘So what’s the theory?’
He said, ‘Let’s sit down somewhere.’