"He had something with him, if that's what you mean. Like a bag of some
kind."
"And you let him go up?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing. I felt
a rush of dismay.
"Said he had to. Needed a signature." Patrick Mooney then shrugged and
reached for the dooijamb to steady himself, his whisky breath wafting
across the hall. Great security.
I stepped into the elevator as the door was clanking shut, and watched
as he rubbed his eyes and eased his own door closed.
Now I was really puzzled. If the FedEx guy came "earlier," why was he
just now leaving? A lot of scary theories went through my mind as I
pushed the button for the third floor.
I took a deep breath as the elevator opened, but again I saw no
packages. So far so good. Getting off, I set down my roses on the hall
carpet and fumbled for my key. When I inserted it, the lock felt a
little rough, causing me to think for an instant I'd used the wrong
key, but then it responded.
What had caused that? I wondered. Had the guy been fiddling with my
door, wiring a bomb? Using one hand I pushed it open, again holding my
breath and standing aside, but it opened okay. I exhaled, then reached
back to drag in the flowers.
But if he didn't leave a package, what was he doing here? Casing out
where I lived? Planting a bug in the elevator? And why was he here so
long?
The place was dark when I stepped in, the drapes drawn. I relocked the
door, then surveyed the gloom. No explosions, so I guessed he didn't
plan to kill me. Yet. Here I was, home, safe and sound. I just stood a
minute, still uneasy.
Then I remembered the flowers, my dripping bouquet, and headed for the
kitchen. Deal with them, and then maybe get a bottle of white wine out
of the fridge and sip some in the bath.
After my unnerving sequence with Sarah, thoughts of going to the office
had zero appeal. Time to lighten up, way up.
Preoccupied, not looking around, I stuffed the roses into a vase by the
sink, and then I thought again about the white wine and opened the
refrigerator. I'd still not bothered to turn on any lights, but the
kitchen and its ancient fridge were dimly illuminated by the tiny
window just across. I wasn't sure where I'd put the bottle, since I'd
had to rearrange things to make room for the dup of Carly's interview.
(I was also planning to take home a safety dup of Paula's interview
sometime later in the week.)
Why was I doing that? Taking home copies? It was a sign of deep
compulsion. You couldn't really make a professional-quality second
negative from a first positive--by that time it would be
third-generation--but I'd brought it anyway. Now and then I just have a
raw instinct that keeping a safety backup around is a good idea. But
the canister had ended up devouring the entire lower shelf of the
fridge.
I opened the white door and peered in. The light was out, and for a
moment I stared numbly at the dark, half-filled shelves. The only thing
that struck me as odd was that I could see the pure white of the empty
bottom shelf.
For a second I could only stand and stare, but then I backed away,
trying to figure out what was wrong, and stumbled over something. I
regained my balance and flipped on the overhead light.
"What!"
The floor around me was littered with bottles, my old toaster, my tiny
microwave. It was a total shambles.
I recoiled stumbling again, this time over cans strewn across the
linoleum. My kitchen, it was slowly sinking in, had been completely
trashed.
I felt a visceral wave of nausea. It's the scariest thing in the world
having your space invaded like a form of psychic rape. I sagged against
the refrigerator as I gazed around. The cabinets had been emptied out,
a hasty and haphazard search. Quick and extremely dirty, as glass
containers of condiments, including an old bottle of dill pickles, were
shattered and their contents smeared into the floor.
"I don't believe this." I marched back into the living room and reached
for the lights. This room too had been turned upside down. The TV,
stereo, VCR, all had been swept onto the rug. But they were still
there. That guy, that animal, who did this wasn't a thief. He'd been
looking for something.
My breath now coming in pulses, I edged into the bedroom and switched
on the light. The bed was the way I'd left it, the covers thrown back
and the pillows in a pile. The clock radio was there, and so was the
old Mac, still on the table in the far corner, my "workstation." Again
nothing seemed to be missing.
I headed back to the kitchen, where the refrigerator door was still
open. I gazed at the interior a moment, still puzzled, trying to figure
out what wasn't right. . . .
Shit! Shit! Shit! That's what was wrong. The field of white bottom
shelf was empty. Totally empty. The film canister of Paula's interview
was gone.
For a moment I just leaned against the kitchen counter, barely pushing
aside an impulse to throw up in the sink. Think, I told myself, get a
grip and think. . . .
It was the film he'd wanted. And he'd wanted it badly enough to pick
the lock, then rip my home apart looking for it.
I pulled at a tangle of hair, feeling my mind in chaos, and tried to
reason out the situation. Why? Why would he steal a positive that
couldn't be used for anything?
Finally the real truth of what had happened hit me like a fist in the
chest. My Home Sweet Home had been violated.
Seething, I went into the living room and reached for the phone, the
only thing not on the floor.
My first instinct was to call David, but then I decided he'd just go
into a tizzy of hysteria and be no support at all. So instead I called
Lou, praying I wouldn't wake Sarah. In an unsteady voice, I tried to
tell him what had happened.
He seemed puzzled to hear from me again so soon, but then he quickly
turned FBI, concerned for my safety.
"Guy sounds like a professional," he declared. "Probably got in with an
electric picker, like the Edge. Any asshole can buy one for a hundred
and thirty bucks. It'll rake cylinders at a hundred times a second. Pro
like that, you can be sure there'll be no prints."
"But why would . . . ?" My voice was still a croak. "I mean, my God,
all for a lousy reel of film?"
"Fucker wants you to know he's in town. So how he did it's as important
as what he did. It's a time-proven scare tactic." He paused. "Morgan, I
don't like this one bit. There could be more before this is over."
"Think I should call the cops?"
"Damned right you should," he said, slowly and sadly, "but to tell you
the truth, they ain't gonna do all that much. Somebody messed up your
apartment and lifted a third-hand copy of a woman talking. They'll say
it sounds more like malicious mischief than a crime. Then they'll write
it up and that'll be the last you'll hear from them."
"Well," I said, my anger welling up, "maybe I don't feel quite so
laissez-faire. Tell me, you know anybody who can run a plate for you on
a Sunday?"
"You got the prick's license number?" he exclaimed. "Why the hell
didn't you say so?"
"Honestly, it sort of slipped my mind. I'm having a little trouble
thinking straight right now."
Fortunately my short-term memory is pretty good, even when I'm
stressed, so I spewed it out.
"Don't go anywhere," he declared. "I'll get back to you in five
minutes."
I hung up the phone and lay down, flat out on the carpet, trying a
breathing exercise to calm down. The problem was, it wasn't working.
Having had some experience with being robbed--I once got completely
cleaned out when I had a ground-floor apartment down in the Village--I
know you go through certain Kubler-Ross-like stages of anger, denial,
depression, acceptance. You also go through a predictable series of
recriminations: I should have had window bars and gates; I should have
had a different lock; I should have had two different locks. In the
instance just recalled, I'm virtually certain an apartment painter
duplicated a set of my keys on his lunch break and then passed them on
to a second-story artist. No way to prove that, mind you, but it had to
be what happened. I also suspect he checked my appointments calendar to
see when I was going to be out of town.
But in this case the lock was definitely picked. Nobody had a set of my
keys except the super, and Steve. So the guy with the Spanish accent
knew how to slip through doors and he had no financial interest in my
old VCR. He only had an interest in my film. What had he said there on
the sidewalk outside Paula Marks's apartment? Something about how
making this picture was a big mistake?