Was the man so upset he’d forgotten what kind of business he was in?
“I’m looking for a new apartment,” I said, straightening my backbone and pasting a cordial smile on my kisser. I took the ad for Judy’s place out of my skirt pocket and handed it to him. “I saw this listing in the newspaper yesterday, and it sounds just right for me. So I was hoping to see the apartment this afternoon. Is it still available?”
He looked down at the ad in his hand, then back up at me. Now he was smiling also-so broadly and intensely I thought his tiny, tobacco-stained teeth would pop out of his gums and blast out of his mouth like buckshot. “Sure, doll,” he said, suddenly acting like my best friend. “The pad’s available. And it’s vacant, too, so I can show it to you right now-soon as you fill out an application.” Scooting over to the front desk, he snatched a printed form out of the top left drawer and gave it to me. “Need a pencil?” Before I could answer, he plucked one from the holder on the desk and handed it over.
What a chameleon! I thought, marveling at the man’s quicksilver mood change. Was he merely busting to make a buck, or was he hustling to unload a bad luck rental where a young woman had recently been murdered? From the way he was smiling and sweating, I figured both motives were applicable.
“Thank you, Mr… ah… Mr…?”
“Swift,” he said, still grinning, “but you can call me Roscoe. Come sit over here while you fill out the form.”
He snaked his arm around my waist and guided me over to the guest chair at the side of the desk.
To avoid any sneaky fanny pats or pinches, I sat down quickly.
“Thank you, Roscoe,” I said, gazing up at his lizardlike face and batting my lashes to beat the band. I was trying to look alluring and flirtatious (as Abby always advised me to do), but the effort was making me kind of sick to my stomach, so I probably just looked like a bilious cow with gnats in her eyes.
Deciding to ditch the nauseating coquette routine and get down to business, I turned my attention to the application form and hastily filled it out, giving my name as Phoebe Starr and listing my address as 104 Christopher-which was just a few blocks away from where I really lived. I put down my true phone number, however, in case Roscoe decided to dial it to check me out. Then I gave Abby as a reference, stating that she was my current landlady.
The minute I finished, Roscoe swerved over to the desk, snatched the form out of my hands, and shoved it into the top right-hand drawer. Then he pulled a set of keys out of a different drawer and jingled them in the air. “C’mon, doll,” he said with another too-wide grin. “The apartment’s right around the corner. And I got a hunch it’s the perfect pad for you.”
He didn’t mention that it had been somewhat less than perfect for the last tenant.
STANDING IN THE HALL OUTSIDE JUDY’S apartment, waiting for Roscoe to fish the keys out of his pocket and open up, I studied the lock, knob, panels, and jamb of the door for evidence of breaking and entering. Terry was right. There were no unusual marks on any of the metal parts, and no telltale nicks or gashes in the wood.
I looked at Elsie Londergan’s door for a second, thinking I might learn something by comparing the two entranceways, but quickly lost my train of thought and flew into a major panic. What if Elsie heard us out here in the hall, or saw us through her peephole, and came out to see what was going on? If she let on that she knew me and called me by my real name, my cover would be totally blown! I’d have to confess my real purpose for being here. And then I’d have to deal with Roscoe Swift as my actual self, which could significantly lower my chances of digging up any info about Gregory Smythe-not to mention leave me exposed to a possible new source of danger.
(Why, oh, why hadn’t I thought of this before? Before I had hoofed it up to Judy’s apartment like a demented donkey? Before I had so willingly-okay, mindlessly-placed myself in the position of a sitting duck? If I had any sense at all I’d quit my job at Daring Detective and look for work as an oyster shucker. Or maybe a street sweeper. Some kind of job where foresight didn’t figure.)
But I was a lucky duck (or donkey) for the moment. Elsie didn’t appear. And Swift lived up to his name by opening the door to Judy’s apartment swiftly. Then we both stepped inside and he closed the door behind us, flipping on the light.
My heart screeched to a halt. Standing there in Judy’s kitchen, holding my breath and blinking against the glare of the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, I felt as if I had entered a tomb. Or a church. I was both deadened and electrified. And I felt closer to Judy Catcher than I ever had before. A trace of her cheap, spicy perfume still hung-like incense-in the stagnant air. I thought if I closed my eyes real tight, and concentrated real hard, I might be able to hear her humming…
But Roscoe quickly broke my spell. “You got to use your imagination,” he said, snapping open the kitchen window shade, then flinging wide the door to the bathroom. “The single girl who was living here moved out a few weeks ago, so the place looks empty and dreary right now. Needs some furniture and a homey touch. But just look at this flooring!” he exclaimed, gesturing toward the dingy, cracked linoleum as though it were a layer of marble veined with gold. “It’s like a ballroom dance floor! And the carpeting’s even better,” he said, lurching into the tiny sitting room and twirling once around like Arthur Murray himself. “It’s the perfect shade of red. They call it Prussian Passion. It goes with any color.”
Especially the color of blood, I thought, walking into the room and staring down at the carmine carpet, searching for the section I knew poor Terry had soaked and soaped and scrubbed with his own hands. It was faintly visible in the center of the floor, midway between the sitting room and the bedroom. A dusky oblong stain the size of a bathmat. The very spot where Judy’s soul had left her bleeding body.
The location of the stain didn’t actually prove anything, I realized, but it did indicate that the killer had been admitted to the interior of the apartment before the murder took place. (Okay, okay! I may have been jumping to conclusions. Yes, Judy could have been shot in the kitchen when she opened her door to the killer, and then she might have stumbled halfway to the bedroom before she fell. But it was far more likely that the two bullets fired straight into her heart would have killed her instantly-i.e., kept her from stumbling anywhere.)
“The apartment’s the right size for me,” I said, carefully bypassing the barely discernible bloodstain and heading into the bedroom. “And the location couldn’t be better. But my major concern is safety.” I walked over to the bedroom window, raised the worn shade and looked out at the rusty, partially snow-covered fire escape. “Do you have many break-ins here?”
“Never had a single one!” Roscoe swore, lying through his little brown teeth (the police had, after all, declared that Judy was shot during a random burglary). “This is the safest building in the whole goddamn city!” he insisted. “The neighborhood’s safe, too.”
Pretending to test its workability, I unlocked the bedroom window and raised it a couple of inches, checking both the frame and the glass for signs of a forced entry. There were no scratches or scrapes to speak of, and the glass panes were uniformly filthy, suggesting-if not proving-that none of them had been recently replaced. A blast of cold air prompted me to close the window and relock it.
“Next to safety, privacy is the most important thing to me,” I said, shivering, turning to look Roscoe right in the eye. “I don’t need any new friends or enemies. And I can’t stand gossips or busybodies. I’m an unmarried woman with a liberated lifestyle, and I want to live in a building where all the residents keep their noses in their own behinds.”