Flesh and Blood

  Tannenbaum arrived a few minutes later. He flashed his badge to the doorman, then joined Frank in the lobby.

  “You’re punctual, Frank,” he said. “That’ll get you a long way with Midtown North.” He walked hurriedly to the elevator. “She lived on the fourteenth floor. Apartment A.”

  A strip of yellow paper with black lettering hung across the door: DO NOT ENTER CRIME SCENE. Tannenbaum inserted the key, opened the door, then leaned under the paper and walked into the apartment.

  Frank followed along behind him.

  “Well, this is it,” Tannenbaum said, as Frank joined him in the foyer. “It’s a mess, of course. It always is with this kind of thing.”

  A few yards beyond the small foyer, Frank could see the thin slants of grayish light that came through the nearly closed louver blades. A line of reddish stains ran in a rough diagonal across the dark brown blades, and as Frank’s eyes drifted downward he saw a large pool of dried blood which spread out across the carpet only a few feet from the window. The figure of a body had been drawn around the stain in white chalk, and from its position relative to the stain, it was obvious that Hannah Karlsberg had died of wounds to her throat and chest.

  Tannenbaum strode into the living room, stopping just to the right of the chalk outline. “Did you notice the door?” he asked, as he turned back to Frank.

  “You mean the jimmy marks?” Frank asked.

  “That’s right,” Tannenbaum said. “Very crude. I mean, not exactly what you’d call a cat burglar.”

  “Were both locks jimmied?”

  “No, just the bottom one,” Tannenbaum said. “We figure the top one wasn’t bolted.” He shrugged. “Who knows why?”

  “Is there any other entrance?”

  Tannenbaum shook his head. “Just the fire escape outside her bedroom window, but it looks clean. Her window was locked. No marks outside it. Looks like he just got lucky with that bottom lock.”

  Frank walked slowly into the living room. Earlier, in his office, he had imagined an overturned chair and a shattered lamp. Instead, he saw an overturned magazine rack and a heavy glass coffee table whose top had been knocked off its deep green marble stand.

  “Looks like she fell into it,” Tannenbaum said as he stepped gingerly over the edge of the table. “There were blood stains and small pieces of flesh on one corner.” He glanced about the room, his eyes taking in the pattern of blood drops that dotted it. “She moved around a little,” he said. “You can tell that from the walls.”

  All four of them had been splattered with blood, along with the ceiling. The knife, in its flight, had sent arcs of blood high over the killer’s head, and some of it had reached the high speckled ceiling which now looked down upon the even bloodier scene below.

  Frank walked to the far right of the room and nodded toward the corridor that led back into the remaining rooms of the apartment. “Anything back there?” he asked.

  “No,” Tannenbaum said. “It’s clean as a whistle.”

  Frank said nothing, and Tannenbaum looked at him curiously. “Want to see the rest of the place?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Follow me.”

  Tannenbaum turned swiftly and led Frank down the corridor and into the back bedroom. The bed was made up neatly.

  “She must have been up late that night,” Frank said as his eyes moved over the bed. He looked at Tannenbaum. “Did you notice the number of cigarettes in the ashtray in the living room?”

  Tannenbaum pointed to another ashtray which rested on the small white table beside the bed. “That one’s full, too. Same brand as the pack we found on the floor of the living room.”

  “Was it her brand?”

  “We checked that out. It was.”

  “She had emphysema,” Frank said. “Had she always smoked like that?”

  “We hear she’d been trying to quit,” Tannenbaum said. His eyes lingered on the ashtray. “Looks to me like she was a little nervous that night.” He shook his head. “If she were a younger woman, I’d figure some sort of romantic problem, you know. Maybe she was waiting for her married lover, something like that. Maybe they had words. Things can get very nasty in a situation like that.”

  Frank nodded.

  Tannenbaum walked to the bedroom window, parted the blinds and peered out. “Of course, the jimmy marks wouldn’t go with that theory,” he said. “But still, when I saw the bed all made up, despite the fact that she died early in the morning, I thought that it could have been someone she knew.” He turned back to Frank. “I mean, people don’t wait up for psychos.”

  “Not the ones they don’t know, at least,” Frank said.

  Tannenbaum laughed. “But the way I see it now, she was maybe dozing on the bed while the guy was trying to get in.”

  Frank looked at him doubtfully. “Wouldn’t she have heard it?”

  “Maybe not,” Tannenbaum said. He pointed to a pair of headphones which lay on the floor next to her bed. “She could have been using those things. They’re like speaker systems for your ears. If she were using them, she might not have heard anything until it was too late.”

  “Was a record on the stereo?” Frank asked.

  “She had a CD player,” Tannenbaum said. “And the answer is, yes. Classical. Loud, too. Beethoven’s Ninth.” He shrugged. “In any event, she was up late.” He stared at Frank intently. “What would keep you walking the floor till the morning light, Frank?”

  “Love can do it,” Frank replied. “Money. Family troubles.”

  Tannenbaum released the blinds and they clattered shut. “Nobody heard a thing, you believe that?”

  “Not unless he gagged her.”

  “Lab says no for the gag,” Tannenbaum said. “And he couldn’t have drugged her first. Not the way she was dancing around the living room.”

  “Who’ve you talked to?”

  “We’ve canvassed the whole building. The people right downstairs were taking a much-needed vacation in Saint Thomas. The woman in the one next door was shacked up with her boyfriend for the evening. That leaves the one across the hall.”

  “And?”

  “The sublessee hadn’t moved in yet,” Tannenbaum said. “So, what can you do in a neighborhood like that?”

  Frank shook his head. “Not much.”

  “When she hit that fucking table,” Tannenbaum said, “that made a big noise, you know?”

  “Yeah,” Frank said.

  “As for screaming,” Tannenbaum added, “the M.E. says he might have gotten her vocal cords first.” He smiled. “What do you think, Frank, a lucky punch?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Tannenbaum shrugged. “Well, maybe time will tell,” he said as he headed back out of the room.

  Frank followed him slowly into the room across the hall. It was set up as an office. There was a small wooden desk, a bookshelf filled with books about the fashion industry, and a tall antique oak filing cabinet. A computer rested on top of the desk, along with a small portable typewriter. A box of Hannah’s personalized stationery lay open beside the type-writer, light blue paper headed with an elegant gold script: Hannah Karlsberg, Fashion Consultant. It did not list her address or phone number.

  “Far as we can tell, absolutely nothing was taken,” Tannenbaum said. “She had nice clothes, nice jewelry, and this computer would be worth a few bucks on the street.”

  “How about money?”

  “There was three hundred dollars in the top drawer of her desk,” Tannenbaum said. He pulled the drawer open and pointed to the small black tray inside it. “It was laying right there, right in the open.”

  Frank glanced about the room. One wall held an enormous framed painting of an island paradise where brown native people lounged happily by the river, while the one opposite it was decked with an enormous handmade quilt. There were also a few photographs. One showed a large, middle-aged woman as she posed stiffly in front of the Eiffel Tower. Frank nodded toward it. “Is that her?”

  “Yeah,” T
annenbaum said. “Like they say, at a happier time.”

  Frank’s eyes moved from one photograph to the next. Hannah in Venice, Hannah in Rome, and finally, Hannah standing on one of the serpentine ramparts of the Great Wall of China.

  “She got around, no doubt about it,” Tannenbaum said.

  “Traveling like that,” Frank said, “it’s expensive.”

  “She made a good dollar,” Tannenbaum said. “We checked with your client on that. According to her, Hannah was pulling down over a hundred thousand a year.”

  “She spent a lot of it on this place,” Frank said.

  “She had a lot to spend,” Tannenbaum said quietly as he ran his fingers over the elegant oak desk. “But like they say, it don’t buy happiness.”

  “You figure she wasn’t happy?”

  Tannenbaum shrugged. “Who is? Money or no money.”

  Frank stepped to the door and glanced back toward the living room. The chalk outline of Hannah Karlsberg’s body spread out before him, the single outstretched arm reaching desperately, as it seemed to him now, for some final hopeless hope.

  “What else can I do for you?” Tannenbaum asked.

  “How about letters? Postcards?”

  “We went bottom up on that,” Tannenbaum told him. “Unless you’re talking about recent snapshots. She had a box of those, but then just about everybody does.”

  “Is it still here?”

  “Yeah,” Tannenbaum said. He walked to the closet on the right side of the room and opened it. A small wooden chest rested on an upper shelf. He took it down and handed it to Frank.

  Frank took the box and opened it. A thin scattering of glossy color photographs stared up at him.

  “Oh, and since you’re looking for lost heirs,” Tannenbaum said, “you might be interested in this. It came in today. She left everything to the American Cancer Society.” He laughed. “You think they got any button men over there, Frank, people they send out to smoke a rich benefactor once in a while?”

  Frank said nothing. He closed the box softly and walked back into the living room. The light from the window flooded in all around him, glaring hazily in the luxuriously framed pictures and awards which she had used to decorate the rose-colored rear wall.

  “She took pride in herself,” Tannenbaum said as he joined him in the living room. He glanced about randomly. “This place. The way she did that wall. Pride.”

  Frank’s eyes drifted down to the wide red stain which rose like a gaping wound from the pale blue carpet. Nothing had ever looked more out of place. It was as if something had crept through the window, some creature from another world, and taken her in a single murderous instant that nothing could reclaim.

  7

  Frank didn’t bother to return to the apartment before heading for Irini’s later that night. He knew that his own rumpled brown suit wouldn’t fit the elegant decor, but the other one, which hung in Karen’s closet, was not in significantly better shape, and he’d refused, absolutely refused, to allow Karen to refurbish his wardrobe. She’d claimed it was her way of investing in him, and that in return she expected a percentage of his business after it got rolling. For a moment he’d actually considered it, but only for a moment, then his senses had returned to him and he’d simply thanked her softly and said no. To her credit, Karen had never brought the subject up again. She’d even suggested that maybe wrinkled jackets and slightly shiny trousers were what people expected, and that anything a little brighter or with a slightly more recent cut would arouse a certain disquiet in his prospective clientele.

  In any event, the suits had remained unchanged, and as he stepped into the salmon-colored foyer of Irini’s and fell under the disapproving gaze of the tuxedoed maître d’, he realized that it wasn’t really Karen’s money he’d refused, but the crisp, cool tone of her style, and that he sill preferred the look of a slightly battered man to anything he saw in the flashy magazines.

  “May I help you, sir?” the maitre d’ asked quietly.

  “I’m meeting somebody.”

  “Who might that be?”

  “Karen Devereaux.”

  The maitre d’ looked at him unbelievingly. “She’s expecting you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “This way, please.”

  Karen was sitting at a table in the far right corner of the room. She was dressed in a dark blue silk blouse and a long black velvet skirt, and as he moved toward her, Frank realized that he would never know a more beautiful woman, that she had fallen into his life as miraculously as a flaming meteor, and that it would never happen again.

  She smiled brightly as he sat down. “Hi,” she said.

  Frank dropped his hat in the chair beside him. “Nice place.”

  “You like it?”

  He smiled. “It’s fine.”

  She leaned toward him. “You look tired.”

  “It’s been a busy day.”

  “A new case?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  Frank allowed himself to laugh softly as he shook his head. He knew that soon he would be alone again, but he did not know when, or how, or why, but only that while he remained with Karen, he wanted her to love him.

  She laughed lightly. “You never want to talk about them. Were you that way with Sheila?”

  “Sheila never asked.”

  “Did you like that better?”

  He shrugged indifferently, the smile fading despite his best efforts to hold on to it. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Karen’s face grew somber. “The way you say that sometimes, Frank,” she said, “the look in your eyes when you say it, it’s as if you mean that nothing matters, nothing at all.”

  Frank picked up the menu and opened it. “What’s good?”

  “Have whatever you like,” Karen said dully.

  Frank lowered the menu. “I don’t want to start it off like this.”

  “Why not? It’s become our usual routine.”

  “That’s what I don’t like.”

  “It takes two to make a conversation,” Karen said curtly. Her eyes darted away from him. “Or anything else, for that matter.”

  She meant kids, and he knew it. She wanted a child. Perhaps she wanted his child, but he suspected that the exact identity of the father mattered least of all in her immediate calculations. She wanted the experience of child-bearing, of parenthood. She wanted to be a mother, but he knew that he would never be a father to anyone again, never know that exquisite joy, or expose himself to the dark brutal emptiness that had followed in its wake.

  He folded the menu. “Order for me, Karen,” he said. “I don’t know what these things are.”

  She stared at him resentfully. “Are you proud of that?”

  “No,” Frank said. “It’s just a fact. I don’t have any particular feeling about it. Why? Does it embarrass you?”

  “You know better than that,” Karen snapped. “Don’t try to make me out to be some New York snob, Frank. It won’t work.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “Is that what you did with Sheila?” Karen asked accusingly. “Did you try to put her in some little square, nail her down, so you could go your own way?”

  Frank glanced away, and drew in a long, slow breath.

  The waiter stepped up almost immediately, and Karen ordered herself a Black Russian and him a shot of Bushmills.

  “So,” she said crisply, “I ordered for you.”

  Frank nodded slowly.

  For a long time, the two of them sat in silence. Then suddenly, Karen leaned forward and thrust out her arm. “Feel this, Frank,” she said brightly, trying to start the dinner over again. “Feel this material.”

  Frank felt the cuff of her blouse. The material was soft as liquid, and for a moment he half-expected it to dissolve at his touch.

  “And look at the color,” Karen added enthusiastically. “Doesn’t it look like it has a glow of some kind?”

  “It’s very beautiful,” Frank said.
r />   “You met the designer,” Karen told him. “She was at the party last night.”

  Frank said nothing.

  “Imalia Covallo,” Karen added. “Very tall. She sat near you for a while. Do you remember her?”

  “Yes,” Frank said.

  “I bought this in her shop this morning,” Karen said. She sat back and lifted her arms gracefully. “It’s called the ‘Imalia Covallo Look.’”

  “She has a shop?”

  “Oh yes, very exclusive.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Where else, Fifth Avenue,” Karen said. “You have to have an appointment to get in.” She laughed. “It’s all very haute couture and all that.” She lifted her nose to the air in a broad, mocking gesture. “So precious, dahling.”

  “You made an appointment?” Frank asked, almost unbelievingly.

  “Yes, at the party,” Karen said. “She’s really very nice.” She ran her fingers up the sleeves of her blouse. “And the clothes, Frank. You should see the clothes.”

  Frank let his eyes move over the shimmering blouse, its intricately woven fabric and radiant sheen. “It’s very nice,” he said again.

  She smiled sweetly. “Think we can begin again, Frank?” she asked.

  For a moment, he didn’t speak. Then, as last, he lied.

  “Maybe,” he said.

  It was almost ten by the time they got back to the apartment, and for a while, the two of them sat on the terrace and watched the lights of the city. There was a distinct chill in the air, but the view was worth it. It swept in toward them from up and down the long glittering canyon of Park Avenue, and as he sat in the white wicker chair and listened to the distant traffic down below, Frank remembered his tiny porch on Waldo Street in Atlanta, the metal lawn chair he’d kept there, and the wall of city lights which he’d watched night after night. He could feel his old discontent rising again, reaching into his voice, his eyes, making itself visible to those who were around him.