Trail Of Blood Part 25

"Yes. I have some more questions, I hope that's okay."

"Let me check my busy social schedule. Sure, it's okay."

Theresa waited patiently for the tea routine, trying not to tap her foot. Her mother would kill her if she was late to her own birthday party, and she'd even hear it from Frank, since his mother was to host the s.h.i.+ndig. They would both have to make a showing before cutting out to wait at the valley. But she couldn't rush Irene. Theresa might find herself in a place like this someday, with a visit from a stranger the only entertaining thing to happen that year.

She began, "We talked about your encounter with Dr. Louis."

"I've been trying to remember more about him." The old lady stirred her tea as delicately as any queen. "I came up with a white s.h.i.+rt with gold b.u.t.tons. The b.u.t.tons had an anchor on them."

"Really," Theresa said, just to say something.

"I got rather a close look at them. Does that help?"

"They thought one of the victims might be a sailor, the one they called the Tattooed Man. But I'm here to focus on the room, the little storeroom he put you in. The building is going to be destroyed tomorrow, and it's driving me crazy that we still can't figure out which office the room with the body belonged to."

Irene tapped her spoon on the cup. "Dr. Louis had a door behind his desk, and that opened into the closet."

"I understand that, but the other offices probably had such built-in closets as well. The door behind his desk-was it next to the outer wall, or the inner wall, by the hallway?"

For the first time Irene seemed unsure. "Neither...somewhere in the middle."

"Tell me again about the arrangement of the room. When you first walked in from the hallway-"

"His desk was on the left," Irene said immediately, "but not touching the wall. He had a chair behind it for him and two in front of it-"

"Closer to the hallway door."

"Yeah. On the right were two windows and shelves going almost to the ceiling, with books and bottles and things. He had a coat rack in the far corner, way behind his desk. That was about it. Kind of spa.r.s.e, really. That also struck me as odd-most doctors' offices that I've ever seen, even today, are crammed to the gills with stuff."

"So the desk sat about midcenter along the south wall?"

Her face scrunched up in concentration. "Yeah, I think that's about right."

"And the door to the storage room, in the south wall behind it-would you say that was closer to the outer wall, or the hallway wall?"

Irene thought so long that Theresa had to gasp out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding.

"The outer one, I guess. Otherwise his desk would have been in the way of the door."

"Okay. When you entered the room, the little storage room, did the s.p.a.ce open up to the right or the left?"

"I see what you mean. G.o.d, I tried not to think about this for so many years-"

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be. Okay. I woke up on the cot.... I pushed him and ran past the shelves.... I think the storage area would have stretched between the middle of the room and the outer wall. When you looked into it, it opened to the right. The cot lay in the back corner. I had to get past him, out the door, around the desk, and out the door to the hallway."

Theresa pondered this with a mix of exhilaration and disappointment. The area in which they found James Miller lay farther into the building. If that section of floor had not belonged to Dr. Louis's office, it moved Arthur Corliss up to number one suspect. Corliss, the adored father of her new friend Edward. Maybe-Odessa could have installed the table after Irene's attack and before James's murder. "And this was a cot, not a table?"

"A cot, canvas thing about two feet off the floor. Standard military issue, I learned a few years later."

"Did you see any plumbing in there? A sink, a toilet?"

"I didn't really stick around to inventory the place, dear. I only remember shelves, bare wooden things made out of two-by-fours. I grabbed on to one to haul myself up. It gave me a splinter."

"What did he have on the shelves?"

"Not much, as I recall. Bottles and jars, like his outer office. A stack of paper and a typewriter, I remember that."

"Any medical instruments? Like a stethoscope, or...knives?"

Irene grinned to show that the delicacy had been wasted on her. "To chop up his victims with? I don't remember any, but again, I didn't take the time to look around."

"And then you ran out."

"As fast as my chubby little legs could carry me."

"And you saw no one else? All the other tenants had gone home?"

"Yes. Yes...." Irene sipped tea.

"You seem unsure about that," Theresa said, pressing her.

"I didn't see anyone. But-oh, that was it. The dog."

"Dog?"

"The man in the next office must have had a dog. I heard him whining and scratching at the wall next to me, as if he heard us in there and knew I was in trouble. Animals can always tell, you know. They sense it. Or maybe he just wanted us to come and let him out." She shook her head, the badly dyed locks going every which way. "Funny, I forgot all about that until now. Probably because when you asked I thought you meant humans."

James Miller had made a notation about dog hair in his notes. "And you're sure this dog was in the other office? Not in the hallway or outside the building?"

"No, the scratches were close, and on wood. Real clear."

"Did he bark?"

"Yeah, once or twice. Obviously no one was there to hear him, except good old Dr. Louis-the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Why would someone leave a dog in an office overnight?"

"Honey." Irene Schaffer's eye twinkled over the rim of her teacup. "People didn't have electric alarms that called the police when a burglar opened the door or smashed the window. And thieves were thick on the ground then. People were desperate."

"I see. Irene, I'm going to try to get a blueprint of the building and bring it here to show you. Then we can make some notations about the layout."

"Sure, bring it by. I'll try to make time for you."

"Thanks." Theresa set her cup gently on the doily-clad end table. "I have to go now, or I'm going to be late to my own birthday party."

"How old are you?"

Theresa made a face. "Forty."

She expected the ninety-one-year-old Irene to point out that forty made her a mere child, but the woman said, "That sucks."

"Yes, it does." At the door, strangely reluctant to leave, Theresa turned back. "Say, you never told me about robbing the bank."

Irene's eyebrows pushed the wrinkles on her forehead up to her hairline. "I wouldn't rob a bank, dear. I've never taken a thing that didn't belong to me, no matter how tight things got."

"But you said-"

"I said I knocked one over. That's different."

Theresa waited, returning the older woman's grin.

"It was the Union National Bank Building on Euclid. They demolished it in the fifties to build a Woolworth's. My boyfriend at the time-Harold something-or-other-worked for the demolition company and I got to sit with him in the cab as he swung the wrecking ball."

"I see. You knocked it over."

"That we did. Every time that wrecking ball smashed into the walls, the ground shook all the way up through the machine until my teeth rattled. My heart bounced around in my rib cage. It was something to feel, all right."

"Cool."

"Actually, after a while it got a little tedious. They didn't go just bam, bam, bam. They had to stop after every swing and take a look at what they'd done and decide where the next blow needed to be. It all had to do with the weight of the upper floors and the placement of the supports. Harold knew all about that stuff and I wanted to know everything about Harold. Always date interesting men, dear. Life is too short to waste on boring people."

"I'll keep that in mind," Theresa promised as she left.

CHAPTER 33.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 10.

PRESENT DAY.

One glance told Theresa that her aunts had won control of the cake. Had it been up to her cousins, they would have had it decorated with black icing and perhaps a vulture or two. But her cousins were no doubt busy with their own children and jobs and households and left it to the aunts, and the aunts had picked out a round white concoction with pink roses and yellow b.u.mblebees. The fact that it would have been more appropriate for a preschooler made her feel not the slightest bit younger and certainly no less self-conscious about the entire celebration.

That would not, of course, stop her from eating as much of the frosting as she could get.

"Don't stick your finger in that," Frank warned.

"Too late."

"It will make you fat."

"Too late for that, too."

"Are you guys going to kick out a death certificate on Kim Hammond soon?" he asked. "Her mother calls us every day about it. I keep referring her to you, but she calls us."

Theresa let her aunt's German shepherd lick the frosting residue from her finger. "Christine said she was having some kind of problem with it-not the cause of death, she's going to keep that a generic 'bodily trauma' and then list 'decapitation' and 'exsanguination' as factors. But paperwork is holding it up. She's still trying to get the medical records and birth certificate."

"Another reason why the mother needs to call you and not me."

"Go ahead and tell her to." Theresa paused to hug one of the many children of her many cousins, then turned back to Frank. "You getting anywhere on Kim?"

"No."

"Not at all?"

He sipped red punch from a plastic cup, making a face she knew meant it would taste better with some rum in it. "Snaps to the girl for staying off the drugs and all, but it seems that all she did with her new free time was sit around her mother's apartment and watch TV. As far as we can tell, she didn't contact her old gang, didn't return to her old haunts. She went downtown now and then, but what she did there is anyone's guess. Probably just shopped. Her mother did say she'd go to the West Side Market once in a while."

"Where Peggy Hall worked?"

"Yeah. But no one ever saw them together."

Another cousin stopped by to hug Theresa. "Happy birthday."

"Thanks."

"So, you're over the hill now, huh?"

"And speeding down the other side." Theresa would have laughed at the comment from anyone other than Heather, the youngest and perkiest cousin, the daughter of the youngest and perkiest aunt. Heather's b.u.t.t probably wouldn't fall until she drew social security no matter how many beautiful and perky children she pushed out.

"Well, you look great."

"Thanks," Theresa said. "But from now on I'll only look great for my age."

Frank frowned in confusion, because he was, of course, a man, and didn't understand.

"It's one of those lines you cross," Theresa explained to him. "It starts when people start calling you ma'am instead of miss, as if a memo had been sent out to everyone in the world except you. Then in a few years you find your normal poundage has been s.h.i.+fted upward, and even if you lived on plain lettuce, your high school weight has become an impossibility. Then you find that you can walk past a group of young men without hearing any suggestive comments."

"Depressing," Heather said.

"Actually, that's the only good part of aging I've found so far," Theresa told her. "Sometimes I like being invisible."

"That's what Kim seemed to have been," Frank said, giving the punch another try. "Invisible. If she went anywhere or did anything in the weeks before she died, we have yet to find out about it."