He went back to emptying the blue box. He wasn’t going to do anything for a tenant who couldn’t tip.
I returned to my flat thinking I’d better retrieve my books before they got packed with whatever her next of kin would be taking. I could feed the bird at the same time.
The super hadn’t told me about the police tape. I debated crawling under it, but that wouldn’t tell me why it was there. So I called Bernie, the only cop I knew and the man who was likely handling the case, and for a change didn’t have to leave a message.
“It’s just a formality,” he explained. “I’m sure it was natural causes.”
The paper boy had found her that morning. When she hadn’t responded to his knock as usual, he’d tried the knob. Bernie’s scenario was that Mrs. D. had fallen, as old ladies are wont to do, and hit her head on the cast-iron radiator.
“C’mon,” I said. “There’s nothing by the radiator she could trip over.”
“At that age, you don’t need anything. A dizzy spell, your knee buckles. She wore orthopedic shoes.”
“So? She was healthy as a horse. She used to take the stairs for exercise.”
“Yeah, but at that age. We see it all the time, Annie. Old people. Weak bones.”
“So you’re going to save money on an autopsy by chalking her up to statistical probability?”
“No, we’re waiting on the autopsy. She isn’t high priority.”
Alone people never are, I thought.
“Actually, you might be able to help,” Bernie said. “You ever been in her apartment?”
“Plenty of times.”
“Good. Her door was probably unlocked all night. Get the superintendent to let you in and see if anyone took advantage.”
“Me? Didn’t she have one of those ‘in case of emergency phone so-and-so’ numbers?”
“You tell me. Apparently she’s got a son someplace, but we haven’t tracked him down yet.”
“She never mentioned him.” An estranged son wouldn’t know if anything was missing anyway. Was I really the only person close enough to her to know? I told him I already had a key and asked if it was okay to touch stuff.
“We don’t put tape up for decoration,” Bernie said. But despite the possibility of theft, he was in no hurry to send in the forensic team. “She was old, Annie,” he reminded me.
“What are you saying, Bernie? That she was senile? Because she wasn’t. She beat me at Scrabble all the time.”
“She was eighty-two.”
That surprised me. “So what?”
“You sound like you’d rather she was murdered.”
I just didn’t want her dismissed. “She wasn’t a dotty old lady,” I said.
Bernie paused to grind his teeth or something, then said, “Take a look around, don’t touch anything. And don’t break the tape,” he warned before hanging up.
Bernie and I had met during the investigation of my nephew Ivor’s murder, which got me more involved with family affairs than I’d been in decades. We aren’t friends, but he finds my thought patterns useful on occasion. He says my brain’s wired differently, so I make connections he wouldn’t. I once told him it’s an occupational hazard of subject indexers, but only once. I don’t want him calling the National Library when he needs a consultant.
I hadn’t told Bernie about the envelope; it must have Freudian-slipped my mind. I hadn’t even opened it, as if that act would make her death more real, even though—or because—I was pretty sure this is what she’d mean by “in case.”
Because Mrs. D.’s newest piece of furniture dated from around 1952, her flat looked like a scene from a PBS Mystery! My eyes zoomed in on the chalk outline under the window opposite her front door, travelled to the big bloodstain by the head, then panned up to the red smear on the radiator. There was nothing in the area she could have tripped over or stumbled against—unless you count sixty-inch shears a hazardous product.
The place definitely looked different, and it wasn’t just poor Bijou huddled silent in his cage like a street person in a doorway. The middle cushion of the sofa had a dent in it, something I’d only ever seen after having sat there myself. The doily on the back of the wing chair was off kilter, and the cut-glass ashtray wasn’t quite centred on the coffee table. I bet myself that, because of cutbacks, Bernie wouldn’t dust for fingerprints unless he had good reason to.
Hands in the back pockets of my jeans to avoid inadvertently touching anything, I went up to the birdcage and said, “Hi, Bijou.” He looked at me with a baleful black eye. “Guess you miss your mom, huh?” He responded with a slow blink. The cage was uncharacteristically messy, as was the area of carpet it stood on—chaff and gravel and feathers all over the place. Something like my apartment, although not so cramped and literally shittier. The food and water containers were the kind with long tubes that you filled from the top, and my conscience eased when I saw they were far from empty.
I scanned the room from this angle. Bijou’s cage stood about three feet behind the wing chair, and three feet in front of and to the side of the window over the radiator. I tested the distance. Mrs. D. might have stumbled on her way to talk to the bird, but she couldn’t have hit the radiator. In the light coming from the window, I could see smears in the ashtray, as if it hadn’t been properly wiped. Maybe Mrs. D. made an extra effort when she expected company, but that didn’t sound like her. She’d struck me as the kind of person who ironed nightgowns.
Bijou hopped off his perch for a snack, and I noticed his water cup had things in it I couldn’t, and didn’t want to, identify. On the assumption the cops would skip dusting the birdcage, I removed the container to clean it, but in the kitchen, the gleaming sink and counter tops needed protection. On TV the cops always use a handkerchief; I figured the kitchen towel would do.
There was no kitchen towel.
In the bathroom, there was no bathroom towel.
Who steals towels?
“Not everybody ties them through the fridge door handle,” Bernie told me when I called him. I hadn’t realized he’d taken in so much of my flat the couple of times he’d been here.
“She had one with roses on it that was strictly decorative,” I told him back. “Even that’s gone.” I’d confirmed that after I returned to Mrs. D.’s apartment, having cleaned and filled Bijou’s water container at my place.
Bernie mulled that over a moment. “Nothing else missing?”
“Hard to say, since I couldn’t touch the doors and drawers. But she must have had a visitor.” I told him what I’d spotted. “Unless your people sat on the sofa or used the ashtray.”
“Or she did.” He sounded insulted.
“You didn’t know Mrs. DesRochers.”
Bernie sighed like he
