Silent Treatment (17 page)

“Yes, I believe her,” he said. “A doctor, or someone posing as a doctor, came into that room after I left. A short time after his visit Evie’s aneurysm burst. I think he injected something into that IV. You know, maybe that story Evie was working on has something to do with what happened. I wish to hell I knew what it was all about.”

“Did you check her office?”

“At the magazine?”

“No, the one in the Village.”

“What?”

“She was renting an office—you know, workspace—someplace in Greenwich Village. Didn’t you know that?”

“I … um … no. No, I didn’t know that either. Do you know where it was?”

“No idea.”

Harry brushed his hand over the pocket where he was carrying Evie’s rabbit’s foot and keys.

“Julia, I need to find that place,” he said.

She looked at him with concern.

“You need to go home and get some sleep, Harry. That place’ll be there tomorrow. Besides, if you don’t know where it is, finding it may not be so easy. She doesn’t have a phone there. That’s as much as I remember of what she said about it.”

“Thanks,” Harry said. “Julia, who in the hell was she?”

The book agent set a twenty and a ten beneath her glass and guided him out of the bar into the cool night air.

“Harry, if you asked ten different people in Evie’s life that question, you’d get ten completely different answers. It would be like the proverbial blind men trying to describe an elephant by whatever part they happen to be feeling.
Snake, tree, wall, stone, leaf
. They’re all correct … but only up to a point. Want to share a cab home?”

Harry knew that she lived in almost precisely the opposite direction from his apartment.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “Don’t worry about me. I need to walk for a bit to clear some of this Old Grand-Dad out of my head. I’ll get some rest. I promise.”

They waited until he had flagged down a taxi for her, then embraced.

“Call if you need me,” Julia said. “And don’t drive yourself too crazy trying to see any more than the rest of the blind men.”

Harry watched as the cab disappeared around the corner, then headed slowly downtown.

Harry ambled down Lexington to Fifty-eighth and then across toward Central Park South. He loved walking the city at any hour, but especially at night. That he was in no particular hurry was just as well. The double bourbon was definitely slowing him down. For a time, he considered simply writing the whole night off by stopping in another bar or two. But he wanted to think through what Julia Ransome had told him, and he had never been much of a thinker when he was tight.

During his eighteen months in Nam, he had become something of a functional alcoholic, often drinking to excess as a means of coping with the horrors of his job. In that regard he was not much different from many of the other officers. Fortunately, he had been able to practically stop drinking after the war; and even more fortunately, he had never given in to the urge to numb his feelings with narcotics. For many of those docs and medics who did, the war was still raging, and would be until they died.

He was crossing by the fountain in front of the Plaza when he glanced down Fifth Avenue. The offices of
Manhattan Woman
magazine were on Forty-seventh Street. It was almost eleven o’clock. Unless some of the staff was preparing for production, there was no chance of his actually making it up to her office. But he couldn’t face going home yet, and C.C.’s Cellar would be uncomfortably crowded. The group performing there right now wasn’t one of his favorites anyway—a popular progressive quartet whose music he found pretentious. Before he had a chance to rethink the one-night bender option, he turned downtown toward the magazine office, buying a pack of mints along the way to cover the alcohol on his breath. He chewed all of them during the ten-block walk to Forty-seventh.

The guard at the desk in the lobby of the tastefully refurbished building put aside his
National Enquirer
and eyed him suspiciously. Harry explained about Evie’s death and his desire to go through her things before they were tossed into a carton by someone and put into storage. He took her picture from his wallet and extracted a twenty at the same time. The guard studied the spectacular woman in the photo for a long moment, then slipped the bill into his shirt pocket and made a call. Three minutes later, Harry stepped out of the elevator and into the twenty-third-floor offices of
Manhattan Woman
magazine.

“Dr. DellaRosa, we’re all so sorry about Evie. I’m Chuck Gerhardt, layout.”

The man, in his early thirties with thinning, closely cut hair, had on tight black jeans and a black turtleneck. The abstract metal-and-glass sculpture suspended from his neck by a heavy chain reminded Harry of a tuba. His tepid handshake could not have cost him more than a calorie.

“Pleased to meet you,” Harry said. “And thanks for your condolences. I can’t believe she’s gone.”

Dr. DellaRosa
. Harry felt rapport with Evie and those other women who chose not to trade in their surname for their husband’s. There was no point in correcting the man, though. Harry had not been invited up to the office in years, and he had no intention of setting foot in the place
again after tonight. He was searching for a clue—any clue as to what Evie’s secret project was, or where her Greenwich Village hideaway was located. Of course, he thought, any other tidbits offering Insight into the life of the stranger to whom he had been married for nine years would be gratefully accepted.

“You’re lucky I was here,” Gerhardt said. “First thing next week we put the rag to bed, and I have a ton of work to do. We call it
panic mode
. That’s why I wasn’t at the funeral today. All the bosses went, but the peons who actually do the work around here got chained to our desks.”

“I’m sorry you couldn’t make it. It was a beautiful service. And I apologize for disturbing you this way.”

“Hey, no problem. I just can’t believe Evie’s gone. She was the best, Dr. DellaRosa. She’d give you the shirt off her back.”

“I know,” Harry said. The irony of the man’s metaphor was not lost on him. “Look, I haven’t been able to sit still since the funeral. I was just walking around the city and I decided to come in, see if I could get Evie’s things.”

Chuck Gerhardt looked at him strangely.

“Dr. DellaRosa, I’m certain the man you sent did that already. Yesterday. No, no, the day before. I remember because—”

“Did you see this man?” Harry felt every muscle in his body tense.

“Only for a moment. I happened to be by the front desk when he came. Kathy—the receptionist—took him down to Evie’s office. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, nothing,” Harry said, feigning sudden understanding. “I know what happened. It was my partner at work. His gym’s just a few blocks from here. He volunteered to come by for me a few days ago. With everything that’s been going on I just forgot. Okay if I just go down there anyhow?”

“Sure.”

“The end of that hall, right?”

“No … um … her office is down that corridor there. It has been for a couple of years.”

“Yes, yes, of course. I haven’t been here for a while.”

Evie’s name was still on the blond oak door. Harry went inside knowing the gesture was fruitless. He was right. The office had been picked clean. Nothing on or in the desk, nothing in the file cabinet, nothing on the walls. The books that had been in her small bookcase were neatly stacked in one corner. Harry had no doubt that every single volume had been checked for papers or hollowed-out compartments. What little doubt he had about the break-in at the apartment vanished. The robbery there was nothing more than a smoke screen to cover a thorough search.
But for what?

Just in case, he checked the underside of each shelf, as well as the bottom of all three desk drawers. Nothing. The wastebasket was empty. Harry tried to imagine how anyone could have simply walked into the office and stripped it so thoroughly. The story presented to the receptionist had to have been convincing and smoothly told. The man, himself, must have been iceberg cool. This was no amateur.

Were the thefts from the co-op and Evie’s office connected with her death? How could they not be?
On impulse, Harry settled into the desk chair and switched on Evie’s computer. The hard disk prompt came on. Harry responded to it and waited. But nothing else happened. There were no files. Not one. Not a piece of correspondence or an article or even a word processing program. The data in the computer had been extracted like coins from a piggy bank.

“Anything I can do to help?”

Chuck Gerhardt stood by the doorway, smiling understandingly.

Harry’s weak, bewildered smile was totally genuine.

“No. Thanks, though. Thanks for everything.”

Gerhardt set three ten-dollar bills on the desk.

“I owed this to Evie,” he said. “Now I guess I owe it to you.”

“Nonsense. Please keep it. If she thought enough of you to lend it, I’m sure she’d be happy to have it end at that.”

“Oh, it wasn’t a loan. She had a friend in the Village
who works on unusual jewelry. This chain came undone and the medallion fell on the marble in the foyer downstairs. It broke into several pieces. I got it in Germany on a very special holiday with a very special friend. I thought it was a total loss, but Evie’s jeweler saved the day.”

The Village
. Evie never shopped farther downtown than Saks Fifth Avenue. Even C.C.’s seemed Bohemian to her. The first time Harry had heard of any connection between her and Greenwich Village was when Julia had told him about the secret office. Now this.

“Chuck, do you by any chance know who this jeweler is?”

“Well, Evie never really told me, but his card was taped inside the box that the medallion came back in. I’m almost certain I kept it. Come on down to my office.”

Harry followed Gerhardt to a large studio that was cluttered with the tools and products of his trade. The layout designer rummaged through his desk for a time, then triumphantly surfaced with a business card.
Paladin Thorvald, Fine Jewels, Antiques and Collectibles
. Harry copied the information down.

“Now you can feel perfectly comfortable about keeping the money, Chuck,” he said, patting the man on the back. “You’ve earned it.”

Harry stopped by a money machine for some cash, and then took a cab down to the Village. The jewelry and antiques shop of Paladin Thorvald was just off Bleecker Street, a couple of blocks from the Bowery. It was nearly one in the morning, but here as in many areas of Manhattan there were still a fair number of people about—some, of course, the ubiquitous shadow people, waiting for their portion of the night to begin.

Harry had no clear plan other than to show Evie’s picture to anyone who would look. If he had no luck, he would go home for a few hours of sleep, and then begin again first thing in the morning. Speed mattered. Whoever had searched the apartment and Evie’s office was resourceful
and desperate enough to commit murder. And to make matters much worse, Albert Dickinson was out there just waiting for a positive coroner’s report before pouncing on his only suspect, one H. Corbett.

Thorvald’s was a small shop on the first floor of a dingy, yellow brick building. There were iron bars in front of the single plate glass window, and a small sign announcing that business hours were nine
A.M
. to seven
P.M
. Harry peered inside. A single shaded bulb illuminated a collection that seemed largely to have crossed the line separating antiques from junk. Hardly Evie’s kind of stuff. There was no chance she would have gone out of her way to visit this particular shop, Harry felt certain of that. Her office had to be someplace nearby.

He tried her photo three times on customers leaving a nearby convenience store, and then on the clerk. The clerk, Pakistani or Indian, recognized Evie as a frequent customer, but had no idea where she lived. He only worked the shift from eleven on. Harry couldn’t imagine his wife walking these streets alone at night. At least before today he couldn’t. As he made his way from one block to the next, he sensed the shadow people getting a bead on him and moving closer. He was either a john or a mark—possibly both. Before long someone was going to make a move on him. He glanced at his watch. It was stupid to have come down here at such an hour. Now, checking over his shoulder several times each block, he looped back toward Thorvald’s. Two passersby had never seen Evie, and two more hurried away when he approached. He decided to catch a cab and head on home. As he passed the antique store, he looked in again through the bars. A large, bearded man in a loose shirt or caftan was moving about at the rear of the shop.

Harry rapped on the window. The man glanced up, then pointed to his watch and waved him off. Harry knocked again. This time he held up Evie’s photo and two twenties. The man hesitated, then shuffled over. In his ornately embroidered caftan, with a full beard, thick ponytail, and single, heavy, gold earring, he looked like a cross between Eric the Red and Ivan the Terrible. But his face, while
it might have frightened a young child, was kind and reassuring. He peered through the window at the photo. Harry could see the recognition in his expression and quickly pointed to his wedding ring, the photo, himself, and finally to the bills. Paladin Thorvald hesitated, then shrugged, deactivated some sort of alarm system, and opened the door.

“You’re Desiree’s husband?” he asked after Harry had introduced himself. “I never had any idea she was married, let alone to a doctor.”

Harry flashed on the many hours he and Evie had spent choosing her engagement diamond, and then their wedding bands. The news that she was wandering about the Village late at night using the name Desiree and wearing no ring would recently have surprised him much more than it did now.

“I assure you, Mr. Thorvald. I
am
her husband. At least I was until a few days ago. Could I please come in and talk to you for a minute?”

Although Thorvald did step back a few paces to allow him in, Harry could tell that the man had misgivings. He decided that there was no reason to hold back anything except that Evie’s death was being investigated as a possible homicide. He handed over the two twenties.