Succubus Takes Manhattan (13 page)

“Is Vincent beautiful?” Nathan asked.

“Not quite yet,” I told him. “Vincent is definitely attractive as humans go, but upper-level demons usually pay Admin for improvement jobs. It’s expensive, but worth it.”

He studied me. “Have you had an . . . improvement job?”

Suddenly I was seeing the ex-boyfriend, the unpleasant part of the ex, too. I rolled my eyes and said nothing.

At least Nathan had the grace to look embarrassed. “So you expect that at some point in the future, Vincent will change his appearance as a career move. Do you think he could have done that already, or be in the process?” he asked, avoiding my eyes.

Sybil shook her head. “He couldn’t afford it. We’d talked about when he would have saved enough in favors and gotten enough power on his own to pay Admin. Their rates for this are pretty steep and he wasn’t there yet. He’d only been a demon for a few months! And for that he’s come very far. And he would have told me if he were ready to do anything like that. He would have consulted me, discussed exactly what he wanted done or should have done. I have more experience and I know Satan and I know he wanted to please Her. And now—” Sybil burst into tears again.

Nathan nodded and made a notation in his book. “Has he ever missed or been late for an appointment before? Do you have his current address? Was he reliable at work?”

Sybil nodded vigorously. “He’s never late. He’s good at work, I know. The other guys think he’s amazing, especially for such a young guy. And his address—wait a minute, let me write it down for you.” I glanced over and saw it was way uptown on the West Side. That would give him an unpleasant commute to my building. “Are you going to go search his apartment?” Sybil asked, almost as an afterthought.

“I may,” Nathan said carefully.

Sybil bit her lip. “I’ll come with you. He gave me a key.”

I sat up a little straighter. I hadn’t known they’d been that serious.

“Did he have the key to your place as well?” Nathan asked, all business.

“Yes,” Sybil said. “It was reasonable. He was always doing nice little things for me.”

“So he had your key,” Nathan repeated. Then he turned to me. “And he had access to your apartment as well.”

I shrugged. “He’s our doorman, what good would he be if he couldn’t let in the plumber or hang up the dry cleaning? But I don’t think he would have it on him, I think they have a set of master keys in the office.”

Nathan made notes and asked more questions about Vincent’s habits and his job. I was a little embarrassed that Sybil knew a lot more about my building security than I did.

“You’ve called his apartment as well as his cell?” Nathan asked after it seemed like he’d exhausted all the avenues of inquiry.

“He doesn’t have a landline,” Sybil said. “He just uses his cell as his main phone.”

He seemed to consider a matter before he spoke. “Normally, I don’t like having clients along when I’m investigating, but since you have a key to his apartment I’m not sure there would be a problem if you came along.”

“And me,” I included myself immediately. Nathan looked like he was going to protest, but I stood up and put on my coat. “I’m going with Sybil. I’m not letting her deal with this by herself.” The fact that he would be there was immaterial. A close woman friend, that was one thing. Your friend’s ex? Not much better than useless.

chapter
ELEVEN

So we all crammed into a taxi to Washington Heights, right up under the George Washington Bridge—the west One-Sixties and on. Washington Heights is what real estate agents call a “transitional” neighborhood. Until very recently, it was working class and poor and ethnic, mainly immigrants who didn’t have family established in better neighborhoods. I remembered when it was Jewish and Italian and Greek and then Hispanic. Bodegas—where you can buy pork rinds and saints’ candles and other occult paraphernalia mixed in with the Campbell’s soup and ramen noodles and toilet paper—still dot the street corners. The complexion of the area is in the process of changing again, this time from poor and immigrant to young and hip and hopeful.

Overhead the bridge traffic rumbles nonstop and the streets are in deep shadow from the tangle of overpasses and the bus station that perches atop giant pylons. Sybil led us to a run-down building next to one of the bridge access entrances. The place looked like a relic from the near past, the first floor and stairwell covered with graffiti, mainly in green and silver, probably gang tags. The linoleum on the stairs was worn through to the sub-flooring and I could hear TV voices shouting in Spanish.

Vincent lived on the third floor. Sybil fitted two keys into two locks, one of them of the police bar variety favored in iffy areas. The door itself was solid metal, made to withstand serious attack.

We entered through the kitchen, which was aggressively clean and unfathomably large. I looked to explore the cabinets under a huge slab of countertop, but couldn’t find the doors. “It’s a bathtub,” Sybil said softly, and then I saw that the Formica slab was just a loose, heavy piece which could be removed. And, as Sybil said, it was a bathtub, old and scarred enamel scoured impeccably clean.

The kitchen led directly to another room in the railroad car arrangement. This middle room appeared to be a study and living room. A large TV sat against the wall and a small desk was tucked into a corner. I watched Nathan go through the desk methodically, sifting the bills and noting the books. I noted the books, too, all of the new demon coursework through the first four years. Vincent was definitely ambitious. Most demons didn’t qualify past the first year or so of study. Most preferred the other employment opportunities to the long years of apprenticeship and all the exams to rise in the ranks of Hell.

Nathan moved around with confidence, making notes, looking, wiping a finger over the remotes to see how long they’d been unused. I was impressed with the way he searched: patient, organized, in command in an unfamiliar environment.

Sybil had already moved into the bedroom. I was shocked to see the bed was made. Fine linens, six-hundred-thread-count sheets and a duvet cover in sage green looked vaguely familiar. Oh, right, Syb’s from before she’d redecorated. They had seemed feminine mixed with her florals, but here the simple lines and solid colors looked tailored, disciplined, and masculine. A framed picture of Sybil stood on the left side of the pine dresser, symmetrically balanced with a photo of an older, dark-haired woman on the right.

“His mother,” Sybil said when she noticed me looking. “That was his biggest regret about being a demon, that he couldn’t come back and take care of her.”

Other than the photos, the bedroom seemed strangely impersonal. The bed was freshly made, the clothes uniformly folded and organized in the dresser, the closet hung with all the shirts arranged by color and facing in the same direction.

Sybil stood in the middle of the room shaking her head. “It’s wrong,” she said, and wrung her hands. “It’s just . . . wrong.”

Nathan was next to her immediately. “What’s wrong?”

Sybil looked around as if she were trapped. “Vincent is neat, he keeps the place well,” she stared slowly. “But . . . he’s not this anal. Not usually. And there’s only one uniform hanging in the closet, and he has three.”

“Well, he was wearing one for work,” I said. “And the third could be at the cleaners.”

“Then he didn’t come home to change,” Nathan said crisply and made more notes. “Let’s go through room by room, Sybil, and you tell me what’s wrong.”

She looked around the bedroom again. “The uniforms. Everything is too neat in the closet. I think someone else must have gone through it.” She turned and looked at the bed. “There’s no book on the end table.”

“He kept books in here?” I was surprised. I hadn’t pegged Vince as an intellectual.

She nodded. “His current course work, and notebooks. He wrote out his notes by hand. He was working on
The Hierarchy and Sin
series.”

We went back to the living room and this time Sybil looked over the bookcase by the desk. “And look here, none of the books from that series is here, either.” She looked around and appeared confused for a moment. “Something else is missing.”

Nathan nodded. “Electronics. We can assume he had his phone on him, but there’s no computer.”

Sybil nodded thoughtfully. “Right. I don’t see his computer. Or his iPod, or his camera. None of them.”

“You know he had the iPod and the camera?” I didn’t think he’d earned that much.

Sybil turned red. “I loaned him my old ones I didn’t need anymore.”

“Are we done?” I asked, but I should have known better. Nathan went to examine the bathroom, only to find that there wasn’t one. There was a tiny water closet next to the kitchen.

“There’s only the tub and sink in the kitchen,” Sybil said. She opened a cabinet next to the sink and, sure enough, it had a cheap mirror hung on the inside and the lowest shelf held a toothbrush, toothpaste, shaving cream, deodorant, and shampoo.

“Lily, would you look at this?” Nathan’s voice sounded a bit strained and low, close to my shoulder.

I turned to face him and was overwhelmed with his presence enveloping me. We were alone and the smell of his cologne (Versace L’Homme—thank goodness, something decent) and cashmere, the broad shoulder so tempting to lean on, the impulse to simply melt into him was nearly irresistible. Suddenly his arms were around me and he held me so tight and it felt so good. His face was just over mine. “Lily, Lily,” he whispered and all of a sudden we were kissing.

His mouth devoured me. Why had we been apart? Why had we broken up? There was only this feeling of return between us, the knowledge that we both belonged here, together, with each other.

He knew it, he had to feel it quivering like a frightened thing between us.

Then he broke the kiss gently and stepped back. One single step. Not so much away from me but to show me something.

“Look at this,” he said, and he pointed to the trash bin which he had pulled out from under the sink.

“I’d rather not,” I replied, smiling. “It’s trash.”

Nathan nodded. “Exactly. Do you have any idea how much information is in the trash? Archaeologists love trash middens. And here we are, and . . . look. Just look.”

I took a deep breath and looked into the plastic-lined canister. There was a toothpaste box, coffee grounds and filters, and a few pieces of paper that looked like grocery receipts and movie stubs.

Nathan reached down to the papers, and that was when I noticed that he had put on latex gloves. I was impressed; I never would have thought of that. But it enabled him to reach into the garbage and grab the papers. I didn’t see why they would be interesting. Nathan, though, wasn’t bothering with the movie tickets. Instead he had laid out the receipts on the counter, facedown, and that was when I saw the writing.

Single words, as if they were personal reminders. They didn’t make any sense to me. “Get Sybil,” Nathan said to me.

I found my friend still fondling the remotes with a bemused expression. “The other things should be here,” she said. “He was methodical, he kept all the remotes and the iPod and camera together. Everything in one place, he always said. And I always joked that this apartment was so small that there was only one place.”

I put my arms around her and let her cry quietly for a minute before I told her that Nathan needed her in the kitchen. Then I steered her gently around the beanbag chair and the table.

Nathan wasted no time. “Please, Sybil, we need your help. Take a look at this. Don’t touch it, just look. Is that Vincent’s handwriting?”

She shook her head No.

“Are you sure?” he asked again.

“I’m sure,” she said.

“Even I’m sure,” I added. I’d seen Vincent’s writing any number of times, on work orders and messages and notes detailing what a plumber or electrician had done while I was out. Vincent printed everything in neat, boxy letters that looked like he’d been trained to write on blueprints or something like that. The words here were scribbled cursive only vaguely intelligible, where Vincent’s writing was more legible than half the fonts on my computer.

Nathan looked at them and hummed. Then he turned them over to the receipt side. I was confused. What could a grocery receipt tell him? Well, one was from Duane Reade. Nathan looked at that and then opened the cupboard where we’d discovered Vincent’s toothbrush.

“What information can you get from a pharmacy receipt?” I asked, curious.

Nathan smiled. “Look at this. First of all, this Duane Reade is in Brooklyn, see the address down here? Now look—there’s a shampoo purchase here.”

“Yes, so?” I asked.

Sybil’s eyes opened very wide. “Not the same shampoo as in the cabinet. The one on the receipt is Suave—look here. And Vincent uses L’Oréal.”

“So this isn’t his handwriting and it isn’t his receipt,” I repeated slowly, understanding the implications. “And so if there are addresses on the other receipts we have some idea of where he’s being held!”

“Not so fast,” Nathan said softly as he studied and made notes to himself. “We don’t know that he’s kidnapped or in trouble. So far as we know at the moment, he could be gone entirely voluntarily, although that looks less likely. What we do know is that there was someone here who was not Vincent. We know that this person shopped someplace that was not in this neighborhood.”

“We know that person used cheap shampoo,” Sybil added.

“A common brand,” Nathan agreed. “Those are the hardest to trace. Anyway, we know that someone else was here and possibly cleaned up after himself, and maybe took the electronics.”

“A thief?” Sybil asked.

Nathan shook his head. “A thief wouldn’t have left the place so neat. I’d bet serious money that whoever was here wiped down the surfaces so there won’t be prints. No, the electronics that were taken were things that could have useful information. I wonder . . .” He looked out the window blankly, his mind somewhere else.

“What?” Sybil was agitated and worried. And I didn’t blame her.

“I wonder if he was waylaid so that someone else could come up here and search. But for what? For keys? For his computer?”