I got up and moved over to the kitchen cabinets, opening doors at random, but there didn’t seem to be any liquor at all. I found a bottle of vanilla extract and poured the contents into a jelly glass. Tillie downed it without even looking.
She began to breathe deeply, calming herself. “I never saw her before in my life,” she said in somewhat more ordered tones. “She was crazy. A lunatic. I don’t even know how she got in.” She paused. The air smelled like cookies.
The policewoman looked up from her notes. “Mrs. Ahlberg, there was no sign of forced entry. It had to be someone who had a key. Have you given a key to anyone in the past? Maybe someone who was house-sitting? Someone who watered your plants when you were away?”
At first Tillie shook her head and then she stopped and shot a look at me, her eyes filled with sudden alarm.
“Elaine. She’s the only one who ever had one.” She turned to the policewoman. “My neighbor in the apartment right above me. I gave her a key last fall when I took a little trip to San Diego.”
I took over then, filling in the rest; Elaine’s apparent disappearance and her sister’s hiring me.
Officer Redfern got up. “Hold on. I want Benedict to hear this.”
It was 3:30 in the morning by the time Redfern and Benedict were finished, and Tillie was exhausted. They asked her to come down to the station later that morning to sign a statement and in the meantime, I said I’d stay with her until she had herself under control again.
When the cops finally left, Tillie and I sat and stared at each other wearily.
“Could it have been Elaine?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t think so, but it was dark and I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“What about her sister? Did you ever meet Beverly Danziger? Or a woman named Pat Usher?”
Tillie shook her head mutely. Her face was still as pale as a dinner plate and there were dark circles under her eyes. She anchored her hands between her knees again, tension humming through her like a wind across guitar strings.
I moved into the living room and surveyed the damage more closely. The big glass-fronted secretary had been tipped over and lay facedown on the coffee table, which looked to have collapsed on impact. The couch had been slashed, the foam hanging out now like pale flesh. Drapes were torn down. Windows had been broken, lamps and magazines and flowerpots flung together in a heap of pottery shards and water and paper pulp. This was what insanity looked like when it was on the loose. That or unbridled rage, I thought. This had to be connected to Elaine’s disappearance. There was no way I’d believe it was an independent event, coincidental to my search for her. I wondered if there was a way to find out where Beverly Danziger had been tonight. With her porcelain good looks and her blinking china blue eyes, it was hard to picture her loping around all looney-tunes, but how did I know for sure? Maybe she’d driven up to Santa Teresa the first time on an institutional pass.
I tried to imagine what it would be like to wake in the dead of night to some hissing female on the rampage. An involuntary shiver took me and I went back into the kitchen. Tillie hadn’t moved, but her eyes came up to my face with a look of dependency.
“Let’s get it cleaned up,” I said. “We’re neither of us going to sleep anyway and you shouldn’t have to do this by yourself. Where do you keep your dustpan and broom?”
She pointed to the utility room and then with a sigh she got to her feet and we went to work.
When order had been restored, I told Tillie I wanted the key to Elaine’s apartment. “What for?” she asked apprehensively.
“I want to check it out. Maybe she’s up there.”
“I’ll come with you,” she volunteered promptly. I wondered vaguely if she was going to follow me around for life like Yogi Bear and Boo-Boo. Still, I gave her a quick hug and told her to wait a minute while I made a quick trip to my VW. She shook her head and followed me outside.
I took my semiautomatic out of the glove compartment, hefting it in my hand. It was a nondescript .32 with a cross-hatched ivory grip and a clip that would hold eight rounds. The life of a private eye is short on gun battles, long on basic research, but there are times when a ballpoint pen just doesn’t get it. I had visions of some deranged female flying out of the darkness at me like a bat. A .32 may not have much stopping power, but it can sure slow you down. I wedged the gun in the back of my jeans and headed back to the elevator with Tillie at my heels.
“I thought it was against the law to carry a concealed weapon like that,” she said uneasily.
“That’s why I have a permit,” I said.
“But I always heard handguns were so dangerous.”
“Of course they’re dangerous! That’s the point. What do you want me to do? Go in there with a hunk of rolled-up newspaper?”
She was still giving that one some thought when we reached the second floor. I took out the automatic and eased the safety off, pulling back the slide on the barrel to cock it. I slipped the key to Elaine’s lock and then I opened the door and let it swing back. Tillie was holding on to my sleeve like a little kid. I waited a moment, staring into the gloomy interior with my heart thumping. There was no sound… no movement inside. I felt for the light switch and flipped it on, peering around the doorframe quickly. Nothing. I indicated that Tillie was to wait where she was and I moved through the apartment quietly, turning lights as I went, using a modified version of my best junior G-man stance every time I entered a room. As far as I could tell, there was no sign that anyone had been there. I checked the closets and took a quick peek under the bed and then sighed, realizing that I’d been holding my breath. I went back to the front door and had Tillie come in, closing and locking it behind us. I moved back down the hallway to the den.
I went through Elaine’s desk quickly, checking her files. In the third drawer down, I found her passport and flipped through the pages. It was still valid, but it hadn’t been used since a trip to Cozumel one April three years back. I tucked the passport in my back pocket. If she was still around, I didn’t want her using her passport to slip out of the country. There was something else knocking around in the back of my head, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I shrugged to myself, assuming it would surface in due course.
I deposited Tillie at her door.
“Look,” I said, “when you have a chance, take a careful look around and see if anything’s missing. When you go down to the police station, they’ll want a list of stolen property if you know of any. Do you carry any homeowner’s insurance that might cover the damages?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “I guess I can check. Would you like some tea?” Her expression was wistful and she clung to my hand.
“Tillie, I wish I could, but I’ve got to go. I know you’re uneasy, but you’ll be okay. Is there somebody in the building who can keep you company?”
“Maybe the woman in apartment 6. I know she’s up early. I’ll try her. And thanks, Kinsey. I mean that.”
“Don’t worry about it. I was glad to help. I’ll talk to you later. Get some sleep if you can.”
I left her looking after me plaintively as I headed toward the lobby. I got in the car and tucked the gun in the glove compartment again, and then I headed for my place. My head was full of questions, but I was too tired to think. By the time I crept back in the folds of my quilt, the sky was a predawn gray and an enterprising rooster somewhere in my neighborhood was heralding the day.
The phone shrilled again at 8:00 A.M. I’d just reached that wonderful heavy stage of sleep where your nervous system turns to lead and you feel like some kind of magnetic force has just fused you to the bed. Consistently waking someone from a sleep like that could generate psychosis in two days. “What,” I mumbled. I could hear static in the line, but nothing else. Oh goody, maybe I’d been wakened by a long-distance obscene phone caller. “Hello?”