In the meantime, I drove back to the condominium and had a brief chat with Roland Makowski, the building manager, who confirmed what I’d already heard through Julia. Pat Usher had departed, bag and baggage, the same day I’d spoken to her. She’d dutifully left a forwarding address-some motel down near the beach-but when Boland tried to get in touch, he’d found out it didn’t exist. I asked him why he’d wanted to contact her. He said she’d taken a dump in the swimming pool as a parting gesture and then scrawled her name across the concrete in spray paint.
“She did what?” I asked.
“You heard right,” he said. “She left a turd the size of a Polish sausage floating right in the pool. I had to have the whole thing drained and sanitized and I got people who still won’t go in. That woman is demented and you know what pissed her off? I told her she couldn’t hang her towels over the balcony rail! You should have seen her reaction. She was in such a rage her eyes rolled back in her head and she started to pant. She scared the hell out of me. She’s sick.” I blinked at him. “She panted?” “She was almost foaming at the mouth.” I thought about Tillie’s night visitor. “I think we better take a look at Elaine’s apartment,” I said flatly.
The stench came at us like a wall the minute the door was opened. The destruction was systematic and complete. There was fecal matter smeared everywhere and the couch and chairs had been slashed with murderous intent. It was clear that she’d gone about it quietly. Unlike Tillie’s apartment, no glass had been broken and no furniture overturned. What she’d done instead was to open all the canned goods and pour the contents on the carpeting. She’d ground in crackers and dried pasta, jams, spices, coffee, vinegar, soups, moldering fruit, adding contributions from her own intestinal tract. The whole sick stew had been sitting there for days and the Florida heat and humidity had cooked the mess to a boiling foment of fungus and rot. The packages of once frozen meat that she’d torn open and tossed into the thick of it were full of wiggling life of their own that I didn’t care to inspect. Big flies buzzed around malevolently, their glittering fluorescent heads like beacons.
Roland was speechless at first and when I turned he had tears in his eyes. “Well, we’re never going to get this cleaned up,” he said.
“Don’t do it yourselves,” I said automatically. “Hire someone else. Maybe your insurance will cover it. In the meantime, you better call the cops.”
He nodded and swallowed hard while he backed out the door so that I was left to search the apartment by myself. I had to be very careful where I put my feet and I made a little mental note never to chide Pat Usher for anything. As far as I was concerned, she could hang her towels anyplace she pleased.
Chapter 21
With the cops on the way, I didn’t have much time. I picked my way through the apartment, gingerly opening drawers with a hankie across my fingertips out of respect for latent prints. I did a superficial run-through and came up with nothing, which didn’t surprise me. She’d stripped the place. All of the drawers and closets were empty. She hadn’t left so much as a tube of toothpaste behind. By now, she could be anyplace, but I had a feeling I knew where she was. I suspected she’d used the last two flight coupons for a return trip to Santa Teresa.
I closed the place up again and went next door to tell Julia what was going on. It was two-thirty in the afternoon and I had a four o’clock plane to catch with almost an hour of driving just to get to the airport. The sky was miraculously clear again, the air smelling damp and sweet, sidewalks steaming. I loaded Elaine’s suitcases back in the rental car and took off, promising to call Julia as soon as I learned anything new. This case was going to break for me. I could feel it in my bones. I’d been on it a week now and I had smoked Pat Usher out of hiding. I wasn’t sure what she’d done to Elaine or why, but she was on the run now and I wasn’t far behind. We were circling right back to Santa Teresa where the whole thing had begun.
When I reached the airport in Miami, I returned the rental car and picked up my seat assignment at the TWA counter, checking the four bags through to Santa Teresa. I got on the plane with six minutes to spare. I was beginning to feel a low-level anxiety, the sort of sensation you experience when you know you’re having major surgery in a week. There was no immediate danger, but my mind kept leaping into the uncertain future with a churning dread. Pat Usher and I were on a collision course and I wasn’t sure I could handle the impact.
With the three-hour time difference, I felt like I got back to California roughly one hour after I left Florida and my body had trouble dealing with that. I had to wait an hour at LAX to catch the short hop to Santa Teresa, but even so it was only seven in the evening when I got home, toting Elaine’s bags with me like a packhorse. It was still light outside, but I was exhausted. I’d never eaten lunch and all I’d had on the plane were some square things wrapped in cellophane that I was almost too tired to pick open. It was one of those lurching flights with sudden inexplicable drops in altitude that make napping tough. Most of us were too worried about how they’d collect and identify all the body parts once we’d crashed and burned. Some woman behind me had two kids of the whining and screeching sort and she spent most of the flight having long ineffectual chats with them about their behavior. “Kyle, honey, ‘member Mommy told you she didn’t want you to bite Brett because that hurts Brett. Now, how would you like it if Mommy bit you?” I thought a quick chop in the ear would go a long way toward parent effectiveness training, but she never consulted me.
At any rate, when I got home, I headed straight for the couch and fell asleep, still in my clothes. Which is why it took me until morning to figure out that somebody had been in my apartment searching discreetly for God knows what. I got up at eight and did a run, came home, showered, and dressed. I sat down at my desk and started to unlock the top drawer. It’s a standard-issue desk with a lock on the top drawer that controls the bank of drawers to the right. Somebody had apparently slipped a knife blade into the lock and jimmied it open. The realization that someone had been there made the nape of my neck feel like I’d just applied an ice pack.
I pushed back from the desk and got up, turning abruptly so that I could survey the room. I checked the front door, but there was no indication that anyone had tampered with the double-key dead bolt. It was possible that someone had made a duplicate of the key, though, and I’d have to have the lock replaced. I’ve never worried about security, and I don’t run around doing tricky things to assume that my domain is inviolate-no talcum powder on the floor near the entrance-way, no single strands of hair affixed across the window crack. I resented the fact I was going to have to deal with this breakin, surrendering a sense of safety I’d always taken for granted. I checked the windows, moving carefully around the perimeter of the room. Nothing. I went into the bathroom and examined the window there. Someone had used a glass cutter to make a small square opening just above the lock. Electrical tape had evidently been used to eliminate any sound of breaking glass. Where the strips of tape had been peeled off, I could still see remnants of adhesive. The aluminum screen was skewed in one corner. It had probably been popped out and then put back. The job had been cleverly done, set up in such a way that I might not have discovered it for weeks. The hole was large enough to allow someone to unlock the window, sliding it up to permit ingress and egress. There’s a curtain at that window and with the panels in place, the small hole in the glass wasn’t even visible.
I went back into the other room and did a thorough search. Nothing seemed to be missing. I could see that someone had eased sly fingers between my folded clothes in the chest of drawers, had deftly gone through the files, leaving everything much as it had been, but with faint disarrangements here and there. I hated it. I hated the cunning and the care with which it had all been done, the satisfaction somebody must have felt at pulling it off. And what was the point? For the life of me, I couldn’t see that anything was gone. I didn’t own anything of value and the files themselves were not worth much. Most of the ones I kept at home had been closed out anyway and my notes on Elaine Boldt were at the office. What else did I have that someone might want? What worried me too was the suspicion that this might be Pat Usher’s handiwork. Somehow she seemed much more dangerous if, along with savagery, she was also capable of craftiness and stealth.