Face of Murder

“What are we delivering?” Shelley asked, a little primly. Rookie agents were always sticklers for the rules. Except for the ones that weren’t, and ended their careers quickly. She would learn to loosen up over time.

“Justice,” Zoe said, after some thought.

Shelley’s peals of laughter burst through the narrow staircase, echoing from the walls. “I like that,” she said, once the worst of her mirth had subsided.

The apartment was on the second floor, at the opposite side of the building from where they had come in. Zoe thought it a shame they hadn’t had more opportunity to gain some clues as to Wardenford’s state of mind from the exterior, but you made do with what you had. The lock on his apartment door was surrounded by scrape marks, an early clue to a habitual drunk. He missed the keyhole often, unable to see it clearly.

Zoe rapped sharply on the door as Shelley joined her, just slightly out of breath from the climb.

There was a rolling, crashing noise from within, then a few unsteady, heavy footsteps. “Jus’a minute,” a male voice slurred.

“Bet he’s real popular with the downstairs neighbors,” Shelley muttered.

Zoe simply waited. Her patience was rewarded. James Wardenford cracked open his door without bothering to engage the safety chain, leaning on the walls of his own corridor for support as he eyed them with a squint.

He was wearing only a bathrobe one size too big for him, left open to the waist, and a pair of old, stained shorts. His feet were muffled now by worn slippers, the threadbare soles almost gone at the front. There was still a bottle of beer in his hand, two-thirds empty.

“Good morning, James Wardenford,” Zoe said, deliberately raising her voice a notch. “My name is Special Agent Zoe Prime, and this is Special Agent Shelley Rose.”

Normally there was a reaction at this point. The suspect would try to run somehow, or stammer, or shrink back in fear. Or they would blink far too quickly, take in rapid breaths, other signs that Zoe had come to recognize.

Wardenford, whether due to his drunken state or something else, barely reacted at all.

“Yup,” he acknowledged. “Better come in while I get some clothes on.”

Shelley shot Zoe a puzzled look. “We’d like to talk to you about—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wardenford said, waving a hand dismissively. “Henderson. I know. I can’t go to your station, or whatever you call it, like this.”

He shuffled away from the door, leaving it swinging open. Zoe hesitated for a moment, unaccustomed to such a reaction, before taking the initiative to follow him inside.

The thin foyer gave on to doors in all three directions, one of them lying open ahead. It was clearly a living area, a small sofa perched in front of a television, and Zoe ducked inside. Shelley closed the door and stayed there, nodding to Zoe when she glanced back. She would guard the exit. A wise move. It wouldn’t do to have him dart past them and out to freedom while they lounged around on his sofa.

Not that his sofa was much use, Zoe saw as she approached it. There were seventeen empty beer bottles scattered on the sofa, coffee table, floor, and other odd points of the room. Among them nestled a further three whiskey bottles and four of vodka—this, then, was a man not particularly fussy about his drink so long as it did the job of getting him drunk.

There was only a foot between the edge of the coffee table and the sofa. The repeated stains on the carpet, gouges in the wood, and watermarks on the fabric of the cushions indicated that it was frequently too small a gap for an inebriated man holding a glass or bottle ready to spill or drop. Two pizza boxes were stacked haphazardly on top of the trash can, and packaging for five microwaveable meals around it. It seemed he had given up on opening the trash can to dispose of his waste after blocking access himself. Across the open-plan room, the kitchen looked pitifully underused.

The story needed no further investigation. He was an alcoholic, as they already knew, and he had clearly been binge-drinking for some time.

Wardenford emerged noisily from another of the doors in the corridor. As Zoe joined him, she gained a glimpse of a bedroom strewn with clothes and the wafting scent of old vomit.

“Right, then,” he said, finishing off the last button on a crumpled shirt. “Off we go. Do you need to put handcuffs on me, or is it more informal than that?”

Zoe blinked. She had made a lot of arrests, and she had taken a lot of people in for questioning. She could not recall a single one of all those people ever volunteering to be cuffed.

“No,” she said, feeling off-balance. “This is just a chat for now. But we will take you to the field office in order to record our conversation.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, nodding a little too aggressively. The alcohol had cut his limits, stopped telling him when to stop. “Lead on.”