Small Town

He hung up the phone and started to laugh. It was wildly inappropriate, his friend and client was dead in the next room, his buddy Marilyn, and he supposed it was shock that propelled the laughter.

But it was funny, wasn’t it? You had to admit it was funny.

Oh, no, he wouldn’t touch anything. God forbid he do anything to compromise the integrity of the crime scene. He’d used his thumb and forefinger to switch on the lamp, he’d nudged the door open with his foot. He’d been ever so careful.

Locking the barn door, he thought, after all the horses had bolted. Because, God help him, he’d already cleaned the apartment to the best of his professional ability. You could eat off the fucking floor, if you were so inclined, and what do you suppose that did to the integrity of the crime scene?

two

She was at her desk by ten. She turned on the radio — it was preset to WQXR — and raised the volume a notch. She’d lower it in the afternoon, when people who were so inclined made the rounds of art galleries, but for now she could play it as loud as she liked. Not rock-concert loud, not even Carnegie Hall loud, but with sufficient volume so that it was real music, not just background noise.

Though it might as well have been background noise for all the attention she paid to it. She busied herself in correspondence, real mail and e-mail, made phone calls, and sprang up from her chair from time to time to walk around the gallery, straightening a painting that had gotten itself tilted, dusting a piece of sculpture, and just claiming the place as her own, like a cowboy riding his fences.

Mornings were her favorite time. No one came to the door, and the phone hardly ever rang. She had the place to herself, and the work to herself, and she liked it that way. Chloe would come at one o’clock and station herself at the reception desk, and potential customers would drift in, stare thoughtfully at the work, and wander off again. She enjoyed it when one of them wanted to talk about the art, enjoyed it even more when someone actually bought something. (And it did happen sometimes. You knocked yourself out making phone calls and working your mailing list, you eighty-sixed the jug wine and cheese cubes and got Fabulous Food to cater the opening, and then someone walked in off the street, someone you never heard of who never heard of you, either, and he fell in love with something and wanted to know if you took American Express. Damn right she did.)

She enjoyed all that, and couldn’t have stayed open without it, but the sheer contentment of her morning routine, all by herself in her ever-changing private museum — that was the real payoff. That was close to heaven.

But there was something she was supposed to do, and she couldn’t remember what it was.

At eleven o’clock they interrupted the music for a five-minute news summary, and she wasn’t paying any attention to it until she heard a name she recognized. “Marilyn Fairchild,” the announcer said, and said something else about the police pursuing several leads, and then the item was past, and he was saying something no doubt important about India and Pakistan.

Marilyn Fairchild, murdered the other night in her West Village apartment. She’d been aware of the murder, she was always aware of it when a woman was murdered in Manhattan, but either the name hadn’t registered or, more likely, they hadn’t announced it. Pending notification of kin — wasn’t that what they always said? And now she could understand the policy, because she could imagine how a person would feel, getting the news of a loved one’s death over the radio. She was a little bit shocked and stunned herself, and she barely knew Marilyn Fairchild.

She’d been found in her bed, strangled. She hoped they’d find the bastard, hoped some slick son of a bitch didn’t get him off, hoped—

That’s what she couldn’t remember!

Maury Winters’s number was on her speed dial, and she pushed the button and drummed her fingers waiting for the receptionist to pick up. She said, “Susan Pomerance for Mr. Winters,” and looked up when a buzzer sounded. There was a young man at her door.

Was it safe to let him in? He was black, and that automatically triggered a mental alarm, she couldn’t help it, she was white and that was how she reacted. She sized him up at a glance and noted his short hair, his regular features, his skin tone that suggested a Caucasian grandparent or great-grandparent. He was clean-shaven, his jeans had been ironed, his sneakers were tied.

None of this meant anything — you could be neatly dressed and nice-looking and white in the bargain, with your fucking arm in a cast yet, and turn out to be Ted Bundy — but he looked all right, he really did, and he was carrying an envelope, just an ordinary six-by-nine manila clasp envelope, and she didn’t see how he could tuck a knife or a gun into it.