Paloma: A Laurent & Dove Mystery (3 page)

Back on track with one less man to worry about, Paloma exhaled. Already her hulking fear seemed to be fading. Men were such distractible creatures. After all, even her pursuer had botched the job three times. Slowly, her fluttering heart quieted.

An announcement came over the loudspeaker. “First Class passengers for United Airline, Flight 970 for Buffalo and Chicago will now begin boarding at Gate Twenty.”

At last. Several people in the waiting area stood and gathered their belongings. A flight attendant breezed in from the gate entrance. A line began to form. Meanwhile, Santa in the far corner feverishly patted his pockets. 

Sizing up the passengers, her darting eyes shot from one person to another. No one caught her attention. Safety was tantalizingly close, a matter of twenty feet. Gaining confidence, she fiddled through her bag and pulled out her ticket – Seat 23C. The attendant called out row numbers. She was straining to hear when an announcement on the PA system overrode the boarding instructions. 

“Paloma Dove, please report to the United Service desk.”

She froze. Then regrouped. Certainly her mind was playing tricks. It happened to everyone occasionally – hearing their name being called, or something like their name. She stepped forward. 

A second announcement pealed out. “Paloma Dove, report to the United Service desk.”

This time there was no mistake. The words were shockingly clear. Her fear slammed back into overdrive. The man! Had he somehow alerted airline personnel to detain her? Stunned, she watched the passengers enter the gate. She couldn’t get on the plane. The boarding pass would identify her. She reeled back around and collapsed against the wall. Her bad leg shook uncontrollably as she fought to stay upright. How much longer could she run, hide, stay out of his grasp?

Her faith wavered. Maybe she shouldn’t fight death any longer. Frozen, she could almost feel the cold metal barrel pressed against her temple. She swallowed hard, closed her eyes and considered surrender. Perhaps dying was less horrifying than living. Perhaps by dying she’d be free from her self-imposed sentence of endless guilt and inconsolable loneliness. Just let it happen, an inner voice said. But then, from deep in her mind came another voice, a child’s voice. “Mommy, I got you a present.” Warmth spread through Paloma as she remembered Maddie, her doe-eyed daughter. “
Feliz cumpleaños,
” Maddie said, holding a glittery snow globe. Overcome with emotion, Paloma reached blindly for her daughter’s silky hair. But all she felt was the palpable din of the concourse. And the memory dissolved. With stoic resolve,  Paloma took a step toward the gate, then pulled short. Maddie’s eighteenth birthday was only months away, a tentative occasion to make amends. Was giving up an option? Barely ten feet away, two uniformed women sauntered by. Turning on her heels, Paloma rushed to the bathroom.

Ensconced in the farthest stall, Paloma peeled off her clothes, ripped open her bag, and pulled out a print dress. Quickly, she stepped into it, zipped up the front and slid her bare feet into sneakers. She uncapped a black eyeliner, drew lines into the folds of her neck, wrists, and poked the soft black tip under her fingernails. She then yanked off the wig, pulled out three hairpins, and shook her dark auburn hair. With trembling hands she took a plastic razor, pulled her hair taut and ran the blade against the grain. Tufts of hair floated in the toilet water, along with her shredded ticket and identification. She flushed and watched it all swirled away. Another life gone.

Before leaving she needed to make one more adjustment. Fingering through her wallet, she pulled out a wad of bills. A homeless woman wouldn’t have this kind of money. About to toss it on the floor,  Paloma heard a crying baby. She cracked open the stall door and saw a woman changing a child’s diaper. Paloma slipped out, sailed past them, and dropped the rolled cash into the woman’s open, disheveled bag. 

Back on the concourse, the crowd had not abated. Paloma hurried along the wall. The quicker she reached her destination, the quicker it would all be over. 

Airport security was ahead. Two heavyset men in uniform stood solid, like rocks in a rushing creek as people parted around them. 

She neared the metal detectors, the bottleneck, Checkpoint Charlie. Uniformed men and women increased in numbers. Some stood, some sat. They were busy with the job they had to do, sizing up the passengers, looking for anything suspicious. She scurried by. But she wasn’t leaving, not out the front doors. She turned back and rejoined the throng of passengers that swelled behind the X-ray machines, metal arches and rolling tabletops. Every few seconds the mass moved along. Four… Three… Two people were ahead of her. Suddenly, shuffling footsteps, murmuring voices faded into the background. She focused, catching details.

The security guard, less than a foot away, wore a shirt with crisp-ironed lines. Cuffs were buttoned and the collar was tight around his neck. He looked buffed and shined, a school boy. His lips moved. “Ma’am, please place your bag down.” 

Paloma ignored the request.

“Lady, put your bag down.” 

She took a step forward. The concourse blurred. Her heart revved up anticipating what she must do. Suddenly, she felt his touch on her sleeve. It was time. She lunged forward through the metal frame, tripping the alarms. His grasping hand was unable to hold tight.

She was running now like a wounded dog down the concourse. Her shriveled leg could hardly stand the pressure. Jolts of pain rose up her back, but she couldn’t stop; she must put up a fight, be driven down. Her only thought was the mechanics of falling: the bending of the knees, the leaning into the fall. Then it happened. An iron weight rammed into her back, and like a cue ball, her head cracked against the floor.

Chapter Four

At four-forty in the afternoon, Max stood at the corner of MacDougall and St. John’s. He took in the panoramic view. Streets in New York City were all the same to him – tireless avenues of never-ending traffic closed in tight by concrete, metal and humanity. He gazed at the six-story, center-entrance building, he’d seen hours earlier in the
Times
. Clearly, the first floor apartment had taken the brunt of the assault. The rest of the building remained occupied. Tenants climbed the front stairs, weighted down with plastic bags, bikes and strollers. Catcalling kids leaned out from open windows.

Amid the normalcy, Max looked for answers. Was Daisy’s mother the target? Or could it have been a mistaken apartment?  He’d seen that often enough. Cretins who’d reverse letters, numbers, then show up at the wrong place with their pricks on backwards. He shook his head. Who was he kidding? Could they have found Agnes? Max sauntered down the length of the building, passing beneath the bay window that was now boarded and tagged
Emergency Enclosures.
The smell of burnt wood hung in the air. Of course, there was one other possibility.  Maybe, like in Chicago, it was another staged death. Only this time there had been a catch, a complication. After all she couldn’t have intentionally killed someone. Not the person he knew, not Agnes.

Beyond the damaged area was a rear first floor apartment. The jostling of pots and pans filtered out an open window. Max continued to the end of the building where, on a small patch of grass, a wiry, gray-haired man lounged in a lawn chair. The man’s eyes were closed and his head was tilted back as if he were trying to get a tan. Smoke curled from a cigarette planted between his fingers. 

“Excuse me, sir. Laurent, FBI.”

The man’s body jerked. He then opened his eyes and sat straighter.

“I’m investigating the fire. Need to ask you a few questions.”

The man eased up from the chair and strolled over to Max. “What can I do for you?”

“You live here?” 

“For twenty-five years.”

Max nodded toward the front. “Looks like a pretty bad situation. I hear it wasn’t electrical.”

“Some moron lobbed a bottle of gasoline through the window. Landed on the couch. At least that’s what the police told me. They were all over here, like nightcrawlers after a rain.”

“I bet,” Max said. “You awake when it happened?”

“Nope, asleep. Woke up to the smoke alarm. I got out of bed fast, then scooted my ass out.” The man pointed at the sidewalk. “Ran down here. That’s when I saw the flames. The living room was lit up like a pumpkin. Made me sick. Anyway, I yelled for Paloma to get the hell out. That I’d catch her if she’d get to one of the windows. But she never came. Turns out she wasn’t home.”

“I heard someone else was in the apartment,” Max said.

“Sure was. An older lady. Probably some relative. You know these Puerto Ricans.”

Max’s jaw tightened. “Yeah.  Family’s important to them.”

The man’s grimace dried up.

“How can I get hold of the landlord?” Max said. “I need to see the apartment.”

“He’s a big shot doctor. Has an answering service. Only calls you back if you’re changing the time of his golf game. The person you need to speak with is Ivan, the caretaker. But he doesn’t have a phone. Just gotta wait ’til he shows up for the rent.”

“Thanks for your help,” Max said.

“No problem.”

Max retraced his steps and shuffled up the front stairs. He wasn’t about to contact Ivan or the doctor. He didn’t want anyone nosing around his investigation. Raking his fingers down a worn pad of call buttons, he was immediately buzzed in. Pity. No one gave him the chance to use his favorite line – Publisher’s Clearinghouse.

Paloma’s apartment was to the right. The door, no longer on its hinges, was propped into position. He heaved it aside and stood on the threshold. The last time he’d been in Agnes’s place was fifteen years earlier. It wasn’t an apartment back then, but a partially renovated house with all the trappings – walls in various states of repair, toys scattered everywhere, and hubby’s slippers by the door. His heart pounded. After years of watching from the outside, he now had unencumbered access into her world. 

He stepped in.

The room was shrouded in soot and ash; the burnt smell, pungent and damp. Shards of glass cracked under his shoes as he walked on the soaked rug. The couch, located directly beneath the boarded-up bay window, had been hacked to smithereens. Its wooden frame and wire springs were a tangled mess. Tufts of burnt upholstery and batting littered the floor along with downed Venetian blinds, gnarled and twisted. Paint on the woodwork had blackened and cracked like alligator skin. Adjacent walls had been hacked, exposing lathe and plaster. This was no clambake. 

Against the opposite wall ran a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. Max pulled out a penlight. Heavy, soaked hardcovers with spines of varying thickness and height stood in neat rows. While the books had not burned, the water damage was evident. Paloma had an inquisitive mind. Besides the various novels and Reader’s Digest collections, there were books on cooking, mathematics, auto repair, business, and art history. Library of Congress numbers and Dewey decimals catalogued a good percentage. Either Paloma had gone to a load of library sales or had one serious overdue account. He pulled out a book,
The Steno’s Bible
, and checked the back cover. To his surprise it was stamped from the Buffalo and Erie County Library. He flipped to the opening pages – published in 1968. Examples and exercises in curlicued lines followed. A textbook? He replaced it. Standing back, he passed the beam of light across. Meaningless titles of obscure books followed in seemingly random order. Something struck him about the books on the higher shelf. Their bindings were darker, cracked; their library numbers, handwritten, not typed. He pulled the first book down,
Corset and Crinoline
by W. B. Lord. Stamped among the aged-brown pages was
Buffalo Library.
Published in 1882, the book was filled with engravings of women in stiff-looking undergarments. He slapped the book closed. From all appearances it looked like a collectible. Suddenly he had a thought. On the shelf below the stenography book, he pulled out,
The Life and Times of Jean Míro
, and checked the publication date – 1969. He then grabbed the last book on the lowermost shelf, publication date – 1982. Smiling to himself, he cracked the pattern. The books were in chronological order by publication date. An odd quirk. 

Crossing the living room, he entered a bedroom, her bedroom. Dim light seeped through sooty windows. The water damage was significantly less. Latex gloves, empty plastic bags, syringe caps surrounded the disheveled bed. This was where Daisy’s mother must’ve been found. 

Beyond the bedroom was a galley kitchen. Max stepped down the cramped aisle and tugged each knob of the top and bottom cupboards. Canned goods, cleaning supplies, dishes, utensils were organized into neat rows and compact stacks. A dank, damp smell swelled from the unlit, half-filled refrigerator. He pulled out a milk carton and checked its expiration, a week overdue. Bottles of beer lay on the second rack. The Agnes he knew didn’t drink. Could there be another man? He slammed the door. A short hall led him to the bathroom, the farthest room from the fire. He whipped open the medicine cabinet and ran his eyes along the shelves looking for evidence – shaving cream, razors, Right Guard. But there wasn’t a hint of a male companion. Relieved, he shut the cabinet. Hell, even if there were, he’d win her over with his charm. He could play that game.

Natural light seeped in from an area on the other side of the tub. He pulled the shower curtain aside. More burnt debris had collected in the tub. But why so far away and separate?

Rolling up his sleeves, he reached into the bathtub and sifted through the sooty paste. Slivers of metal were embedded in the goo. Staples. Casting a beam of light to the floor, he noticed several sets of back and forth footprints. Following the trail, he walked beyond the kitchen and back into the bedroom, finally stopping at a desk. Someone had made several trips from the desk to the bathtub.

He pulled out the drawers. Except for some paperclips and odd change, they were empty.    

Highlighting the footsteps, he looked more closely. These weren’t boots, but someone with shoes and small feet. Agnes?