Read Online A Is for Apple by Kate Johnson - Free Book Online

found Shapiro.”
    Thank God. “Where?”
    “In my apartment. He’s—well, he’s dead.”
     
    On the subway, Xander told us in quiet tones how he’d stayed up drinking and slunk back to his apartment in the early hours when he got thrown onto the street for being unable to pay his bar tab. Drunk and pissed off, he’d stumbled straight into bed and hadn’t looked around his studio space until he’d got up to get some water about an hour ago. Whereupon he’d found the body of Don Shapiro, arranged into the pose Xander had used for the portrait, which was standing next to him on an easel.
    Xander, panicking, had called Harvey for my number, and had ended up telling him the whole story. Harvey had told him Luke was here with me and that we were his best bet.
    Kind of sweet, but what the hell did he expect us to do?
    As soon as we were in the open air and I could get some signal on my phone, I called Harvey.
    “What are we, waste disposal?”
    “It’s nice to hear from you, too,” Harvey said. “Listen, look after Xander, will you? It can’t be nice finding a body in your apartment—”
    “No,” I said shortly. “I remember what it’s like.”
    “I told him you were with the government,” Harvey said.
    “Cheers.”
    “What else could I say? I’d be there myself, but I’m kinda far away and…”
    “Yeah, I know,” I said resignedly. “I’ll call you back later.”
    “Thanks, Sophie.”
    I ended the call and looked up at Luke on one side of me, and Xander on the other. Boy, they actually made me feel short. Well, maybe average sized.
    “This is it,” Xander fished a key out of his pocket as we approached a huge warehouse door. We weren’t far from the meatpacking district and the smell of dead things hung heavily in the air. I shuddered. I haven’t eaten meat since I was a child, and this kind of reminded me why. Not to mention that the smell might be coming from Shapiro…
    Xander fitted the key in a smaller portal and we stepped in after him. “It’s a total mess,” he said with what I supposed was normally cheerfulness, but now came out rather strained and horribly nervous. “Obviously I don’t usually have all the blood…”
    “That’s okay,” Luke said, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “You should see Sophie’s place.”
    I scowled at him, but Xander managed some sort of smile.
    He unlocked an inner, metal door and we walked into a big warehouse type space. The floors were thin and creaked alarmingly, there was crap all over the place—big easels and blank canvases, huge vats of paint, boxes of materials, things like bits of string and sequins on the floor. There was a curtain pulled across to just by the door; behind it was a big messy bed and a jumble of clothes, with another curtain behind that hardly concealing a little shower room.
    Every wall, the whole ceiling and all over the floor, the bedspread and the curtains, and even part of the windows, were all covered with paintings and scribblings. It was like Xander had run out of canvas and started putting down his ideas on his actual apartment.
    “Wow,” I said. “Pretty cool.”
    Xander disappeared into the bedroom section and lit up a cigarette with shaky hands.
    “Very nice,” Luke agreed distractedly. He and Xander seemed to have come to some sort of détente on the way over, after I stamped on Luke’s foot and made him apologise, and then on Xander’s and made him accept.
    “There is one thing,” Luke went on conversationally. “Where is the body?”
    Xander came out and stared around. He pointed at what might have been a sofa under decades of debris, an easel beside it, pools of sticky drying blood staining the painted floor. To be honest there was so much going on in the room I’d hardly had time to look for a body. Certainly the blood hadn’t seemed out of place on the garish floor.
    “It was right there,” Xander said, going over and cautiously lifting a large sketchbook as if expecting Shapiro’s