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Authors: Margaret Maron
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small children with a third one on the way. They also heard that he hadn’t drawn a sober breath since they’d suspended him and that his wife had taken the kids and gone back to her parents in Pennsylvania.
Lotty ran the number through without comment. It had come back clean.
Now she sat at the terminal and gazed unseeingly at the blinking cursor.
Maybe the gun had been stolen since then, she thought. Maybe it’d been lost. Or sold.
She gave a mental shrug and reached for the phone book. The simplest way to find out was to just ask. The clock above her desk read 22:36:15. Nevertheless, she looked up the number, dialed it, and was pleased when the phone was answered on the first ring.
Almost as if her call were expected.
CHAPTER 8
After leaving her mother’s apartment, Sigrid had intended to see a new Polish film recommended by Oscar Nauman, but on the drive over to the East Side, she passed a small revival house and saw that Rebecca, one of her all-time favorites, was listed on the marquee. It’d been several years since she’d seen it on a big screen and she yielded to impulse. After all, she told herself, did anyone actually need East European profundity on one’s birthday?
There were many who couldn’t read Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel or watch the Hitchcock film without becoming exasperated by the heroine’s timidity and insecurity, but Sigrid thought that du Maurier had captured exactly the paralysis that can inhibit a self-conscious woman. God knows she’d experienced those same inhibitions enough times herself, she thought. She settled happily into one of the theater’s dusty velour seats with a box of popcorn and watched an odious Mrs. Van Hopper bully Joan Fontaine around Monte Carlo.
After the film, she browsed in a bookstore down the street till it closed at ten, treating herself to paperback reprints of two books she’d been meaning to read for some time, Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life and a favorably reviewed Isak Dinesen biography. Even so, it was only twenty minutes past ten when she handed her car keys to the parking attendant at the garage near her apartment.
A derelict had been sprawled on a steaming grate in front of the garage as she drove in. As she left, she saw a uniformed officer helping him into his patrol car. With the mercury hovering in the teens tonight, police all over the city would be hustling as many of the homeless as they could into the public shelters.
The walk home was bitter cold, past shuttered businesses and a failed hotel. As Sigrid hurried down Christopher Street, hugging her books and the picture frames to her chest like a small shield, a frigid wind blew straight off the river and needled her face like slivers of Arctic ice. She was glad to turn the corner of her own nondescript street and reach the gate to Number 42½, a sturdy green wooden door set in a high brick wall.
The lock was so stiff from the cold that her key would not turn at first; and for a moment, she feared she’d have to ring for Roman Tramegra, her housemate, to buzz her in. Fortunately, the key turned on her next try. She stepped inside the tiny courtyard and let the gate swing to behind her.
Here, everything was frozen as stiffly as the lock: a dormant dogwood rose from a bed of dead herbs and flowers, a young pear tree that Roman had espaliered against a wall seemed lifeless, and brittle ivy leaves growing over the front of the house rustled with metallic whispers as she passed. The little marble Eros which Roman had lugged home last summer looked utterly forlorn and abandoned. It made Sigrid think of all the homeless who would not find shelter tonight and she shivered despondently. This was no night for anyone not made of marble to spend outside, and she felt incredibly fortunate that she could turn a key in her own door and find warmth and comfort on the other side.
Roman had left a light on over the stove in the kitchen, a sure sign that he’d also
Lotty ran the number through without comment. It had come back clean.
Now she sat at the terminal and gazed unseeingly at the blinking cursor.
Maybe the gun had been stolen since then, she thought. Maybe it’d been lost. Or sold.
She gave a mental shrug and reached for the phone book. The simplest way to find out was to just ask. The clock above her desk read 22:36:15. Nevertheless, she looked up the number, dialed it, and was pleased when the phone was answered on the first ring.
Almost as if her call were expected.
CHAPTER 8
After leaving her mother’s apartment, Sigrid had intended to see a new Polish film recommended by Oscar Nauman, but on the drive over to the East Side, she passed a small revival house and saw that Rebecca, one of her all-time favorites, was listed on the marquee. It’d been several years since she’d seen it on a big screen and she yielded to impulse. After all, she told herself, did anyone actually need East European profundity on one’s birthday?
There were many who couldn’t read Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel or watch the Hitchcock film without becoming exasperated by the heroine’s timidity and insecurity, but Sigrid thought that du Maurier had captured exactly the paralysis that can inhibit a self-conscious woman. God knows she’d experienced those same inhibitions enough times herself, she thought. She settled happily into one of the theater’s dusty velour seats with a box of popcorn and watched an odious Mrs. Van Hopper bully Joan Fontaine around Monte Carlo.
After the film, she browsed in a bookstore down the street till it closed at ten, treating herself to paperback reprints of two books she’d been meaning to read for some time, Carolyn Heilbrun’s Writing a Woman’s Life and a favorably reviewed Isak Dinesen biography. Even so, it was only twenty minutes past ten when she handed her car keys to the parking attendant at the garage near her apartment.
A derelict had been sprawled on a steaming grate in front of the garage as she drove in. As she left, she saw a uniformed officer helping him into his patrol car. With the mercury hovering in the teens tonight, police all over the city would be hustling as many of the homeless as they could into the public shelters.
The walk home was bitter cold, past shuttered businesses and a failed hotel. As Sigrid hurried down Christopher Street, hugging her books and the picture frames to her chest like a small shield, a frigid wind blew straight off the river and needled her face like slivers of Arctic ice. She was glad to turn the corner of her own nondescript street and reach the gate to Number 42½, a sturdy green wooden door set in a high brick wall.
The lock was so stiff from the cold that her key would not turn at first; and for a moment, she feared she’d have to ring for Roman Tramegra, her housemate, to buzz her in. Fortunately, the key turned on her next try. She stepped inside the tiny courtyard and let the gate swing to behind her.
Here, everything was frozen as stiffly as the lock: a dormant dogwood rose from a bed of dead herbs and flowers, a young pear tree that Roman had espaliered against a wall seemed lifeless, and brittle ivy leaves growing over the front of the house rustled with metallic whispers as she passed. The little marble Eros which Roman had lugged home last summer looked utterly forlorn and abandoned. It made Sigrid think of all the homeless who would not find shelter tonight and she shivered despondently. This was no night for anyone not made of marble to spend outside, and she felt incredibly fortunate that she could turn a key in her own door and find warmth and comfort on the other side.
Roman had left a light on over the stove in the kitchen, a sure sign that he’d also
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