Page 12

Twelve

Monday 6pm

Brody Murphy flashed his badge at the doorman of the Upper East Side apartment block, if doorman was the right word. He buzzed them in from under the canopy covering the street entrance, into a double height marble-floored lobby with small trees in pots standing next to overstuffed sofas. A marble desk held a computer, a telephone and a number of CCTV monitors. The doorman stood up.

“Help you, officers?”

“We’re here for a look round 10-F. Mr Kaylan Sully’s apartment,” Brody said. Charlie kept quiet. Let the doorman assume he was an NYPD officer.

“No one in,” the doorman said.

“We still need to see his apartment,” Murphy said. “Mr Sully is sadly deceased. Caught up in the shooting at Blue Wave Books. Can you let us in?”

“You got a warrant?”

“We don’t need one. Not when the guy’s been murdered.”

The doorman thought for a minute and shrugged. “If he’s dead, he’s not going to complain, right? I can’t leave the desk. I’ll get the super.” He picked up the phone and a few minutes later a young Black man in navy cargo pants and a black T-shirt appeared from behind one of the trees, which presumably hid a door. He gave Murphy and Charlie a suspicious look but agreed willingly enough to escort them to Kaylan’s apartment. The three of them rode up silently in the lift. A much smoother, quieter lift than the one in the apartment where Charlie was staying.

The apartment itself was everything Charlie’s was not, despite being another cool and spacious three bedrooms and tiny kitchen with white walls and polished wood floors. Somehow, these wooden floors and white walls felt like luxury. Possibly because there were no undulations in either floors or walls. It also had one of the most spectacular views Charlie had ever seen, drawing him to the living room window like a moth to a flame. He had no idea which direction he was looking in, or the names of any of the buildings he could see, only that they stretched out into the distance high above the tree tops in the street below. Lights were coming on all over the city and it was magical.

“How much would a place like this cost?” he asked Murphy.

“A million bucks? More?”

The super was lurking by the apartment door. “About that,” he said.

Charlie turned away from the window and sighed. “More than I’ll ever be able to afford,” he said. “Let’s get on with it.”

They started in the living room, although there was little to search. A sectional sofa sat in front of the window, and next to it, a large marble-topped dining table. A few abstract prints adorned the walls. It wasn’t the room of a twenty-year-old computer genius.

“It’s more like a hotel room,” Charlie said, remembering Kaylan’s tiny hall of residence room in Llanfair. “Do you know if he’d been here long?”

“Coupla months. Some people buy them fully furnished,” the super replied without moving from the door. “They all have cleaners anyway.”

The rest of the flat was equally uninformative. A small study held a single desktop computer, and one of the bedrooms had a video-game setup but those were the only electronic devices. There was no sign of the mess of paints, canvases and sketchbooks Charlie had seen in Llanfair. There were no books. The fridge held only leftover pizza and milk. The only things out of place were a pair of tights and two pairs of women’s underwear in one of the drawers in the main bedroom, suggesting that Kaylan had a regular visitor. The rest of the clothes were conservative chinos and shirts of the kind Charlie imagined would fit in with the FBI, though not with the Kaylan he knew.

“How old was this guy again?” Murphy asked.

“Twenty.” Charlie was gazing around the apartment with its straight-out-of-a-magazine appearance when there was a disturbance at the door. A high-pitched female voice cried, “Where is he?”

Charlie and Murphy turned round to see the super barring the way to an elegant young woman with glossy brown hair and impossibly tight jeans. She saw them. “Who the fuck are you? What are you doing here? And where is Kaylan?”

Once they had settled the woman into a chair at the dining table and provided a glass of water, she introduced herself as Hermione McCabe. She was a pleasant young history student, and Kaylan’s sometimes girlfriend. She looked suspiciously at Murphy’s NYPD badge, but Charlie’s accent appeared to be reassuring.

“We weren’t exclusive or anything,” she said, “but he was an okay guy and …” She blushed. “… we went to some nice places.” Charlie assumed this meant Kaylan spent lots of money on their dates. “I’ve been calling him for days. I thought we had plans for tonight.”

Charlie thought they may as well get all the information they could before breaking the bad news.

“How did you meet?”

“Some party at the university. He was doing computer science,” Hermione replied. Murphy twitched at this, but got himself back under control.

“Not many students have an apartment like this,” Charlie said.

Hermione raised her eyebrows. “He always said he was going to get roomies, but he didn’t need to. His grandmother left him the money to buy it. He hadn’t been here long. He’d been staying with his mother, but they didn’t get on. I met her once, and gotta say, she is weird.”

Ah, yes, the grandmother’s inheritance. The same inheritance Kaylan had told Charlie he had used to pay for his sojourn in Llanfair. Either the grandmother had been richer than Croesus, or Kaylan had been up to his old tricks of diverting other people’s money into his own bank account. He wondered if the FBI knew where Kaylan had been living. He also wondered if the FBI had been finding Kaylan more trouble than they’d expected. And surely his mother lived in Chicago?

“Kaylan wasn’t into painting any more then?” Charlie asked.

Hermione’s mouth fell open. “Painting?”

“He was studying art last year.”

“He said he was doing computer science in London.”

Kaylan’s habit of lying hadn’t changed. Perhaps it was time to tell her the truth about why they were there. Or some of it at least.

“I’m sorry to have to tell you, Ms McCabe, but Kaylan was killed in the Blue Wave Books shooting on Sunday evening.”

The tears were instant. Hermione covered her face with her hands and wept. Murphy went to the kitchen and refilled the glass, bringing a few pieces of kitchen roll for Hermione to mop her face. She sobbed and snuffled for a few minutes while Charlie and Murphy sat quietly, waiting. After a while, she blew her nose, and looked up.

“I can’t believe it. I lost my best friend in a school shooting, and now this.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”

Her face was red and swollen, and her eye make-up was smeared, but the weeping slowly passed. “Did you know Kaylan was intending to attend the poetry reading?” Charlie asked.

Hermione’s eyes turned inward as she thought about it. “Poetry? He said he was going to see some people who could help him with something. Sorry. I can’t remember much more than that. We didn’t see each other that often.” She blushed through the smudgy mess of her face. “We didn’t talk all that much to be honest. He was kinda secretive, ya know.” She took a breath. “I suggested that we go to a show last weekend, and he said he couldn’t do Sunday because of these people he wanted to see. You’re English, right? Why is an English person here asking questions?”

“Did he say why he wanted to see them?” Charlie asked ignoring the question about his Englishness.

Hermione frowned. “Something about how this guy had popped up in a bar in the Village, and it was weird because he needed help. Serendipity, even if they don’t think so.” The emphasis seemed to be a direct quote.

“As if he wasn’t sure these people would want to see him?”

“I guess.”

Charlie asked the same questions in lots of different ways, but it was clear Hermione knew nothing more than she’d already shared. Kaylan had a problem, had met someone (singular) in a bar, and then planned to meet someone (plural) on Sunday night because he thought that he could get help with his problem. It was suggestive, but that was all. Charlie asked Hermione to look around the apartment for anything different or missing. She dutifully looked, but shook her head in each room.

“It’s just like every other time I came here.”

She left, and Charlie thought it was time they did the same.

“It wasn’t true about the painting,” a voice said, and Charlie recognised it as the super, still leaning against the doorframe. “You need to see his storage area.”