Ten minutes later, Waltz pulled into a No Parking zone on 34th. We made plans to meet in a half hour, Waltz bird-dogging his sister’s birthday gift. I went looking for briefcases. I preferred the four-hundred-dollar model made of brown leather as soft as cream cheese, but had to be satisfied with an inexpensive fabric job.
I paid for my purchase, checked my watch, and was ambling toward the agreed-upon entrance when I noticed Waltz by the perfume counter. When I was a couple dozen paces away, I watched him lift a sample, spray his wrist, wave it dry. Sniff.
His shoulders slumped and he continued down the aisle. I picked up speed to catch him but, passing the perfume counter, stopped to lift the bottle Waltz had sampled. I spritzed a shot in the air. Inhaled. Then continued after Waltz, an odd notion in my head, and my heart running a half a per cent faster.
Harry Nautilus slipped into the cottage in Gulf Shores, a white box with red hurricane shutters, part of a cottage community on the Intracoastal Waterway. He waved thanks to the Gulf Shores cop who’d overseen the fast access.
It was a typical vacation place, Nautilus noted: Large windows to let in the view, simple furnishings, small, neat kitchen. There were posters for annual Gulf Shores shrimp festivals on the wall, bright and colorful. Outside on the water, a shrimp boat chugged along, its nets hung on outriggers and wafting in the wind.
Nautilus opened a door to the side of the main room and his heart skipped a beat. It was an office, small and spare and simple, but seemingly a place to see patients: Large desk and ergonomic desk chair, an overstuffed armchair in the corner, a couch, all seemingly de rigueur for a shrink. The room was greens and grays, the light through the window giving everything a relaxed and pleasant cast.
“Knock, knock, Vange,” said a voice from the front door. “Permission to come aboard?”
“Come in,” Nautilus said.
The voice was followed by a pair of eyes as green as the sea. The woman wearing the eyes must have been eighty, her hair as white as snow, her leathery, sunbrown face as creased as an antique saddle. She wore blue jeans and a tee-shirt advertising a local seafood restaurant.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
Nautilus ID’d himself. Felt compelled to explain the reason behind his visit.
“Oh, my lord,” the woman said. She looked stunned and Nautilus moved to her side, helped her sit on the floral couch, got her a glass of water.
“Mind if I smoke?” the woman asked, pulling a half-crushed pack of cigarettes from her back pocket. “She keeps me an ashtray in the second drawer by the sink. And bring me a beer instead of water, please. It’s in the fridge.”
Nautilus retrieved a brass ashtray and a Bass Ale, set them beside the woman.
“I take it you knew the Doctor well, miz …?”
“Helena Pappagallos. I’ve been living two cottages over since I retired as a ship’s cook fourteen years back. Vangie’s had this place for eleven years. I’ve seen her every weekend she could get down. I have a boat and sometimes we’d go fishing.”
“Often? I mean her coming down, not the fishing.”
“She tried to come down every weekend – it’s only a three-hour drive – but work kept her visits at two to three weekends a month on the average. Sometimes she’d grab a few extra days, but she was a busy woman. This was her escape, mostly.”
“Mostly?”
Pappagallos crushed out one cigarette, lit another. Took a bubbling suck at the beer bottle. Shook her head.
“She’s consulted with a few patients here. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve seen any. I could tell they were patients because they’d park their cars and skitter to her cottage like scared cats. She’d put a Do Not Disturb sign on the door. I once asked her why she saw patients when it was shrinking or whatever she was getting away from. She said she thought differently down here. I think she just loved what she did.”
Nautilus felt his spirits fall. If Dr Prowse hadn’t seen patients recently, an entire line of pursuit crumbled like a house built of spit and lint.
“So she doesn’t see patients here any more, Miz Pappagallos?”
“I said I don’t see patients here any more.”
“What’s the difference?”
“No one ever came or went that I saw. But every Saturday, from one to three, she put the sign on the door.”
“Do Not Disturb,” Nautilus said. “Her work sign.”
“Like she was analyzing or whatever. Come to think of it, for the past three-four months or so, she’s been here every Saturday. That’s a record or something, first time in years.”
“And each weekend the sign’s been on the door?”
Ms Pappagallos nodded through a haze of blue. “Saturdays from one to three p.m. You could set your clock by it.”
Nautilus walked Ms Pappagallos to the door. Time to head back to Mobile, call Carson and pass on the latest. Not that there was anything solid, just a bag of smoke that grew larger by the day.
He headed back to the office to retrieve his briefcase. He was stepping out the door when he remembered he’d swung the office door open on his entry, hadn’t checked behind it for a calendar, bulletin board, or the like. He re-crossed the living room to the office, stepped inside, closed the door.
On the back side of the door was a photograph enlarged to poster size. Nautilus stared at it in disbelief. He closed his eyes and opened them again.
The photo was still there.
Waltz drove us to lunch at his favorite Indian restaurant, maybe three square feet larger than my living room. The air was perfumed with ginger, cardamom, cumin, cloves, coriander. When I die, I want my body marinated in those spices before I’m cremated, everyone downwind salivating instead of weeping at my demise.
The waiter arrived and I ordered saag paneer, Shelly the lamb vindaloo. We split an order of chapati. The food arrived in minutes, bowls of fragrant magic. We ate in silence to acknowledge the perfection of the selections.
“By the way, Shelly, whatever became of the hair and fiber samples vacuumed from the floors of the scenes?” I asked as the dishes were swept away and we nibbled at golf-ball-sized servings of mango ice. “Forensics run any tests?”
“No need, can’t imagine what they’d prove.”
“Because everyone knows Jeremy Ridgecliff is the perp?”
Waltz frowned. “You think otherwise?”
“No.”
“If we’re not going to get anything solid, then why process –”
“A friend of mine is a pathologist. Clair Peltier heads the Mobile-area office of the Alabama Bureau of Forensics. In her own field she’s as reknowned as Dr Prowse. Her take on testing is that every answer is the answer you want.”
Waltz thought a moment, tapping his chin with his forefinger.
“Because no matter what answer you get, it answers something?”
“Bingo. You think I could put Clair in touch with the NYPD forensics folks? I guarantee you they’ve heard of her.