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Confused and slightly inebriated, I walked to the door as Anatoly opened it. “Did you forget something?” I asked as I acknowledged Maria.
“No, I…may I come in for a moment? I promise not to be long.”
I glanced at Anatoly who looked more than a little peeved at this point. Reluctantly, he stepped aside as I waved her in. She was frowning, intensifying the few wrinkles in her face.
“Maria, this is my boyfriend, Anatoly.”
Maria either didn’t hear me or didn’t care. “Did Enrico call and tell you why he wasn’t coming?” she asked, glancing at the round, rented table, now the only piece of furniture not holding a box.
“No,” I said carefully, not really wanting to relive that particular phone conversation. “He just said he was having a bad day.”
“Did he say he was going somewhere?”
“No.”
“Did he say he was feeling ill?”
“Why are you bothering me?” I asked bluntly. I was required to attend these people’s séances, but there was nothing in my escrow that stipulated that I had to play twenty questions.
She sucked in a sharp breath and toyed with the belt of her trench coat. “I went to see him.”
“So?” Anatoly asked impatiently.
“I still have the key to the building, so I let myself in, and when I was standing outside the door to his condo I smelled food and I could make out the sounds of Gabrieli playing on the stereo, but he didn’t respond to my knock or to the doorbell. When I called out to him, the only response I got was from that damn parrot.”
“Maybe he doesn’t want company tonight,” Anatoly suggested. “Maybe he has a guest over and he’s in the middle of enjoying some wine and other pleasures and your presence would have been an intrusion.”
I suppressed a smile. Subtlety was not something that Anatoly was comfortable with.
“I didn’t see any evidence of a guest.”
“How could you see evidence of anything when you’re standing outside a door?” Anatoly continued reasonably.
“Because I have the key to his apartment,” Maria admitted after a moment’s hesitation. “I tried to let myself in, but the chain lock was on. Enrico may want to avoid me, but my trying to come into the condo on my own accord should have thrown him into a rage. I expected a confrontation of some kind. But he didn’t scream at me or even acknowledge my attempt. I’d say that he might not have been home, but then he wouldn’t have left the CD player on.”
“And he wouldn’t have been able to chain lock the door,” I pointed out.
“Well, that would be explainable, but the music…”
Her voice trailed off and Anatoly and I exchanged looks. Last I checked it was a lot easier to leave a stereo on than chain lock a door from the outside. But I didn’t really want to argue the point.
“Maria, I don’t know where Enrico is or why he has his music on,” I said slowly. “All he essentially told me was that he was having a bad day. His exact words were that he was being haunted, whatever that means. He said he was going to be late and then we kind of got into it.”
“You got in an argument? What could you two possibly argue about? You don’t even know one another.” Then her eyes widened in horror. “You didn’t insult his food, did you? Or did you praise another chef? Perhaps you said something nice about Wolfgang Puck. Enrico is very jealous of Wolfgang Puck.”
“Wolfgang never entered into our conversation. I was just a little flippant when he said he was being haunted.”
“Enrico doesn’t believe in ghosts,” Maria said firmly. “He comes to the Specter Society meetings because he finds them amusing…although now I suspect his reasons for coming have more to do with me than anything else.”
“I don’t know anything about any of that,” I said. I was beginning to lose patience with this line of questioning. She was uninvited and she was preventing Anatoly from ravaging me. “All I know is that he told me he was haunted, I made a joke about that and then he called me a fucking bitch and hung up on me.”
“What!” Maria gasped. “But he only uses such profanity for food critics and diet gurus!”
“Yeah, well, I’m neither,” I said drily.
Maria now looked even more agitated than she had when she walked through my door. She started wandering around the room, weaving in and out of boxes like a confused rat aimlessly exploring a maze. “Something is amiss.”
“It might be,” Anatoly agreed. “But it’s not our problem. Now if you’ll excuse us.”
Maria glanced down at the empty wineglasses on the box near where I had been standing and comprehension spread across her countenance. Unfortunately, the comprehension didn’t seem to be mixed with even the slightest bit of acquiescence. “If you’re right,” she said, directing her comments to Anatoly, “if Enrico isn’t answering the door because he specifically doesn’t want to talk to me, then I’m going to need another person to act as my decoy.”
“Forget it,” Anatoly and I said in unison.
“I’ll pay you,” she said quickly. “A hundred dollars. All you have to do is pick up the phone and call him.”
“And if he doesn’t answer?” Anatoly asked.
“I’ll pay you two hundred more to go over to the house and find out what’s going on.”
“Excuse me, but I’m about to invest in a million-dollar property. Three hundred dollars isn’t even enough to pay for the sales tax on my upcoming furniture-shopping spree. If you want a decoy you’re going to have to find someone who is a little more desperate.”
“Me for instance,” Anatoly said.
“You?” I squeaked. “But you already have more business than you can handle!”
“This is a one-night job, correct?” Anatoly asked.
“Yes,” Maria said uncertainly. “Do you do this kind of thing often?”
“I’m a P.I.”
“Like Magnum,” she exclaimed.
I rolled my eyes. “You just gave away your age.”
Maria flushed, but kept her focus on Anatoly. “This is perfect,” she continued. “You can call him and if he’s not available then sneak over, break in and—”
“No,” Anatoly said quickly. “I’m not going to break the law for you. But I will find out if he has a guest.”
“You can do that without breaking in?”
“Of course.” Anatoly smiled. “Magnum did it all the time.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” Anatoly mused as we followed Maria through the winding traffic.
Enrico hadn’t answered his phone, not even while Anatoly was leaving a message on his answering machine telling him that he believed someone was in the process of breaking into his restaurant. After that the three of us piled into two cars, Maria into her Mustang and Anatoly and I into my Audi, and we all went over to Enrico’s condo on Telegraph Hill. Since I had been the one doing all the drinking, I had given Anatoly the keys.
“I thought you wanted me to,” I lied. The truth was that I couldn’t stomach the idea of sitting home alone, thinking about the sex I wasn’t having. At least this was distracting. “Besides, it’s not like we’re trying to hunt down the Zodiac Killer,” I noted. “Maria basically hired you to knock on a door and ask if anybody’s home. I don’t see how I could screw that up for you.”
I saw the flash of white teeth as he laughed in the darkness. “You’re underestimating yourself. I’m sure you could screw up anything if you put your mind to it.”
I groaned as he pulled into a spot located only one block away from our destination. “I really hate you, you know that?” I asked lightly.
“I hate you, too,” he whispered. He kissed me and I felt his rough hands gently but firmly pulling my hair back from my face. Anatoly had incredible hands. Watching him knead bread dough was the equivalent of watching a porn flick.
We walked to the condo and found Maria in her car blocking the complex’s garage. She rolled down her window just low enough so she could reach her arm out and shove a set of keys at us. “The silver one’s to the building, the gold one’s to the condo itself. Come down and let me know what he’s up to as soon as you can.”
“No,” Anatoly said simply.
“No?” Maria repeated. “No, what?”
“If you want us to go in there you’re going to have to open the door for us.”
“But that’s preposterous! You yourself suggested that the whole reason Enrico didn’t answer the door earlier is because he didn’t want to see me. If he knows I’m there what’s to keep him from hiding out again?”
“I didn’t say you had to call out to him. But you have to be there. I’m assuming that the reason you have these keys is that this was, until recently, your home. You can argue that you have a legal right to burst into this condo unannounced. Sophie and I can’t make that same claim, not unless we’re there with you, as your guests.”
Maria lowered the window farther and glared up at Anatoly. “No one is that paranoid! What’s the real reason you’re insisting I accompany you?”
“That is a real reason,” he said. A streetlight flickered above us as if struggling to stay awake. “Another real reason,” he went on, “is that I find your motives for hiring me questionable. You’re divorcing Enrico, so why are you so concerned with his well-being? Do you still have feelings for him or did you do something to him and now you want someone else to find him and clean up the mess…or even take the blame?”
“I came to you for help and now you’re accusing me of some kind of crime?” Maria shrieked. “I have never been so insulted! How dare you! You’re completely full of…” Maria shook her head violently, too angry to continue.
“I believe the word you’re looking for is chutzpah,” Anatoly said with a smirk. “Are you coming or should Sophie and I go home and leave you to stew in your Mustang?”
Maria let out something that was between a scoff and a growl before raising her window and thrusting open her door. She didn’t even bother to look at Anatoly or me as she marched to the entrance of the building and unlocked it. She walked in without holding the door open for us.
“What have you gotten us into?” I muttered.
“I got myself into this,” he countered as we followed Maria up three flights of stairs. “I take no responsibility for your decision to come.”
When we reached the top floor of the four-story building, we paused. From the look of it there were only two apartments on this floor, and, as promised, the music of Gabrieli could be heard coming out of one of them. Maria went up to that door and pressed her hand against the wood. “Now what?” she whispered. I started to raise my finger to my lips, but then realized that the volume of the music would allow us to whisper without the fear of being overheard.
“Do you expect me to break through the chain lock for you?” Maria went on.
Instead of answering, Anatoly reached into his pocket and took out a small black object that looked like the kind of magnifying-glass used by jewelers. “What’s that for?” I asked.
“See for yourself.” He gestured for Maria to step aside and then put the object against the peephole. Silently, he invited me to look through it. Upon doing so I discovered that the device reversed the optics of a peephole, making it possible to look into the condo in the same way someone inside would have looked out into the hall. Little gizmos like that always delighted me. It was so very 007.
Anatoly smiled at my obvious pleasure and then took a turn looking through it.
“Well?” Maria asked in the same whispered hiss she had used before. “What do you see?”
“A parrot.”
Maria squeezed her eyes shut in an expression of disgust. “I hate that damn bird. Enrico’s trained it to torment me, you know. He used to instruct it to steal my soy nuts.”
I did a quick double take. “You’re not serious.”
“This would be a good time to open the door,” Anatoly said, locking eyes with Maria.
“I told you, the chain lock is on.”
“It was on,” Anatoly corrected. “There’s no reason to assume that’s still the case, unless you know something you’re not telling us.”
Maria’s glare became a little more venomous. In one swift movement she stuck her key in the lock and pushed the door open…or at least she opened it as much as possible, considering that the chain really was on.
“See?” she said with an I-told-you-so smirk. Anatoly shrugged and reached into the pocket of his jacket again. This time he took out a thin rectangular mirror that was roughly as long as his palm. He leaned against the doorjamb and stuck the mirror through the slit in the door.
“Can you see anything beyond the bird?” I asked.
“Not much—a sofa, the television. I can see the doorway leading to the kitchen and…uh-oh.”
“Uh-oh?” Maria and I said at the same time. We were no longer whispering.
Anatoly withdrew the mirror and stood up. “Does Enrico usually take naps on the kitchen floor?”
“Of course not!” Maria replied. “Why do…My God, is he lying on the floor of the kitchen?”
Without waiting for Anatoly to answer she began to pound on the door. “Enrico! Enrico, answer me! This isn’t funny anymore. Open this door!” Then, she pursed her lips and whistled. “Giovanni, sweetie, open door. Open door, Giovanni.”
I looked at Anatoly. “Is she talking to the parrot?”
Anatoly didn’t answer. Instead he pushed Maria out of the way, took three steps back and in a rush of motion broke the chain on his first try.
Maria rushed past him to the kitchen where, from the front door you could see the loafered feet of a man lying on his back. For a split second I hoped that maybe Enrico was just passed out in a drunken stupor, but Maria’s scream put an end to my optimism. Anatoly went to her and when I heard him swear loudly in Russian I knew we had trouble.
Maria let out another penetrating scream and a man from the condo next door stepped out into the hall. “What’s going on?” he asked. A wet mat of gray hair clung to his scalp as he tightened the belt of his terry-cloth robe.
“Nothing good,” I said quietly. I reluctantly stepped in and, passing the impassive parrot, walked into the kitchen. Maria was hysterical and Anatoly was trying to drag her away from what was on the floor.
It was a body, presumably the body of Enrico. There was little question that he was dead. No one could lose that much blood and live. And the way that it caked on his throat, bringing grim attention to the gash that had been made there—it was too sick. And there was the murder weapon, lying beside him caked in the blood it had spilled. Not a knife, but an honest-to-God scythe. The kind that you would expect someone to carry while dressed up like the grim reaper on Halloween, except this blade wasn’t plastic. Above the globs of crusted red blood there was the unmistakable gleam of real steel.
“Maria, we have to call the police,” Anatoly was saying as he struggled not to slip in the pool of body fluids on the floor. “We don’t want to disturb the crime scene any more than we already have.” His hands were around her waist and, considering his significantly bigger size, he should have been able to pull her away easily. But Maria was flailing like a panicked swimmer on the verge of drowning. She was knocking things off the counter, a large bowl of washed arugola, a plate of half-made hors d’oeuvres, it all fell into the blood as she clamored to get free. I stepped around Enrico and grabbed one of her arms just as she reached back in an attempt to claw at Anatoly’s face.
“Let me go!” she cried. “I have to help him!”
“You can’t,” Anatoly breathed as he finally got a firmer hold of her and together we dragged her out of the room. “All you can do is calm down and call the police.”
She tried to claw at him again, but he managed to pin her to the floor. “Call the police, Sophie.”
“I think someone else may have already done that.” I gestured to the staircase and now, in addition to the little man still standing in his bathrobe, there was a small collection of people standing in the stairwell, looking aghast. “Did any of you call the police?” I asked.
It was a moment before anyone spoke, but eventually an elderly woman who couldn’t have weighed more than ninety-five pounds, stepped forward with her hands on her hips. “Why is your friend assaulting that poor woman?” she asked.
“I’m not assaulting her,” Anatoly yelled back. “I’m trying to keep her from messing up the crime scene. Now, if it hasn’t been done already, call the damn police!” But he clipped the last word short and his head immediately jerked up and he stared across the apartment.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
