Chapelwood (The Borden Dispatches #2)(81)
“Ma’am.” He tipped his hat at Lizbeth. “Sir.” He bobbed his head at me.
“Can we help you?” she asked him. It was a silly question, but a sociable one, and I suppose she felt the need to say something.
He checked over his shoulder, saw no one, and whispered, “This is for Chief Eagan.” He slipped me a folded note.
“You’d like me to . . . deliver this to him? Is that what you mean?”
He shook his head. “No. I’m giving it to you because you’ve stood with him. Excuse me, and good afternoon to you both.” With that, he ducked back into the station.
I glanced at the note and tucked it into my vest pocket, and strolled away with Lizbeth at my side—as if our departure had not been interrupted.
“What is it?”
“An address,” I replied.
“Whose?”
“Let’s find out, shall we?”
Twenty minutes later we found ourselves at a flophouse on the south side of town. The district was seedy, but I’d seen far worse; and if Lizbeth was put off by it, she hid her revulsion quite admirably. The front face of the building was flat and made of wood siding, covered in peeling gray paint that might once have been the color of custard. Its windows were intact, if swollen with damp, and all of them were open.
No one greeted us or stopped us at the door, and the room number we’d been given was upstairs on the second level—so that’s where we went.
Lizbeth, being somewhat more nimble than I, scaled the steps more swiftly than I did. She reached the door first and stood before it, pausing to wait. Finally I joined her, and stood beside her—catching my breath. We listened to the sounds of men coughing, a couple fighting, a dog barking, and a badly maintained automobile chugging by . . . but that grew tedious in only a few seconds, so my companion reached for the knob and turned it.
The knob swiveled easily, and the catch released. Lizbeth lifted an eyebrow at me, then used her free hand to knock—loud enough to announce us, but not so loudly that anyone down the hall might ask us what we were doing.
“Hello?” she called. I did not join her, or offer to go first in any pseudo-chivalrous fashion. A woman knocking and saying hello was surely less threatening than a man of my size doing likewise, so let her take the lead.
No one answered. We looked both ways and saw no one to interfere, so we let ourselves inside with a slow creep forward . . . punctuated intermittently by Lizbeth’s continued efforts to make our presence known in a discreet, pleasant fashion.
Within moments, we stopped bothering with the civilized charade.
“Oh God,” she said. “This is Leonard Kincaid’s room.”
I swallowed hard, gazing at the smudged and dripped shape upon the wall, outlined in the rough shape of a hand-drawn cross. A day or so ago, it was red. Now it was rusty brown, and drawing flies. The room smelled exactly like it looked: dirty, and as if something had died there. “Well, we were asking after him, weren’t we? That nice patrolman must’ve overheard us.”
She withdrew a lavender handkerchief from a pocket and held it up over her nose. “How . . . thoughtful of him to send us here.”
“He was only trying to help, I’m sure.”
“I know, but . . . but . . . isn’t there someone who cleans this sort of thing? The landlord, if no one else. Wouldn’t you think?”
“But it only happened last night, or yesterday . . . I forget what the newspaper said. Perhaps the police forbade it, until their investigation was concluded. Besides, I can’t imagine anyone is beating down the door, hoping to land the living space for himself.”
“You say that as if the landlord has any intention of telling prospective tenants what occurred here.”
“Good point, madam. He’ll probably empty the place and throw a fresh coat of paint on the walls. It’ll hide both the blood and the odor. Well, while we’re here . . .” I returned to the front door and shut it quietly. I turned the dead bolt, not to prevent interruption, really—but to buy us time, in case of it. “Let’s not dally, but let’s be thorough. You never know what the police might have missed or ignored entirely.”
She went to his bed, which was made up as neat as anything you’d find in a hospital, and sat upon the edge while she went through his nightstand drawers.
As for me, I went to the desk pushed up against a wall, with a large slate board mounted above it. The board itself had been wiped clean. Resting on the tray at the bottom, I spied a large gray eraser chock-full of white dust, but whether the police had cleared away the chalk marks, or the killer himself . . . I couldn’t say. The desk’s top two drawers were empty, but the middle one on the left held a roll of old newspapers wrapped in a rubber band. Upon inspection, they were not entire periodicals—but clippings that were slapped together.
“Did you find something?” Lizbeth asked.
“For a moment, I thought so.” But the excerpts didn’t relate to the axe murders, for that would’ve been easy, wouldn’t it? “I appear to have been mistaken. It’s just a loose assortment of stories and advertisements, and if they’re related to one another in some way, I don’t see it offhand. There’s also . . . a small flask and two little glasses, another tome or two relevant to accounting, and half a pack of the office stationery he once used at work. How about you?”