Page 36 of Fade Out
“Yeah.”
“Can you call again so I can listen to the message?”
He thought about it for a long moment and then said, “Okay.” He dialed again and then handed me the phone.
“Hello. This is Winslow Porter,” he said. The way he pronounced his name was very grand. “I’ll be in Paris until early nineteen eighty-six. If you’re a friend of mine you’ve already got my number in France. If you’re not a friend of mine don’t bother to leave a message. I won’t call you back.”
I handed the phone back to Wally. It wasn’t a good idea to leave a message like that. It was like asking to be burglarized. Apparently, Mr. Porter had confidence in the building’s security. After just a few minutes with Wally, I didn’t have any.
“There are other entrances to the building, aren’t there?”
“Uh-huh.”
“What are they?”
“There’s a commercial plaza downstairs. Residents have an entrance to that.”
“And a loading dock?” I guessed.
Wally pointed at something in front of him. I stood on my tippy-toes and looked over the desk. Under a shelf were five TV screens hooked up to security cameras positioned all over the building. One watched the loading dock, another what looked like the entrance to the commercial plaza, two were trained on fire exits, and one watched the valets park cars.
“So, you watch TV all day?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Must get boring.”
He leaned forward. “I used to work the night shift. Two of the valets had a hooker come by and give them BJs. I called the police. Got them fired.” He seemed very proud of that, and more attentive than I would have thought.
I nodded. The loading dock was probably the best way into the building, but it was a two-person job: one to distract Wally, while another entered through the loading dock. Not something I could do on my own.
“So you’re on days now, Wally?”
“Kind of. Three to eleven. Monday through Friday.”
That suggested there were two other shifts during the week. They probably had two guys take care of the weekends with twelve-hour shifts. So, five, maybe six security guards. I suspected Rita had made her way past one of them.
“Thanks, Wally. You have a nice day,” I said, and walked out of the building. Winslow Porter’s apartment was going to have to wait. I needed to find out more before I worried about how to break into unit 3535.
Though I already had an idea how to do it.
* * *
The cab droppedme off in front of 2137 North Hudson. Andrew Happ’s house. It was Victorian with a gray stone façade, two-stories with a raised basement and ornate wooden stairs leading up to the first floor. It was topped with some green metal work. The house looked placid, as if to deny that there had been gunfire in front of it just the week before.
I walked over to the house just to the south of Happ’s. It also had stairs up to the first floor. This house was red brick though. I knocked on the front door. After just a moment, a small, attractive woman with her hair pulled back into a thick ponytail opened the door a crack. I could smell dinner cooking behind her, or rather dessert, something with chocolate. We’d met before, the sour look on her face attested to that.
“Do we have to do this? Do you know how many times I’ve talked to the police in the last week? Six. The last time was yesterday. All the questions were about you. They say you killed Ruby—I mean, Rita. Whatever.”
I decided not to ask to come inside. “They haven’t even proved that Rita’s dead.”
“They sounded pretty sure.”
“They found a box with a woman’s body. No hands, no head.”
“Jesus Christ.”
My beeper went off. I ignored it, saying, “They think it’s Rita. I disagree.”
