He closed his eyes, dreaming of hole-in-the-wall restaurants and tightly packed cafes and little dance places with postage-stamp floors where you had to dance cheek-to-cheek or not at all. Elizabeth’s perfume: Chanel No. 5, bought once a year in minuscule bottles after much frantic saving, applied sparingly and only on very special occasions. Elizabeth’s clothes: silk and wool hiding an infinity of mysterious rustles. Elizabeth’s shoes: high-heeled but sturdy, making her seem taller and thinner than he wanted her to be. Gregor had to remind himself that those days hadn’t actually taken place in black and white.
He started drifting into sleep, and the dreams changed, in color and intensity. Elizabeth, Elizabeth, Elizabeth, he thought, and saw her growing older, into the woman he was married to. But not growing sick. In dreams like this, Elizabeth never got sick. She just got lovelier and lovelier, more and more perfect. Her hair got white and the skin on her face got impossibly soft. The polish she wore on her fingernails got paler.
He was just slipping into the best dream of all, when the phone rang. The phone was in the bedroom, but he had turned the ringer on high, to make sure he heard it no matter where he was in the apartment. When ringing, it sounded as shrill and crazy as a police whistle under his ear.
He sat up, brushed the hair out of his face, and waited. It rang on and on and on. He got off the couch and went into the bedroom.
“Stupid,” he said.
Then he picked up the receiver and listened to the sound of police sirens, whirring and screaming and choking in somebody else’s endless night.
3
“Gregor,” Jackman said, as soon as the noise had fallen off enough for him to say anything. “Listen. I’m at Engine House. I’ve sent a police car for you.” Gregor sat down on the bed and ran his hands through his hair again and made another stab at counting to ten. “What do you mean, you sent a police car? You can’t send a police car for me here. Everybody on the street will think I’m being arrested.”
“I’m not arresting you, Gregor.”
“I know that,” Gregor said.
“I’m just in a goddamned hurry. I told them to put the siren on. When they get there, just climb in back and let them bring your ass out to me.”
There was the sound of someone talking in the background, an urgent, excited voice just a little too indistinct for Gregor to hear. Jackman said, “Just a sec,” and stopped breathing into the phone. A moment later, he was back, swearing.
“Goddamned idiots,” he said. “Christ, Gregor, you can’t get anything done right any more. Not anything. They say it’s black people they’ve lowered the standards for, but let me tell you. They’re hiring white idiots, Gregor. They’re taking white people on this police force with IQs of twenty-nine.”
“Mr. Jackman,” Gregor said.
“Oh, stop with the Mr. Jackman. Come on out. The car’ll be there any minute.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” Jackman said. “You were right. I’ve got another body. She wasn’t a body when we came through the door, but she sure as hell is a body now.”
“Cordelia Hannaford?”
“Emma Hannaford,” Jackman said. “And you were right about something else. I’m being set up to believe she committed suicide out of remorse. And I do mean set up.”
“How?”
“For one thing, I’ve got a suicide note that’s not a suicide note.”
“John—”
“Gotta go,” Jackman said.
The connection was broken with a slam, making Gregor wince. He looked down at the slippers on his feet and sighed.
He wasn’t dressed. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t even awake.
And there was a police siren out there someplace, getting closer.
TWO
1
FOR SOME REASON—MAYBE because this was the second death—Gregor had expected the scene at Engine House to be more garish, more lurid, more melodramatic than the one he had walked into Christmas Eve. Instead, it was less. The day was dark, its sky carpeted in black storm clouds, its air full of snow and grit—but there was still enough light to see by. None of the vehicles parked on the circular turnaround at the bottom of the terrace steps had its lights on. Stacked together there, wearing none of their ordinary badges of emergency, they made Gregor think of the commuter lots that had sprung up all along the Main Line.
The car Jackman had sent for him had turned out not to be a regular police car, but a “transportation vehicle” meant to bring accused but possibly dangerous prisoners from jail to courthouse during a trial. There was a cage in the back, but only a single man in front. Gregor was able to ride in the passenger seat, like a normal person. After a while, he’d even managed to convince the driver to turn off the siren. Like most of Jackman’s lowest level footmen, this one was very young and scared to death of his boss. To make him see reason, Gregor had had to make the boy just as scared of him.