JM03 - Red Cat Read Online Free

what the hell did I know?

    David’s questions played over again in my head. Do you think I’m stupid? No, not stupid, David, not even close, but maybe a little crazy— maybe more than a little. What kind of person do you think I am? Twenty-four hours later I still had no answer. That too familiar face had become a mask, and those blue eyes had gone suddenly opaque.

    By the time I finished my hot chocolate and my browse through the newspaper, it was time to meet Victor Sossa.

    The wind had quickened a knot or two, and my coat might have been sewn from cheesecloth for all the good it did on my walk to Lispenard Street. My face was brittle when I stepped into the minimalist lobby of the building just off Church Street, and my eyes were full of grit. Victor Sossa was there, inspecting a tiny crack in the polished stone floor and waiting for me.

    Victor was somewhere in his fifties, a compact, muscular man with skin the color of light coffee. His face was wrinkled as a tobacco leaf, and his bald head was covered by a green knit Jets cap. His eyes were black and bright and skeptical. He looked at his watch and at me.

    “You March?” he said. I nodded. “You’re right on time.” Wherever his accent had originated, it was now mostly from the Bronx.

    Victor Sossa was the building’s nonresident manager— the super— and I’d gotten his name and number from the building’s managing agents. Victor and his crew tended to several properties in the neighborhood, all high-priced apartment houses converted a few decades ago from what had been warehouses and factories. Once upon a time, thirty or so years back, the building we were standing in had housed a textile company. More recently, on November 18— when Hendry’s was overflowing with rock stars— it was the spot where David and Wren had whiled away an afternoon. David could recall the address, and that the apartment was a large one-bedroom on the fourth floor, but he didn’t know the apartment number or its owner’s name. I was hoping Victor could help me out.

    I had a little story for Victor about investigating an auto accident that had occurred on the eighteenth, and about trying to trace someone who might have witnessed the whole thing from the window of a fourth-floor apartment. He listened politely and nodded, but I’m not sure if it was my story he believed, or my fifty dollars. Either way, he smiled and told me what I wanted to know.

    3

    It wasn’t quite three when I returned home, but already light was draining from the sky. Gray bars of cloud were stacking in the west and the sun looked like a patch of old snow. I paused in my apartment doorway. There was a long black coat slung across the back of my sofa and an open bottle of tonic water on the kitchen counter, next to a bottle of vodka, a paring knife, and three-quarters of a neatly quartered lime. There was a midnight-blue Kelly bag on my long oak table. I smelled Chanel and heard the shower running. Clare.

    I’d started seeing her again about six months back, after a long hiatus. Two years ago she’d decided that what passed for our relationship wasn’t particularly healthy, and that I wasn’t particularly fun, and I couldn’t argue with her. I hadn’t changed much since then, and certainly not for the better, so when Clare called me last July I could only assume that she’d revised her thinking on health and entertainment.

    I’d given her a key in October. It made things more convenient, but I still wasn’t used to it. Not that she ever dropped by unannounced; Clare was nothing if not a considerate guest, always calling first and always bringing a little something— orange juice and croissants in the morning, cheese and grapes in the afternoon, and on those evenings when her husband was out of town, cut flowers, takeout Indian food, and an overnight bag. So it wasn’t surprise that unnerved me so much as a long habit of solitude. I was still unaccustomed to opening the door on