“Yes? Or maybe Greenwich Village. Or Soho. I don’t know—folks call it different things depending on how fancy they want to seem.” She hitches her tote, nods toward a left turn just after a printshop and a little red corner café. “Okay, this is the address I have.”
The street is narrow, with a bodega and signs for an Italian social club. The buildings along here are mixed tenements and industrial businesses: a bakery, a carpentry workshop, two garages. Some of the fire escapes are folded down right onto the sidewalk. But street plantings—including some full-grown trees—make it into a nice neighborhood.
They reach a tenement, indistinguishable from the other tenements on the block. Nomi doesn’t try the front door, ducks through an old carriage entrance on the right. It leads through to an ugly communalgarden area with concrete pavers, a dried-up fountain, withered shrubs. At left, an open wooden door shows six shallow stairs leading into the tenement.
They arrive at a short, dark landing with two apartments opposite each other. Nomi can smell old drains, cooked vegetables, body odor: the scent of many people living in close proximity. These are the types of apartments where the bathtub is in the kitchen.
“Here goes nothing.” Nomi knocks on the left-hand door. No answer. She tries again. Still nada. She tries the door handle. No luck. “Shit.”
“If she’s not home, is that it?” Noone looks a little frustrated.
Nomi winces. “Okay, I heard that Janice hasn’t been at work the last few days, so I have a feeling ...”
She scrounges in her inside jacket pocket, feeling for pointed sharpness, and comes out with two slender metal filaments. She’s practiced a lot with these, mainly on Keil locks. This is a Kwikset, but it doesn’t look tough. Now she slips her tension wrench into the keyway, applies some light torque to the plug, rakes the pins gently ... There’s a click. She tries the handle again. This time, it gives.
She glances over her shoulder at Noone, her unstitched eyebrow raised. “Oh wow, looks like the door’s open.”
“Did you ... Did you just pick the lock?”
“Shut up, come on.”
This is the second time in three days she’s snuck into a stranger’s living room. Thankfully, there are no dead bodies in this one.
The apartment is three rooms—the living area, one cramped bedroom, and a kitchen with a bath, as predicted. Janice has worked hard to pretty things up: She’s hung nice curtains, polished the hardwood floors, kept the shelves and fixtures white to match the walls, added a few ferns. But it’s still a fairly down-market place.
“Stay by the door,” Nomi says quietly. “I want to look around.”
“Not much to see.”
“Noone, you’re great with corpses, but not so good with domestic details.” She points at signs he overlooked as she pulls on a pair of leather gloves. “Some small picture frames are gone from their spots on the walls, no keys on the hook by the door, no coat on the coat stand. And I’m not seeing a handbag anywhere. I think she’s split, but keep watch while I check.”
Noone returns to the door as Nomi searches the apartment. The bed is unmade, and a bunch of clothes are missing from the dresser. No jewelry, no makeup. Janice D’Addario is in the wind. Nomi checks old mail on the kitchen benchtop, but she only hits the jackpot when she looks through the wastebasket.
She goes back to Noone, holding her prize. “Okay, we’re done, let’s go.”
“We’re done?”
She shows him the matchbook and the flyer she found in the trash. Both display the same image: a pair of lips, open wide to show tonsils and teeth, done in a comic book style. “That’s the logo for Big Mouth—it’s a club up near West Fourteenth and Ninth. One of Lamonte’s.”
“You think Janice might be there?”
“I think Janice is covering her ass. She’s staying somewhere else, because she’s not an idiot. But she’s probably working shifts at Big Mouth so Lamonte knows she hasn’t flown the coop just yet.”
Noone examines the flyer. “How can you be sure she hasn’t just—”
“Not here,” Nomi interrupts. She takes back the flyer, shoves it and the matchbook into her tote. “I’ll explain later, but hanging around when you’ve broken into someone’s apartment is never good policy. Let’s go.”
Nomi locks the door behind them. Once they’re down the shallow steps and out of the building, she feels safer.
But as they walk through the courtyard, someone else arrives through the carriage entrance: a guy in his thirties, medium build on the shorter side, curly dark hair and glasses. He’s wearing polyestertrousers and a turtleneck under a brown corduroy jacket, carrying a large coffee to go, and Nomi recognizes him instantly.
She pinches the elbow of Noone’s peacoat and trains her eyes forward, voice low. “Keep walking.”
Nomi’s never mentioned anything to Noone about the guys she used to work with at Tenth Precinct, but something in her tone must send out alarm bells, because she feels him straighten. When they pass the guy wearing corduroy, and his voice behind them says, “Hey, hold it right there,” Noone has already positioned himself in front of her before they turn around.
“Can we help you?” Noone’s posture is relaxed, but his words are completely cold.
Nomi can see this going poorly, opts to defuse. “Nah, it’s okay, Detective Gaffney was just saying hello, weren’t you, Calvin?”
