Unlike the Whittier’s elegant, prewar brownstone, the building that housed Leesa Culver’s apartment was a postwar concrete block with crap security.
Eve considered the graffiti adorning it reasonably artistic and remarkably lacking in obscenities.
On street level, it stood beside a diner, called just that. A Diner advertised twenty-four-hour service. Something she imagined a woman in the victim’s line of work appreciated. On the other side, another post-Urbans building someone had faced with fake brick offered a street-level pair of retail spaces. One had a sign announcingFOR RENT, and the other housed something called the Witchery that had a lot of crystals hanging in the window.
Eve caught Peabody eyeing it.
“Don’t even think about it.”
“Too late, I already did.”
But with Eve, she walked to the doors of Leesa’s building, and waited for Eve to master in.
The lobby with its dingy walls and grimy floors offered a single elevator painted battleship gray. Eve barely glanced at it before pushing open the door to the stairwell.
She said, “Apartment 403.”
“Looser pants. Looser pants. Yours are really nice, by the way, but the jacket? That hits ult. I’m thinking about making myself one.”
The stairwell echoed with sounds of a crying baby, someone’s too-loud music, voices raised in a fight about making the month’s rent.
And it smelled like spoiled cabbage soaked in urine.
“Making a jacket?”
“A leather jacket. In my abso-mag-to-the-ult craft room. I just have to decide on the color.”
“If you make yourself a pink leather jacket, you’ll leave me no choice. I’ll have to kill you, but I can make sure you’re buried in it.”
“Good thing I’m thinking more classic and go-with-everything color. Not black, but maybe a gray with some blue undertones, or a deep brown or maybe a more coppery brown or—”
“This is your mind on the job?”
“It distracts me from four flights of stairs. But job-wise, maybe he—and it feels like a he—hired Culver before. Maybe she knew him from her work.”
“She wasn’t registered for female clients, so that reads male. Unless her killer didn’t like her spouse, lover, father, brother screwing an LC.”
“That also plays.”
“No ’link, no ID, no other jewelry on the body, and no money. LCs have to carry their registration and ID when they’re working.”
“Those would have been anachronistic with the pose, the painting.”
“That, and without a ’link we can’t know if she had any previous contact with the killer.”
She pushed open the door on four to a skinny hallway lined with doors of the same battleship gray as the elevator.
Up here, the lack of soundproofing allowed Eve to hear a woman in 404 shout: “Get up and get out, you lazy son of a bitch. I’m done! Do you hear me? Done!”
“Record on. Dallas and Peabody entering the apartment of Leesa Culver.”
She mastered into chaos.
The tiny space held a sagging two-cushion sofa wrapped in an ill-fitting red-and-gold cover and buried under clothes. Someone—she assumed Leesa—had tossed a couple of wigs, one black, one as red as the sofa, on the single chair.
Upside-down plastic crates made a kind of coffee table where several dishes piled. A tiny screen adorned the beige walls along with a couple of unframed posters. One of the Eiffel Tower, one of Big Ben.
A table barely bigger than a dinner plate and also piled with dishes, take-out containers, and a long-dead rose in a black vase had one chair. Currently serving as another depository for clothes.
