82 Desire

silencer. Now everyone was doing it.
    Maybe that accounted for the surprised look on the dead man’s face—if you saw a potato, you had to fear the worst.
    Skip turned to Denton, the coroner’s deputy. “Check his pockets, will you? I want to know if it’s Allred—the guy who belongs here.”
    Denton pulled on gloves, knelt, and turned out the pockets, unearthing a wallet with driver’s license and credit cards.
    “Yep. Seems to be.”
    The papers proved nothing, of course, but they were a good indication. “Do you have a home address?”
    “Uh-huh. Louisa. Not a great neighborhood.”
    Gottschalk said, “You want all this paper put in boxes?”
    She sighed. “Yeah, I guess so.”
    She wondered if she was actually going to get through them. “I’d like to look at his Rolodex—could you dust it and pass it over?”
    She couldn’t leave the crime scene until the body had—she might as well do something to amuse herself.
    She looked up Fortier first, just to satisfy her curiosity, but neither Bebe nor Russell was in the file. In fact, there wasn’t a single name she recognized except that of Talba Wallis, a young lady she wanted to see almost immediately.
    She called her. “I need to see you at my office this afternoon—say at three o’clock.”
    “Now look. Just because I was nice enough to—”
    “Ms. Wallis. Be there.” Skip hung up.
    When they had taken the body, she canvassed the neighbors.
    No one had heard the shot, though two admitted hearing a crazy woman yell for help the morning before.
    One of them shrugged. “I couldn’t go look. I was on the phone.”
    The second had the grace to look frightened, if not contrite. “I was alone. I locked the door until it stopped.”
    “Did you call the police?”
    “Yes. I dialed 911 and got a busy signal.”
    Maybe she had and maybe she hadn’t. Today was Saturday and hardly anyone was working. Probably many more people had heard Talba screaming. Skip wondered if any of them had called the police.
    Next she headed for Louisa, a block-by-block street, in terms of safety and degree of gentrification. Gene Allred’s block wasn’t one of the good ones. It was altogether an odd place for a white man to live, but maybe he’d won it in a poker game.
    It was a double shotgun, so run-down it surely qualified as blighted property. A black woman stared out one side, through a nearly rusted screen door. “You want Mist’ Allred?”
    “Does he live here?”
    “Yes’m.”
    “Anybody live with him?”
    “Nah. Had a wife. She left.”
    “Seen anybody around here lately?”
    At this, the woman hunched her shoulders, hooded her eyes, even, it seemed, narrowed her nostrils. Someone had most certainly been around. She said: “Nooo. Ain’ seen nobody.”
    “Come on, now. Who’d you see? This is a murder investigation.”
    The woman’s eyes widened. “Mist’ Allred dead? Wonder what happen now.” She looked frightened.
    Skip stared at her, uncomprehending, until it finally came to her. “Did he own the building? Is Allred your landlord?”
    “Was. He was my landlord.”
    She turned and disappeared into the house. Skip tackled the other side. It came as no surprise that it was as thoroughly ransacked as Allred’s office. It stank of mildew and dirty dishes left in the sink. The furniture was beyond secondhand—probably picked up at dumps. The place must have been numbingly depressing before the ransacking.
    What sort of person could Allred have been, to look so neat and live so pathetically? A drunk, perhaps. Someone who was long past caring. Or a loner, someone unable to connect with people or things, just doing his job and muddling through. Maybe the other tenant could help some.
    The woman was older—sixty, perhaps—and rail-thin, with a white handkerchief tied around her hair. Probably she normally wore a wig, but couldn’t be bothered on a Saturday morning. Up close, Skip saw that energy crackled from her. She was obviously much sharper than Skip had first thought—she might be quite a good witness if she could be persuaded to talk.
    “I’m Detective Skip Langdon.” Skip produced her badge and offered to shake hands, but the woman declined. Skip waited, but no introduction was forthcoming. “May I ask who you are?”
    “I’m Mist’ Allred tenant. Miz Smith.”
    “Mrs. Smith. If you didn’t see anything, you must have heard something—that place looks like a war zone.”
    “Oh, yes’m. You didn’t ax nothin’ about