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  Still reeling from being correct, I leaned over to look closely at the photograph again. “A really fat bird?” I asked.

  Duffy clicked his tongue. “Think, Rachel. Look at the other trees and even the other branches on that tree. None of them appears in any way abnormal. Some of the branches are thinner and would have been weaker than the one in question, so we can rule out damage from a storm or any phenomenon that would have affected them all equally. So what can we surmise from that?”

  My mind was focused on the idea that I’d never use the word surmise for anyone but Duffy in dialogue, so I wasn’t going to have a satisfactory answer for him. “Don’t try to teach me, Duffy. Just tell me what I’m looking at.”

  “It’s the angle and the kind of damage done.” Duffy was still leading me to an answer instead of just giving it to me. He would have made a really annoying college professor, but his students might have had a chance to learn something. “What does that kind of damage to a healthy branch?”

  Okay, in order to make this scene end in time for the following Thanksgiving, I would have to think harder. This was about Duffy’s claim that Damien Mosley (or whoever was at the bottom of the ditch) had been murdered. It wasn’t about trees or their nature, of which I knew nothing. If I were writing this scene and wanted to prove a murder had been committed, what would I use to break a tree branch in a crime scene photograph?

  “A bullet?” I said.

  For a moment, I thought Duffy might actually kiss me on the cheek, but he managed to suppress the impulse. He did clap his hands and point at me. “Exactly,” he said. “There would be no point in going to check the scene again now because it has been years, but the photograph indicates that someone shot from a low angle toward a high angle, as if trying to hit someone’s head from a supine position, missed his target, and instead hit a tree branch quite a distance away.”

  That sounded like an enormous leap of logic to me, but Duffy is always right about this stuff, and besides, I had clearly guessed correctly, so it was really my victory. “So you think someone tried to shoot Damien, missed, and then instead of taking another shot, he pushed the guy over a cliff?”

  “That is one possibility. Another is that a second bullet actually lodged in Damien’s skull, and because of the extensive damage done by the rock on which he landed, the medical examiner did not think to look or did not find a remnant if the bullet passed through. It seemed obvious enough that Damien had fallen and hit his head. There was no reason to search for another cause of death.”

  It sounded so logical when he said it. If I had written something that preposterous or suggested a county ME was that incompetent, my editor would be all over me with notes about implausibility, and Sol would be right. As Joseph Mankiewicz, the writer and director of All About Eve, once said, “The difference between life and the movies is that a script has to make sense, and life doesn’t.”

  “So what do you think you should do about it?” I said. “Do you think the North Bergen cops will push for an exhumation based on that picture?” He hadn’t mentioned any of the others, and I didn’t want to look at them.

  “I’m not sure,” Duffy admitted. “What I see as clear evidence, they might view as speculation. I’d like to gather more information.” That sounded vaguely ominous.

  “I’m not going to the scene of the crime so you can try to dig five-year-old bullets out of a tree, Duffy. I have fictional things to make up for you to do.” Might as well embrace the crazy.

  He spread his hands to deflect any misunderstanding. “I have no intention of asking you to do that.”

  “Good.” But I knew something else was coming. It was in his tone.

  “What I would ask is that you join me in a visit to Damien Mosley’s apartment in West New York,” Duffy said.

  I shook my head reflexively. “No, not this time. Whatever you think you can find in an apartment that nobody’s lived in for years is your problem, Duffy. I have to write a thousand words today, and that means I have to get my head in the game. I don’t have time to traipse out to West New York with you. I wouldn’t be any help, anyway.”

  “I disagree. You have a good eye for abnormality that can be quite useful.”

  I didn’t point out that I felt my eye for abnormality was the quality that helped me create Duffy Madison. That would have been cruel, if accurate. I had been looking for a character who was not like everybody else, and Duffy was clearly that.

  “You know what you’re looking for,” I encouraged him. “You brought that picture of the bent tree branch. I never would have thought to look at that if you hadn’t led me to it. Trust your talents, Duffy.”

  He stood up and started gathering the photographs from my dining room table. “Of course,” he said quietly. “I understand. You are a busy woman, and you have obligations.” He slid the pictures back into the envelope and sealed it. “It’s just that I am used to working with a partner, and Ben is not able to fill that role for me on this case. It feels a little odd, that’s all. Sorry to trouble you.”

  If you think fictional characters can’t successfully employ passive aggression, you won’t ever understand why I found myself in Duffy’s car heading to West New York. But I made him promise I would be back by five. I needed to write the thousand words and be ready to go by seven.

  I had a date.

  Chapter 15

  “This building was extensively renovated as the area became more valuable in the real estate market,” Duffy explained. “It is an eighty-year-old structure, but you would never know that now.”

  What he said was true: The six-story apartment building where Damien Mosley had apparently never actually lived had been given an extensive makeover, which was not terribly surprising. The Hudson River banks on the New Jersey side, now known in local real estate jargon as “The Gold Coast,” offered views of the Manhattan skyline that people in Manhattan couldn’t get, so those willing to defile themselves to the point of living in the Garden State were happy to pay the outrageous prices for up-and-coming areas like this one, which was just starting to gentrify.

  It was a lovely building now, true to its heritage but clean and inviting. The brick was old but had clearly been very recently steamed to bring out its color. The windows were gleaming in the afternoon sun. The doorman at the front entrance looked at us with an air of consternation. No doubt we were ruining the ambience.

  Duffy walked up to him. “I am a consultant investigator for the county prosecutor’s office,” he said. It was true, but not in this county. I assumed Duffy saw no need to include that piece of information. “My associate and I would appreciate it if you would allow us entrance to an apartment in this building where we believe a crime has been committed.”

  The doorman was wearing a long coat, thankfully not wool, and a matching hat that were supposed to make him seem almost regal, or at least verging on butler-quality servant. Instead, he looked mostly like the guy on the label of Beefeater Gin, and his accent was pure Bayonne.

  “You got ID?” he asked. “Anybody could walk up here and say they’re investigating for the county. Let’s see a badge.”

  That was a problem since Duffy was a consultant and not an officer of the county, especially not this one. “Consultants are not given badges, but I have a business card,” Duffy said, reaching into his pocket for his wallet.

  The doorman held up a hand. “Don’t bother. You can get business cards from VistaPrint for free. Doesn’t mean anything.” He was a very good doorman, I thought. If I lived in this building, I’d give him an excellent tip at Christmas time. And if I lived in this building, I could probably afford it.

  “I can give you the name of a contact at the prosecutor’s office to vouch for my credentials,” Duffy said, still pulling out his wallet. He extracted a business card from his wallet.

  And handed it to the man wrapped in a twenty-dollar bill.

  There was no acknowledgment of the bribe from the doorman at all. He shoved it into his coat pocket befor
e a resident of the building could come out and see him compromising her security for the price of a light dinner at TGI Friday’s. “That won’t be necessary, sir,” he said with a sudden change in inflection. “Which apartment is in question?”

  My hypothetical tip declined by half.

  “Apartment Four-D,” Duffy said. “Leased to Mrs. Dorothy Mosley.”

  The doorman’s eyes registered quick surprise. “Oh, that one,” he said. “Nobody’s lived there for years.” He opened the front door for us. “Third door on the right out of the elevator.”

  We had almost passed him in the doorway when I swear I heard him mumble to himself, “Could have gotten into that one for ten bucks.”

  Duffy Madison stifled a laugh.

  We didn’t talk while riding the elevator—and thank goodness this old structure had one, because they weren’t necessarily mandatory by law in those days—but with the key the doorman had given us, we got into the apartment without any trouble at all.

  The unit itself had probably been upgraded when the building went co-op, so the walls were clean and straight. They had been painted probably in the past few years but not in the past six months.

  For a place that hadn’t been occupied for years, it was not as dusty and depressing as one (me) might think. Dorothy must have had an agreement with someone to come in and clean periodically, or it would have been obvious, and it wasn’t.

  But one glance around the place told you there had been no occupant for a while, definitely. Everything was left in place. There were no dishes in the sink or in a drainer next to the sink. There was no newspaper open to the crossword puzzle. There were no cords for chargers plugged into the outlets, waiting for a smartphone that would undoubtedly come home dead as a doornail.

  That struck me. “Did anybody ever find Damien’s cell phone?” I asked Duffy, who had started opening kitchen cabinets, which had dishes and cooking implements but no packages of food, perishable or otherwise.

  “Not that I know of,” he answered. “It wasn’t in the file. No wallet was found. I asked about the car at the scene of what North Bergen insists on calling the ‘accident,’ and they said there was no registration in the glove compartment, but the license plate and VIN number indicate it was Damien Mosley’s car. It was never reported missing or stolen because Damien lay dead at the bottom of the drop. It was finally towed from the spot to a police pound three weeks after the incident and sold at auction a year later. It never occurred to them it was there because its owner was the John Doe they were trying to identify.”

  “You’d think that would be their first assumption,” I said while opening a closet in the hallway. Cleaning supplies, brooms, a vacuum cleaner. Nothing personal and nothing anyone would have been using recently except whoever was doing the periodic straightening up.

  “Yes, normally,” Duffy said. “But five years ago, when a body came back with no fingerprints on file, the obvious move would have been to go to dental records. But it seems Damien Mosley never had so much as a cavity in his life. His teeth were in perfect shape. Dentists don’t autograph their work, so they had no idea where to look. The car seemed a separate issue. No one in the department then put two and two together.”

  “What are we looking for?” I asked him. There was still time to get home and do some work before Ben came to pick me up. I’d asked Paula, and she laughed and assured me this was a date. I had no doubt she would lay out clothes on my bed for me to wear tonight. Paula dates more than I do, but then the pope probably dates more than I do.

  “Whatever seems unusual,” was the reply. Which didn’t help at all.

  I walked slowly toward what clearly were the bedrooms. There were two, and that made me wonder more about how much this place must have cost to buy than who might have slept there. This is the toll of living in a high-rent area. Of course I own my house, or the bank does, but in my business, you’re never more than one contract away from being unemployed.

  “I can’t tell from looking around whether this place was Dorothy’s or Damien’s,” I said a little louder. “It’s almost completely impersonal.”

  “But not totally abandoned,” Duffy said. “Someone lived here, but they did not live here recently. And it’s not like it was being readied to sell; it would look more generic than this. There are paintings on the wall. There are area rugs. It’s just that nothing has been used in a while.”

  “Why would someone keep a place that could sell for a lot of money off the market if they weren’t living here?” I asked him. I looked in the bathroom, first door on the right. Clean. Perfect. Like a hotel room. There were things in the medicine cabinet but no prescriptions that would have named labels.

  “That is an excellent question,” Duffy admitted. “The assumption must be that it was expected someone would be living here, but those plans went awry. And once I can get some bank records on Damien Mosley or his mother, it might be possible to determine who created the trust to cover the maintenance fees here after the mortgage was paid off, and how long it is instructed to do so.”

  I walked into the first bedroom, clearly the master, which required that I yell out to Duffy. “Why can’t you find Dorothy Mosley?” I asked. “She didn’t vanish like her son, did she?”

  “Mrs. Mosley has proven to be more elusive than I might have anticipated,” he called in to me. “But it is more difficult to do research when one does not have the authority of the government behind him. I am working in foreign territory for me, as you must know. I’ve never investigated privately, and Ben can’t do much to help.”

  The bedroom was very neat but wasn’t being obnoxious about it. There was a chenille bedspread, white, on the queen-size mattress set in a white wooden frame with a matching headboard that incorporated two shelves, one above each pillow. The shelves held books that told me nothing about the person (or people) who slept here. Classics, nonfiction that ran mostly to biographies of American presidents, and some travel guides to places like Rome, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and Bali.

  “I think this place was decorated by Central Casting,” I told Duffy, assuming he could still hear me. “There’s no hint of personality.”

  “On the contrary,” he called in, which indicated my voice was carrying. “We are seeing a great deal of information about the person who lived here.”

  We were? I wasn’t seeing it. But then, it’s always been an advantage in this world to have been born fictional. It gave him observational powers that no real human could have. I knew Duffy would explain exactly what we were learning in excruciating detail later, so I didn’t ask the question now.

  The closet in the bedroom yielded a little more. There was clothing for a woman and probably not one old enough to be Damien Mosley’s mother, judging from the styles. Nothing flashy and not very much: black-and-gray pants, plain-white and light-gray blouses, buttoned up, no incredibly high heels, skirts. Enough clothing for exactly two days. Either she hadn’t owned very much, hadn’t kept it here, or there was a colossal unpaid bill for merchandise left unclaimed at a local dry cleaner.

  There was no hairbrush. No laundry (although that made sense, given the obvious cleaning service and the time elapsed). No obvious impulse purchases. No winter coat or outerwear of any kind. Was there a closet in the front room or the hallway where such things might be kept? Did she only live here during warm weather? It was like the idea of a woman resided here.

  Duffy appeared in the doorway. “What have you discovered?” You’ve got to love the guy: He assumed I had found stuff out and seemed almost annoyed that I hadn’t told him yet.

  “That I’m a lousy detective and you had no need to bring me here,” I said. “I write for a living, Duffy. I’m better at making things up than dealing with what actually exists. You can look around this room and see eighteen things that will give you insight into the woman whose apartment this is. I see a generic bedroom in a generic unit in a generic building. The conclusion I could draw is that it’s very clean here.”

 
“Very good,” he answered.

  Okay, so that was unexpected. “What do you mean, ‘very good’? I just told you I can’t draw any conclusions about the person who lived here, and you tell me that’s a plus?”

  Duffy walked in and looked around briefly. “Indeed. And you’re wrong. I can’t find eighteen things offering information in here. Only four.”

  That was four more than I’d noticed, but I teed up the question for him anyway. “Which four?” I asked.

  “The woman who lived here had very little ego, did not feel fluctuations in temperature, had no friends or family, and kept herself virtually cut off from the rest of the world. Or there is one other possibility.”

  Having become a straight-line machine, I asked, “What’s that?”

  “It’s more than likely she never lived here at all.”

  Chapter 16

  “So Duffy thinks this apartment was staged to make it look like someone lived there?” Ben Preston sat down at my dining room table and picked up a slice of pizza from the box I’d positioned between us.

  We’d decided to stay in and keep it very casual tonight because the last time we’d tried going out to dinner, we’d only been interrupted—by Duffy, of course—and it had felt a little weird. We knew each other a little better now, and besides, I’d had a couple of wearying days following the product of my imagination around on his errands and didn’t feel like trying too hard to impress anybody. Ben understood, so he showed up in jeans and a plain, clean blue T-shirt. I’d told him to imagine what he should wear and then dress one step below that. He’d followed orders very well.

  “Not exactly,” I answered after chewing up and swallowing my bite of the peppers-and-onions half of the pie. Ben had requested and gotten pepperoni, but I’m not a fan. “Duffy says someone definitely was living there, which he decided through some bizarre train of thought that wouldn’t make sense to a normal person. But he says that it’s meant to seem like Michelle Mosley lived there, but that she never did.”