Red Light Read Free

half an hour. Let my
people work.
    While
they worked, Merci and Zamorra toured the apartment. It was an upscale interior
in a downscale building: good carpet, leather furniture, recessed lighting
aimed to dramatize good prints of Kahlo and O'Keeffe, Hockney and Basquiat.
Over the expansive black leather sofa in the living room hung a painting she'd
never seen before. It was ghostly but vibrant at the same time, a little too
crime-lab for an ocean-view room, in her opinion. It was a Rembrandt of someone
raising somebody else from the dead.
    Good
luck, she thought. She had tried it herself, twice.
    Zamorra
spoke occasionally into a tiny tape recorder. Merci, as always, wrote her
observations into a small notebook with a blue cover.
    She
wrote: Aubrey Whittaker, what did you do?
    But
between the contents of Aubrey's closet—provocative clothes and lots of
them—and the contents of a leather-bound calendar in her purse—a blizzard of
dates with a blizzard of people listed only by initials, coded notes in the
margins, phone numbers all over it—Merci came to suspect that Aubrey's
profession was one of the oldest. The 240-count box of condoms Zamorra found
beside a pair of thigh-high leather boots in the bottom of the closet seemed to
confirm it.
    Nineteen
and a real pro.
    The
bed was neatly made. There was a Bible open on the stand beside it. A crucifix
hung on one of the bedroom walls. And the damned evangelist on TV. Zamorra
stared at Merci. It hurt. Zamorra's newlywed bride had been diagnosed with a
brain tumor just two months ago; since that day his sharp face, once sly and
charming, had taken on an expression of increasingly resigned menace. She was
worried about him but didn't think she knew him well enough to question or
intrude. Good fences made good neighbors and Zamorra's fence seemed excellent:
He said almost nothing about anything. She was going to talk to a doctor about
him.
    "I
saw her yesterday," Zamorra said.
    Merci
felt her heart rise, settle. "Yesterday. Where?"
    "Some
of the vices were huddling with her at Pedro's. I took it she was a call girl
they were going to chum with. I sat at the counter, got a number four and
didn't ask."
    "Who
in vice?"
    "Kathy
Hulet and your tall blond friend."
    "Mike?"
    "Yeah.
Mike McNally."
    “I’Il
be damned."
    "We
all are."
    "It's
a matter of timing. Let's go see the neighbor."
    On her way out of
number 23 Merci asked Lynda Coiner if they'd found any brass. "None
yet," she said. "But if it's here, we will."

    The
neighbor was Alexander Coates. He lived downstairs, three units over, in
number 2. He wore baggy black nylon pants with elastic at the ankles, a
scoop-neck T-shirt and a red silk robe. Athletic shoes, new. Short gray hair in
a widow's peak, neat gray beard, wide gray eyes. He asked them to sit. In the
fireplace, gas flames huffed over ceramic logs. Wooden letters on the mantle
spelled NOEL. Merci smelled a familiar green aroma, masked by a floral spray.
    "I'm
devastated by this," he said. "Aubrey was such a sweet girl. So young
and good and ... oh, I guess you
could say mixed-up."
    "Let's
start with what you saw and heard," Merci suggested.
    Coates
looked at Zamorra. "Can I get you coffee, cocoa, anything?"
    "No."
    Coates
exhaled, looked into the fire, began. He was home alone tonight. Around
eight-thirty he heard footsteps on the wooden walkway above. He heard a knock
upstairs— Aubrey Whittaker's place, number 23. A moment later he heard the door
shut. Nothing of consequence, then, until a little after ten o'clock, when he
heard Aubrey Whittaker's door shut again, and footsteps going back down the
upper walkway in the direction from which they had come earlier.
    "How
could you tell her door from number twenty-four or twenty-two?" asked
Merci.
    "From
living here eighteen years. I've listened to lots of people come and go. You
know."
    Yes,
she did know. Because she could imagine Alexander Coates. You've waited for
lots of dates, she thought. You've waited and