In the night room Page 0,31
coat hooks.
The odor had doubled and redoubled upon itself in the past few minutes; now it had become so intense that it stung the eyes.
Maggie groaned when she saw the damage.
Borca and Beck strolled around the loft, writing in their notebooks, examining the books, looking at everything they found curious.
“Don’t worry,” Maggie said. “I know a great cleaning service. They practically specialize in tiger piss.”
Borca had been eyeing her. “Where are you from, anyway?”
“Where do you think I’m from?” Maggie asked.
“Well, not from here. China or Japan, some Oriental country. Asian, you’re supposed to say now.”
“Actually, I was born in a small town in rural France.”
Borca was nonplussed by this information. “Uhhh . . . do you have any idea who might have done this? Did you see anyone enter or leave the building?”
“Mais non,” she said.
He turned to Tim. “Presumably, you can give us a description.”
“I can try. White male, about six feet tall, a hundred and eighty pounds. I have no idea how old he is. The guy kept getting older every time I looked at him.”
The policemen exchanged glances.
“Can you remember what he was wearing?”
“A gray sweatshirt with a hood. Blue jeans. Sneakers, I guess.”
“What do you mean, sir, he kept getting older every time you looked at him?” Beck asked.
“In the beginning, I thought he was a young guy, in his early forties, say.”
Beck and Borca, who were in their early thirties, glanced at each other again.
“But every time I looked at him after that, he seemed to be older. I mean, I saw wrinkles I hadn’t seen before.”
“We have his name,” Borca said. “Mr. Kohle won’t be hard to find.” He handed Tim a card, paused for a second, and gave another to Maggie. “Give me a call if you think of anything else. We’ll be back in touch when we locate your perp. He didn’t steal anything, did he?”
“Apart from my peace of mind?” Tim said.
“Look, it’s not so bad. Get a cleaning company in here, you’ll be good as new. All you lost was a couple of your own books.”
“But how did he get in?” Tim asked.
“When we find your guy, we’ll ask him,” Beck said.
“You should be hearing from us soon,” Borca said.
“Not to make any promises,” said Beck. “But this sort of stuff usually gets cleared up in a day or two.” Like Borca, he was having trouble not staring at beautiful little Maggie. Unlike his partner, he was no longer struggling with the impulse.
The elevator doors closed, and before Tim could say anything, Maggie said, “If I were Mrs. Officer Beck, I could live out on Long Island and give French lessons.”
“Marriage might not be what he had in mind,” Tim said.
“Dommage,” Maggie said. “Now let’s get up as much of that stuff as we can, okay?”
They mopped up what they could with paper towels, and when they ran out, they went to the deli for more. When eight rolls of Bounty and Brawny had been stuffed into a black plastic garbage bag, and the bag sealed up to keep in the stink, they brought out a mop and a bucket and washed the floor in front of the bookshelves, over and over, for half an hour. Tim sprinkled white wine and baking soda—an anodyne of his own invention—over the infected area and scrubbed that into the wood before rinsing it off. The ruined books went into another black bag.
“What do you think?” Maggie asked.
“I can still smell it.”
“Should I call the super-duper-A1 cleaning service?”
“Please do.”
Maggie floated away to the loft she shared with Michael Poole, leaving him attempting to ignore the lingering odor of feline urine, now compounded with the aroma of spilled chardonnay, while he summoned the courage to face his computer. He made himself a cup of peppermint tea. He removed a low-carb no-fat cookie from a container of puritan design and took both to his desk. A flashing little icon at the lower-right-hand corner of his screen informed him that he had received one or more e-mails. Not now, thanks, nope. Dutifully, he evoked his document, clicked to the last page he had written, and did his best to continue. His heroine was about to reach a great turning point in both the book and her life, and to discover the details that would bring breath, air, and light to the scene, Tim had to work with unalloyed concentration.
Over the next hour and a half, he succeeded in writing two paragraphs. The unseen e-mails ticked away