back for me in the morning. Nine o'clock will be fine."
The men retreated out the apartment door, both looking mildly scandalized. But T.S. and Lilah were too exhausted to notice. She loosened his shirt for him and he breathed in huge, even gulps of air. The room grew still around him. But just when he thought that he was safe at last, a tiny spark of burning sensation flamed into life at the pit of his stomach and spread rapidly through his abdomen.
"Oh, no." He struggled upright and stumbled to his feet. "I think I'm going to be sick again." He staggered down the hall, searching out his bathroom, his lovely, clean bathroom where he could be alone. Lilah gently guided him and watched anxiously as he lurched inside and dropped to his knees, hunched over the toilet bowl.
Gently, she closed the door and stood waiting across the narrow hallway where she could hear him if he cried out. He would be all right now, she thought vaguely, and he would certainly want to be alone.
Only T.S. wasn't alone. As he began to heave and an urgent need to void himself of poison overcame him, two tiny heads poked their way out of the small swinging door that was inset into the larger bathroom closet door. Brenda and Eddie watched cautiously as their master made strange retching sounds into the toilet bowl. They inched forward, tails switching cautiously, and sniffed delicately at his trouser legs. Unsure of their findings, they withdrew in silence to watch. Their creature was very sick indeed.
By the time Auntie Lil had been rescued from Homefront by a distracted Annie, it had been too late to track down Herbert for any fresh information. Not even she would tempt the dark city streets at two in the morning. She had, instead, returned home in a glum mood, troubled both by the thought that someone had died in the Hudson River that day and by the many unanswered phone calls she'd made to her nephew. There had to be something else she could do.
She went to bed in a bad mood and rose in a worse one. Half a pot of black coffee did little to improve Auntie Lil's outlook. She sat by the phone, increasingly frustrated, as she dialed without success. Herbert was not home yet—he was probably still overseeing surveillance at Emily's—and Theodore refused to answer his phone. She'd left dozens of unanswered messages and would be damned if she'd leave one more.
She took her anger out on the operator at New York Newsday, who kept insisting that Margo McGregor was not in. When Auntie Lil persisted, the canny woman recognized her voice from the day before and launched into an impromptu lecture on how low it was to pretend to be someone's mother.
"Miss McGregor's mother died last year, I'll have you know," the woman informed her importantly. "It was very awkward when I mentioned that you had called."
"I didn't say where I was calling from," Auntie Lil pointed out in desperation, but the operator had already cut the connection.
That did it. Another hour like this and the inactivity might actually drive her to start cleaning up the apartment. She dressed and made her way back to midtown, arriving near Times Square just after ten. If the police couldn't solve the mystery of Emily's building, she had decided, she'd just have to do it herself. After that, she'd return to the soup kitchen and snoop around some more.
If Herbert was on duty, he remained well hidden as she marched firmly up the front steps of Emily's building and peered boldly in the front door. She'd gotten in once before and she could do it again. Unfortunately, mid-morning was a bad time to be lurking around a building full of actors and night people. Everyone was probably still in bed and no one was likely to be coming or going. After five minutes of waiting—a near record for Auntie Lil—she took matters into her own hands. Rummaging through her enormous pocketbook, she found several credit cards jumbled among a tangle of handkerchiefs and loose jewelry at the bottom. She contemplated which one to use and decided to sacrifice her Macy's charge card to the cause.
She wasn't quite sure how to go about it. She checked the street for pedestrians and, other than a pair of figures far up the block, no one was about. She inserted the hard plastic into the doorjamb and began to jimmy it