elevator occupied a corner of the building front. Both apartments' doors opened off the back wall and were situated side by side on the south side of the building. Loud music blared from behind one of the doors, making it impossible to tell whether the second apartment was occupied or not.
"What do we do now?" T.S. whispered, although talking softly was a moot point.
"What do you think we do?" Auntie Lil stepped up to the door of the silent apartment and firmly pressed the bell. No one answered. She pressed it again with equally unsuccessful results.
"No one's home. Time to go," T.S. declared with some relief.
"Don't be daft." Auntie Lil stared at him incredulously. "Of course no one's home. The occupant's dead."
"We don't know for a fact that she really lived here," T.S. reminded her.
"We will in a minute." Auntie Lil surveyed the door carefully. "Good God, it looks like Fort Knox." There were four supplemental locks on the door in addition to the regular deadbolt. Unfazed, Auntie Lil began to rummage through her gigantic pocketbook.
"You must be joking," T.S. said. "You can't pick any of those locks."
She produced a credit card from the depths of her bag. "I can try."
"It's not the right kind of lock," T.S. began, but Auntie Lil would hear none of it. She tried to slip the thin wafer of plastic between the doorjamb and the door, but a heavy metal strip prevented insertion.
"Damn!" Auntie Lil banged a fist against the door and froze. It had yielded an inch. "Theodore!" She pushed it again and it opened further. "It's not even locked. Four locks and not one of them is locked."
"I don't like this," T.S. said. "Isn't there usually a dead body on the other side when this happens in the movies?" He pushed up behind her and they opened the door cautiously, peering around the edge and making their way slowly inside.
There was no dead body inside. Only a dark and deserted studio apartment, devoid of any signs of life at all. The fold-out sofa bed's cushions had been pulled off and left heaped on the floor. Several tables had been swept bare, the contents scattered onto the floor in a jumble of magazines, cracked vases, upturned lamps and three-day-old newspapers.
Several picture frames had been toppled from a window sill and lay face down on the carpet. Auntie Lil picked them up—the glass was shattered and any photos that had been inside were gone. "Someone had to break these deliberately," she said, pretending to demonstrate. "They'd have had to crack the frames sharply against this edge of the window sill." A small pile of glass lay in a mound, proving her theory. "Why?"
Books were pulled from a small bookshelf against one wall and piled in careless heaps on the floor, pages mashed together or ripped. Even the refrigerator door hung open. The meager contents—a carton of milk, a dish of mold-covered pudding, three eggs and an opened can of now rotting pineapple chunks—no longer smelled fresh.
"It's been searched," T.S. whispered. "At least a couple of days ago. I wonder what they were looking for."
"Shut the front door," Auntie Lil whispered back.
"What?"
"Shut the door. I don't want anyone walking by and seeing us in here."
He obediently shut the door and fumbled for the light switch of a lamp mounted on the wall. Illumination only made the mess that much more depressing.
"The Eagle," T.S. said. "The man sitting beside her. He must have stolen her pocketbook and gotten her keys. The place has been robbed. He knew where she lived."
"It hasn't really been robbed," Auntie Lil said. She picked up a photo frame. "This is sterling silver. Why didn't he take it?" She searched among the piles of possessions strewn across the floor. "No jewelry left. Of course, she might not have had any. But here are some settings of real silver. And the television's still here. Look, here's some sort of handheld video game, still in the box." She held up a crumpled sheet of colorful paper and some ribbon. "It was a present and it's been unwrapped, but the burglar didn't take it. If it was a robber, he wasn't very thorough."
T.S. noticed a small bureau in the miniscule hallway leading to a tiny bathroom. Clothes had been pulled from the drawers and dangled down in multicolored strips. Old lady clothes. Out of style. Smelling musty.
"Here's the closet," Auntie Lil announced in a loud whisper. She poked her head inside and set to work