“Oh, believe me, I’m well aware of that. But don’t you want to know who’s behind this? Don’t you want to end it once and for all? There’s so much I’ve learned if you’d just…”
“Just what? Spit it out!”
He sighed and looked away for a moment. When he turned back, he appeared calm once more. “Come to my house tomorrow. Give me two hours. If you still want to walk away from all this, fine.”
After work, Riza walked up to the fifth floor in her apartment building. She crept down the hallway, looking at the closed doors and wondering which apartment Sandy had fallen from. It revealed itself quickly enough. Yellow tape with the dark words ‘Crime Scene Do Not Cross’ stretched in front of the door to Apartment 503.
Riza tried the knob and found it locked.
Down the hall, a door opened and a man stepped out. He jumped when he saw Riza and dropped a cardboard box, sending junk mail, plastic bottles, and broken-down cardboard scattering across the hall.
Riza picked up a flattened box that had contained oatmeal packets and walked it to him.
He looked about sixty. His bald head had only a spattering of gray fluff around his ears. He wore spectacles over beady gray eyes, and his small mouth turned up at the sight of her.
“Thank you,” he said, taking the cardboard and returning it to his box. “Trying to get my recycling out before the guys come to pick it up. I missed them last week, hence the extra.” He held up the box as if in explanation.
“Sure, yeah. I live on the second floor. I’m Riza.”
He propped the box on his hip and extended his hand, cold and dry in her own rather slick, warm one. “Joel. What brings you up here?” His gaze drifted past her toward the blocked-off door.
“To be honest, curiosity. I’m a bit of an armchair detective, I read a lot of true crime, that kind of thing. I wondered about the woman who jumped.”
The man’s eyes widened, and he leaned toward Riza. “Someone pushed her. I told the police as much. I heard some yelling not ten minutes before it happened and then a terrible scream. She wasn’t alone in that apartment.”
“Who lives there?”
“No one. It’s been vacant since last fall. A guy and his daughter lived in 503 for a few years, Mark and Jenny, but they moved to Oklahoma for a job offer. That apartment and the one beyond are both empty.”
“Did you see anyone leave? The person who pushed her must have walked by your door, right?”
“Must have, but I was getting ready for work and didn’t so much as look through my peephole. Kickin’ myself for that now.”
“Yeah, I bet. Thanks, Joel. Have a good evening.” Riza gave him a one-handed salute and walked back to the stairwell.
Despite crawling into bed promptly at ten pm, Riza hadn’t slept a wink. She rolled over and stared at her alarm clock. The neon numbers clicked from eleven fifty-nine pm to midnight. She thought of the apartment three floors above her own. Had Sandy been in it at midnight the night before? Had Riza lain sleeping while her friend awaited her death just rooms away?
She sat up and got out of bed. Leaving her lights off, she slipped on laceless sneakers and opened her apartment door. Two steps into the hallway, she turned back. In a kitchen cupboard she grabbed a pocket flashlight, an old bank card, and a can of mace the same size as a spray deodorant. She’d bought a case of the mace canisters during a warehouse sale the year before and had tucked one in every crevice she could think of, including her glove box, nightstand, medicine cabinet and even her cubby at work.
The Pinewood Village Apartments were eerily quiet at midnight. The hall stood empty, lit by dim yellow bulbs at either end. A murky red light above the exit signs was the only illumination in the stairwell. Most of the residents used the elevator.
The carpet muffled Riza’s footfalls as she walked up three floors. When she creaked open the heavy metal stairwell door it groaned on its hinges, and Riza grimaced.
She moved toward the yellow tape covering 503. Drawing the bank card from her pocket and biting her lip, she slid the card into the slit between the door and the frame, wiggling it until she heard the lock click.
The apartment locks weren’t safe. She’d told the complex manager more than once and had eventually gotten approval to add a deadbolt to her own door. ‘Anyone with a credit card could bust in and slit your throat while you slept,’ she’d told Frank, the guy who managed the building. He’d paled and looked at her warily before signing a form that gave her permission to hire a locksmith.
Now she pushed the door open and slipped inside, easing the door shut behind her. Moonlight splashed across the cream carpeting. Riza pulled her flashlight from her pocket, but paused before turning it on. Something creaked near the bedroom, a sound ominously like a person taking a step.
She tiptoed to the wall and pressed her back against it, retrieving her can of mace and flipping back the little metal safety latch. As she watched, a shape emerged from the interior hallway, a man, his form dark and hulking. He didn’t see her, but paused at the edge of the living room as if he too sensed a presence in the apartment. He turned back and then froze, swinging around and clicking on a large bright flashlight. The beam hit Riza full in the eyes and she cried out, holding up the can of mace and spraying in the direction of the man’s face.
The man dropped the flashlight and howled in pain—“Fuck!”—as Riza threw her can of mace at him and lunged toward the door. She jerked the door open and fled into the hallway.
“Freeze, goddammit! Police. I will shoot.”
She’d almost reached the stairs when his words registered. Hands on the heavy door, she froze, and slowly lifted them above her.
5
Riza sat in the interrogation room for more than an hour, her head lolling on her hands. She’d be worthless at work the following day.
The door opened and a man strode in, jerked out a metal chair and sat down. His face was red and puffy, his eyes swollen, the surrounding skin shining like an overripe tomato. He glared at her, lacing his fingers on the table.
“Rizza Marsh?”
“Reeza.”
“Reeza—got it. I’m Detective Howe. You might remember me as the guy you maced an hour ago. Care to tell me what you were doing in Apartment 503 at the Pinewood Village Apartments?” He flipped open a notebook and wrote her name with such force he tore a hole in the page and had to rip it out and start over.
Riza’s mind raced, struggling to remember the story she’d concocted during her time in the police station. It had all seemed simple before the angry man with the red-rimmed eyes stormed in to question her.
“I live on the second floor in the building, apartment 208,” she started. “I thought I heard something and went to investigate.” The story was flimsy. Out loud, it sounded even more unbelievable than it had in her head.
“Three floors above you? You must have superhuman hearing.”
“Not three floors above me. I just… I heard someone outside. I thought maybe someone jimmied their way into the building. I walked each floor and then ended up on the fifth.”
“And decided to credit-card your way into an apartment that just happened to be a crime scene?”