Page 33 of Take the Fall
“He wouldn’t say what was taken. Not down the phone.” He scowled at the windshield like it had let him down personally. “Kept telling me I had to come and see it for myself. That it wasn’t the kind of thing you said out loud on a line. Mr. Almeida. A grown man, being cryptic about a break-in.” He dragged a hand along his jaw. “So no. I don’t know what we’re walking into. Which is either very serious or very stupid, and I can’t tell which, and that’s somehow worse than knowing either way.”
“It’s not our line of work,” he went on, to the glass. “We do complex cases. Serious cases. We don’t do...” He stopped. Restarted. “We are significantly over-qualified for whatever this turns out to be.”
“You’re on partial duty.”
He turned in the seat. Slowly. “I know what I’m on.”
“Easy files. Short leash. Nothing that strains the review. That’s the condition, and you know it is.” I kept my voice even. “Murphy thought it was the funniest thing he’d heard all year.”
“Murphy practically pushed me out the door.” A pause. “Which I am choosing not to examine.”
“Mr. Almeida is a good man.”
He didn’t argue that. A moment passed. “He let me into my own home once when I’d lost the run of myself. That counts.”
“It does.”
He looked out at the street going by, the route we drove home every evening of our lives, and went quiet with it. The aggrieved thing was still there. Underneath it, something else had caught. Whatever it is in him that catches when there’s a scent of something, however absurd the something. He didn’t know I could see it. I’d have kept driving just to watch it happen.
“You didn’t have to come,” he said, at last.
“Your building is my building.”
“You have an actual caseload.”
“And I put it down for an afternoon.” I turned onto our street. “So stop whining. We’re in the same boat.”
“I’m not whining.”
“You’ve been in agony since we left the station.”
“That,” he said, with some dignity, “isprocessing.There’s a meaningful distinction.”
The building came up on the right. He looked at it through the glass and made a small wounded sound, like a man delivered to the door of the exact place he’d bribed God to get out of.
“Home,” he said, bleak. “I waited weeks to leave and I’m back before lunch. There’s a lesson in that and I refuse to learn it.”
I parked.
The building wore its usual face. Four stories of yellow brick gone the color of weak tea. The steps. The strip of garden the width of a coffin between them and the pavement.
Mr. Almeida was on the steps before I’d killed the engine.
I’d nodded to the man a hundred times and never once seen him like this. Square, careful, somewhere in his sixties, the ring of keys at his belt he touched like a man counting them. Today he was pink to the ears and wound so tight he had the inner door open and the two of us into the lobby before Carlson had finished buttoning his coat.
“Detective. You came. You actually came.” He looked between us, and something in him eased half a notch, just at the fact of it. “It is Gnorman. They have taken Gnorman again, and this time I do not stop calling until somebody comes.”
“Slow down for me, Mr. Almeida.” Carlson had gone still beside me, the loose afternoon falling off him. “Who’s Gnorman?”
“He has been part of this building eleven years.” The words came fast, backed up too long behind him to stop. “Eleven years, in the front, where every soul passes him coming home. And now somebody comes in the night, into my building, past my locks, and takes him. Keeps him a day. Two days. Brings him back in the dark, and then takes him again. And leaves these.” He drew a small folded stack from his shirt pocket, three sheets kept flat and squared, the kind of evidence a man makes himself when no one else will. “Notes. Every time, a note.”
I felt the afternoon change temperature.
Taken in the night. Kept. Brought back. Taken again, with notes left behind. I have stood in enough doorways to know the worst shape a few plain sentences can make, and Carlson got there a half-second ahead of me, because his voice came out flat and stripped of every joke in it.
“How old is he,” he said. “Does he live alone. Is there family we should be calling right now, before anything else.”
Mr. Almeida stopped. Looked at the two of us braced in front of him. Something crossed his face, a confusion, then a small dawning horror as he understood what we had understood.
