Pat said she had too much to do to come with us, so we set out alone. It wasn't too far, only about a dozen blocks, and I'd made sure my employer had eaten a good breakfast, so we arrived there in pretty good time. The front door of the spray-painted tenement building was unlocked.
My employer smiled as we climbed up the stairs to the second floor apartment. "You know the main problem with not having police?"
I shrugged.
"There's nobody to preserve the crime scene. It makes it a lot harder to reconstruct what happened." She smiled. "Sometimes."
She walked up to the apartment door and rapped on it with the head of her cane. After a moment, the door opened and a man looked at us curiously, then suddenly realized who we were. He glanced around behind him, probably realizing what a mess the place was. He wiped a hand on his jeans and held it out.
"I'm Leo," he said, shaking our hands, then he abruptly turned, motioning us into the apartment. "Please come in. Did Patricia send you, or are you--"
"Pat sent us," Jan said, stepping inside and looking around slowly. The living room, if that's what it was, looked like a particularly messy college dorm room. "We understand that people are blaming you for the death of your girlfriend. I'd like to investigate and find out the truth."
Leo nodded, looking around as if a place to sit down might suddenly appear. It didn't. "A girl gets hurt, people know the boyfriend is Suspect Number One, and plus, I know it looks like nobody else could have done it. But I know I didn't do anything."
Jan nodded. "Why don't you tell us what happened?"
Leo nodded. "Well, Freddy, he's my roommate, he was--"
She held up her hand. "I'm sorry to interrupt," she said, "but I'll talk to Freddy at some point. Why don't you just tell me what you remember, what happened to you?"
Leo shrugged wryly. "This will be short, then. I was asleep. Charlotte was out somewhere. I'd gone to bed around eleven, I guess. The next thing I know, there was a knock at the bedroom door. I was still half asleep, but I got to my feet and opened the door. It was a runner, and I could see Freddy behind her. I guess Freddy had let her into the apartment."
"The runner started to give me a message, but Freddy said, 'hey, man, what's that on your hand?' or something like that. I looked down, and I saw blood on my fingers. I guess I stepped back from the door, and then we saw her on the bed." He paused and wiped his eyes.
"Was the bedroom light on?" she asked.
He shook his head. "No, I was asleep. I saw her in the light from the other room."
She nodded. "What was the runner for? Who was the message from?"
He shrugged and looked down at the floor. "I never did find out. She split when she saw Charlotte's body, and I wasn't thinking that well. I didn't even wonder about it until the next day."
Jan Sleet looked around the room again, then looked at the closed door to the other room. "May I look at the bedroom?"
He moved quickly to open it. "Sure," he said. He reached in to turn on the light, then he stepped aside so we could go in.
It was a small bedroom, not unusual in any way, but much cleaner and more organized than the room we'd just come from. Clothes were stacked neatly in piles. there was a hamper for dirty laundry. A row of hooks on the wall held coats and jackets. There was a ceiling light, and the one lamp had a hand-painted shade.
The large mattress filled nearly half the room, and the crumpled bedclothes were the one thing in the room which wasn't neat and tidy. There were no chairs, so we continued to stand as my employer looked around. I could see her judging how the room would be illuminated with the lights out and the door to the other room open.
It took a moment for Leo to step into the room with us. "I'm sorry if this is upsetting," she said to him, "but I need you to tell me where the body was, where the coat was, where the knife was, everything."
He nodded. "Don't apologize," he said, "I appreciate that you're trying to help." He gestured at the bed. "She was lying there, on the right hand side of the bed. That was her side. I tend to sleep on the left side by habit, even when she's not there, so there was plenty of room for her to lie down without waking me up."
"How was she dressed?"
He shrugged. "Shirt, jeans, shoes. She hadn't taken her clothes off."
"Was that usual? Did she often go to bed with her clothes on?"
He shook his head. "Never. And she always took her shoes off in the house, even if she wasn't going to bed, unless it was really cold."
"Speaking of which, it's been getting pretty chilly at night at night. Was she wearing a coat when she went out?"
Leo looked around, then he went to a small pile of clothes in the corner and picked up a large, tweed overcoat. He held it out. "I'm sorry the place is a mess," he said. "She used to do the cleaning up, and I just haven't felt like it."
Jan Sleet nodded. "I completely understand." She took the coat and looked it over carefully, inside and out. "Where did she get this?" she asked. She reached into one of the pockets and her eyes narrowed. She didn't pull anything out, though, and I wondered what she had found.
He shrugged. "She's had it for a while. She might have found it, I really don't know."
Outside, I had an idea what was next. "Hospital?" I
asked.
She nodded absently, her mind far away. I wondered if she was going to start pretending she had solved it already.
a few questions