The Temporary Detective

Chapter Thirteen

By the time Monday morning rolled around, Isobel was exhausted. After rejecting one apartment the size of a walk-in closet, another with room for only one bed (although Isobel was pleased at the thought of rooming with Delphi, she didn't exactly want to sleep with her), and a third whose eat-in kitchen was undermined by suspiciously chewed-up baseboard moldings, she and Delphi had finally taken a sublet in Hell's Kitchen. It cost more than either of them had budgeted, but it was too good to pass up: an L-shaped studio with a galley kitchen on the fourth floor of a brownstone. It had two large windows overlooking a weedy courtyard and somebody's rusting Hibachi, but more importantly, it was in midtown, convenient to all the audition studios.

After his callback for Two by Two, Sunil had taken them first to the flea market and then to the giant Salvation Army store on Forty-sixth Street, where he proved to be an expert haggler. With his help, they came away with a barely-used futon and frame, an almost-new air mattress, a small table with two chairs, two bookshelves, a filing cabinet, and assorted pots, pans and dishes, all for three hundred and fifty dollars. It had taken Isobel and Delphi all of Sunday to move, and with Sunil's help, they'd unpacked, organized, and rearranged the furniture until late.

Isobel had trouble falling asleep in her new surroundings. When she finally nodded off around two, she dreamed that they were still apartment hunting, but Doreen kept turning up dead in every bathroom. After a few hours of fitful slumber, Isobel was awakened at six by what sounded like a nuclear apocalypse but turned out to be garbage trucks, and that was the end of her night.

Now, armed with the largest coffee money could buy, Isobel settled at her desk at InterBank Switzerland and, since nobody was looking, put her head down. Her thoughts drifted back to the conversation the night before that had precipitated her bad dreams.

"Do you think the murder was premeditated or spontaneous?" Sunil had asked, wiping down their new kitchen cabinets.

Delphi had looked up from arranging her scripts alphabetically on one of the bookshelves. "Does it matter?"

"If it was a cold-blooded, calculated murder, Isobel is marginally safer than if it's somebody with a hair-trigger temper who might flip out if she misplaces a comma."

"I'm the one most likely to do that, given the grammatical skills of this bunch," Isobel pointed out.

But it was a good question. Had somebody followed Doreen into the bathroom in a rage and just let fly? Or was it planned ahead of time? If it was the latter, then the person who killed her knew there was going to be an emergency drill—and that Doreen would be in the bathroom at that particular moment. But who could possibly know a thing like that? Even Doreen couldn't have predicted exactly when she'd have to pee.

Something else struck Isobel, and she stopped inflating her new air mattress to pose a question to Delphi.

"When you go into a bathroom stall, do you lock the door?"

"If I'm the only one in there, I don't always bother," Delphi answered. "Then if I hear someone come in, I lean over and lock it. Why?"

"When I went into the bathroom, the stall door was ajar," Isobel said. "I was rushing and didn't look, and I just pushed it in without thinking anyone would be there."

"What does this have to do with anything?" Delphi asked.

"I might not lock the stall if I knew there was going to be a fire drill and nobody would be coming in. And if Doreen knew about the drill in advance, maybe somebody else did too. So the murder could have been premeditated."

Sunil nodded thoughtfully as he wrung out a dirty dishtowel. "Makes sense," he said. "What better time to slip into a bathroom unnoticed than when everyone is running around in a panic saving their own asses?"