“I didn’t see anything,” she squealed. “I got scared and ran away.”
Virgil tipped his head back, and said, aloud, ‘Thank you, God.”
Capslock pushed on the door. “Open the door. You can call your attorney, but we want to make sure you don’t run away again.”
Silence. Then: “You promise?”
“I swear,” Capslock said. “We’ll sit on your couch, and you can call.”
More silence, then she popped the chain, backed past a short hallway, which led to a compact kitchen, and into the living room. She was wearing a mid-thigh green satin dressing gown that showed off her slender legs, her best feature.
Otherwise, Cohen, like Paisley, was an average-looking woman, long-faced, thin-lipped, a chiseled nose, with auburn hair tied back in a ponytail. Harder-edged than Paisley, as though she might work out on a daily basis. She did smell good, like vanilla.
She backed up until she got to a couch, sat down, and attempted to tug down the hem of her gown. Virgil and Capslock took two easy chairs that faced the couch over a glass table. A second hallway led out of the living room deeper into the apartment but only showed three closed doors.
“Call your attorney,” Virgil said. He got on his own phone and called Trane.
* * *
—
Virgil: “Where are you?”
“At home,” Trane said. “About to eat another pie.”
“We found the woman who was in the library with Quill when he was killed.”
“Holy cow! Uh, who’s ‘we’?”
“Do you know Del Capslock?” Virgil asked.
“Del? He’s there with you?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m coming. Give me the address.”
Virgil gave her the address and Cohen’s name. “She’s calling her attorney. We could be a while.”
“I’m running.”
* * *
—
Cohen was on the phone to her attorney. “I don’t give a shit if you’re at dinner, I got a big problem here, Larry. I got two cops sitting in my living room like a couple of tombstones and they think they got something big on me.”
Pause to listen.
“I know she’ll be disappointed,” Cohen replied, “but think how disappointed she’ll be if the details of our relationship come out.”
Pause.
Then: “I don’t know. They think I was a witness to whoever killed that professor.”
Pause.
“Do you want me to answer that with them sitting here?”
Pause.
“Okay. You know where I’m at,” Cohen said.
* * *
—
She hung up, and said, “He’ll be here in twenty minutes.”
Capslock said, “I gotta pee. Where’s the bathroom?”
Without thinking, Cohen said, “Down the hall.”
Virgil quickly grabbed her attention. “Why can’t you tell us about Professor Quill right now? We know you had a relationship . . .”
“I really gotta . . .” Capslock was moving down the hall, and when Cohen saw him pass the first door on the right, she called out, “Hey, not that one . . .”
But Capslock had popped the farthest of the three doors, and now he stepped back, looked at Virgil, and said, “Oh my God. This is awful.”
“Get out of there,” Cohen screamed.
“I can’t just leave—the poor guy might be in desperate trouble here,” Capslock said. And, “Virgil, do you have a pocketknife? We have to free the victim.”
“He’s not a victim,” Cohen shouted. “This is adult consensual sex.”
Virgil walked down the hall, Cohen tagging anxiously behind him, and looked in the bedroom door: a large man—a fat man—pink in color, with fine skin resembling a baby’s, was on the bed, nude, gagged, trussed up like an Easter ham, ropes to all four corners of the bed to hold him in place with his ass up in the air. A box of battery-powered sex toys sat on the bed beside him.
Virgil said, “Excuse me, Del, but I can’t look at this.”
“I don’t want to, but we can’t let the guy die,” Capslock said. To the man on the bed he said, “If you’re okay, wiggle your fingers.”
The man wiggled his fingers.
“All right, then. We’ll leave the door open. You develop a problem, just yell.”
“He’s gagged, Del,” Virgil said. “He can’t yell.”
Capslock turned back to the man. “If you get in trouble, make some of those strangle sounds. We’ll hear you.”
They all went back to the living room, and Cohen dropped onto the couch, her arms crossed over her chest, the classic female defensive position.
“You gotta admit, that’s not something you see every day,” Capslock said to Virgil.
“I had a case down in Trippton, a motorcycle guy hiring himself out to whip naked women. He had a pretty good client list,” Virgil said. “One of the women told me that it was therapeutic.”
“It certainly can be,” Cohen snapped. “It probably helped her with all kinds of repressive neuroses, both known and unknown.”
“I’m pretty sure it didn’t,” Virgil said.
“Oh, you’re a shrink now?” she sneered.
“No, but another guy shot her in the head. That was the end of her psychological problems. As far as we know.”
They all stared at each other for a moment, and then Capslock said, “Well, that was a conversation killer.”
* * *
—
Virgil pecked away with questions about Quill, but Cohen kept her arms crossed and simply shook her head and sometimes grunted. Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at the door. Virgil answered it, and Trane said, “Got here as fast as I could.” She looked at Cohen, and asked, “Is this the lady?”
“This is her,” Virgil said. “We can’t beat her up because her attorney is coming, and there’s a witness down the hall in the bedroom. You might want to introduce yourself.”
“Oh, fuck all of you,” Cohen said.
Trane went down the hall, looked in the bedroom, showed no reaction at all, came back and sat down with a straight face, then looked at Virgil, and asked, “What?”