Page 55 of The Woman with the Wallet

“So, where’s his roommate?” Max asked, snapping me out of my dark thoughts.

Turning, I found her standing in the doorway to the other bedroom.

“I… have no idea,” I said, suddenly realizing there was a lot about Henry I didn’t know.

I followed Max into the next bedroom, nearly tripping over a pair of kicked-off shoes in the process.

“Whoever his roommate is, he’s a slob. And that’s coming from someone who isn’t exactly a neat freak,” Max said, kicking a half-full box of cheddar cheese crackers out of her way. “See anything weird here?” she asked.

“The lack of cockroaches in this mess?” I said. “What are you seeing?”

“What’s missing,” she said.

“What is missing?”

“Laptop, phone, TV, charging cords, half the clothes in the closet… it’s like he took everything that he really needed and just left the mess. Why?”

“Lazy?”

“Maybe,” she agreed. “Or maybe he was trying to make it seem like he wasn’t cutting and running.”

“We need to figure out who the fuck the roommate is. Was. Whatever.”

I flipped through all of the carefully organized paperwork in the common area, and Henry’s rooms, but everything from the rent to all of the utilities was in Henry’s name.

“Anything in here?” I asked, circling back to Max in the other guy’s sty of a room.

“Nothing personal, no. He took his whole identity with him. Not a single piece of mail.”

“Fuck,” I growled, exhaling hard.

“We need to get moving,” Max said. “The superglue will wear off. Neighbors might hear us moving around. It’s not good.”

She was clearly more practiced in the art of sneaking in and out of places. So as much as I wanted to hang around and go over this place with a fine-tooth comb, I had to trust her instincts and expertise.

So we both made our way back out into the common room, where Max stopped, staring at Henry’s body.

“Come on,” I said, my voice softer as I wrapped an arm around her lower back and led her back out of the apartment after checking that no one was in the hall.

It wasn’t until we were back in the car that we spoke again.

“Was that your first dead body?” I asked.

“No,” Max said, peeling at her fingertips to get the glue off. “God, no. I’ve seen… so many bodies.”

“On the job?”

“On the streets. New York winters can be brutal, merciless. Then there was, you know, starving. Overdosing. Came across someone stabbed to death in an alley the second week I was on the streets. I’ve seen more bodies than anyone should.” She paused. “Were you close with Henry?”

“No. I mean… no. We talked several times, trying to iron out all the details for the job. But that’s the extent of it. I didn’t want any kind of personal connection. This was work. Not to sound like a dick.”

“I get it,” she said. “Still, this is a lot. You basically heard everything leading up to his murder.”

“Yeah,” I agreed, exhaling hard as I pressed my head back on the rest for a second.

“Did you hear anything? Voices? Snippets of conversation?”

“It was quick. It rang for a while. I think he was about to hang up. Maybe call the cops instead. But then he heard me and he just… he whispered that ‘he’s here.’”

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