The woman on the phone asked if Nina was somewhere she could talk. Nina got up so quickly that her chair struck the cabinet behind her.
“Yes.”
She wasn't, not yet. She walked past the meeting room, past the people looking up through its glass, and pushed into the stairwell.
Martin Reed had died overnight. The woman was sorry to tell her. She spoke gently, leaving spaces Nina didn't know how to fill. At the end she asked whether Nina would agree to speak with an officer who was making inquiries about Mr. Reed and had asked to contact her about the visit.
“Yes,” Nina said. “Of course.”
“May I give him this number?”
“Yes.”
The woman repeated that she was sorry. Nina thanked her, absurdly, and the call ended.
In the stairwell someone had left a paper cup balanced on a handrail bracket. She looked at it while she called Adam.
“He's dead,” she said when he answered.
She heard a door close on his end.
“Martin?”
“Last night.”
“I'm sorry.”
“What happened to him?”
“I don't know.”
“Did you ask?”
“No. I mean before. Why was he there, Adam?”
A noise on his end, metal striking something. She pictured him in a house with half its flooring up, his phone trapped between shoulder and ear.
“I don't know,” he said again.
She closed her eyes. “The police want to talk to me.”
“Okay.”
“About seeing him.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“No.”
He was quiet long enough for her to hear traffic through the stairwell window.
“Tell me how it goes,” he said.
“You could tell me something first.”
“What?”
She looked at the cup. There was lipstick on the rim, faded almost to the color of the cardboard.
“Never mind.”
She ended the call before he could make that easier too.
The officer called twenty minutes later. Nina was back at her desk, trying to eat the cold bagel. He said he was near the hospital if she was willing to meet there; otherwise they could find another time. She said she'd come. She sent Vivian a message saying where she was going, collected her coat and left the rest of her food on the plate.
Outside it was brighter than she expected. A delivery cyclist waited for her to stop blocking the office doorway. She stepped aside and watched him squeeze through with two bags hooked over his wrist.
The hospital looked different in daylight, less like a single lit building and more like a place people went to work. She met the officer beside the entrance where she had waited for Adam. He asked to see her identification, looked at it and gave it back. There was nothing ceremonial about it. Nina was relieved by how ordinary that felt.
They sat on the concrete bench. He asked her to begin with the call, so she did, trying to separate what she'd been told from what she had supplied herself. When she got to the bedside, he asked her to slow down.
“His exact words, if you can.”
“When your husband calls, ask him where you met.”
The officer wrote it down.
“And you know why he would ask that?”
“No.”
“Has your husband met him?”
“He says he has.”
“What does your husband do?”
“Property work. Getting places ready for people. Some relocation.”
She heard how little that was. She could have described Adam's hands at work for an hour and apparently not described his job at all.
“He said Martin had been around some of the houses he worked on.”
“Did Mr. Reed mention a problem with your husband?”
“No. Only that question. And this.”
She took out the note. The officer looked at it while she explained Ansel Court, the open house, the year they had rented upstairs. He asked if he could photograph it. She said yes and held it flat on the bench while he did.
“You still go there?”
“No. We moved years ago.”
“Anyone there you know?”
“The people who owned it rented the apartment to us. Adam handled more of that. I don't know who's there now.”
He asked for Adam's full name and number. Nina gave them. Something tightened in her throat as she spoke the digits she used more often than her own.
“Am I getting him into trouble?”
The officer looked up. “I'm asking who knew Mr. Reed.”
“Right.”
She folded the paper. He let the silence remain until she said, “There was something at the end. I thought he said don't ask her. But I can't be sure.”
He wrote that down too, including the uncertainty.
Nina hadn't expected to feel grateful for being taken literally.
She told him about the complaint reference. Her work on it, the disputed contact, the fact that she didn't know the full client action afterward. He asked whether she had the correspondence. She said she had reviewed her own part and needed permission for more. He gave her a card and told her to contact him if she learned something connected to Martin or if anyone threatened her.
“Do you know what happened?” she asked.
“We're looking at the circumstances before he came here.”
“Was he attacked?”
“I'm not going to give you information I might need you to tell me independently.”
He said it without accusation. She nodded. She was used to wanting people not to contaminate one another's accounts. It felt different to be the person on the other side of that care.
They went over how to reach her. Nina asked whether she should stay away from Ansel Court.
“Do you have a reason to think someone there would hurt you?”
“No. I don't know.”
“If you feel threatened, don't go looking for an explanation on your own. Call.”
She put his card in her bag before she could lose it among the other papers.
When he had gone, Nina stayed on the bench. The automatic doors kept opening on a warm gust. A woman came out wheeling a suitcase, stopped, then went back inside. Somewhere in the building Martin was no longer waiting for an answer. He had never explained his question and now he never would.
She opened the message thread with Adam.
I gave them your number.
He read it immediately. For a moment the little dots appeared, vanished, appeared again.
That's fine. You okay?
She looked up at the windows, trying to guess where she'd been the night before. Then she typed: Meet me at Ansel Court. I want to see the place.
He called instead of writing.
“Now?”
“I've got an hour before I need to be back.”
“Nina, what's being there going to tell you?”
“Whether you really don't know why he wrote it down.”
He said nothing.
“You asked me to tell you how it went. That's how it went.”
She stood, tucked the phone between her ear and shoulder and began walking toward the garage.
“I'll meet you,” he said.