Deceptions by Anna Porter (fox in socks read aloud TXT) 📗

his head and looked at the face. Thin lips, low forehead. Eyebrows in a straight line. Berkowitz. A small trickle of blood had congealed in the corner of his mouth. His eyes were open.

She wanted to turn him over to see where the blood had come from, but it was too risky. She checked under the couch to find a Glock with a long silencer, its handle angled back toward Berkowitz. He could have been reaching for it, and the killer kicked it out of the way, or the killer had dropped it in his haste to leave. It had been about twenty-five minutes since Zsuzsa’s call, plenty of time for the police to have arrived if Berkowitz’s killer had forced his way in.

There were no signs of a struggle, no furniture turned over, the photographs were all still on the side table, as she had last seen them. Or were they? Using the tip of her knife, she pushed them face up, one after another. Only one was missing: the photo of herself. She slipped the photo of the laughing Vaszarys into her pocket.

She checked the kitchen. Tidy, clean, two clean glasses in the drying rack near the sink. Overpowering smell of disinfectant. Two glasses and an open bottle of wine on the counter, Szekszárdi Vörös. The glasses had no visible traces of red wine, but both were still wet. Someone must have washed them.

She ran upstairs. A spotlessly clean bathroom with no toothbrush or toothpaste, no shaving cream, no razor, and the bar of soap in the soap dish in the shower seemed unused. A large bedroom with a perfectly made bed, blanket corners tucked in, duvet fluffed, pillows arranged hotel-room style, the biggest at the back, the smallest in front. No pictures on the wall, no books, one jacket hanging in the closet. As she had expected, it bore the imprint of its classy tailor, Vargas, but no shirts or pants to accompany it. The small chest of drawers was empty. Wherever Berkowitz lived, it was not here. But why would he have this apartment if he lived somewhere else?

She went back downstairs, checked the light switch for fibres from her hoodie, slipped outside, closed the door behind her, and wiped the door handle. She crossed the street and walked at a normal pace down toward Gül Baba’s grave. She had reached Erzsébet Bridge by the time she heard the sirens.

She waited for ten minutes, then walked back the way she had come, watched the police cars assemble, the ambulance arrive, and a dark sedan with no police markings park across the street.

Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Time to go.

Chapter Twenty-Four

She was crossing the Chain Bridge when she saw that it was Zsuzsa Klein who had called, leaving a breathless message that something terrible had happened next door and that she should definitely not come to see her friend now. When Helena returned the call, Zsuzsa still sounded frightened. “You’re not going to believe what has happened!” she said. “I don’t know how to tell you, but your friend, Gyuszi, I mean, Mr. Berkowitz, Gyula . . . There was a break-in next door. Someone got into his apartment, and he is dead. They killed him.” Zsuzsa whispered this last piece of information.

“Oh no!” Helena said, affecting a state of utter shock.

“The police are here,” Zsuzsa said. “I am so sorry. I can’t believe it was only today I told you about how careful one has to be around here, but I was thinking of burglars just stealing your stuff. We have never had anything like this happen, not in this neighbourhood. Killed in his own home. So terrible. So sorry . . . The police officer wants to talk to you. I told him you had come to visit Mr. Berkowitz earlier. Is it okay if I pass him the phone?” She held the phone away from her mouth and said something Helena didn’t understand.

Then there was more discussion in Hungarian, and a man’s voice asked, “Ki beszél?” Whatever that meant, Helena’s reaction was to drop the burner phone into the Danube and watch it disappear.

She replayed the scene of the empty apartment in her mind, the missing photograph, and Berkowitz’s inert body. In death, he had seemed younger. He had to have known the person who killed him. He would not have opened the door to a stranger. There was no sign of a struggle and two glasses in the kitchen. Everything was so clean, but that smell of clean had been there the last time she had entered with Zsuzsa. Was it stronger this time? She hadn’t checked under the kitchen sink, but she felt certain that had she done so, she would have found bottles of Lysol or something Hungarian resembling Lysol.

If Berkowitz had not lived in this apartment, was there a reason why he had chosen to have a place specifically here, next to Zsuzsa’s? Or was that a coincidence?

Zsuzsa would, of course, be asked about Berkowitz’s visitor, and she would describe Marianne Lewis, a youngish woman, in her thirties, about 168 centimetres tall, painted nails, red-auburn hair with bangs, blue eyes, a bit flashy in an American way, not over-the-top, but you could tell she was American, and she had a loud horsey laugh. From New York. Visiting here. A friend of Berkowitz’s. They had met somewhere in France. None of this would relate to Helena in the slightest, and if the police were to consult Attila, he would know this disguise, but he would say nothing.

She looked back over her shoulder at the castle above Buda, lit up for the night with thousands of small lights dancing, and the cable car’s track a straight line of white lights heading all the way to the top of the hill. Arcs of lights across the bridge, reaching the lions at either end. A beautiful city in the dark. Attila had been excited to show it to her: