Free Dead Midnight by Marcia Muller

effect, to what they censored. I hadn’t tried it with a physical environment before, but I’d long contended that a place can tell you a great deal about the events that have transpired within it if you’re patient and allow it to do so. Now I waited for the flat to give me some hint of the past.
    From outside came the normal city sounds: more sirens, more barking dogs, someone yelling in the street, a car burning rubber, an alarm gone haywire. But the flat must be well insulated, because all of those seemed very far away.
    In the kitchen the refrigerator made ticking noises. Then there was a swirling and gurgling. Something wrong with the coil, meaning costly repairs or even a whole new unit. Mine did that periodically, and every time I heard it I got depressed.
    The wind was stronger now. It made small, shrill whistles as it seeped through the ill-fitting frame of the rear window. A skylight groaned ominously, and a piece of plaster beside it broke loose and crumbled as it hit the floor.
    I thought of Roger coming back to the city, landing a dream job, expecting stock options, buying a flat full of light. But then the dream job turned into a nightmare, the options didn’t materialize, the flat turned into a maintenance problem—
    No. You can quit a job and find another. You can defer maintenance or take out a home-improvement loan. Those problems are not personal “failures.” Those problems are not the “circumstances” that drive you over a bridge railing.
    I listened some more. Tick. Gurgle. Whistle. Groan. Crack. There was something in between, a subtlety that I couldn’t quite grasp—
    The phone shrilled.
    My heartbeat accelerated and I jumped off the sofa, scooped up the receiver, and answered in a voice made hoarse by surprise.
    “Communing with the dead again?” The caller could have been either male or female, sounded like he or she had covered the mouthpiece with something. “It’s not going to do any good. Better you should reschedule our appointment.”
    “Who is this?”
    A silence. Caution? Surprise?
    The receiver was replaced violently.
    Roger, thank God, had favored state-of-the-art phone equipment. I pressed the key to view the number of the last caller, saw that the prefix was the same. Close by, then.
    “McCone,” Adah Joslyn’s sleep-clogged voice said, “I can’t do it till morning. Shouldn’t be doing it at all.”
    “I don’t ask for a lot of favors.” I pictured the SFPD homicide inspector snuggled up in bed with my operative Craig Morland and her enormously fat cat, Charley. Warmth and comfort were the reasons she didn’t want to run the check.
    “Don’t go all humble pie on me, girl! It ain’t you.”
    I waited her out while she fulminated about late-night calls when I wanted something. Adah, who often denigrated her talents by claiming her straight-to-the-top career path was due to her being the department’s “three-way poster child”—meaning half black, half Jewish, and a woman— was a terrific cop and a better friend, if inclined to be testy.
    “Okay,” she finally said, “fifteen minutes. But this is the last time, McCone. You hear? The last!”
    “Phone booth,” Adah said some ten minutes later. “Lobby of the Redwood Health Club on—”
    “Brannan.”
    “You knew that, why’d you wake me up?”
    “I know where the club is, not their phone booth number.” The club was next door. Whoever called had seen there was a light here in the flat.
    Adah snorted. “
You
know where a health club is? When was the last time we swam together?”
    “We’ll go to the pool next week, I promise.”
    “Yeah, sure. You know, McCone, you and that crew of yours at the pier are really something.”
    I tapped my fingers on the receiver, impatient to hang up. “What does that mean?”
    “Well, you wake me up on a night when I had trouble getting to sleep because my man’s out boozing with your office manager—”
    “Craig’s with Ted?”
    “Right. Seems Neal up