"It sounds like somebody's asking me to stake out a closet."
She smiled at him in a way that was meant to be warm and was. That was the thing about Shirlene; she meant all of it, the warmth and the pressure both, and she did not see a contradiction. "I'm asking you to be visible. I'm asking you to talk to people. Somebody in this building knows something. Somebody always does." She turned the printout faceup and slid it across the desk to him so that he could see the signatures. "Mrs. Dunning in 2F signed this," she said. "Do you know Mrs. Dunning?"
He knew her to nod to. She was a small, very upright Black woman in her eighties who wore a church hat on Sundays and a cardigan with a brooch on every other day and walked with a cane she did not seem to want. She had lived at Sefton Court longer than anyone, longer than Treadwell Residential had owned it; somebody had told him she had moved in the year it was built. He had carried a box up the stairs for her once, the first winter, when the elevator was out, and she had thanked him in a voice that made it clear she could have carried it herself if he had given her twenty minutes.
"She's had her groceries taken," Shirlene said. "Three weeks running. She gets them delivered from Fairmont on Thursdays, she's on some kind of program, and the driver leaves them in the package room because he won't climb the stairs, and by the time she gets down there, they're gone. Three weeks in a row in September. She came in here and she sat in that chair and she told me, and Kurt, I'm not ashamed to say I almost cried." Shirlene looked, briefly, as if she might cry again, and then she did not. "It's one thing to take somebody's shoes. That woman is eighty-one years old and somebody's taking her food."
Kurt had gone up to 2F that same evening. He had told himself it was to take a report, and it was, but it was also because he could not stop thinking about it, the image of an old woman coming down in the elevator on a Thursday afternoon and opening the steel door and finding nothing. Mrs. Dunning had let him in after looking at him through the peephole for long enough that he started to wonder if she would. Her apartment was very clean and smelled of lemon oil and something cooked earlier in the day, onions maybe, and there were photographs on every flat surface, children and grandchildren and what he took to be great-grandchildren, and a framed certificate on the wall from Tacoma Public Schools recognizing Coretta L. Dunning for thirty-one years of service in the Food Services Department. She had offered him coffee and he had said no and she had made it anyway.
She told him about the groceries the way he had heard people tell him about burglaries, with a kind of baffled precision, as if the exactness of the details might make the thing make sense. The first Thursday, eleven items, a chicken and a bag of potatoes and the rest. The second Thursday, nine items. The third, eight. She had stopped ordering the chicken after the first time, she said, because you could not afford to lose a chicken twice. She had it all written down on a yellow legal pad, the dates and the items and the prices, in a slanting cursive that Kurt had not seen since his grandmother died. She did not say how much money she had. She did not say what she had eaten in the weeks the food had not come. When he asked, carefully, whether she was all right for groceries now, whether she needed anything, she had looked at him with an expression so dry and so finished that he had felt himself, at forty-four, go red in the face.
"I've been feeding myself since Eisenhower," she said. "I'm all right, Officer. I just would like whoever it is to stop."
That was September. In October, her groceries had stopped disappearing. Kurt had been glad, and then, when he thought about it longer, uneasy, because nothing he had done had made them stop. He had not caught anyone. He had walked the lobby more; he had parked the patrol car closer to the front entrance; he had stood around the mailboxes in uniform at odd hours like a man waiting for a bus that never came. Other packages had kept vanishing. A pair of headphones, a bag of dog food, a box from a pharmacy. Only Mrs. Dunning's Thursday groceries were left alone, as if the thief had developed a conscience about that one thing, or had been warned off it, or had simply moved on.
Then, on the first Saturday in October, Mr. Eckles in 1A had stopped him by the mailboxes.
Mr. Eckles was a retired long-haul trucker with a bad hip and a recliner pointed at his front window, which looked directly onto the lobby through a gap in the blinds that he maintained, Kurt suspected, with some care. He knew everyone's car and everyone's schedule.