Victor nodded. Gotham's food culture was among the richest and most varied on the entire East Coast. Because it was by the sea, many people, especially those from poorer families, had once been fishermen. During fishing season, they would spend months on boats without coming ashore. That was why they had the habit of drying cured meat, sausages, and salted fish. These preserved meats lasted longer, adapted well to the damp conditions aboard ships, and made cooking at sea more convenient.
When they entered the villa, they saw all kinds of cured meat hanging by the windows. Nearly every first-floor window was the same, stuffed full of meat and miscellaneous clutter, barely serving any purpose as windows at all. There was no reason the second floor would have been spotless.
Yet in both the scene they had seen at the time and the photographs taken now, there was nothing on the windows.
In a shared rental like this, a window did not belong to whoever happened to have the room beside it. Even if Chick's mother did not have a habit of drying cured meat, he could not stop others from doing so. Otherwise, he would be violating the rules of collective survival and might be driven out. It was strange that nothing at all had been hung in that window.
"Chick took them down because he was going to put on a show?" Victor asked.
Schiller nodded. "But the problem is, he may only have realized that after putting the rope around his neck. Imagine it: he had everything prepared, but when he tried to sit on the windowsill, he found that the salted fish covering almost the whole window would jab into his legs, the sausages would hit his head, and the clutter outside the window would be