The dresses, coat, and wig he had worn to St. Fortunata's were all given to charity. There was no practical reason to keep them, after all, and they would be of much better use to someone who actually wore things like that.
The pantyhose he considered burning on the fire escape, but he settled for throwing them into a trash pile headed for the incinerator. Same thing, really.
His earrings must have fallen onto the floor and gotten kicked under the bed. He found them while he was mopping and picked them up. They were dusty, and the gold paint was starting to flake off. He held them up to his face and glanced in the mirror from across the apartment. They looked ridiculous-bulky, gaudy, and unbearably wrong against his work shirt and jeans.
Clip-ons, of course. He would do many things in the course of an investigation, but he tended to draw the line at unnecessary personal mutilation. Then again, if he had realized just how uncomfortable these were after a few hours...
He had a sudden image-flashing pain, glinting golden ornaments glimpsed under red hair-blow swiftly through his mind. He threw the useless things into the wastebasket and went back to his chores, face burning.
He honestly couldn't think of a good way to dispose of his makeup. He couldn't give it away; the sharing of cosmetics, even barely used ones, was an unsanitary practice that presented a risk of infection. But simply throwing it away seemed wasteful, somehow, even though it was doing no earthly good to anyone gathering dust in his apartment.
In the end, he told himself he didn't care and left it all in his dresser drawer. It wasn't as though he was suffering from a surfeit of clutter. It wouldn't do any harm to leave it alone.
Except it was always in his way. Every single time he went to grab something out of that drawer, he would inevitably pull out a tube of mascara or an eyebrow pencil instead. Somehow entire sweaters would hide behind small jars of foundation; eye shadow palettes mysteriously multiplied and completely took over the space. It was an annoyance and a waste of precious time.
It wouldn't take much effort to empty the drawer. Just a few minutes to sort out the clothes he wore from the cosmetics he most emphatically didn't. Or even to dispose of whatever it was he happened to pick up as it came to hand. But he never did. He'd always just toss it back in with a curse, glance at the clock, and conduct a hurried-but thorough-search for whatever he was looking for. By the time he found it, the inconvenience would be almost forgotten.
Many years later, long after Ray kicked his way into his life and he had a dresser again-not to mention a nightstand, a desk without erasers, and end tables, of all luxuries-he would sometimes catch himself reaching in the top drawer and automatically shoving aside a nonexistent compact, floundering when he found empty air. It was at these times that he would rest his hands on the lip and let himself remember all the things that he had lost in fire.