Then I went to her bathroom, her very neat and very immaculate bathroom. I lifted the lid of a spotless toilet and threw up. I felt a little better after that.
I gave the apartment a once-over before leaving it forever. While I walked around the place I had the feeling it was a waste of time, that I wouldn’t find anything. I was right.
There couldn’t have been anything to see there. It was a good apartment, a pleasant apartment, but I got the impression that no one could possibly have lived there. Everything was put together like a stage set. There was nothing extraneous, nothing without a purpose. A desk on stage which is never opened will have empty drawers. Sheila Kane’s apartment radiated this feeling. Her personality had left no stamp on the place. The apartment stood alone, well-furnished and well-arranged, waiting for a rental agent to show it to prospective tenants. But some fool had been dumb enough to leave a corpse in the middle of the living room.
I found a throw rug in a closet and covered the bloody part of the carpet with it. That would do unless someone searched the apartment carefully, and when that happened the bloodstains would be found no matter what I did to hide them. Then I picked up the roll of rug with the girl’s body in it and carried it to the doorway. It was heavier now. Too heavy.
I turned off the light again, opened the door. My key case still held the elevator for me. Somewhere somebody was ringing for it impatiently. I carried my package into it, pushed the button. The door closed and we rode slowly down to the first floor.
A woman was waiting for the elevator. A gray, fifty-ish woman with a sable stole and a lorgnette. She held a closed umbrella in one hand.
“That rain,” she said. “Terrible.”
“Is it still raining?”
She smiled at me. Everything about her told me that her husband had had the decency to die well-insured. “Just a drizzle,” she said. “But these elevators. They should have a boy to run them. So slow.”
I smiled back at her. She got into the elevator and rode to the third floor, which meant she probably hadn’t known Sheila Kane. I left the building knowing that she wouldn’t remember me. She was a woman who lived in a world of her own. That rain and that elevator were her major problems.
The rain had eased up, but the night was as dark as ever. Streetlights tried to brighten things and failed. I carried the rug through the gloom to the car. It went in the back seat. I went in the front seat and the car went to Fifth Avenue, then uptown to Central Park. Traffic was even thinner now. I checked the mirror now and then to make sure nobody was following me. Nobody was.
Central Park is an oasis in a desert or a wilderness in the middle of a jungle, depending on how you look at it. I drove through it, left the wide roads for the twisting lanes, let the Chevy follow its nose. I found a spot and pulled off onto the grass at the side of the road. I killed the engine and climbed out onto grass that was soft and wet from all that rain. The air was so fresh and clean that it didn’t seem like New York at all.
That much was good. If she had to lie dead, at least she should do so in a fresh clean spot. But it was a shame about the rain. There was something very indecent about spilling her out nude and dead in the dampness. There was something...
I opened the back door and picked up the rug again, and by this time I was beginning to feel like an Armenian delivery boy. I held onto one end of the rug and let it spill out. The rug unwound neatly and what was left of Sheila Kane hit the ground, rolled over twice and came to rest face down on the grass.
There was a flashlight in the Chevy’s glove compartment. I got it; took a last look at the girl. The bullet hadn’t lodged in her head. There was a small and neatly rounded hole in the back of her head where it had made its exit. I thought about modern police methods and scientific laboratory techniques and decided they would figure out that she had been killed by a white male between thirty and thirty-two years of age, wearing a blue pea jacket and favoring his right foot when he walked. Science is wonderful. All I could tell from the hole was that the killer had picked up the bullet from the apartment, and I’d guessed that all along.
I turned off the flashlight. I rolled up the damned rug and tossed it back in the car, feeling very sick of rugs and corpses, of the smell of Central Park and of the smell of death. I thought about Sheila Kane, shrouded in darkness in tall wet grass. I thought about Newton’s law of inertia. Bodies at rest were supposed to remain at rest, but the dead girl had broken that law. She wasn’t supposed to be moving around. And how long would it be — before they let her rest? A quick ride to the morgue. An autopsy. And then another ride, slow and sedate, and a final home under the ground.
I got back into the Chevy, put it in low and got the hell out of Central Park. I dropped the rug at my apartment — there was no point shoving it in the garage kid’s nose — and ran the car back to the garage. I turned it over to Adenoids and Pimples.
“Crazy night,” he told me.
“Crazy?”
“That’s where it’s at.” He shifted a wad of gum from one side of his mouth to the other, knocked ashes off a filter-tipped cigarette. He gave me a grin that he could have kept to himself.
“A night to get killed on,” he said. “That type night.”
I didn’t have an answer handy.
“Spooky-kooky, what I mean. Me, I’m happy. I live right, Mr. London. I don’t cut work until the sun comes up. Midnight to dawn, that’s my scene. I wouldn’t walk around on a night like this. I couldn’t make it.”
“I’m walking home.”
“Take a hack,” he told me. “You live far?”
“Not far.”
“You could get hit on the head. Knifed, even. How far do you live?”
“Around the corner,” I said. “I think I’ll chance it.”
“Ruck, anyway.”
I looked at him.
“Rotsa Ruck. Like they say in China.”
They don’t, but I wasn’t going to argue with him. I left him there and walked back to the apartment. Nobody knifed me and nobody hit me over the head, which wasn’t much of a surprise. I put my rug back in the hall where it belonged and sponged a few drops of caked blood from it. There were probably traces of blood in the thing but I wasn’t going to stay up nights worrying about them. Nobody would come to look at my rug. Because nobody would connect me with Sheila Kane. Because there was no connection.
Now it was time to relax, time to unwind. I found a pipe and stuffed tobacco into it. I lit it evenly all around and smoked. I poured cognac into a glass and sipped it. It was smooth and it went all the way down and left a pleasant glow in its path.
It was time to relax, but I couldn’t manage it. There was a picture that stayed in my mind — a picture of a nude blonde, dead and cold, all dolled up in stockings and garter belt, with her face shot up and her hair bloody, lying in the very middle of a room that was the essence of neatness and order.
An ugly picture. A hard one to forget and a hard one to think about.
But I managed to think about something else, finally. I managed to think about my sister, whose name is Kaye. A very nice person, my sister. A lovely woman. A sweet woman.
I thought about her for a few minutes. Then I thought about her husband. His name is Jack Enright.
Two
He had leaned on my doorbell around three that afternoon. I had been doing the Times crossword puzzle. I stopped trying to think of a twelve-letter word for ‘Son of Jocasta,’ put down the paper and went to answer the door. I pushed the buzzer to unlock the downstairs door, then waited in the hallway while he worked his way up a flight of stairs. He climbed quickly and he was panting before he hit the top.