Along the way, I bought a chainlock at a hardware store on 3rd Avenue. I couldn’t help remembering Bart Ailburg, whose door had been armed with a lock like this but who had been murdered anyway. However, no true parallel applied. Ailburg had been murdered by a loved one, which in my case was not the issue.
At the house, I spent ten minutes searching out Romeo, the super, and finally found him drinking wine in the tenants’ storeroom in the basement. He wasn’t drunk, I was happy to see, but he was surly. “I doan wuk Sahdy,” he told me, trying to hide the brown paper bag with its cargo of Hombre or Ripple.
“You don’t work ever,” I informed him. “But you’ll come upstairs with me now or I’ll call Goldbender and tell him I found you drunk in the basement and lighting matches.”
Surliness turned to a kind of clogged outrage. “I ayn drunk!” Then he comprehended the rest of my sentence and was, for just an instant, completely baffled. Innocence bewildered him, he didn’t know at first what to do with it. But he soon enough recovered, crying out, “Motches? I doan got no motches! I doan hob no stinkin motches!”
“And,” I went on, wanting to be certain he understood the threat I was making, “I’ll tell Goldbender that I intend to call the police about a super being drunk and fighting matches in the basement.”
Maddened by this maligning of his virtue, Romeo waved his arms in the air, slopping wine on himself and on the stored possessions of the tenants as he cried, “I doan hob no motches!”
“Goldbender is going to think about his insurance,” I pointed out, “and—”
“I doan hob no motches!”
“And,” I insisted, “he is going to fire you. Particularly,” I added, “when he smells you.”
Romeo became aware of the spillage and began fretfully to pat himself with his free hand. “You makin me nervis,” he said, and he sounded as though soon he might cry.
“Come along, Romeo,” I said. “Put your lunch down over there and come along.”
“This ay muh lunch.” He frowned from the bag to me, and returned to an earlier worry. “An I doan hob no motches.”
“Come, Romeo.” I turned away, not looking back till I reached the stairs, when I saw that Romeo, however much he might be bewildered and mistreated, was also sensible. He was coming along.
As we plodded up the several flights of stairs together, me squoshing in my cold wet shoes, Romeo said, “Wha jew wan, anyway?”
“Just come along,” I told him.
What I wanted from Romeo was his presence. We would enter, Edgarson would approach me, Edgarson would see the witness, Edgarson would depart. The details would work themselves out, but at the finish Edgarson would definitely depart.
Except that he wasn’t there. Gingerly I let myself into the apartment, Romeo snuffling in my wake, and nothing moved in the semi-darkness of the living room. I switched on lights, I looked quickly in bedroom and kitchen and bath, and the apartment was empty. Edgarson had vacated on his own.
Romeo had remained by the door, shoulders hunched against injustice, and when I emerged from the kitchen he said, “O.K. Here I am. Wha jew wan?”
“That’s fine, Romeo,” I told him. “Thank you very much, I won’t be needing you any more.”
Then, of course, he didn’t want to leave. At first he’d been bewildered and surly when I’d brought him up here, and now he was bewildered and surly when I released him. There’s no pleasing some people.
But he did finally go, and I immediately brought out my hammer and screwdriver from the storage cabinet under the bathroom sink and proceeded to mount the chainlock. It was in two parts; a metal plate from which dangled a six-inch chain with a metal ball on the end of it, and a longer metal plate with a long slot. The plate-with-chain I screwed into place on the doorframe at about chest height, then stretched the length of chain out horizontally and marked on the door how far the ball would reach. Next I fixed the longer plate onto the door in the right position, slipped the ball into the wide space in the slot, and experimentally opened the door. When I did so the chain tightened, because the ball was stuck in the narrower part of the slot, and the door wouldn’t open more than four inches.
There. Let Edgarson play with his keys now, it would take more than a key to come through that door. He could open it wide enough to reach his arm in, but that was all.
Safe at last, I turned my attention back to the apartment. Surely Edgarson would have done something to commemorate his visit. Excrement on the floor? Mousetraps in the bed? Something destructive, or nasty, or both?
But I’d misjudged him. The man had beaten me up Thursday night, and yet when he’d had a full day and night to himself in my apartment he’d done nothing to it at all. He seemed to have no pattern, no consistency in his behavior, and if that was deliberately planned to increase my nervousness it was very successful. If I’d found all my dishes broken or all the furniture knocked over in the living room I would have been more angry but less tense, because I would have known what I was up against and what he was likely to do next. This way, it was impossible to guess where or when Edgarson would once more pop up, or what his manner would be when he did make his next appearance.
This time, he had contented himself with going through my personal papers and with leaving me a short but complete note, typewritten and sitting on my answering machine:
The phone woke me at nine-thirty Sunday morning and it was Staples, sounding slightly irritated through his normal cheeriness. “Do you feel brilliant this morning, Carey?”
“What? What?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I wake you?”
“No, but you might. What time is it?”
“Nine twenty-seven. Up late last night?”
Yes, as a matter of fact. I’d stayed up till nearly three, distracting myself from thoughts of Edgarson by trying to make a sensible interview out of Brant’s twaddle. But I was awake now, so I sat straighter in the bed and said, “That’s okay, I ought to get up anyway. What’s happening?
“Another little problem.”
“Problem? You mean a murder?”
“Well, that’s the question. I say it’s a clear-cut case of suicide, but Al Bray keeps saying it feels funny. He doesn’t have a bit of evidence, it just feels funny.”
So that was why Staples was annoyed. It wasn’t so much that Bray disagreed with him, which surely must have happened more than once in the course of their partnership, as that Bray was disagreeing on Staples’ grounds. It was Staples who was supposed to have feelings and be intuitive, while Bray was assigned the role of the methodical plodder. To have the plodder suddenly intuit all over the place could be unsettling.
I said, “You mean you think it’s suicide and he thinks it’s murder?”
“He doesn’t know what he thinks,” Staples said. “It just doesn’t feel right. So he asked me to call you.”
“He asked? Al Bray?”
“We made a deal. If you agree with me it was suicide, Al won’t make any more fuss and we’ll put in our report and that’s the end of it.”
“What if I think it’s murder?”
He chuckled; a bit challengingly, I thought. “Then you’ll have to prove it,” he said.
They sent a car for me, with a uniformed policeman as chauffeur. I hadn’t been happy about leaving the apartment untended, since the chainlock only works when there’s someone inside to attach it, but then I remembered a stunt from several hundred spy movies. I took a paper match, bent it double, and wedged it between door and frame just below the bottom hinge. It protruded just enough to be seen, if you knew where to look, and if anyone opened my apartment door the match would fall. It wouldn’t keep Edgarson out, but it would warn me in time if he’d returned. If the match was on the floor when I came back I’d know Edgarson was once again in residence, and off I’d go for Romeo.