“Now you’re insulting me!” Joe said. “I know when I’m being insulted.”
“The indignation of fools,” Bodenheim said grandly, “is my crown.”
I’d had enough of this touching scene. I got up, saying, “I’m in town till Monday. At the Lexington. If you change your mind, Max, give me a call.”
As I left, Joe moved around to where I was sitting, nearer to Ruth, and he was leaning forward, speaking quickly, flashing his most ingratiating smile and issuing the best words he could muster, about how his good intentions were being misinterpreted, while Bodenheim sat uncharacteristically silent, frozen with contempt, a sullen wax figure in the Waxworks cafeteria.
6
By the time I got back to my hotel, a message from Max was waiting at the front desk. It had been written down faithfully by the hotel operator: “Mr. Heller — my lovely companion has convinced me to come to my financial senses. Please be so kind as to bring the book contracts tomorrow afternoon between 3 and 4 o’clock to the following address — 97 3rd Avenue, near 13th Street. Fifth floor, room 5D.”
I showed the desk clerk the address. “Where is that?”
“Lower Fifth Avenue,” said the clerk, a boy in his twenties wearing a mustache to look older. “Pretty rough neighborhood. On the fringe of the Bowery.”
So I was going to make it to the Bowery, after all. What trip to New York would be complete without it?
I spent the rest of the evening in the Lexington bar making the acquaintance of a TWA stewardess, the outcome of which is neither germane to this story nor any of your business; we slept in the next morning, had a nice buffet lunch at the hotel, and I took her to Radio City Music Hall, where How to Marry a Millionaire was playing, one of those new Cinemascope pictures trying to replace 3-D. My companion was lovely, as were the Rockettes, and Betty Grable and Lauren Bacall; but Marilyn made me ache in so many places. She always would.
My new friend caught a cab to the airport, and I grabbed one to the Bowery, where I asked the cabbie to wait for me with the meter running. He warily agreed, and I entered a shambling five-story tenement that looked to be the architectural equivalent of Maxwell Bodenheim himself.
I went up five flights of spongy, creaky stairs, glad I was wearing a topcoat; the building wasn’t heated. A window on the fifth floor offered a sweeping city view, more worthy of a postcard than a dingy rooming house; the Third Avenue El was just below. Apartment 5D was at the end of the hall, on the right, the numbers hammered haphazardly into the wall next to the gray-painted door, which had no knob, simply a padlocked hasp.
There was no answer to my repeated knocks. I considered saying to hell with it — so Bodenheim wasn’t here, so what? How reliable was a boozehound like Max, anyway?
Pretty reliable, if money was waiting — and I had the feeling his brown-eyed soul mate wouldn’t have missed this appointment if even fifty cents were at stake, let alone several thousand. The tiny hairs on the back of my copper’s neck were tingling... and was it my imagination, or was there a stench coming from that room that drowned out the disinfectant and cooking smells and mildew and generally stale air? An all too familiar stench, worse even than Bodie’s corncob pipe...
On the first floor I found the pudgy, fiftyish, groundhog-pussed operator (“Not the super! I’m the lessee! The operator!”) of this grand hotel. His name was Albert Luck, which was something his tenants were all down on.
“So you know this guy in 5D?” Luck demanded, just outside his door, squinting behind thick-lensed wireframes as if my face were tiny print he was trying to make out; he wore baggy pants and suspenders over his long johns. “This guy Harold Weinberg, you know him?”
“Sure,” I lied.
“Son of a bitch Weinberg sneaks in and out like a goddamn ghost,” Luck said. “I can’t never catch him, and he padlocks the place behind him. If you’re such a friend of his, maybe you wanna pay his goddamn rent for him. He’s behind two weeks!”
“How much?”
“Ten bucks.”
“Five a week?”
He nodded. “Five’s the weekly rate; it’s eighty-five cents a night.”
“I’ll pay the back rent,” I said, “if you give me a look around in there.”
“Can’t. It ain’t my padlock on the door.”
I showed him a sawbuck. “Wouldn’t take much to pop the hasp.”
“Make it twenty,” he said, groundhog eyes glittering, “to cover repairs.”
Soon I was following him up the stairs; he wore a plaid hunter’s jacket and was carrying a claw hammer and a heavy screwdriver. “Tenants like your friend I don’t need... This ain’t a flophouse, you know. These are furnished rooms.”
It took him two tries to pop the latch off. I let him open the door, just in case it was a situation where I wouldn’t want to be leaving any fingerprints.
It was.
The blood splashed around in the eight-by-nine-foot cubicle was mostly on one wall, and the ceiling above, and on the nearby metal folding cot, and of course on the body of the woman sprawled there on her stomach, still clad in the frayed yellow dress, splotched brown now, the same dried-blood brown that, with the smell of decay, indicated she had been dead some time; this happened at least this morning, maybe even last night.
She had been stabbed in the back, on the left, four times, over her heart and lungs, deep wounds, hunting-knife-type wounds, and from the amount of blood that had soaked her dress and painted the wall and ceiling with an abstraction worthy of Washington Square’s outdoor art displays, I figured an artery had been hit. Another slash, on her upper left arm, indicated an attempt to ward off a blow. Her face was battered, bloodied, and blue-gray with lividity.
“Sweet lord Jesus,” Albert Luck said. “Who are they?”
“That’s Ruth Bodenheim,” I said, and then I pointed at the other body. “And that’s her husband, Maxwell.”
Max was on the floor, on his back, feet near his wife’s head where it and its ponytail hung down from the side of the bed. The poet’s eyes were wide, seeing nothing, his mouth open and, for once, silent, the flesh as slack on his dead face as if it were melting wax; he had been shot in the chest, a small crusty blossom of brown and black on his dingy white shirt, bloodstain mingled with powder burns, near his tattered tie. His loose black suit coat was on, unbuttoned, open, and his arms were spread as if he were trying to fly, a sleeve torn and bloody with an apparent knife gash. A book lay near him: The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson; his reading had been interrupted by his killing.
“I better call the cops,” Luck said, his eyes huge behind the magnified lenses.
“Keep your shirt on, pops,” I said, taking a look around.
A small table near the bed, slightly splashed with blood, had the empty pint bottle of whiskey and a wine bottle with a label that said Blackberry; also, a pad and pencil and some scribbled lines of poetry obscured by blood spatter. A window nearby opened on an airshaft. On a small electric stove sat a three-gallon pot of beans, cold; resting nearby was Bodie’s corncob pipe and a half-eaten bagel.
In one corner was Bodenheim’s worn leather briefcase, the repository of his art; leaned up against it was a tool of a more recent trade: a crudely lettered beggar’s sign saying, I AM BLIND.
No sign of a gun, or a knife.
“I’m callin’ the cops,” Luck said.
“What does this Harold Weinberg look like?”
Luck frowned. “He’s your friend.”
I gave him a hard look. “Refresh my memory.”
The landlord shrugged, said, “Good-lookin’ kid, pile of greasy hair, talks too much, smiles too much.”