Leo Haig always tells me to use my instinct, guided by my experience. He stole this bit of advice from Nero Wolfe. My problem is, I haven’t had too much experience and my instincts aren’t always that razor-sharp.
But what I said was, “I have to say something to you.”
“Well, you could have said it back on Ninth Avenue, son. You didn’t have to wait until we both rode back and forth underneath Manhattan Island.”
“The thing is, I don’t know if you’re the right man.”
“What right man?”
“The married man who’s been running around with my sister, and if you are—”
Well, he damned well wasn’t, and that was a load off both our minds. He laughed a lot, and he did everything but explain to me precisely why he was extremely unlikely to be running around with anybody’s sister, or to be married, and we went our separate ways to our mutual relief. I got another E train heading back in the direction I’d come from and he went somewhere else.
At least he hadn’t made me until I’d tailed him to Ninth Avenue. I suppose that was something.
There’s probably a good way to connect from the E train to something that goes somewhere near the Lower East Side, but I’m still not brilliant about the subway system and the maps they have there are impossible to; figure out, especially when the train is (a) moving and (b) crowded, which this one certainly was. So I rode down to Washington Square again, feeling a little foolish about the whole thing, and then I got out and walked cross town. I called Melanie a couple of times en route, but the line was busy.
Melanie’s place was on Fifth Street between Avenue C and Avenue D. I could never figure out why. I mean, I could figure out why the building was there. It had no choice. Buildings tend to stay where you put them, and nobody would have allowed this building in a decent, neighborhood anyway. But Melanie did have a choice. She wasn’t wildly rich, and I don’t suppose she could have stayed at the Sherry-Netherland, but she could have had a better apartment in a safer neighborhood with the income she got from her father’s estate. Instead she lived on one of the most squalid and unsafe blocks in the city.
“You know,” I’d told her a day or two ago, “if you really insist on having this irrational fear of being murdered, you ought to move out of this rathole. Because when you live here, being murdered isn’t an irrational fear. It’s a damned rational one.”
“I feel secure here,” she said.
“The streets are wall-to-wall junkies and perverts,” I said. “The muggers have their own assigned territories so they don’t mug each other by mistake. What makes you feel secure?”
“It’s a settled neighborhood, Chip.”
I walked through it now. It was at its very worst in the afternoon because the light was bright enough to see how grungy it was. It was also bright in the morning, but there was no one around. Starting a little after noon, the rats would begin to peep out of their holes.
I got to her building. They still hadn’t replaced the front door. No one knew who had taken it, or why. I walked up four very steep flights of stairs and knocked on her door.
There was no answer.
I knocked a couple more times, called her name a lot, and then tried the door. It was locked, and that worried me.
See, Melanie would only lock her door when she was home. I know most people do it the other way around, or else lock it all the time, but she had a theory on the subject. If a junkie burglar knew she wasn’t home, and found the door locked, he would simply kick it in. This would mean she would have to pay for a new lock. If, however, she left it unlocked, he would come in, discover there was nothing around to take, and finally settle for ripping off her radio. Since the radio had cost fifteen dollars and the big cylinder lock had cost forty, it was clear where the priorities lay.
I knocked again, a lot louder. She would not be asleep at this hour. And her telephone had been busy just a few minutes ago. Of course telephones in New York are capable of being busy just for the hell of it, but—
I got this sudden flash and didn’t like it at all. So I did something I’ve wanted to do for years. I think it’s something everybody secretly wants to do.
I kicked the door in.
You’d be surprised how easy that is. Or maybe you wouldn’t when you stop to think that some of the most decrepit drug addicts in the world do it a couple of times a day. I hauled back and kicked with my heel, hitting the door right on the lock. On the third try the door flew open and the forty-dollar lock went flying, and I lost my balance and sat down without having planned to. I suppose a few tenants heard me do all these things, but they evidently knew better than to get involved.
The apartment was a rabbit warren, a big living room and a long hallway that kept leading to other rooms, some of them containing Salvation Army reject furniture, some of them papered with posters of Che and stuff like that. Actually I think Melanie paid as much rent for the place as I paid for a room in a decent neighborhood. She said she liked having plenty of space. Personally, considering the condition of the rooms, I would think that a person would pay more for less space. One room in that building would have been bad enough. Five rooms was ridiculous.
The telephone was in the living room. It was off the hook. I worked my way through the apartment, calling out her name, picking up more and more negative vibrations and getting less and less happy about the whole thing. I found her in the back room. She was spread out stark naked on her air mattress, which is just how I had always hoped to find her.
But she was also absolutely dead, and that was not what I had had in mind at all.
Two
She wasn’t the first corpse I had ever seen. One summer I picked apples for a while in upstate New York, a job which consisted largely of falling off ladders. The other pickers would go out drinking when they were done, and sometimes I would tag along. There was usually at least one fight an evening. Sometimes somebody would pull a knife, and one time when this happened it wound up that one guy, a wiry man with a harelip, caught a knifeblade in his heart and died. I saw him when they carried him out.
The first book I wrote, I covered my experiences apple-picking, but never put that part in. God knows why.
So she wasn’t the first corpse I ever looked at, but she might as well have been. I kept thinking how horrible it was that she looked so beautiful, even in death. Her pale white skin had a blue tint to it, especially in her face. Her eyes were wide open and I could swear they were staring at me.
I knew she was dead. No living eyes ever looked like that. But I had to reach down and touch her. I put one hand on her shoulder. She’d been dead long enough to grow cool, however long that takes. I don’t know much about things like that. I’d never had to.
I almost didn’t see the hypodermic needle. She was on her back, legs stretched out in front of her, one arm at her side, the other placed so that her hand was on her little bowl of a stomach. That hand almost covered the hypodermic needle. After I saw it, I picked up her other arm and found a needle mark. Just one, and it looked fresh.
I put her arm back the way I had found it. I went to the bathroom and threw up and came back and looked at her some more. I must have stood there staring at her for five minutes. Then I paced around the whole apartment for another five minutes and came back and stared at her some more.
This wasn’t shock. I was in shock, of course, but I was being very methodical about this. I wanted to notice everything and I wanted to make sure I remembered whatever I noticed.
I left her apartment, closed the door, walked down the stairs and out. I walked all the way over to First Avenue before I caught a cab. The cab dropped me at 14th Street and Seventh. I walked quickly from there to my rooming house on 18th Street, a few doors west of Eighth.