So I used my key and opened the door, stopped on the threshold, and found myself astonished. The room was not empty; it was clearly occupied. There was a shirt draped tipsily over the back of a chair and a pair of pants over the arm, with the pants belt trailing off on the floor.
Two socks were on the floor, near but not on two shoes, as though someone had thrown the socks at the shoes and missed. An undershirt and shorts were over the other arm of the chair and now I could see a bit of a tie peeping out from under the shirt.
It couldn’t be Giles’s room, and I looked at the key. But that was silly. The key had opened the door, hadn’t it? Could Giles have had two different keys, the non-mate having been given him by an erring room clerk, and had he handed me the wrong one by mistake?
No, that was ridiculous. The thin briefcase on the bureau was his. I would have recognized it even without the G.D. on it. Beside it was one of his monogrammed throwaway pens.
I closed the door behind me, double-locked it, walked into the middle of the room, and stood there uncertain. It was all a real puzzler to me, an incongruity. The room was Giles’s since it had his briefcase, his pen, and therefore presumably his clothes in it. Yet it couldn’t be his in some ways.
The thing to do was to leave the key and package, shrug off the incongruity, and go away. I did put them down on the bureau and then found myself staring at the pen that was lying there. Near it was a thin film of talcum powder with something that looked like finger marks near one end as though someone had tried to brush it away. Automatically and without thinking, I drew my finger through it. I regretted it almost at once and lifted my finger to my nose to see if I had placed any undesirable smell on it.
I hadn’t, at least not since I had gnawed at the chicken bone. Absently, I licked at the finger with its taste of chicken and stiffened at once.
Good God! Impossible!
I sat down in one of the chairs—not the one with the clothes draped over it—and stared at those clothes, and then at my finger. To my right was the bureau with the pen, the briefcase, the key, and the package on it, and I reached for the pen automatically, even rising from the chair to do so. A writer reaches for a pen to aid the process of thinking as a non-writer might scratch his head—even if the pen is no more than twiddled. I was careful not to touch the talcum powder, however.
I didn’t intend to do more than twiddle the pen, but the hotel pad was lying on the bureau, too, and I reached for it as automatically as for the pen. With both pen and paper in my hand, I had to produce something and I drew a large, firm question mark and then drew short lines from it in every direction. At about the third or fourth mark, the ink gave out.
It was a dry pen with just a trace of ink having trickled down to the ball-point while it had been on the bureau.
What the question mark meant was just this: How did Giles’s clothes—assuming they belong to Giles—come to be strewn about so? I couldn’t imagine the urgency that would make such strewing necessary, not even the pangs of oncoming diarrhea. In that case, you run for the bathroom and drop your pants and shorts; you don’t get undressed.
Which reminded me that I hadn’t looked in the bathroom.
Surely, if he were in the bathroom, he’d have heard me come in, or if the noise of the shower or of flushing had drowned me out, I would have heard that.
I listened carefully, ear canted toward the bathroom, but I heard nothing. I heard city traffic and I heard footsteps in the corridor—not very loud—that seemed to stop at the door, or near it. For a moment, I expected to hear a key scrape against the lock and see Giles walk in, but it didn’t happen, and then the footsteps, or maybe other footsteps, sounded again and faded. There was nothing to hear in the room itself.
But having thought of the bathroom, it seemed logical to look inside. There might be something there to explain the incongruity of the room. I walked to the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar, and pushed it inward.
And Giles was there, grinning at me silently, stretched out in the bathtub with one leg over the side, his head cradled against the metal of the faucets, apparently quite, quite nude, and, apparently, quite, quite dead.
Although I’ve spent a long time trying to describe what I saw and what I thought since entering the room, it didn’t take as long to see and to think as to describe. I doubt that I had been puzzling in the room for as long as three minutes before I walked into the bathroom.
It was 1:33 p.m. of Memorial Day, May 26, 1975, when I discovered Giles’s body. I didn’t look at my watch at that precise moment, for there was no room in my mind for anything but the absorption of the sight, but I did a couple of minutes afterward. I couldn’t be more than a minute off.
How did I know he was dead? From a medical standpoint, I didn’t. I didn’t feel for his pulse or check for traces of breathing. I didn’t even find out whether the body was cold or not. Perhaps someone else might have had the presence of mind to do such a thing, but I hadn’t. It was the first body I had ever seen unexpectedly and it blasted me into immobility and non-thought. For a minute, it seemed to me my heart had stopped beating. I don’t think I screamed or made any sound at all, because my vocal cords were paralyzed, and by the time I took my first, shuddering breath, seconds after the sight, I was in control again—very shakily.
But there was no doubt in my mind, not a shred, not an atom, that he was dead. The fixed immobility of the body, the open eyes staring right at me with glassy and fixed non-recognition, the lips stretched in an unchanging grimace that was not really a smile. If I had never seen or heard of a dead human before, I’d have known this was an object from which life had departed.
Additional details flooded into my brain over what seemed a long stretch of time that surely must have been a matter of seconds in actual fact. The leg—left leg—draped over the side of the tub was very hairy and the individual hairs were in part plastered to the skin as though the leg had recently been wet. The tub itself had traces of wetness in it.
The shower curtain was partially torn down but no dead hand was clutching at it. One of Giles’s arms lolled its full length along the floor of the bathroom, the other was across his chest. The curtain itself dangled over his groin as though protecting the modesty of the corpse. The one clear thought I can remember during that long, stricken moment was one of wild relief at having Giles’s genitals covered.
Then I finally drew that breath, felt my heart take up its duties, and I staggered shakily out of the bathroom. I should, in theory, have reported the matter at once, but I couldn’t. I had to sit down—or fall down. I made it to the chair from which I had, just a few minutes before, listened for noise from the bathroom.
For half a minute, I continued to struggle for control. I looked at my watch and it was 1:35. It was an Accutron and I knew it was within ten seconds of the official time. I thought, incongruously, that Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., was about to get up to talk and that I would miss it. In the disorientation of the moment, it didn’t occur to me that I might miss Shirley, too.
Finally, I walked over to the bed, sat down on it, and reached for the phone. It was one of those phones with every hole in the dial marked for something and with combinations for this and that. I had no time and certainly no inclination to study the code. I dialed «Operator» and there was the usual maddening wait before the tinny feminine voice said, «Operator, Can I help you?»
I said, as flatly as I could manage, «Operator, I’m calling to report a dead man in this room.»