The mailboxes listed a W. Damascus for apartment 31.
There were slum smells on the stairwell, slum sounds in the halls and behind closed doors and in the airshaft between the building and the one adjacent. There was a sense of life contained and concealed, a teeming, tumultuous life breeding in the cracks of poverty, eating and mating and sleeping and excreting, an animalistic substructure dwelling in a multilayered cave that stank of piss and frying fat. On the second floor, a rat the size of an alley cat stared at Carella and Kling with eyes that glittered in the refracted airshaft light pouring through the stairwell window. Carella, who had already drawn his revolver, almost fired in reflex. Boldly, the rat held his ground and continued to stare at them. They sidled past him, close to the banister, and the rat’s head turned, nose twitching, alert, watching. Carella was sweating when they reached the third floor.
Apartment 31 was in the middle of the hallway, next to 32, and facing 33. Kling listened at the door, shook his head, and then backed off against the opposite wall. Carella moved to the side of the door, revolver in hand, finger inside the trigger guard. Kling raised his knee, shoved himself off the opposite wall, and piston-kicked the flat of his foot against the door, as high as he could, as close to the lock and the jamb as he could. The lock sprang, the door swung inward on its hinges. Kling followed the door into the room, and Carella peeled off like the wingman in a fighter squadron, crouching low, gun in hand, immediately behind Kling.
The room was empty.
They fanned out immediately, going through all the rooms in succession. The bathroom door was closed. Carella slowly turned the knob with his left hand, flipped the door suddenly open, and entered the tiny room gun-first. It, too, was empty.
“You’d better get the super up here,” he said to Kling. “I’ll take a look around.”
The apartment was small and determinedly filthy. The door Kling had kicked in opened on a living room furnished with a three-piece “suite” (one armchair upholstered in gold, another in blue, the sofa in maroon) clustered around a television set in the corner. A picture of a smiling peasant puffing on a pipe, neo-Rembrandt, was hanging over the television set. An open edition of the city’s only morning tabloid lay on the sofa. The date on the paper was September 9. There were empty beer cans and full ashtrays on the floor. In the kitchen, dishes caked with the leftovers of a week’s meals were stacked in the sink, and used breakfast dishes were still on the table. Judging from the dry and moldy cornflakes still clinging to the bottom of the bowl, the last breakfast Damascus had eaten here could easily have been close to two months ago, the date on the living-room newspaper. A September issue of Life was on the bathroom floor, near the toilet bowl. A man’s safety razor was on the sink, and patches of dried, hair-clogged shaving cream clung to the sloping tile sides. Wherever Damascus had gone, he had not bothered to take his razor with him. Two small scraps of toilet tissue were near the cold-water faucet, each with small smears of blood on them. It was reasonable to assume that Damascus had cut himself while shaving, and had used the toilet tissue to blot the blood. A grimy ring circled the bathtub. A sliver of Ivory soap and a swirl of hair were caught in the open drain. Near one claw leg of the old-fashioned tub, a man’s striped undershorts were wadded in a ball. There were cockroaches nesting behind a tube of toothpaste on the sink, and tile lice wiggled on the floor. It was altogether the most charming room in the place.
The bedroom ran a close second.
The bed had been slept in and left unmade. There were grease stains on the pillow, and the sheets were splotched here and there with what might have been semen stains. Alongside the bed, on the nightstand, there was an open box of Trojans. According to the printing on the box, there should have been three contraceptives in it. Carella shook them out onto the bed. There were only two condoms in the box. The bed stank of sweat and God knew what. The entire room stank. Carella went to the window and opened it wide. On the fire escape outside, there was an empty milk bottle and an empty graham-cracker carton. In the apartment across the airshaft, a young housewife in a flowered dress was busily cleaning her kitchen and singing “Penny Lane.” Carella took a deep breath and turned away from the window.
The only closet in the room contained a pile of dirty shirts and underwear on the floor, and a brown suit hanging on the clothes bar. Carella checked the label and was surprised to discover the suit had come from one of the more exclusive men’s shops in town. A gray fedora rested on the shelf over the clothes bar. In the far corner of the shelf, Carella found an open box containing an Iver Johnson .22-caliber revolver and seventeen Peters .22-caliber cartridges.
A bottle with perhaps three fingers of scotch left in it was on the bedroom dresser. Two glasses were beside it. One had lipstick stains on the rim. A matchbook carrying advertising for the A&P was on the dresser top, together with a crumpled Winston cigarette package. Carella was opening the top dresser drawer when Kling came in with the superintendent of the building.
The super was a Negro, perhaps forty-five years old, with a clubfoot and suspicious brown eyes. He wore work denims and a black cardigan sweater. The expression on his face clearly stated that he resented having been born black with the additional handicap of a clubfoot. He did not like white people, and he did not like healthy people, and he did not like cops, and here he was in a stinking tenement flat about to be questioned by two men who were white healthy cops.
“This is the super,” Kling said. “His name’s Henry Yancy.”
“How do you do, Mr. Yancy?” Carella said. “I’m Detective Carella and this is my partner, Detective Kling.”
“I already met your partner,” Yancy said.
“We’d like to ask you a few questions, if we may.”
“Do I have a choice?” Yancy said.
“We simply want to know a few things about the occupant of this apartment.”
“What do you want to know?” Yancy said. “Make it fast because I got to go down and take in the garbage cans before I get a ticket from the cop on the beat.”
“We’ll try to be brief,” Carella said. “Who rents this apartment?”
“Walter Damascus.”
“How long has he lived here?”
“Must be three, four years.”
“Is he married?”
“No.”
“Does he live here alone?”
“Well,” Yancy said, and shrugged. “He lives here alone, but he has women coming in whenever he’s here.”
“Isn’t he here all the time?”
“Not too much.”
“How often is he here?”
“He’s in and out, on and off. I don’t ask nobody nothing long as they pay their rent.”
“Does he pay his rent?”
“The owner of the building never said nothing about him, so I guess he pays his rent. I’m just the super here.”
“When’s the last time you saw him?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Was it recently?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Would it have been in September sometime?”
“I told you I don’t recall.”
“Mr. Yancy, we’d hate to have to bother all the people on this floor, just to find out when Damascus was here last.”
“That’s your job, ain’t it?” Yancy said, and paused. “Bothering people?”
“Our job right now,” Kling said flatly, “is trying to locate the suspect in a murder case. That’s our job.”
“Who got killed?” Yancy asked.
“Why should that matter to you?” Carella said.
“It don’t,” Yancy answered, and shrugged.
“Try to remember when you saw Damascus last, will you?”