Chapter ten
There seemed to be no reason for what I did next, no reason other than that I felt that the one word, the name, scrawled on the white pad by a dying man, was meant for me. It was mine, so I took it. I pulled the pad from underneath the lifeless hand that still clutched the Eberhard Faber yellow pencil and slipped it into my jacket pocket. And then, remembering lessons learned from five thousand hours before the tube and perhaps from another three thousand or so in darkened buildings that sold sustenance (popcorn) along with escape, I took out my handkerchief and used it to shield my palm and fingers from the doorknob. In the hall I looked around and then hastily wiped the outside doorknob, found the stairs, scurried down two flights, rang for the elevator, waited and fretted, and then tried to look nondescript to the three passengers who were already aboard when it finally came and also to the three others who got on at the seventh, fourth, and third floors.
Outside, the Nickerson Building looked just like what it was, an ordinary office building, perhaps 43-years-old or older, built in the late 1920’s on Park Avenue by a contractor who was doubtless dead by now, as dead as Frank Spellacy, and designed by an architect who didn’t give a damn about Mies van der Rohe or Walter Gropius or even the infamous Marcel Breuer who had threatened to saddle Grand Central Terminal with a 55-story mega-structure which I could have inspected if I cared to look over my shoulder, which I didn’t. Instead I walked quickly down Park Avenue for two blocks and then turned right, looking for a bar, any bar.
It was an ordinary place called The Cold Duck or The Green Rooster or something like that. The bar itself ran along the right-hand side and there were some tables and booths and checkered tablecloths and Chianti bottles that held half-burned candles. It was ten minutes after four and only a couple of dedicated topers were in attendance. I sat at the bar’s far end, near the door, away from the drinkers, and when the bartender waddled down my way I ordered a double Scotch.
“What kind?” he said.
“Bar Scotch.”
“On the rocks?”
“Just a straight shot with a glass of water.”
I should have told him to serve it in a large glass because when I picked it up my hand shook so that it sloshed a little of the whisky over the rim which chattered against my teeth. But I got it down, all of it down in two gulps, and then I signaled the bartender. He was in a deep conversation with the two tipplers, talking learnedly, no doubt, of sports or cars or politics, or whatever drunks and bartenders talk about at four in the afternoon, and he seemed reluctant to come all the way down to where I sat, or it may have been that his feet hurt.
“Another double?” he said.
“Make it a single. Where’s your phone?”
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “In the back, near the men’s John.”
I didn’t even have to search for a dime on the way to the phone. I just picked it up, dialed 911, and when the voice answered — a policeman’s voice — I said, “I’m only going to say this once. There’s a dead man in room 1106 in the Nickerson Building on Park Avenue. His name’s Frank Spellacy. S-p-e-l-l-a-c-y. Spellacy.” Then I hung up.
The drink was waiting for me when I went back to my end of the bar. I didn’t really want it, but it was there so I drank it, put three one-dollar bills and some change next to the empty glass, and left. I caught a cab back to the Adelphi and once there, up in my de luxe efficiency on the ninth floor with its Pullman kitchen and its yellow-tiled bathroom, I took the pad from my pocket, the pad with the one-word, one-name message on it, and read it for the first time right side up. It still said Wingo. I tore the page off the pad, ripped it into small pieces, and flushed it down the toilet. Still remembering lessons well learned from screens both large and small, I tore the rest of the pad up and spent five minutes in the bathroom flushing the toilet six times. There was a cardboard backing for the pad, but it seemed too much trouble to tear up, so I tossed it into the wastebasket.
I slumped into my favorite chair, the one where scarcely two hours before I had been eating a cucumber sandwich, drinking a cup of tea, and demonstrating to a New York cop on the make just how smart I really was. I wondered about that for a while. When I discovered a dead man, a small-time grifter, in his office, killed by either a knife or a gun, I stole the one-word message that he used up his life writing because with magnificent egoism, I assumed that it was meant for me. Not for his wife or children or even the cops, but for me, someone he didn’t know, someone he had spoken to once, over the telephone, for forty-five seconds, perhaps a minute. That proved how smart I was. And instead of calling the police and reporting the murder, if that’s what it was, and waiting for them to get there and giving them all the information that I could, which might possibly have helped them find whoever killed the man, the small-time grifter who sold desert lots for ten dollars down and ten dollars a month, and then probably discounted the paper to some finance company, I instead acted like a fool who ran when he should stay and stayed when he should run. I was smart all right. Even brilliant. No wonder the country was going to hell.
I sat there in my favorite chair, smoking a cigarette and brooding and thinking about the one-word message that Spellacy had left for someone, possibly me, but probably not. I spent fifteen minutes thinking about it and then I picked up the phone and dialed O for long distance.
When she came on I told her that I would like to call the Coroner’s Office in Washington, D.C. There was some more palaver while she asked whom I wished to speak to and finally I told her that I would like to speak to the coroner himself, but would settle for whoever answered the phone. A man’s voice answered with “Coroner’s Office.”
I told him my name and then asked, “If a man were killed in an automobile accident, would he immediately come under your jurisdiction?”
“Yes, he would,” the good solid civil-service voice said.
“Would you perform an autopsy?”
“Yes, that’s automatically done in accidents, homicides, suicides, and what-have-you.”
I didn’t ask him what a what-have-you was, although it seemed to take in a lot of territory. But he wasn’t through yet; he warmed to his subject. “Now in the case of illness, if the deceased hasn’t seen a doctor or been attended by one within the last ten days, an autopsy is automatically performed. That also holds true if the deceased has not been seen by anyone — you know, vanished — for a period of twenty-four hours or more prior to his death.”
“I’d like to get some information on a man who was killed in a car wreck about four weeks ago.”
“Are you the next of kin?” the civil-service voice said.
“No. I’m a reporter. With The New York Times.” There was no use in going second class.
The voice relented a little. “What was the deceased’s name?”
“Wingo,” I said.
“His first name?”
That wrecked it. “Well, we haven’t been able to find out his first name. He died under rather mysterious circumstances.”
There was a pause at the Washington end, at the District of Columbia’s Coroner’s Office at 19th and E Streets, Southeast. It was a long, chilly pause. “I’m sorry, but in such cases the next of kin must grant permission for the release of such information.”
“Well, thanks anyway.”
He said that I was welcome, but I don’t think he really meant it.